Year: 2013

Love and the Vulnerability of God
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The willingness of unconquerable strength to make itself vulnerable, for the sake of love, is the essence of God’s incarnation in Christ. It was for intimate union with the only beings made in his image that the Sovereign of the universe so humbled Himself. If we have no inkling of how divine love compelled this emptying of divine power then we will have trouble knowing what makes the one true God different from all the other “gods” our race puts its faith in, and we will be profoundly the less for it.

Scripture tells us God is love. Love in its highest form is found in Him and all true love comes from Him. There is something we need to understand about love and, thus, about our Lord. Love is apparently more important to Him than power. If power alone was the concern of God He would never have incarnated Himself as a man. Such condescension would be unthinkable for a being that existed solely to rule and reign over his creation for the sake of ruling and reigning. The God of the Bible is all-powerful, make no mistake about it, but He is more than that. He also loves.

God wants us in deep communion with Him. He wants to know us and be known by us. He wants our purest affection to be for Him because His pure affection is directed towards us. In short He wants us to love Him and be loved by Him. Apparently the only way this could come about was for God to make Himself vulnerable to us and the only way that could happen was for Him to become one of us.

Perhaps this is because we could never fall in love with a God who remained completely different from what we are, who forever existed so high above us that we could have nothing in common with Him. Love, it seems, requires that its giver and its recipient share something essential. In Christ God shared in something essential, our humanity, and made it possible for us to fall in love with Him in a way we never could before.

What this required of our Creator was a, to us, incomprehensible descent. He emptied Himself of the full power of His Deity to be born in a stable in an obscure town in the backwaters of an empire. As far as physical and emotional vulnerability He incarnated Himself as much a human as any human he had ever made, even to the point of sharing in the danger of being rejected and killed by other humans. Why did God do this? He did it because any possibility for intimate union with us required it.

He did it because love requires such vulnerability. The possibility of love cannot be divorced from the possibility of rejection. An irresistible force cannot be resisted, but it cannot be freely loved either. Coercion and love are antonyms, “coerced love” an oxymoron. God’s love for us was so powerful that divine power itself had to be in some sense given up to enable us to respond in kind, and so it was when He came to earth in the form of the Son of Man.

It may be possible for human beings to worship any number of “gods” who are unwilling to pursue us so ardently, but it is impossible for us to be in reciprocal love with them. That kind of relationship requires a God Who both removes the stumbling block of power for power’s sake and Who risks rejection for the sake of His desire for us. Only the God of Jesus Christ fits this description and because of this only He is worth both knowing and loving with all our hearts.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

We must find our joy in God’s joy, our happiness in His happiness. Human beings are forever trying to achieve these legitimate states of being through illegitimate means. This is perhaps one of the more profoundly accurate definitions of sin.

We dig our own wells, ignoring the one true Well, and drink deeply of the poisoned water we bring up from its depths. That water kills us if we drink enough of it. These false wells may provide pleasure for a season but the pleasure never lasts. The “happiness” of sin is always temporary (and its following misery potentially long lasting, if we are foolish enough to continue in it.) What the errant “well-digger” needs to realize is that only through sharing in the joy and happiness of the holiness of God does he or she tap into what is real and not an illusion.

Sinful pleasure does not come out of nowhere. It is a counterfeit of the real thing, a twisting of something that is inherently good. Our Lord does not object to pleasure. He invented it. He does not object to joy. He is its source. True happiness is the gift of God. When His children seek and find Him they will also find the kind of pleasure that leaves no regret, a clean and holy pleasure. We who love Him are destined to share in His joy.

It is indeed a tragic thing when Christians join the world in the indulgence of illegitimate pleasure, but it is also tragic when Christians decide that all intense pleasure must somehow be the kind that Satan promotes. When we allow ourselves to enjoy innocent delight we are actually blessing the Lord of delight. Moreover, we are obeying His will for He wills that His children enjoy good things. Whether it is in the celebration of a wedding, the joy of children’s play, or the artistic creation of beauty we are living out part of the abundant life Christ promised us when we enjoy these things, and He is not only happy to give them but also happy to participate with us in them.

