Honoring Vows (August 29, 2004)

Reflecting upon Rosita's faithful care of her incapacitated husband from his stroke in 1993 until his death last week has called to mind some thoughts about wedding vows.

I was startled by the words of the pastor who conducted the wedding for my friends Doug and Linda. He talked about their vows with a forthrightness you seldom hear. He said, "You are committed to one another 'for richer or poorer, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.' Doug, there may come a time when Linda gets very sick. You must care for her. Linda, there may come a time when Doug is worse as a person than he is now. You must remain with him."

Thankfully that pastor's words have not proven prophetic - Linda has stayed healthy and Doug has only gotten more Christlike. But the pastor put his finger on something that young people in the thrall of love seldom think about. Things can get worse in unpredictable ways. Your beautiful wife may succumb to Multiple Sclerosis, or Parkinson's, or dementia, or become a quadriplegic - and you will become her caretaker. Your devoted husband may turn into an irritable, contemptuous, self-absorbed jerk - and you'll be stuck with an unhappiness that no counseling can alleviate. But it is just for cases like these that we recite vows in the first place, promising before God and witnesses to keep loving each other till death parts us. No one would need to promise that if love always remained easy.

The pastor who spoke those compelling words to Doug and Linda got divorced sometime later. So did the Reverend who married my Linda and me. I don't know why - never heard the details of either case. I do know that some terrible sin must have been committed, because either adultery or abandonment led to a biblically warranted divorce (Matthew 19:9 and 1 Corinthians 7:15), or because someone dissolved the marriage in contempt of the God before whom they recited their vows. There is no such thing as a no-fault divorce. Divorce always involves sin. That is not to say that those who get divorced have sinned. I like to say that divorce is sin just as murder is sin. A killer and his victim are both "involved in" a murder, but they do not share equal blame. Same thing with rape - it is a gross cruelty to lump together those who commit such a crime with those who are victims of it. It is wrong to assume that all divorcees are marital sinners. Remember that but for an angel's intervention, the most blessed woman who ever lived would have been a divorcee (Matthew 1:19).

You cannot control what your spouse does, becomes, or falls victim to. You can control what promises you make and whether you will fulfill them. If you are single, then do not take wedding vows unless you plan to abide by them. Look around at failed marriages, and determine that "as far as it depends on you" (Romans 12:18), you will not fail. Consider those who became sick and could not (or bad and would not) respond to their spouse's love. If you are ever on the painful side of such deprivation, will you still love? If not, then marry not.

And if you are already married, then "take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you" (Philippians 3:17) and imitate them. Imitate Rosita's steadfast devotion whenever it is your turn to do so. God bless your marriage. God bless the faithful fulfillment of all your vows.

When You Are Tired Of Doing Good (August 22, 2004)

A prayer I like to say for people who are serving the Lord is that they "not grow weary in doing good" (Galatians 6:9).

Many a servant of God has grown weary and cynical - just plain sick and tired of seeing his good efforts come to naught. Or sometimes worse than naught. "Naught" means zero, but sometimes our labors actually seem to result in a net loss. When the kind-hearted soul sees a bad result springing from his good deed he is tempted to say, "Why did I bother? It would have been better if I had done nothing!"

Remember the boy who handed his lunch to Jesus and saw him multiply it to feed a crowd of thousands? I like to think that that event inspired him to be generous for the rest of his life. See what miracles happen when you give! But suppose the next time he gave his lunch he watched bullies use it as ammunition in a food fight. After an experience like that he might decide afterward to hold his lunch bag a little tighter and say, "This is mine. Go get your own."

It is important to draw a distinction here. A bad result to a kind deed may indicate that the good intentions were not wisely channeled. For example, if a man finds that his efforts to evangelize the lost are alienating people, it may be because he has been disobeying Jesus' command to move on when rejected (Luke 9:5), and he has not been following Jesus' example to leave uninterested people alone (Luke 8:37). A generous giver finds that he has been funding laziness because he was not making the poor work for it (Leviticus 19:9--10), and was not taking their worthiness into account (1 Timothy 5:9-10). A faithful wife winds up with a sexually transmitted disease and an abused daughter because she mistakenly forgave her pervert husband without insisting first on his repentance as a condition of reconciliation. (Luke 17:3). In all such cases, the foolish saint must learn from his mistakes and others'. Many disasters result from good intentions feeding unwise practice.

