Do You Know A Holy Man?

Do you know a holy man? Of all the men in your acquaintance, are there any you would describe as holy?

Here is an incomplete picture of what a holy man is like:

He cannot lie. He does not exaggerate or deceive. He will not shade the truth to gain an advantage, or make himself look good, or make you feel good.

He welcomes you with grace and good cheer.

He takes care to remain in control of himself at all times. You have never seen him drunk or high.

He does good things, but you never hear about it from him. All reports of his good deeds come from others.

He will act heroically as the occasion calls for it. He will run into a burning building or dive into icy water to save a victim. If a crazy man with a gun appears, he will try to disarm him, or if he can't, he will step in front of you to take the bullet himself.

You never even knew he had a doctorate. Or that he won a medal of valor in the military. Or set the sales record for his company. Or played in the NBA. Or wrote a best-selling book. Or was elected to state-wide office. He celebrates all your achievements but remains discreetly quiet about his own.

He is chaste: celibate if single, faithful to his wife if married. If he had to work all day every day alone with your lovely wife, sister or daughter, there would be no danger of him trying to seduce, flirt with, leer at or mistreat her. If, as a single man, he courts a woman, he does so honorably. He would never exploit a woman for the sake of sexual pleasure, but would only take her to himself physically as part of a life-long, exclusive covenant. He protects all women from himself.

He drives safely and with courtesy toward other drivers.

He won't let you bully anyone. He will intervene as softly as possible and as strongly as necessary to stop you.

If he once said, "Till death do us part", he meant it. He cannot abandon a spouse, even if she becomes difficult, contemptuous, lazy, or "doesn't take care of herself". If she develops Alzheimer's, he cares for her as best he can until she dies.

He does not indulge in needless luxuries. If he is poor, he does without instead of racking up debt. If he is rich, he gives it away.

He is very hard to offend. If you poke fun at him he will laugh at himself. If you accidentally insult him he doesn't even notice. If you deliberately insult him he is quick to forget it. He does not regale you with stories of how he was wronged.

He lets you talk too.

He refrains from promising what he cannot deliver. What he has promised, he does, even though circumstances have rendered it inconvenient for him.

He assigns to your actions the best motives that wisdom, prudence and honesty allow.

He is not vain. The idea of getting Botox injections makes him laugh out loud.

He treats people as equals. Weak people gravitate toward him, because they know he will not look down on them or ignore them.

He will read this and say, "I am not that man. But I wish I were."

Graciousness 7: Extolling The Goodness Of Others

(A continuation of an occasional series: Graciousness 1-6 are the posts on March 24, 31, April 7, 21 of 2009; May 6 and December 19 of 2011).

A homiletics teacher once noted my tendency to go negative when I wanted to make a positive point. If I were illustrating some feature of humility, for example, I was more likely to tell a story about a proud person and say, "Don't be like that" than to extol a humble person and say, "Be like him." It was a smart observation. I don't think my teacher cured me of this tendency, but he made me aware of it just enough to encourage others to laud more than they scorn. (You can leave the scorning to me. I'm gifted at it.)

Gracious people laud. They tell you about the good deeds of others, and regale you with stories of kindnesses done to them. If they must tell you, "Here is how I was mistreated," they are quick to add, "But here is how I was helped." Grace-filled people notice grace in others, and open curtains to let light illumine acts of kindness that otherwise would not be known.

Years ago I heard a black preacher addressing a mostly white audience. He had grown up in the Jim Crow South. He talked about the time he was in the army and a white soldier friend asked him for a drink from his canteen. He handed him the canteen and the soldier took a sip straight from it. The preacher was nearly moved to tears. All his life he had had to drink from the "colored" water fountain - the whites he knew would not have drunk from the same cup that his lips had touched. But this white soldier treated him as a man, a peer, a brother.

It was not till later that it occurred to me that this preacher must have had thousands of stories of indignities and injustices he had suffered. But he didn't tell us any of those. Instead he remembered, related, and celebrated with us the kindness he had known. He was a man of uncommon grace.

I once tried to encourage a woman who was mildly estranged from her mother to reach out to her, to give her a call. But the woman replied, "When I call Mom, all she does is talk my ear off about people who have treated her badly." Later I had occasion to verify that that assessment was pretty accurate. The older woman could not seem to remember any good deed, only the bad ones where she was the victim. Good things done for her went unacknowledged and were quickly forgotten. Eventually I made a mental note: be like the old black preacher, not the bitter old lady.

