Nobody likes to get pushed around or bullied! Everybody gets subjected to it at least some point in their life. I learned, early on, that if I was going to let someone push me around…..that they’d come back and do it again more often than not. It got me a few bruises and a black eye or two but I don’t think I had any ‘return’ customers. I guess as I got older I had more serious disagreements in taking up for someone else who was getting pushed around. I’ve always had a ‘soft spot’ for kids who didn’t have a dad. I just don’t have much tolerance for someone bullying somebody like that. That zero-tolerance policy got me in a few tight spots and a couple that I was probably lucky to get out of unscathed. And during my rodeo career I was around a group of people day in and day out that if you had a weak spot it’d get exploited and there were more than a few who could make your life miserable if they took a mind to. I never considered myself a ‘fighter’ but I made a resolve early on that I wasn’t going to get pushed around by anyone. 

Our culture, or at least the culture I grew up in, teaches us to retaliate. But if you look at the Bible, which should be our standard of Truth…it communicates a totally different way to handle those kinds of things. A lot of people would quote the Old Testament. In fact I’ve heard it more times than I could keep track of, “Well, you know, it’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” And, agreed, the Bible does state that…but that was in the Old Covenant Law….and we’re not ‘under’ that Law anymore! Jesus came to set us free from the Law! And when He came He ushered in a lot of ‘new’ ways to handle just about everything.

Now, instead of and eye for an eye,….He encourages us to ‘turn the other cheek’! And we see His example time after time when getting mistreated….He always retaliated with compassion, love and forgiveness. It’s not the first thing the ‘flesh’ wants to do….in fact it totally goes against the grain of logic and conventional thinking, even American upbringing…..but it’s the right thing to do….and it works!

So, the next time you get wrongly accused, mistreated or pushed around maybe you should consider some serious retaliation! I’m not talkin’ about the ‘old school’ kind….I’m talkin’ about retaliating like He did! The world will change if we’ll do it!

The wrath of man cannot accomplish the righteousness of God! James 1:20

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