But sometimes the practice is wise and the intention is holy and the result is still bad. This is when the best of men can "grow weary in doing good" - just too spiritually tired to keep doing the right thing. Have you never known a servant of the Lord who got burned in a ministry, or in a marriage, or in a profession, or in a church - and then just gave up trying? I have. I myself have borne the burden of soul-weariness more than once, and will regret till the Lord wipes my memory clean the sin of not having tried again, or tried harder.

I take courage in the example of a heroine of mine, my sister Grace Washburn. A couple weeks ago, at my niece's funeral, my nephew David said that he had wondered why, in 1988, his parents adopted yet another child after all that they had suffered with previous adoptees and foster children. Grace and her husband Ron specialized in taking in abused and abandoned kids, wards of the state. Many of these proved to be "black holes" of love, unable or unwilling to give back any of the kindness shown them. Some committed crimes - against the Washburns and others - and wound up in prison. David asked, "After all the love that my parents gave to them and they threw it all away, why would they do it again?"

They did it again because God called them to care for needy children, and they would do so without growing weary until God said stop. Sixteen years ago, their efforts were rewarded with little Annie, a sick, Down Syndrome girl whose skin was as black as coal but whose spirit was bright as a fireworks display. Annie received love, and gave it back, and we were all privileged to watch love multiply around her like the fish and loaves that multiplied around Jesus. Annie is with the Lord now - her heart finally gave out. But her life and the love that surrounded her stand as a testimony to the value of refusing to grow weary in doing good. The rest of Galatians 6:9 reads, "Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

Never give up doing what you know to be right.

The Godly Duty Of Inducing Guilt (August 15, 2004)

It is necessary that sinners feel miserable in the presence of God and his saints.

In his book, What's So Amazing About Grace? Philip Yancey writes about a prostitute who came to visit a friend of his who works with down-and-outers in Chicago. The woman was "unable to buy food" for her two-year-old daughter. Through tears she explained that she had been renting out her toddler by the hour for kinky sex with perverts in order to get money for drugs. (She couldn't buy food, but she could sell her daughter to get high.) When Yancey's friend asked if she ever thought of going to church, she said, "Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse."

Yancey believes this woman's avoidance of church is an indictment of it. He writes, "What struck me about my friend's story is that women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?"

What? Now wait just a minute. First of all, is it really accurate to say that "women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus"? Maybe a few exceptional ones did, but it is likely that the vast majority kept plying their trade, steering well clear of the Preacher who was so stern about sexual sin that he would equate mere lust with adultery. The woman caught in the act in John 8 did not "flee toward Jesus" - she was dragged unwillingly before him. (And - a point often missed - he never said it was wrong to stone her. That is, after all, what God had commanded. The problem, as Jesus pointed out, was that all the judges had disqualified themselves.) The five-husbanded fornicator in John 4 never fled toward Jesus - she only talked to him because he happened to strike up a conversation with her (a conversation where he quickly dug up the root of her iniquity). I think it is fair to say that the only prostitutes who fled toward Jesus were the ones who were willing to feel terrible in his presence, like the sinful woman in Luke 7 who cried enough tears on his feet to wash them clean.

Secondly, just what is wrong about "being made to feel worse" in church? The apostle Paul speaks of this not as a danger to be avoided but as a goal to be pursued! 1 Corinthians 14:24-25: "If an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all, and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, "God is really among you!" This is a good thing. A sinner in church should not feel warmed and blessed, but convicted and ashamed. In 2 Corinthians 7:8-9 Paul speaks of his joy over the results of his efforts to induce this shame: "Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it - I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while - yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us."

Sorrow as God intended does no harm. Our problem today is not that prostitutes might feel bad in our churches, but that sinners in general feel so good in them. When Isaiah (presumably a decent man by our standards) came into the presence of God, he cried, "Woe is me!" When righteous Job heard God, he said, "I despise myself." When Peter saw Jesus' power, he said, "Depart from me, I am a sinful man." When the tax collector approached the temple he said, "God be merciful to me, the sinner." When Paul the Persecutor saw Jesus, he refused food and water for three days.

But today we who speak for God wring our hands before the sinner and say, "I’m so sorry! Did I make you feel bad?"

I cannot for the life of me see how the Church in North America has "lost the gift" of attracting evildoers. What it has lost, rather, is the will to confront them, and the gracious courage to stir up godly guilt in them. God have mercy on us if unrepentant souls leave our worship services saying, "That was great! I just felt so uplifted today."

