Tearing down statues in our heart.
Tearing down statutes and monuments has become popular, even acceptable by many today. There seems to be a sense of excitement as people deface buildings, monuments, city streets, business fronts, and basically anything they can paint, break or shatter.
Tearing down statues and monuments of stone is a lot easier than tearing down the statues and monuments in our heart. Statues of fear, anger, and resentment. Monuments of lust, greed, and prejudice can all be torn down but they have an amazing ability to rebuild themselves, almost overnight. There’s a story in the Bible about hearts that are hardened but they use the words, ‘fallow ground’. This is ground that is untilled, filled with dirt clods, rocks, weeds. Even if you put seeds on the ground it wouldn’t do any good because the soil can’t receive it.
Even if we tore down all the statues, monuments, religious buildings, etc. things will not change because people’s hearts are still hardened with negative attitudes, actions and emotions. We cannot break the hardness of our hearts through violence. Revenge never fills the void in our heart. Demanding when people, even society changes to what I desire or demand, my heart will still be hard. The only way to break up our untilled heart is to sow, to spread out, do do righteousness.
Darkness can not remove darkness. Evil does not defeat evil. We break up, plow our hardened hearts through acts of righteousness. Go out and do acts of justice and righteous. The results are good beneficial not only to myself but to those we love and society. Why should I expect a person to treat me with mercy, kindness if I tear down their fence or loot their store or kill their young daughter?
Jesus Christ did acts of civil disobedience. So did Gandhi and MLK Jr. Today we are seeing acts of random violence and destruction. People are sowing, doing acts of destruction saying they will change the world to make it more just, fair, equitable all the while destroying people’s livelihood, sometimes their lives. I am not denying or discounting valid emotions of pain, loss, and anger but acts of violence will only reap, produce acts of violence.
Is it truly God’s heart to destroy, to inflict pain? People of every skin color need to decide if they will honor God and follow His word in the details of their lives, including relationships with people of all colors. When all the statues and monuments are torn down, all the buildings are defaced and streets are patrolled by armed vigilantes, will people truly be equal and free? Hatred is never satisfied. If your heart is filled with hate it will come out no matter who is in office or any other aspect of society.
Freedom begins in the heart and then flows outward. It is time for followers of Jesus to live in the freedom that Jesus Christ has bought for them on the cross and to then share that freedom with others, all others.
pauldanielstraub 