If you would be a gracious person, then try to do this: where you see examples of goodness, relate them to others whenever you can do so appropriately. Instinctively gracious people - like my lovely wife - seem to be able to do this without even thinking about it. But natural-born oafs need to put effort into it, like the klutz who learns to dance by mechanically planting his feet on construction-paper cutouts on the floor. It may be awkward at first, but you'll get better at it.

A Christian Speculation On Time And Eternity

My brother said that somebody asked him the other day how it could be just that a person who commits a few decades' worth of sin should be punished forever in hell. The punishment does not seem to fit the crime. Few people live long enough to sin for even 100 years. So why should they be punished for quintillions of millennia?

I recall that when I was in college a theology professor addressed this problem. He said the reason that finite sin brings about infinite punishment is because it is committed against an infinite God. It is not so much what you did but Whom you did it against. Your sin can be quantified but God cannot. I think I speak for many when I say that this solution is not intuitively satisfying.

Later a seminary professor made an intriguing suggestion. He said that, though he could not prove it conclusively from Scripture, he suspected that hell is full of people who keep on sinning. They refuse to learn, they do not repent, they choose to continue to rebel against God rather than submit to his will. So their ongoing sin is met with ongoing punishment.

He may have a point. Revelation 16:9-10 speaks of people who, though they suffer apocalyptic judgment, curse God and do not cry out to him for mercy or change their ways. They prefer opposition and its pains to submission and its joys. Maybe hell is like that.

I have another idea though that I would like to throw at the problem. It has to do with time and how we experience it. Perhaps it might prove helpful to put the question of hell's duration (or heaven's, for that matter) in the context of how we understand time.

I told my brother about a thought that popped into my head a month or so after our father passed away suddenly from a heart attack. I was a junior in high school. Our mother grieved with a sorrow inconsolable. Mom and Dad were best friends, and never in my life have I known a marriage better than theirs. So she struggled when he was taken away suddenly. She said to me through tears, "I know that this is wrong and selfish of me, but I think, 'How can he enjoy heaven now if I'm not there with him? How could that be heaven for him?'" An answer came to me in a flash. I said, "Maybe when Dad got to heaven he saw you there." I explained as best I could that, maybe, when we die, we get off the timeline of earthly history and are carried above it into an eternal state. If that is the case, then heaven is not to be understood as a place where people are arriving little by little over the course of thousands of years. Maybe the redeemed are all there at once.

She liked that answer, and I am glad that it comforted her. Is it true? I don't know. We'll find out some day. I would be the first to admit that it cannot be reconciled with literal interpretations of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 or the martyred souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9-11. But there are several orthodox doctrines that cannot be reconciled with literal readings of those texts. Everyone acknowledges they are symbolic to some degree. (For example, how can souls, which are immaterial, be "under" an altar?) The question is, "How symbolic are they, and to what extent and in which directions?" and that probably is not easy to determine. The realities of heaven and hell can only be communicated to us in terms of our earthly experience. Everything that is true about them must be transposed down to our limited categories, like a Mozart symphony played on a kazoo.

Maybe one of our limited categories is time. We experience personal reality as a succession of moments which we call time, and have difficulty even imagining any other kind of existence. But I'm pretty sure that God exists outside time. I'm pretty sure that time, like the universe itself, is something that he created and is not bound by. If the timeline of history can be imagined as the pages of a book, then we live our lives on (let's say) page 172. The previous 171 pages are history as we know it, and the following pages are, to us, future and unknown. But God holds the whole book in his hands. He can open it to any page. He can even write himself into the book as a character, as he did in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

I wonder if, when we die, we get off the pages of that book and are joined to God's eternal state. If that is true, then the reality of the afterlife is not quite like an endless series of pages in a book that is already very long. It is not like living a billion quadrillion pages followed by a billion quadrillion more. Maybe it is more like seeing that book of time, and a good many other things besides, from the perspective of a good and loving God.