The term “holy pleasure” is not an oxymoron. In fact it is descriptive of one of the greatest blessings human beings can receive. It is the only kind of pleasure that satisfies because it bears God’s stamp of approval. The radical ascetic’s total rejection of such pleasure is not of God, but of the Devil. Denying the legitimacy of such a blessing, and the joy and happiness it brings, is a lie. It may sound pious, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The Bible tells us that someday we will fully enter the happiness of our Master. That is a profoundly accurate description of Heaven. Yet even in this fallen world there is the potential for experiencing some of that happiness, if only through a glass darkly. Though we still imperfectly walk in His ways in this place and time He still grants us blessed glimpses of our true home. Such is the generosity of a perfectly loving God.

“Chronological Snobbery” and America
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The great Christian writer and apologist of the last century, C.S. Lewis, spoke of a flawed view of the present and the past which he termed “Chronological Snobbery.” By this Lewis meant a societal assumption that everything new in human thought and custom was automatically better than most, if not all, of the human thought and custom that preceded it. The Oxford don was one of the last of the true classical scholars of the Western tradition (he half-kiddingly referred to himself as a “dinosaur.”) As such Lewis was able to see the Modernist rejection of tradition and natural law that, even then, was going on all around him for what it was; an unreflective rejection of any kind of time-tested way of living. One has to wonder what this man who passed away in the early 1960’s would have thought of America in 2013.

There seems to have been a proliferation of Chronological Snobbery here during the past few years. Our nation is ever more rapidly giving itself over to an attitude that enthusiastically rejects the time-honored worldview of many earlier generations in the name of “progress.” This is reflected in the recent development of laws designed to overturn what is increasingly thought of as the, at best, misguided and, at worst, intentionally oppressive moral imperatives of an earlier time in the country’s history.

Inherent in many of these legislated changes to previously accepted norms is an apparent lack of forethought as to what the new norms might lead to over time. Such a lack is one of the cardinal qualities of Chronological Snobbery. If a people decide that everything their forebears believed in was fatally flawed, based on an evolutionary notion of human progress, then they tend to assume that they are more enlightened beings. Pride is the obvious conscious or unconscious result of this way of thinking, and pride and snobbery are to a large degree synonymous.

Lewis himself was self-admittedly such a snob when he was a young Atheist. With the onset of a greater maturity in thought that immediately preceded and followed his religious conversion he came to realize the flaws of a pat faith in human progress. As an older man with a wide-ranging understanding and appreciation of the history of Western civilization he came to realize that his young pride had blinded him to its more enduring virtues. Would that more of us could come to share Lewis’s mature worldview today.

The reason we do not seems to be rooted in the fact that the last few generations in this nation are inheritors of what might be described as “The Tyranny of the Young and Distrusting.” Since at least the 1960’s there has been an aggressive rejection of both the wisdom of past ages and the older individuals who are perceived as repressively carrying on the convictions of those past ages. Advanced age is no longer seen as producing wisdom as much as in producing a supposed ignorance. This historically novel phenomenon is perhaps most strikingly seen in the now very public rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States by many, a rejection that has become profoundly more prevalent in the last several years.

It appears to be a fact of history that those societies who give up on the idea of an unchanging, transcendent moral order eventually descend into moral anarchy. If this is true then America, after 237 years, seems to be descending at a rate greater than any other society previous to it. This is because our recent widespread embrace of Chronological Snobbery, in the rapid rejection of what was considered an unchanging moral code not many years ago, is possibly unprecedented by any culture in the history of mankind. What is sure to those of us who have decidedly rejected embracing it is that we do not look forward to the future it heralds in the country of our birth.

Human Desire and God’s Timing
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley

If God does not act on our behalf in the way, or at the time, we would expect Him to we might be tempted to think that He does not love us. If God does not immediately give us what we desire we might wonder if He is our champion or our enemy. Sometimes our response is even anger towards our Lord. Such is the reaction of fallen human nature to not getting its own way how and when it wants it.

It is disconcerting to realize that we sometimes react to God the way a small child reacts to its parents when those parents challenge its will. Who has not seen (or been) a frustrated six-year-old screaming “I Hate You!” at a mother who will not buy the candy bar he or she wants? The innate human response to not getting our way with someone is to decide that someone does not have our best interest in mind. Anger usually follows.

In this world even the desires of a child of God are often frustrated. The reason for this is that our flesh (the “old man” who, though dying, still dwells within us) sometimes influences us to want the right thing in the wrong way or at the wrong time. For instance many un-married Christians have a God-given desire for a spouse but choose relationships with people who God knows would not be good for them or for the other person. Or perhaps they desire the right partner, but one or both of them are not yet at the level of maturity required to make a marriage work. The result is frustration, a surrendered believer’s legitimate desire for a good thing thwarted by the sovereign wisdom of God. The pain of such denial is real. When it happens to us we often feel like we cannot help but react.

