When God Exposes our Faults in Public

Galatians 2:11-17

¹¹ But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. ¹² When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile Christians, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision. ¹³ As a result, other Jewish Christians followed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

¹⁴ When I saw that they were not following the truth of the gospel message, I said to Peter in front of all the others, “Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish traditions?

¹⁵ “You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sinners’ like the Gentiles. ¹⁶ Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.”

¹⁷ But suppose we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely not!

There is a flaw in the image many Christians have about God. Yes, He is a loving, merciful, and gracious God that is slow to anger and abounding in love. But His grace has a time limit because He has a plan and purpose for humanity that in His wisdom He formulated from the beginning of time, and He desires that we become partners with Him in carrying out this plan. So when He gives us instructions that we choose to dismiss, and He repeats them to us for a period of time, yet has not obtained our obedience, in His loving kindness, He still desires that we choose to partake of His plan and purpose by doing our part that He is asking us to do.

For that, He will speak to us in our prayer closets, and if there is no obedience at that time, He will send people or other ways to tell us what He desires from us. He can even send angels to alert us of His necessity for us to obey because He knows how what He’s asking us to do fits in His plan even if it seems something that our flesh wants nothing to do with. As believers, we are called to lay down our lives and choose His will and His ways over our own so we can seek the Kingdom of God and all His righteousness in order to become mature with Christ character; then we can receive the things He has promised us and at this point they can be added onto us.

Numbers 14:18 tells us, “‘The Lord is slow to anger and filled with unfailing love, forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion. But he does not excuse the guilty. He lays the sins of the parents upon their children; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations.’” NLT

You see, our disobedience can also cause us to go past the time of grace God allots for us to obey, and then the disobedience becomes sin which can also cause others to disobey until it becomes like a domino effect that God surely wants to avoid because He does not want the sin to transgress the next generations. When we are disobedient to God we will also see how our children and others around us would start acting out the disobedience as well. In the post titled "Understanding Your Kiros Time," we saw in Esther chapter 1 that there could have been through Queen Vashti an avalanche of disobedience and rebellion that had to be stopped. She was not expelled from her position as queen just because of a one-time disobedience, if it got to that point is always because there had been many other times in which the person had disobeyed until he or she had to be removed because of rebellion and lack of repentance.

I had to learn that lesson many years ago with my ex-husband. Our relationship was rocky, and prophetically I had seen in the spirit that there was going to be a separation between us. The Lord had told me to allow the separation, but I got filled with fear because we had not gone through anything like that before. It seemed to me that my marriage was going to end at that time and I wanted to fight to stay married until I had exhausted all resources to save it. But God had another idea. He kept telling me to allow the separation, but I would not hear of it, and He even sent people and other means to drop the hints about it. He did that for some time without success of my obedience. 

I also started seeing our son that was 2 years old at the time being disobedient to me and not listening to what I would say to him. It was as if he could not hear me. One evening I was standing very close to him while he was playing with some toys on the floor and I started to call out his name. I did that four or five times and he never even acknowledged me. I started feeling frustrated and at that time the Lord spoke to me audibly and said rigidly, “Now you know how I feel!”

Following that I went to a women’s conference at my church where there were thousands of people. At some point during that evening the key note speaker said that she had spent the afternoon feeling heaviness and God had told her she was feeling the heaviness of the people she was about to minister to. He also gave her instructions to lay hands on them, so when the evening came and she mentioned that, and called the women forth to be prayed for, I knew I had to come forth. To my surprise, when my turn came for her to lay hands on me, with microphone on hand, she said to me somewhat sternly, “Your man is not your god!” 

That startled and made me feel embarrassed because everybody got to hear it, and I thought to myself, “great, now everyone here knows I’m having spousal issues.” I like to be a private person and only share my private things with those I trust to share them with. But I had also realized I had raised three idols called my husband, our marriage, and God's promises for us. He had promised great things for us and I thought “How does a separation fit into this promise?”, but I wanted the promise to be manifested in my own way and in my own time frame. That had turned me into an idolater.

Then after the evening at church was over, I rushed home to talk with the Lord. He had also shared with me at that time that He was frustrated with me playing a deaf ear to what He was saying, but that it was ok to allow the separation because He was with me, and would never leave me not forsake me. Shortly after that the separation did happen and it was hostile. My ex-husband had even filed for divorce, but God had told me the divorce would not take place. After several months of attorney visits and much praying and seeking the Lord, my ex-husband called me one morning and told me he wanted to come back home and asked me if I would agree to that. I said, “yes, come home.” What followed after that is that he stopped all divorce proceedings, and just as the Lord had said, the divorce did not take place. 

Well, because I am saying here “my ex-husband” I need to explain that many years after that our relationship did end and God gave me permission to end it because He saw my faithfulness in fighting for my marriage, but my ex-husband chose to reject and oppose the calling of God for our lives and marriage, as well as our son’s life. To God that became a deal breaker and He chose to disqualify him from the promises He made to us.

What I would like you to learn from this is that we have a necessity to trust the Lord when He asks us to do things that may seem unfathomable and inconceivable to us. These things go many times against the word and promise He gave us, but only He knows in His wisdom what would take for us to get to our destination in Him and see His promises manifested. 

Let’s not wait until He has to take drastic measures for us to hear and finally obey, so we don’t get disqualified like Vashti. At the time Paul exposed Peter in such a public manner, chances are God could have already been telling him to stop such behavior during more private times of intimacy with Him, but Peter was not obeying quickly enough until things had to get that drastic from God through a fellow apostle.To Him alone be all the glory. ▪