Somewhere I think C. S. Lewis speaks of our experience of reality as something like traveling on a train. Suppose you get on a train and travel from Chicago to Glacier National Park, as my wife and I did a couple years ago. The scenery zips by you, and you enjoy to some extent the sights from the window as the train moves on. But that's the problem: the train always moves on. You long for it to stop, to reach its destination so you can get off and explore delights on either side of the uni-dimensional track. If heaven were as time-constrained as earth, then its endless succession of days might be compared to a train that never stops, a journey that never ends. It lasts a long time, and you never get off the track. But what if heaven were more like a destination than a journey? In this life, we can never fully explore a good moment, no matter how ecstatic it is. Every moment flits through our fingers and is converted into a memory. You can never hold on to it. Poets talk about trying to possess those moments and re-create them for the sake of ongoing joy. ("If I could save time in a bottle"; "Some day...I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight"). What if, in heaven, we don't have to take a quick snapshot of the scene outside our window and cling to the memory of it by means of a photograph because now, at last, the train has stopped and we can actually go there?

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that the afterlife is not so much a matter of endlessly succeeding days as it is a destination that is either granted by grace or deserved by sin. Its eternality, when transposed into the language of time-bound persons, becomes "lots and lots of years" because the only alternative (again, for time-bound people) is "death" or "non-existence", and it certainly isn't that.

The other day I received a jolt of joy as I listened to physicist Brian Greene explain the extraordinary implications of the nature of time as Einstein helped us to understand it. If you have ever listened to that stuff about relativity, you will know that it is practically impossible to wrap your mind around the paradoxes and anti common-sense notions that physicists now know to be true. At one point, Greene defined time as "that which allows us to see that something has changed." I saw that as a beautiful definition with theological implications that Christians can receive gladly. God does not change. James 1:17 says, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." Hebrews 13:8 says, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Our eternal God is not governed by time which, by its very nature, requires change in order to be perceived, or even to exist. Perhaps, when we die, we will not be governed by time either. Perhaps instead we will arrive at the destination that our will or his grace has chosen: wretched alienation from him, or blessed union with him.

When Does God Forgive Our Sins?

When does God forgive our sins?

One simple answer is that he forgives our sins when we confess them and turn from them. King David received this forgiveness for the terrible sins of adultery and murder. When Nathan rebuked him, David said, "I have sinned against the Lord," and Nathan replied, "The Lord has taken away your sin" (2 Samuel 12:13). In Psalm 32:5 David wrote, "I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.' And you forgave the guilt of my sin."

John the Baptist talked about God's forgiveness in the same way. Mark 1:4-5 says that he preached "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins", and that as people confessed their sins, he baptized them. Presumably God forgave them.

Peter said much the same in Acts 2:38. A few weeks after the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, he told a crowd of people, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins." What Peter said to crowds he also said to individuals. In Acts 8:22 he told Simon the Sorcerer that he had to repent and beg God's forgiveness: "Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord in the hope that he may forgive you" (Acts 8:22).

Then there are the comforting words of John the Apostle to all who confess: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

A thousand tweaks and nuances and qualifications could be offered here, but the general pattern is plain. Forgiveness is something God extends to those who confess and repent. He does not withhold forgiveness from penitent people, no matter how wicked they have been. Even the miserable tax collector who was too ashamed to approach the temple and lift his eyes heavenward, but who could only mutter, "God be merciful to me the sinner", went home justified according to Jesus (Luke 18:13-14). With rare exceptions (Luke 23:34; John 8:11; Acts 7:60), forgiveness of sin follows the acknowledgement and rejection of it.

That is why part of the sermon I heard this past Easter Sunday bothered me. A guest speaker celebrated the resurrection of Christ and encouraged us to share the love of God with our neighbors, which is very good. But he repeatedly spoke of God's forgiveness as something that had already been given to an unbelieving world. The cart of forgiveness was put before the horse of confession, repentance and faith.

For example, though he acknowledged the apologetic value of defending the resurrection of Christ and the validity of the Bible, he said, "I have yet to see an apologetic more powerful than these two: The God of the universe loves you, and he forgives you." But that is not an apologetic. In fact, it is just a false statement when said to impenitent unbelievers. Though it is true regarding followers of Christ, the speaker at this point was not talking about encouraging faithful Christians - he was talking about evangelizing unbelievers. The biblical pattern of addressing people who have not yet surrendered to God is not, "God forgives you" but rather, "Repent, believe the gospel, and God will forgive you." The tense of the verb is crucial. Noah certainly did not say to his neighbors, "God forgives you." Nor did Jonah say that to the Ninevites, nor Isaiah to the Israelites, nor John the Baptist to the Judeans, nor Jesus to the Galileans, nor Paul to the Galatians, nor John the Apostle to the Sardinians. Forgiveness in the Bible is a thing promised to those who turn to God in faith and repentance, not a preemptive strike blasted scattershot at everybody regardless of their attitude toward God and sin.

