Recently, as I was scanning the news stories, I ran across a video of a portion of a night-time talk show host’s program. I was shocked as to his remarks concerning God, Bible-believing institutions and Bible-believing Christians. He poked fun at, ridiculed and blasphemed our heavenly father.

My first response was that I wished the guy could get his facts straight, for he was ignorant with a lot of information he was using from the past. I quickly moved on to another response, which was anger and frustration. I actually prayed something like this: “Lord, how can you just let this man say these horrible things against you and your church? Why don’t you put him in his place?”

All of a sudden, the Holy Spirit of God reminded me of a story in Scripture. In this story from Luke 9, Jesus and two of his disciples were heading into a town, and the residents were not very hospitable towards him and asked him to leave. When the disciples saw this, they wanted Jesus to allow them to call down fire from heaven and destroy them. Jesus reprimanded them for not having the right attitude, then went on to tell them what attitude they should have. He stated that his desire was not to destroy lives but to rescue them. I immediately asked the Lord to forgive me for my wrong attitude and to help me have compassion instead.

 As Christians, we will always face those who oppose what we believe, and some may even lash out with unkind words or even violence. If we respond with anger and a wrong attitude, we will drive those far away from God even farther away. If we show kindness, respect and love, it will go a long way to convincing others of the error of their way.

We need to spend a lot of time in prayer for them but also asking the Lord to help us to always have a Christ-like spirit.