Tough Love

Does the Lord become inpatient? Does he do such things? Micah 2:7 (NIV)

Looking back, I can see that anytime I encountered leniency and mercy in my addiction, it didn’t motivate me to change, but rather, only encouraged my behavior. When I was first forced to address my problem, I wanted transformation, but because I suffered little discomfort, when the temptation returned, I didn’t hesitate much. I can get away with it. Nothing really bad happened before. I’ll be fine.

Repeated abuse of mercy did not lead to more leniency though. It led to increasingly painful consequences. God showed me kindness and I still refused change, so he allowed it to hurt when I relapsed. At the time, this angered me. I thought you were all forgiveness and love, God. Why are you allowing me to go through this?

This seems to be the attitude of God’s people in today’s passage. Repeatedly abandoning God to follow themselves provoked God to send the prophet Micah to foretell of his people’s approaching self-inflicted disaster. Micah’s audience wasn’t convinced though. That doesn’t sound like the God we know. God is all about patience and forgiveness. He wouldn’t punish us. He loves us.

It is, of course, precisely because he loves that God disciplines his children (Hebrews 12:6). God may be patient and slow to anger, but when we use that kindness as a license to sin, we pursue our own disaster.

Unfortunately, the addict, like many of us, requires consequences to change. It’s true that the addict must want to change for himself before he is willing to do what it takes to find recovery, but most addicts won’t just suddenly wake up one day and decide to embrace radical life transformation. It often requires significant pain to get there. It often requires legal problems, jail, loss of income and loss of family, to get the addicts attention.

This is not God’s first plan. God’s kindness is supposed to lead us to transformation (Romans 2:4). If, however, we refuse to be changed by his love and mercy, then we will find that he uses tough love and consequences to get us there. When we insist on going our own way, we will find that God’s love is sometimes painful.