Which Sins Do You Choose To Confront? (July 25, 2004)

Last week I said that some sins are worse than others. This week I'm wondering why we are more willing to confront some sins than others. Is it because they are truly worse in the eyes of God, or because for some reason they rankle us more? Or perhaps because they are easier targets?

Leadership Journal records the responses of four evangelical pastors to the question, "What's the most important thing you want to say, pastorally, to a homosexual couple?" Disturbingly, none of the four even addressed the question, much less gave what I thought was the obvious answer: "Repent." I imagined these pastors standing with John the Baptist and shaking their heads in dismay as John tells Herod, "You cannot have your brother's wife." (How alienating! Now Herod will be offended! He’ll regard us as adulterophobes. How will he ever come to know how kind and loving and joyful we are if we tell him he has to repent? And who are we to judge a man who clearly was born with a promiscuous orientation?)

It interests me that we evangelical pastors are not nearly so wishy-washy about challenging sinners when the issue is dear to us and less politically sensitive. My favorite example is the oft-cited passage in the book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, where Pastor Jim Cymbala savages the sin of gossip. He tells new members:

I charge you that if you ever hear another member speak an unkind word of criticism or slander against anyone - myself, an usher, a choir member, or anyone else - that you stop that person in mid-sentence and say, "Excuse me - who hurt you? Who ignored you? Who slighted you? Was it Pastor Cymbala? Let's go to his office right now. He'll apologize to you, and then we'll pray together so God can restore peace to this body." But we won't let you talk critically about people who aren't present to defend themselves.

I'm serious about this. I want to help you resolve this kind of thing immediately. And know this: If you are ever the one doing the loose talking, we'll confront you.

I was deeply impressed with this quote when I first read it, and used it in a sermon. But now I'm wondering, does Cymbala take the same approach with other grave sins? (Maybe he does! Please understand I am not criticizing him at all. I’m just wondering.) If the sin were fornication rather than slander, would he urge members to confront the sinner on the spot? Imagine a pastor telling new members, "I charge you, if you ever hear another member say, 'I'm living with my fiancé,' you stop that person in mid-sentence and say, 'Excuse me? You're living in sin? Let's go to the pastor's office right now so you can repent.' I want you to resolve this thing immediately. And know this: If you are ever the one doing the cohabiting, we'll confront you."

Maybe that is exactly what he would say, and if so, I applaud his consistency. But what I'd like to know is just what is the set of sins concerning which it is our duty to stop the sinner cold and insist on immediate repentance. Abusing drugs? Having an abortion? Viewing pornography? Refusing to tithe? Getting drunk? Using a racial epithet?

Just wondering.

Are All Sins Equally Bad? (July 18, 2004)

I think one of the devil's favorite games is to get people to obliterate moral distinctions and lump unlike things together.

What spurred this thought is a comment I heard on WMBI by a Christian counselor who said, "We have many fat preachers condemning gays, but no gay preachers condemning gluttons." It's a line designed to get a laugh and provoke reflection over how shameful it is that we treat some sins as more damnworthy than others. Who are we to condemn homosexual sin while giving ourselves a free pass on overeating? The Bible says gluttony is wrong, but many of us are afflicted with this weakness, and so, like gays, we are all sinners in need of God's grace and his unconditional love that meets us where we are blah blah blah blah blah blah.

I am tired of these false moral equivalencies that trivialize perversion. It is true that everyone is a sinner and in need of God's grace. It is also true that a saint like Mother Theresa and a beast like David Berkowitz (Son of Sam killer) must both receive forgiveness through faith in Christ. But it is not true that all sins are the same. Gluttony and sodomy are not comparable, and it is not equally valid for a glutton to rebuke a sodomite as the other way around.

More times than I can count I have heard evangelicals utter the careless statement that "All sins are equally bad in God's eyes." No they aren't. Jesus explicitly denies this in his statement to Pontius Pilate, "He who delivered me over to you has the greater sin" (John 19:11). Only if sins differ in severity can one be regarded as "greater" than another. Likewise, when Jesus says that it will be "more tolerable" for Tyre and Sidon on judgment day than for Korazin and Bethsaida (Matthew 11:21-22), it is hard to see why Tyre and Sidon should get off easier unless somehow their sins were not as bad as those of the other cities.

