A few years ago, I took part in an action that I now deeply regret. It started
me on a journey that redefined how I understand “Love God with all your heart
and soul and mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself” and how I
understand the nature and responsibility of the Church. I was on the governing
body of my local church when we made the decision to exclude a group of people
from leadership in the church. We were so well-intentioned. We were trying to
honor God by drawing a line in the sand and holding fast to biblical principle
as we understood it and in doing so we singled out this one sin among the
rest…making it the unforgivable sin among all sins. Shortly after this, God brought me to Matthew
23:23-24: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you
hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected
the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the
former. You blind
guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
My heart was convicted. Here I am – a sinner. A
woman who had a child out of wedlock and not one but two divorces under my
belt. By all holy and righteous biblical standards, I never should have been
considered for, let alone asked to become an Elder. And not only did I serve but
I was often commended by my peers and my pastors for my work. How could I turn
around and tell another person that their particular sin prohibits them from
living out God’s call on their life in the church, but mine doesn’t. Now before
you go defending me…but your sin was in the past and forgiven and all that
sanctifying stuff…Adultery was not my only sin. I am also a liar. I tell
untruths from time to time and I lied during the time I was serving as leader
of my church. And there were other sins I committed while serving as leader,
some of which I still struggle with, but those didn’t prohibit me from being a leader
in the eyes of the church.
In our human
need to categorize everything, we’ve placed some sort of artificial hierarchy to
our sinful acts. Consider this: The sinful act that separated us from God
forever was the eating of a piece of fruit when God said not to. In our human
understanding of right and wrong, that kind of thing is punishable by 5 minutes
in time-out, but in God’s eyes, it was bad enough to cast us out away from his sight
for eternity. By excluding
these people until they got their act together, we were implying that we were
somehow more holy, more righteous than they. Here’s how Jesus put it in Luke
18:9-14: To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to
pray, one a Pharisee and the other a
tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you
that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like
this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But
the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but
beat his breast and
said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I
tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.
For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble
themselves will be exalted.”
But wait you
say…the tax collector knew he was a sinner and was repentant. These people we
relegated to the outer courts of our temple weren’t and aren’t repentant and
insist that they are no different than us. They don’t see themselves as poor
wretches any more than we do but by our action we announced ourselves to be
better, more holy, and closer to God than they.
Jesus talks about this too, in John 9:39-41: Jesus then said, “I came into the world to bring
everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so
that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great
pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.”
Some
Pharisees overheard him and said, “Does that mean you’re calling us blind?”
Jesus
said, “If you were really blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to
see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure.”
People who seek
to love God with all their heart and soul and mind and strength and their
neighbor as themselves and yet are blind to the sin in their life that is so
blatantly obvious to others—that’s all of us! Whatever the sin, it doesn’t make
any one of us too sinful for God’s grace to cover or too “spiritually
misguided” to answer God’s call to be in or to serve within the body of Christ.
We are all being molded into Christ
image, in his timing, in his way, by his hand, and we all need his grace to
redeem us every moment of our lives just as much as the first time we fell on
our knees and declared with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believed in our
hearts that God raised him from the dead. (Romans 10:9)
I’ve
deliberately tried not to reveal the “sin” that we leaders deemed as qualifier
of who is and isn’t good enough to lead God’s people in that church because it
doesn’t matter what it was or is. It’s not the action of sin but the core of
our own sinfulness in which our actions originate that equally separates each
and every one of us from God. It isn’t the good we do or our efforts to not do
bad that brings us back into his Presence, but the unlimited grace revealed in
a single act by God himself on the cross. He endured our “time-out” so that we
could again enter his presence redeemed—all of us.
Matthew 9:13
“But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not
sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (NIV)
“Go figure out what this Scripture means: ‘I’m after mercy, not
religion.’ I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.” (MSG)
“Learn what this means: ‘I want mercy, not sacrifices.’ I’ve come
to call sinners, not people who think they have God’s approval.” (GW)