This is where the temptation to believe a lie about the Lord rears its ugly head. The pain we experience in not receiving something we desperately want, something that makes sense to us to receive and receive right now, can be intense. We begin to wonder if the God we believe in really has our best interests at heart. We begin to wonder if He is against us, and if He is against us who can be for us? Sometimes we lash out at a God we have come to think is a cruel parent, perhaps like the darkly imperfect human parents who raised some of us. For that matter, even the best human parents make mistakes

But the God of the cross is anything but a bad parent.

He is, in fact, the perfect parent. No one knows us better than the One who created us. No one loves us better than the One who died for us and has redeemed us. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ knows and loves us perfectly and wants to bless us more deeply than we could ever imagine. However He also knows what we need, and when we need it, far better than we do. As obvious as this might be to us intellectually our hearts often have a harder time accepting it. It seems to take longer for our hearts to grow in trust than our minds.

The answer is the realization and acceptance that coming to fully trust in our God is a long process. We believe, but we still need to continue to ask Him to help us in our unbelief, to be prepared to grow in faith over the long term. A Giant Redwood tree is not made in a day and neither is our faith. Growth in faith tends to be incremental. Patience does not come overnight. When the Psalmist tells us to “wait on the Lord” he means, among other things, that a patient heart will receive its desire at exactly the right time. God gives us the desires of our heart when the giving will do us the most good. If we wish to be wise, and enjoy life in Christ to the full, we do well to accept that getting the things we want, even desperately want, will not be according to our imperfect schedule but according to His perfect one.

The 21st Century Christian, the Information Age, and “Compassion Fatigue”
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It is impossible for the believer to be content with this world as it is, but it is also impossible to change everything our spirit tells us is wrong with it. This can create a conundrum for the sensitive soul who longs for the redemption of all things, knows this must await the return of Christ, but at the same time also knows that we are called to be lights in the darkness in the interval. This dilemma is only compounded by living in an age in which mass communication on a global scale has made us more aware of what is wrong with the human race than any other generation in history.

The vast majority of Christians in 500 A.D. or 1000 A.D. or 1500 A.D. most likely had no idea what the needs were of people outside of a twenty mile radius from their place of birth. The ability to know what was wrong with the world (and to act in any way other than prayer to address how that wrong impacted people) was radically limited by the lack of media technology we take for granted today. This most likely both simplified and focused the lives of our predecessors in the faith. Their immediate community was their only world and, thus, their primary concern.

This kind of existence is nearly impossible for a conscientious believer today, at least in the developed world. Through an endless supply of print media, television programming, websites and other forms of modern communication we citizens of the 21st Century daily come face to face with a myriad of problems that plague both the Church and the world at large. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the immensity of needs on this fallen planet.

This reality contributes in a profound, but perhaps little appreciated, way to the afflictions in the community of faith that we today call “Compassion Fatigue” and “Ministry Burn-Out.” There are saints who deeply and sincerely want to make a difference for the Kingdom of God, but they have become so inundated by what they see and hear and read everyday that they either feel paralyzed by the immensity of it all or they have taken on too many causes at one time. The result is a sense of frustration and failure that can be discouraging to an extreme.

Added to this problem is the wrongheaded assumption in the West that we are all capable of doing far more than the benighted people of the past. Too many in the church have unconsciously adopted the world’s idea of unaided human potential being somehow limitless. Some have justified the taking on of too many challenges by using the Biblical declaration that “with God all things are possible” or “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” They take this to mean that God can give us the strength to do the superhuman things it would take to address most, or even many, of the problems we see everywhere thanks to living in the Information Age. The rub here is this: God will indeed give us the strength to accomplish what He truly has called us to accomplish. What He will not do is give us the strength to accomplish something he never had in mind.

In this truth is the solution to our conundrum as Christians living in the 21st Century West. We must seek God’s will for our ministerial lives while purposefully not listening to the cacophony of needs that are served up by our access to mass information. God expects us to learn to listen to His often “still, small voice”, not to what other people, or we ourselves, may tell us we must do to save the world. We are only responsible to do what He has called us to do with our finite human lives. Yes, our Lord can empower us beyond what we are capable of accomplishing in the flesh alone, but He does not expect us to achieve what He has never asked of us.

