Some Fire and Brimstone

Sin is something that nobody in or outside the church likes to talk about, except for me, and that is where I find my problem. I love talking about sin. Mine, yours, big, small, Christians’ non-Christians’, it really is a most interesting topic as it can be seen through the widest variety of lenses, and only one of those lenses is right. The difficulty, I find, is getting my lenses to match the right one, but then, that is the largest difficulty, or should be, for all Christians. I can tell that I am prattling and have determined that context is necessary.

My husband and I once attended a high-school Bible study. We and those we attended with were the typical teenage rag-tag bang from all different places and in all different stages of our Christian-hood. Now that we are aspiring grown-ups and all still living in or around the same town, we have decided to get together again and give this group Bible study another go. Although this time, we are without our fearless leader, he who now lives in Africa, so it falls to us as a group to decide how we are to conduct our meetings, how much accountability we want to uphold with each other, and, most complicatedly, how we intend to handle the sins of other members.

The Bible was clear about how to handle sin in Church and Jesus had a very clear way of dealing with sin in the people he met. “Love the sinner but hate the sin”, just doesn’t cover it quite enough, and quite frankly, that little idiom really bugs me. It’s true we are to hate sin and love people, but thing get far too complicated for that when dealing with individual circumstances.

Now, I feel I have to go much much further backward to why the Law was established in the first place. The ancient Israelites badly needed some kind of code of conduct. God wrote the Law with the purpose of preserving the way he originally intended people to behave before the Fall. This code ran with themes of fairness, sexual purity, love and respect of each other, and, most importantly, love and respect for himself. Acting outside of the law means going against the way God designed people to behave, which results in consequences some may seem petty, some extreme, but all spiritually devastating,

Jesus seemed to really like sinners. He spent a lot of time drinking wine with tax collectors and loose women. But in all seriousness, Jesus’ guideline for how he treated sinners seems to me to have been varied by a simple question of how THEY treated their sin. Hypocrisy was really the only sin that openly ticked him off. He was less than polite to the Pharisees who thought of themselves as better than they were and he pulled out a whip and started overturning tables when he saw that people were using the temple to make a profit. He also got frustrated with his disciples when they were afraid after he told them not to be. The guideline with Jesus was if you say you are following God, you better be following God. For this reason, God probably looks differently on a pastor who is having an affair than he looks at the atheist woman said pastor is sleeping with.

Both the pastor and the woman in my scenario and the woman will suffer the consequence of emotionally and physically bonding with someone they are not meant to be bonded to. They will lose a part of themselves to the other that can not be recovered. They will risk broken homes and destroyed marriages. They will risk getting STDs or a pregnancy they aren’t equipped for. But the pastor will also have to deal with the fact that he is seen as an example of the Christian lifestyle and his sin could cause others to either think God approves of his behavior or drive others away from coming to the church. People who claim that they follow Christ by calling themselves Christians have a lot of responsibility by representing a lifestyle approved of by God. An ordinary person sinning hurts themselves and others. A Christian sinning hurts the name and reputation of God almighty. Not to mention, Christians have a guidebook and the Holy Spirit to guide them to do the right thing. When you tell your kid they can’t have a cookie and they take one anyway, it’s significantly more frustrating than when the kid takes a cookie without knowing they aren’t supposed to.

James wrote that “faith without works is dead”. What you do does not effect if you are saved. Christians can sin as much as they want without losing salvation, but they may as well not be saved at all if it doesn’t effect how they live. What is the point of having faith and knowing God if you are going to live like and suffer the same (sometimes worse) consequences as someone who doesn’t.

So what does this all have to do with the Church? Well, keeping brothers and sisters accountable is a huge part of being in fellowship with one another. If I knew a friend was on a path to destruction for herself, I would want to let her know. If I was in denial about how my mistakes were effecting my life and how I am representing God, I would really want a kick in the pants.

Paul says that if a fellow Christian is sinning outright without (and I need to stress this) repentance or struggling, doesn’t admit to doing something wrong or doesn’t want to stop, you should go to them and talk to them about it. If they don’t listen, you bring another member or two to try to get through to them. If that doesn’t work, they have to leave the church to be “given over to the devil” to hit rock bottom and hopefully change their behavior.

All Christians are sinners. Pretending we’re perfect does a lot more harm to us and the church than admitting that we mess up. We all have particular subjects that we struggle with and Satan tempts us with again and again and again. That is the struggle that comes with being sinners and being in a sinful world. We have a responsibility to each other to be firm and not let each other fall or cause others to stumble. Sin in the church is dangerous, rampant, and too often ignored.

Meanwhile, sin outside the church, particularly premarital sex, abortion, and homosexuality, Christians seem either all to ready to jump into condemning or are too afraid to admit that those things are even sin at all at the risk of seeming judgmental. We can’t ignore that sin is wrong and we can’t tolerate it, but we also have to have compassion for the people. Be willing to eat with them, to love them, to show mercy without agenda. Jesus told people to “sin no more” but he never got angry with the broken people. He saw them as sick and he had the cure. Paul said that God’s mercy was not to allow Christians to continue to sin, but so that people would know that it is safe to repent and receive forgiveness.

To the sinner who doesn’t know him, God is a loving father ready to welcome back his lost child. To the sinner who has accepted Christ, God is the father to be obeyed and respected because he has loved and given so much. What an insult it is to God when we accept his forgiveness for our sins and then take that as an opportunity to drag his name through the mud with our arrogance and unrepentance.

All that being said, I can now explain my reasons for feeling the way I do about our group of friends. They all claim to be believes. Some have lifestyles that do not reflect that. We will not be popular at all if we point that out to them or tell them they can’t lead or, God forbid, have to ask them to not come back for a while. But I want to take sin seriously because God does. I need to hold myself and my friends to the standard God sets and that’s not easy. That’s really not easy at all.

In a nutshell, there are, in very broad terms, four responses we should have toward sin. In ourselves, we should strive to identify what sin is and carve it out. We should seek God for help and strength against Satan and temptation. We must also go to him for his ever-flowing grace when we inevitably fail. We also need to go to our fellow Christians for support and prayer.  In fellow Christians who are struggling, we need to pray with them and encourage them to resist temptation. We need to love them and rejoice with them when they succeed. In Christians who will not acknowledge or are not trying to change their sinful behavior, we need to be firm and strive to bring them back from destruction. For sinners who do not know Christ, we need to show the love and grace of God above everything else. But in any situation, we can’t ever be afraid of the truth and our hatred of sin needs to stem from our love of others and our love of God.