With regard to gluttony and homosexual practice, it doesn’t take an Einstein to see from the Bible which sin is worse. The Old Testament does not prescribe the death penalty for eating too much, but it does for gay sex (Leviticus 20:13). The New Testament does not use pigging out as an example of a sin to which the wicked are "handed over," but it does so for homosexual indulgence (Romans 1:24-27). I don't see gluttony listed among the sins that keep people out of the kingdom of heaven. But gay practice listed there (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

And as for the social cost - my goodness. I have never met a woman who did not want to go on living just because her husband had gotten thick around the midsection. But just about any pastor can relate stories of poor, distraught, near-suicidal women who did not know what to do after their husbands had left them and the kids for another man. And though a fat guy may give himself a coronary before his time, at least he's not spewing a virus that has taken, and continues to take, tens of millions of lives.

Wisdom requires us to assign degrees of value to what is good and degrees of opprobrium to what it evil. To lump together all sin into one indistinguishable mass is intellectually lazy and biblically dishonest. A careless refusal to distinguish greater from lesser sin tends to mask true outrages, and gives false comfort to evildoers who ruin others' lives and imperil their own souls.

Some gifts are greater than others (1 Corinthians 12:31). Some expressions of love are greater than others (John 15:13). And yes, some sins are greater than others too.

Does Goodness Unite? (July 11, 2004)

Goodness is the great divider.

I thought about this theme when my son asked prayer for a friend whose parents are on the brink of separation. It is one of those cases where one partner is good and the other is evil. Here the husband is pleasant, mature and courteous, and the wife is foul-mouthed, hostile and (I think) under-medicated. She is insisting that he get out and leave her all the money.

Their troubled relationship illustrates what I have long regarded as a massive flaw in the marriage counseling industry: the assumption that, if you become a better husband or wife, it will make your spouse a kinder and better person too. This is not true. What is true (generally) is that if your spouse is already good, your goodness will delight him and make him better. If he is bad, your goodness will anger him and make him worse.

An under-appreciated teaching of Jesus is that his holy presence would generate discord rather than unity. He said, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household" (Matthew 10:34-36). This division was not purposeful, but a simple matter of fact. People's inclinations toward good or evil would snowball in opposite directions as they met Christ. His goodness would divide them.

Rather than acknowledge this painful truth, it seems to me that much of the Christian community chooses instead to fear that others will disapprove of them. “If they don't like us, we must be doing something wrong. Worse, if they don't like us, they won't become Christians!” That may be so, but don't worry about it. Do what is right, do what is pleasing to God, and let people respond this way or that however they may. Certainly it is good to be loved, but the goal of inspiring other people's love must never be allowed to trump the goal of doing right. Nazis and pedophiles and terrorists (and even some spouses) will never like us no matter what we do - or they may offer to keep us in their good graces only if we sacrifice the holiness that they find displeasing. We can't do that. We must simply remember that goodness divides, and ever will divide, and we must never regret any goodness that has met with either cool indifference or hostile opposition.

Martyred missionary Jim Elliot said it well when he wrote in one of his journals, "Let me not be a milepost on a single road: make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me."

If You Loved (July 4, 2004)

In the movie Critical Care, a comatose old man is kept alive by artificial means as his daughters argue about disconnecting him. As the story develops and involves doctors, lawyers and hospital administrators, we see that this (possibly) brain-dead old man is a pawn in a game where millions of dollars are at stake.

He cannot communicate, and the only visible sign of life is that his fingers constantly tap the bars on the side of his bed. This activity is ascribed to random neural firing. But an aide, knowing that the man had served in the navy, wonders if he might be tapping out Morse code. Indeed, when he translates the taps into dots and dashes they signal, over and over again, the words, "If you love me."

The movie never tells us whether the message is a coincidence or the man's deliberate attempt to communicate. Most likely it is neither, but rather a message from God to all those involved the case. The movie makes the point that the actual decision whether or not to disconnect matters less than what is motivating the decision. “If you love me,“ and the sentence hangs there for others to complete. Let us assume that there is no money involved, no career at stake, no selfish emotions to indulge, no policy to follow. If you loved me - and that was the only thing you had to consider - well, then, what would you do? Disconnect or leave connected? If the answer is obvious, then do that.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, "The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering about whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did." When you "act as if you did" you not only do the right thing, you find also (maybe) that your good work has pulled some affection along behind it. Lewis continues, "As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less."

Play this game with yourself. Pretend that you loved someone, and were motivated so purely by love that all your natural self-interest was magically snatched away. What would you do?