Making a point...or a difference?

      "Jesus didn't come to make a point.  He came to make a difference."  Andy Stanley
      Ever since I heard that sentence, it's been rolling around in my brain.  Stanley's point--this is a terribly broad and brief paraphrase!--is that as believers we are not here to score points...we are here to serve and love our Lord and other people.
     Yes, we know that truth, but isn't it something how quickly we forget?  Given time and opportunity, we all tend to drift to defaulting to rules rather than relationships.  It's so much simpler to judge other people rather than love them.  It's so much more manageable to text them rather than spend time listening to them.  And it's surely much easier to ignore them rather than invest emotional energy in them. Serving, forgiving, encouraging, helping those that are sometimes unlovely or difficult can be so messy, so time-consuming, so exhausting.
      Ah, but it's those very places of messiness and challenge and weakness that God calls us to come and follow Him.  Jesus didn't come to this earth just to make a point about Who God is.  No, He came to make an eternal, destiny-altering difference by taking all our messiness--all our failure, dirt, and chaos--and dying for us so that we might know Him and gain eternal life.
     And so we follow Him into the trenches filled with broken, weak, doubting, hurting humanity.  We aren't here to make a point.  We're here to make a difference...like our Savior...and for our Savior.
      We do that by the way that we reflect our Savior in our daily lives.  We do that by the way that we love, the way that we care, the way that we forgive.  "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." (Col.3:12-14)
      I surely can't do this...but He can.  And so I pray that He will do it through me.
      Father, help us this day to put on love, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience and forgiveness.  We don't need to be clothed with designer duds.  We don't need to be "right" and score points.  We don't need to have lovely homes or perfectly behaved children or ideal, enviable families and relationships.
      No, it's not our beautiful lives that will impact the world for Christ...it's our bountiful love.  It's His love, His forgiveness, His patience, His kindness as poured out through us--weak, leaky vessels that we are--that will make an eternal difference.
    Thank You, Jesus, for coming not to make a point, but to make an eternal difference for us--undeserving, unlovely, ungrateful though we are.  Help us to love as You love, that others might see how good and great You are.  Thank You for loving us...help us to love. To God be the glory.