God is asking you to rip off the fake labels others have sewn onto your life in an act of judgment. He is also asking you, through an act of forgiveness, to remove the fake labels you have prematurely and impatiently placed on people and cultures before God was able to finish His supernatural work of transformation

I was traveling with a friend on a ministry trip. One of our stops took us into South America with a flight to Caracas, Venezuela. As our Venezuelan host gave us a tour of the city, he also took us high into the surrounding mountains to visit a business. The warehouse where the business was located had no sign out front announcing what was inside. Once inside, I had an eye-opening experience.

Before me, all across the room were people sitting at sewing machines.  Beside each person was a large pile of designer labels with names like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, and others. These were not small piles. Some were three feet tall. Hundreds of labels were stacked on the floor in no particular order. I watched as expressionless workers reached up in an act of repetitive boredom and took the next garment from the rack while reaching down with the other hand to grab the next available label. The label and the garment were joined together under the piercing needle of the sewing machine. Like robots working in human form, this fake label attaching enterprise was taking place all over the room. There was no thinking involved just the repeated habit of attaching false labels to garments.

That experience in Caracas reminds of what I see taking place in the lives of some people. Maybe you have allowed other people to sew fake labels of judgment onto your life. It is time for you to reach up and tear off those fake labels. The garment of your life is supposed to be labeled with the love of God, not with the judgment of any person or institution. 

A dark seamstress is at work in the Church trying to convince people they are not who God says they are. Those who attach these labels have a pile of false judgments stacked up and ready to attach to other people and segments of culture. They are doing this out of a false sense of religious duty. These judges resemble the people in the garment shop in Caracas who were assigned to perform a single function – a function of judgment that does not contain a word of hope. Hope is powerful. Only hope has the ability to steer a life toward the realization of its original design.

Today, rip off the fake labels from your life placed there without God’s permission. Rip off labels from the lives of others upon whom you have placed a fake label in premature judgment. These labels do not reflect the heart or design of the ultimate Designer. You and every other human being were designed by God to wear garments of righteousness. Labels describing God-inspired destinies are waiting in the pile next to your spiritual sewing machine. Sew with mercy and wisdom.