Sometimes we truly need to ignore all the voices telling us to “do something” and listen to the Voice which says “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” If we decide to only take on that yoke we will find we accomplish far more than we could ever do, in and of ourselves, at the beck and call of even the Christian voices in mass-media that tell us we must somehow do the impossible.

Not Out but Through
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Taking the easy way out in hard circumstances is a perennial temptation in the Christian life. The desire to follow the path of least resistance is a function of fallen human nature. It comes in the form of the voice in our head that tells us ease is more important than building our character and comfort more important than being authentic witnesses of God’s grace in our times of trouble.

Most of us want to avoid pain and, in and of itself, there is nothing wrong with that desire. The sin comes when we chose such avoidance at any cost, including the cost of ignoring the will of God. Suffering is sometimes necessary if we want to stay on the path of obedience. Our Lord uses trials and tribulations to refine His children as gold is purified by fire. Such refining is painful during the time we undergo it. There is no way around this truth. It is only later, in retrospect, that we realize the experience has brought about something so blessed that it was worth the hurt of the moment.

There are times in the life of every Christian when we must decide whether we are willing to endure pain, be it emotional or physical, if that is God’s will. In such circumstances our temptation is to try to avoid the pain by “opting out” of a trial rather than trusting Him to bring us through it and out to the other side. If we give in to this temptation we are in danger of hurting ourselves, and sometimes others, in a way that will be far more painful in the end.

Most would agree that a trip to the dentist for a root canal or a tooth extraction is an unpleasant experience. Such procedures are, to say the least, uncomfortable but we know that the result of the procedure is worth the pain involved because we will be able to enjoy healthy teeth for many more years. Despite knowing this we can decide to ignore the condition, hoping that the pain will go away. We may even foolishly let it run its course because we are so afraid of the immediate pain of visiting the dentist.

The consequences of these kinds of avoidance decisions are always harmful to our bodies and souls in the end. Unfortunately, beyond that, we may also hurt others in the process. This is especially true when we are trying to win someone to Christ. If a non-believer sees a Christian unwilling to endure necessary pain, for the welfare of themselves or others, that non-believer might be less convicted of the truth of our Savior’s own self-sacrifice for them. They will see cowardice in us and that perception compromises our witness and makes our faith seem far less authentic and attractive.

It should again be stated that the desire to avoid pain is not inherently sinful. Jesus Himself asked that His own great cup of pain be taken from Him. The fear He experienced in the Garden of Gethsemane was unimaginably intense and completely understandable from a human perspective. The Son of Man did not want to experience the agony of the cross and who among us would? But obedience to His Father was more important to Him than avoiding the anguish required to redeem the human race. Beyond that He knew that the future joy of having many new brothers and sisters in the Kingdom of God would be worth the pain.

May we, too, have that perspective on the unavoidable and often necessary pain we must face in this life. For the sake of our Lord, others and ourselves may we never take the “easy way out” when the only way out is through.

Human Desire and God’s Timing
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved.

When God does not act on our behalf in the way, or at the time, we would expect Him to we might be tempted to think that He does not love us. If God does not immediately give us what we desire we might wonder if He is our champion or our enemy. Sometimes our response is even anger towards our Lord. Such is the reaction of fallen human nature to not getting its way when and how it wants it.

It is disconcerting to realize that we sometimes react to God the way a small child reacts to its parents when those parents challenge its will. Who has not seen (or been) a frustrated six-year-old screaming “I Hate You!” at a mother who will not buy the candy bar he or she wants? The innate human response to not getting our way with someone is to decide that someone does not have our best interest in mind. Anger usually follows.

In this world even the desires of a child of God are often frustrated. The reason for this is that our flesh, the “old man” who, though dying, still dwells within us, sometimes influences us to want the right thing in the wrong way or at the wrong time. For instance many un-married Christians have a God-given desire for a spouse but choose relationships with people who God knows would not be good for them or the other person. Or perhaps they desire the right partner, but one or both of them are not yet at the level of maturity required to make a marriage work. The result is frustration, a believer’s legitimate desire for a good thing thwarted by the sovereign wisdom of God. The pain of such denial is real. When it happens to us it often seems like we cannot help but react.

