Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by doing so, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:19-21 HCSB

There are so many distracted drivers on the road. I can’t tell you how many times an ongoing car has come into my lane. Those little lines on the road are very important, when we get out of our lane, it can be fatal. The term, “stay in your lane” has become urban slang for minding your own business kind of like, “you do you.”

Have you ever worked at a job and had someone overstep their job and cross over into your job? It can cause a lot of confusion. When we seek revenge this is exactly what we are doing. We are stepping over into a job that is God’s and God’s alone.

I must confess that I used to like to take revenge, but I have learned that God is much better at this than I am. I have learned to let Him handle that.

Several years ago, someone else and myself were involved in the worst spiritual battle we had ever experienced. We were fighting pure evil. The evil plans that had been laid out would rival what you see on true crime shows, and had it not been stopped, would have probably been one or more of those shows. What the enemy had not considered was that we were aware of a skeleton in their closet. We had access to it and had we pulled it out and exposed it, we would have instantly stopped this battle and gotten some serious revenge. Sounds like a no-brainer doesn’t it?

But, there was one problem. Each time I decided to expose it, I was reminded of Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” Whenever this Scripture was brought to mind, I knew I had to stand down. My partner in this battle felt strongly that God was warning her not to do this as well.

You see, we could have exposed illegal activity on the part of our enemy. We could have referred to Ephesians 5:11 which tells us that we are to have no part in unfruitful works of darkness, but expose them. We could have used that as justification for exposing wrongdoing. But the problem would have been our motive. You see, they had been doing this for many years. We didn’t consider reporting it until they came against us. I wasn’t reporting it because it was a bad thing to do. If so, I would have reported it as soon as I knew about it, right? But instead, I chose to report it when their evil deeds started to effect me and those I love. I wasn’t doing it simply to expose dark deeds, but to get revenge.

In this case, I had to adhere to Romans 12:19 and leave revenge up to God. This is His job and He clearly states this in our Scripture passage. And in my opinion, no one does it better. In this case, we need to simply stay in our lane.

Psalm 46:10 is the other reason I could not report this behavior. First my motive was all wrong, but secondly, if I had reported this it would have been to bring glory to myself or to achieve what I wanted on my own. Our job is to bring glory to God. When all things worked out in our favor without us exposing what they had done, the glory was given to God. Everyone saw God at work. They did not see what we had done. They saw what He had done.

The interesting thing that happened during the course of this battle is that I learned that God does not play tug of war. Each time we began to take matters into our own hands, we could feel God stepping back. We began to fall. But when we gave it all over to God, He worked it all out.

Revenge is God’s job. It’s up to Him to determine when and how it will be served and just how much will be served.

If we stay in our lane, then we can rest assured God will take care of the revenge. All we have to do is love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44). We can leave the rest to God.

When we take matters into our own hands, we are telling God that we do not trust Him to handle it. Do you really want to say that to God? Better think that one over, my friend.

Have a great day!