One of the biggest lessons I learned in year 2020 was to learn to respect and honor people regardless of what my eyes can see about them in the moment.
When I say honor people, I do not mean idolize people but to give the same humane treatment to everyone.
A good number of people who I may have relegated to a corner in my heart for a number of reasons turned out to be different from the thoughts I had in my heart. Every single time I think about those times I could have disrespected them with my words or actions, I thank God that His Holy spirit within me restrained me multiple times.
An easy way to put it is that you never know what God is doing with people at different seasons of their lives, therefore we should never ever dishonor or disrespect people. The trend with my generation right now especially on social media is “to bash” people. People say spiteful and awfully disrespectful things to people on social media, many times to gain traction or so to say “trend”. Thinking about it right now, I wonder what kind of blessings or curses people have drawn to themselves through the ways they treat people.
Now let us delve into the things I am learning about honoring and respecting people.
Human Beings are veiled Creations:
So God created human beings in his own image.
Genesis 1:27
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them
God created us just like Himself, He is a spirit and so are we, veiled with our bodies. The true content of our lives exist in our spirits but we do not get to see everyone’s spirit. We do not even fully comprehend how our spirits function talk more of understanding the content of another man’s spirit.
More often than not, we often fail to comprehend how powerful we are as spirit beings living inside bodies. God has given every human dominion and authority to function here on earth. For example, a minute part of our bodies – the tongue is so powerful that we can bring things to life or put to death with our tongues. – James 3:5-7
Imagine one who recognizes fully the dominion he/she has in Christ Jesus, he or she may do as he pleases with his authority.
Elisha was a man of God filled with power, he was disrespected by some children who probably didn’t know anything about honoring people talk more of elders. Elisha went ahead to curse them and immediately bears devoured the boys – II Kings 2:23- 24. Although I have my reservations about Elisha cursing those boys like that, he was a man after all with flaws who was disrespected and knew the power he had.
On the other hand, Jesus Christ suffered even worse in the hands of men and women but instead of cursing them, he said to His father to forgive them because they were clueless about what they did.
Imagine if those people really knew who Jesus was, they probably wouldn’t have given Him such an unfair treatment.
I believe Jesus’ story sums it up, the fact that He is a powerful king but was veiled in the flesh of a man.
The covenant between God, Abram & His children:
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
Genesis 12:3
The above scripture points us to a peculiar covenant God had with Abram which was not limited to him only, the covenant transcends through every human being on earth.
Let us start by picturing this : God made that covenant as stated in Genesis 12:3 with Abram in private, nobody knew about it. He probably only told his wife at most about it. Imagine if he was in our time and he went on twitter to post something and someone went all out cursing him out.
LOOL! The poor oblivious twitter user just went all out to draw upon himself curses from the Lord.
You may say, “well, not everyone is a walking Abram these days!”. The bible tells us that everyone on earth will be a blessing through Abram. That means that the covenant between Abram and God didn’t stop there, it continues from generation to generation. Even more so , as believers in Christ we are engrafted into the lineage of Jesus Christ which goes all the way down to Abraham- Matthew 1:1-17
Lastly, I know of a truth that God deals differently with His children, as we walk with Him, He puts covenants in place with His children to reinforce His love for us amongst many other reasons. When covenants like that are in place between God and His children, I do not think such a child would reveal such intricate details of his or walk with the world. That said, imagine disrespecting or dishonoring those kinds of people! We would never know who is who & who is not, so it’s best to just respect them or just be quiet.
God is always doing a new thing with His creations:
For I am about to do something new.
Isaiah 43:19
See, I have already begun! Do you not see it?
Further more, God has knitted us in such a way that we cannot completely decipher who we really are in one day. We gain awareness of ourselves and flourish differently as we walk with God daily.
The truth is God is always working on us, we are His workmanship like the bible describes it in Ephesians 2:10. Therefore looking down at anyone or disrespecting or dishonoring someone because they do not seem to “flourish” at the moment just doesn’t cut it. I mean who would have thought that Joseph, son of Jacob who was a slave boy in Egypt would become a Prime minister. His reality looked nothing like the new thing God was working on in his life.
How Can I honor People with ease?
- Become friends with Jesus! – Jesus walked this earth and knew what it was like to be bashed, persecuted but regardless respected & honored people. There is no better person to learn from than Him.
- Commit to Abiding in Christ & Him in You – To abide in Christ is to read & study God’s word. As we do that often, God prunes us, and makes it easy for us to live right.
- Commit to love people & honor them – I strongly believe that with the help of the Holy spirit you would be able to consistently respect and honor people. Always ask Him for help as often as you need help. But first decide to honor people.
With that said, I hope we commit to a life of respecting & honoring people around us. May God help us in Jesus name.