PETRI DISH OF HUMAN NATURE

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By Akin Ojumu

Family. All made up of people…fallen, broken, sinful people fully imbued with the Adamic nature. Our toxic humanity hangs over the family like ominous dark clouds hiding the blue skies from sight. 

Any wonder then that family often turns out to be what it is? Broken, wrathful, vengeful, spiteful, full of all kinds of drama. Bitterness, enmity, envy, strife, jealousy, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, insecurities, unforgiveness, and unexplained fits of anger are all in full display.

Family is the Petri dish of the human experiment. It is the laboratory of life where all the failings, flaws, and foibles of humanity are tried, tested, and perfected. The family is the first proving ground of the flesh and its lawless deeds. It’s from here we launch out into the world with our baggage of iniquitous behaviors.

Yet, God has called all people within the family unto a higher calling. This is especially so for the family made up of professing Christians. It is expected of Christ followers within the family to be better people who, on a daily basis, press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. This high calling of God has nothing to do with Church titles or positions or spiritual gifts or endowments. The highest of God’s callings is the call to love. When we fail in the test to love, we fail at everything else.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

Love heals all wounds. It’s the potent elixir that can cure all wrong. With love, family endures. Without love, family devolves. Where love is, there’s life. Where love is absent, death and destruction pervade. Show me a family where love holds the reins, I’ll show you a people in whose lives Christ truly reigns. Show me a family where hate sits on the throne, and I’ll show you a people who worship God with their lips alone.

It’ll take the grace of God for the family not to choke to death on the corrosive fumes of human nature. God alone is able to breathe life into the family in spite of the tendencies for fratricide of fallen people. It’s only God who can disperse the dark clouds of toxic humanity. No one else and nothing else can break the stranglehold of human nature over the family.

Only the love of God can repair that which is broken. God alone can renew that which has turned sour. And it’s only God who can restore that which is lost. I only pray that God will come to our rescue before it’s too late and we are too far gone into our self-destruct mode.

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