Follow Up, Part 1

One of the questions I have been asked in response to A Tale of Three Women, is how do you welcome a person into your church, home, or life who is living a life that you believe does not bring honor and glory to God?

I almost dread answering this question, because it is so easy to come across as very legalistic and judgmental to some, and appear that you are giving free license to live however you want to others. These extremes come when we are not living lives that, like Jesus, are full of both grace and truth (John 1:14, 17). Truth without grace leads to legalism and judgmentalism. Grace without truth leads to license. Grace and truth together lead to love. In answering this question, I am not so much trying to balance grace and truth, but be full of grace and truth, if you understand my difference.

The first thing I would say is that you welcome them by loving them. The great commandment does not come with loopholes, small print, black out days, exceptions or exemptions. Love your neighbor as yourself applies to everyone. We do not get to pick and choose who this applies to any more than we get to pick and choose who our parents are. The reality is that love cannot happen outside of relationship, outside of investing yourself into another. Sometimes distance makes physical presence impossible, but you can still invest into a person over the phone or through social media. It is not ideal, but it can be done. But to love someone, you have to be in a position to invest some of yourself into them; and without some kind of intentional, personal investment of yourself, that can’t happen. If we are going to obey the command to love our neighbor, we have to be willing to invest ourselves into them. And that means having them around.

The next thing I would say is that we need to be mindful that we approach people with whom we greatly disagree with an attitude of humility and meekness rather than from pride and self-righteousness. We need to own the fact that we are no more successful at living a life that brings glory to God than the person we are comparing ourselves too! They may well be struggling with, ignorant of, or consciously living in sins of a certain brand, but the reality is so am I and so are you. The brands of sin may be different, but that doesn’t really matter does it. In fact, sins of the heart, private sins, are much more sinister and dangerous to the Christian life than public ones. We tend to forget this. Again, I think of the parable of the Lost Sons in Luke 15, the younger son whose sins were all very much “sins of the flesh” (sex, eating, and drinking) but the sins of the elder brother were sins of the heart (lack of love, mercilessness, unforgiveness, self-righteousness, and pride). Jesus makes it clear that while both are lost, the elder brother’s condition was much worse because he never was able to own it. If we are really humble and meek in God’s presence, we are going to be very slow to compare ourselves to others. As Fenelon says, the humility that can still talk needs to be carefully watched!

More tomorrow….