Copyright 2017 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
There is a disturbing tendency I have identified more than once in myself. I have noticed that my response to the wrongs of others often has less to do with my wanting to help them be free of whatever the wrong is than it does removing the presence of their wrongdoing because it bothers me personally. By this I mean that my response to evil in others is more self-centered than others-centered. As such, it is not a Godly response and therefore, if I act on it, it may do more harm than good.
When someone is doing something wrong in my presence, whether they are a believer or a skeptic, I become uncomfortable. Some of this discomfort no doubt is related to knowing how God thinks about the sin in question. To a much lesser extent, I may be thinking about how people are hurting themselves as well as those they love by transgressing biblical moral norms. Sadly, though, I have come to believe that the majority of my negative reaction has more to do with my desire to live in a world free of human wrongdoing prior to the final establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.
I have always, I think, been a perfectionist by fallen nature. A manifestation of that trait is my desire to “know the rules” and play by them as much as I can through the enabling presence of divine grace in my life. When others around me are not playing by the same rules, it tends to make me ill at ease. Rather than forbearing the faults of another sinner who is saved (or not saved) in the same way and by the same God as myself, I often feel anger rising that I have to be exposed to their faults at all.
Apart from the aforementioned obvious irony of the self-righteous “log” no doubt lodged in my own eye, this tendency of mine makes my daily life tenser that it has or ought to be. It is hard to be happy and/or joyful when the presence of human depravity makes me anxious. This is a problem because that depravity is getting noticeably worse in the human race at large. Even Christians are not free of it due to the enduring presence of the flesh which our spirit is forever fighting against to whatever degree of success or failure. I’m certainly not free of it.
Jesus, on the other hand, was with sinners all the time. He even managed to love them to the point of dying for them. Certainly there were times when he called sin sin and reacted strongly against it, but this did not seem to scare the majority of people away from Him. Jesus also never indicated by his words or actions that he was uncomfortable with people’s wrongdoing simply because He found it personally offensive. He may have reacted against it because it was offensive to His Father and destructive towards the persons involved, but it never seemed to be just because it made Him uncomfortable.
This can be explained, of course, by the fact that there was no sinful self-righteousness in the sinless Son of God. That said His followers are not free to be unlovingly at odds with their fellows just because they are not perfectly sinless in real time the way the Christ is. Part of our progressive sanctification must involve an increasing humility and love for both lost unbelievers and the imperfect believers with whom we walk out the faith.
I suspect it starts with examining why we are so put off by the presence of something of which we ourselves are often guilty. We might also endeavor to remember that sin, whether on our part or that of another, will be a daily reality in our lives until either our Savior returns or we go home to be with Him. In the meantime, the love of Christ calls us to transcend our self-centered need for perfection in those around us by accepting them just as they are while humbly helping them (and by extension ourselves) find a holier way to live.