This is where the temptation to believe a lie about the Lord rears its ugly head. The pain we experience in not receiving something we desperately want, something that makes sense to us to receive, and receive right now, can be intense. We begin to wonder if the God we believe in really has our best interests at heart. We begin to wonder if He is against us, and if He is against us who can be for us? Sometimes we lash out at a God we have come to think is a cruel parent, perhaps like the darkly imperfect human parents who raised some of us. For that matter, even the best human parents make mistakes.

But the God of the cross is anything but a bad parent.

He is, in fact, the perfect parent. No one knows us better than the One who created us. No one loves us better than the One who died for us and has redeemed us. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ knows and loves us perfectly and wants to bless us more deeply than we could ever imagine. However He also knows what we need, and when we need it, far better than we do. As obvious as this might be to us intellectually our hearts often have a harder time accepting it. It takes longer for our hearts to grow in trust than our minds.

The answer is the acceptance that coming to fully trust in our God is a long process. We believe but we still need to continue to ask Him to help us in our unbelief, to be prepared to grow in faith over the long term. A Giant Redwood tree is not made in a day and neither is our faith. Growth in faith tends to be incremental. Patience does not come overnight. When the Psalmist tells us to “wait on the Lord” he means, among other things, that a patient heart will receive its desire at exactly the right time. God gives us the desires of our heart when the giving will do us the most good. If we wish to be wise, and enjoy life in Christ to the full, we do well to accept that getting the things we want, even desperately want, will not be according to our imperfect schedule but according to His perfect one.

Wanting What We Need
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

We do not need the “God” we want or the “God” we do not want. We only need God as He truly is, irrespective of either our positive or negative desires.

An overabundance of subjectivity is part of our fallenness as a race. Being emotional beings is not a problem in and of itself (God Himself has strong emotions.) The problem comes when our passions become more of a driver in our spiritual lives than they should be. Feelings are not intrinsically sinful. What we do with them can be.

At any given time our emotions can be leading us closer to our Lord or farther away from Him. This is a function of how accurately those emotions are painting spiritual reality. It does not so much matter if they seem to us positive or negative; most of us tend to know both poles of feeling on a regular basis. This is part of our nature as bearers of the image of a passionate God. What is far more important is how much credence we are giving to them as far as what they may seem to tell us about His nature. It is in allowing either extreme to define our perception of God that we often get into trouble.

Emotions and desires are intimately intertwined in the human heart. We tend to want what we feel is good and not want what we feel is bad. This may be an obvious point, but it bears repeating because how we deal with desires that are mediated by our emotions has profound ramifications for our spiritual lives. It can be argued that nothing is more important for us than who we ultimately decide God is because that is the greatest determinant in whether we decide for or against Him. We dare not make that decision based solely, or even wholly, on whom we want Him to be or not be; to paraphrase the discovery of Moses God “is Who He is”, nothing more and nothing less.

Whether we like it or not Who we desire Him to be is irrelevant to Who He is. It, however, is very relevant to who and where we will be eternally. It is vital that we come to know God as He really is. How to best get there is the problem we all face (and it should be stated here that the answer to this problem is not necessarily to elevate human reason at the expense of human emotion. Both our cognitive and emotive perceptions are equally fallen.)

This is where both God and His word come to the fore. The best way we can arrive at a true knowledge of Him, in defiance of what may be a faulty system that amounts to wish-fulfillment, is through a Holy-Spirit inspired knowledge of the Bible. We can learn to apprehend God’s revelation of Himself in the pages of scripture, but the only way this happens is through both immersing ourselves in meditation on that scripture and praying that it will be made real to us by His Spirit. We must also ask that this true knowledge of the Divine will become the one thing we most deeply desire. As this prayer is answered both the Bible and the Spirit behind it will become our “avenues” to Objective Reality. Our subjective desires must yield to this reality if we are ever to come to know the Lord we profess to serve. Only then we will recognize Him not as who we want or do not want Him to be, but as who He really is.

This may not be what we initially want, but it is what we finally need.

Thanking God for the Wrong Thing
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

We are to give thanks in all things, not for all things. It is a mistake to thank God for intrinsically evil happenings in our lives. God can bring good out of such events, and for that we can and should be thankful, but He does not expect His children to pretend that the events themselves are good. Furthermore he does not expect us to subtly imply that He is involved in any way with evil that others have brought upon us or that we have brought upon ourselves.

Many years ago there was a film that depicted the “hazing” ceremony involved in pledging for a certain college fraternity. In one scene a pledge is literally being lashed repeatedly as a part of this ritual. Each time he is struck he is required to say, “Thank you sir, may I have another.” Some Christians feel that they should say something similar to their Lord when someone does something bad to them. They wrongly believe that He has somehow endorsed, or even caused, the pain that comes as a result of someone else’s sin. This is never true. God is not the author of the sin in our lives, no matter how it got there.

It is true that He allows evil to exist in our world today. God created a moral universe populated by higher beings designed to be moral “free agents”. When some of His creatures took advantage of that freedom by rebelling against their creator, evil came into existence and we have been affected by that evil ever since. We are the benighted descendents of two of those free agents, Adam and Eve. We, like they, are sinners.

We live in a fallen world in which catastrophe can befall us due to our own transgression, the transgression of others, or as a result of the fall of nature which accompanied the Fall of man. All of these catalysts are ultimately our own corporate fault as we belong to a race, which has been justly cursed by a holy God.

All this is to say that when bad things happen to us we should not imply that our Lord has any personal responsibility for them. We should not curse Him for the evil which comes into our lives and, by the same token, we should not thank Him either. The reason some believers do thank Him is because they think that it is somehow an act of deep humility to give thanks for the hurricane that destroyed their house. But hurricanes and tornados were not a part of the original creation; they came about when human sin entered the picture. It is foolish, not humble, to thank God for something that ultimately results from human transgression. What we can thank Him for is His promise to bring spiritual good in our lives out of our losses.

God does not gain any pleasure from seeing the misery we often go through in this life. He redeems our trials because, as His children, He desires us to ultimately be transformed partially through those trials. We need to be thankful for the blessed ability our Lord has to bring good out of evil and for the fact that His love for us compels Him to do so whenever we are afflicted.

Removing the Log
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The only way to effectively confront sin in others is to admit to the sin we have been guilty of ourselves. People do not enjoy being lectured by someone who sets themselves up as morally superior to them, but if the one doing the confronting first confesses to their own faults those people may listen. This truth is crystallized in the words of our Lord about the log in our eyes versus the mote (or small particle) in another’s. It is very easy to find sin in others and ignore our own. Such is the nature of human pride.

Most of us have had the experience of being on the receiving end of a sermon in which the preacher exhorts his listeners to identify and repent of a particular sin. Sometimes the speaker does not give any indication that the transgression in question is one that he also struggles with. The overall effect of such messages is to make the listener feel morally inferior to the speaker. However I have also heard sermons in which the pastor/teacher confesses to personally fighting the same thing. When the one talking is publicly honest in this way I immediately feel a respect for and identification with them that makes me more open to examining myself in the area in question. By confessing their own struggle with sin they gain the right to be truly heard. They have removed the log.

In God’s eyes the only person who is truly morally superior to everyone else is Jesus Christ. All others are self-deluded if they think otherwise. Yet often we succumb to the illusion of moral superiority. In addition we find another dark principle at work in our flesh. When we are losing the battle against a particular wrong in our own lives we can become that much more strident about attacking that wrong in the lives of others. During the 1980’s a certain American televangelist was known for the ferocity of his on-air attacks on the sexual immorality that was, and is, so rife in this country. Later it came out that the man was soliciting prostitutes. Such hypocrisy was a tool that Satan readily and effectively used to turn many Americans away from giving the claims of the Gospel a fair hearing at that time.

It is not that confronting sin in another is inherently wrong. The Bible tells us that we are to do so for the benefit of both the individual and the church of which that individual is a part. But if that person detects the slightest trace of self-righteousness in the one doing the confronting the confrontation is likely to end in both anger and defiance on their part. Because of this the sin can be compounded and the condition of the person ends up being worse than had nothing been said at all. Thus God’s loving redemptive purposes are thwarted, at least for the moment, and that is a terrible thing. Humble self-examination is the only way to prevent these tendencies from destroying what might be a legitimate God-given opportunity to help turn another from their sin. We must be open to confessing before confronting.

Sometimes the best way to start such a conversation is to immediately admit that we are no better than the other person in that particular area of sin or, alternatively, in some other kind of sin of which we have recently been guilty. This usually disarms the defensiveness that is so often the product of an exhortation that is without humility on the part of the one doing the exhorting.

Love alone must be what ultimately compels us to confront evil in others. Part of loving someone is identifying with them. In admitting we are not qualified to be anyone else’s judge we love the person in question and we earn the right to be heard. Then the Holy Spirit moves and blessed repentance can become a reality for them, and us.