The speaker doubled down on universal forgiveness when he quoted himself explaining the gospel to a new acquaintance: "It boils down to this: the God of the universe knows you. He knows all about you. And he loves you. And all the goofy stuff you’ve got clogged in you - he has forgiven every bit of it. He’s forgiven your every sin. And he welcomes you into a relationship with him." Then he asked the young man, "Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to trust him right now?"

What a grace that I was not asked that question! Smart aleck that I am, I would have replied, "Of course there's a reason. There's no need to trust him. I'm already forgiven - you said so yourself. You told me that he's forgiven my every sin, every bit of it. Well, if I'm already forgiven, what's so urgent about giving my life to Christ?"

As much as we might like to say to the man on the street, "God has forgiven your every sin," we simply cannot do that and remain true to the gospel of Jesus Christ. God has not forgiven every sin of every man we meet. Some sins - sadly - will remain forever unforgiven. What God has done is provide the means by which all who trust in his Son will have their sins taken away. But they cannot rejoice in this truth until they repent and believe.

The speaker continued, "The world needs to know that they're loved and forgiven." "Loved" I will grant. There is a universal aspect to God's love as celebrated in John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son...". But forgiven? No, not just yet. We can't jump the gun here. A mere two verses later the Gospel of John makes clear that unbelievers are not forgiven but condemned: "Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God." (John 3:18).

We Christians have good news to share with a fallen world. But it is not, "You have been forgiven! Now come to Christ." Rather, it is, "Come to Christ, and you will be forgiven." As Peter said to the centurion Cornelius concerning Jesus in Acts 10:38: "All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name."

Do We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve?

Recently a couple people complained to me about the way their spouses treat them. I had nothing to say to make it better. But it caused me to think about all those cases I know of where good people are matched with flawed partners. How does that happen? Why do good people often exercise poor judgment in selecting a mate?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower offers one answer. A character asks,"Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing?" Another replies, "We accept the love we think we deserve."

This answer strikes many as insightful, but I have a couple problems with it. For one thing, it places "love" in the category of "things we deserve", and I deny that it is healthy to regard love this way. Love is a thing given, a delight freely offered, not a thing deserved or a merit duly compensated. If I do well on a test, I deserve an "A", and if I cheat, I deserve an "F". But love is not parceled out according to the same categories of fairness and desert. If you think you deserve someone's love, or that someone else deserves your love, I'm afraid you are stepping away from the very meaning of the word "love". Love is not a merit-based commodity. Justice may rightly be spoken of as a thing deserved, but not love.

The other objection I have is softer. I cannot help but think that the slogan, "We accept the love we think we deserve" has an edge to it. It seems to accuse the person in a bad relationship of having a bad self image. "It's at least partly your fault you've got a bad partner - you accepted his paltry love because you didn't think you were worthy of better!" Well, I don't know about that. If you have a bad spouse, I won't add to your woes by blaming you for having such a poor self image that you settled for crap. Instead, I want to praise you for a virtue that you might not have known you had. I certainly don't want to tempt you to pride. But I do want to make you aware of a phenomenon that may give some comfort and understanding. For that, I need to tell you a story.

When I was in seminary I had to take lengthy psychological tests to prove I was sane. We all did. Trinity Seminary wisely did what it could to keep psychopaths out of the pulpit. So I filled in the ovals and completed the sentences and asked myself, "What kind of stupid question is that?", and resisted the temptation to give fiendishly sarcastic answers which I would have found very funny but which probably would have landed me in the category of "Needs Counseling".

Amazingly, I passed. I avoided - however narrowly - the label "Totally Bonkers" and qualified for an MDiv without any mandated counseling or medication. Go figure.

But like everybody I had to get my test results interpreted. You would meet with a counselor who would tell you what your tendencies were and where you were susceptible. One thing that came out in my evaluation was that I probably trusted people too much. "Naive" is the pejorative term for it; "clueless" is another. I don't see bad motives. I don't see warning signs that other people see.

The counselor put a positive spin on this defect, for which I was grateful. "Actually this tendency speaks well of you," he said. "The reason you are not suspicious of other people is because you expect them to be like you. You are honest, so you assume people are telling you the truth. You don't have ulterior motives, so you don't suspect others of being devious and manipulative." He gently warned me that there was a possibility that I would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous people, savaged and blindsided by those who lack integrity. I was likely to impute good motives to bad people, and pay the consequences of misplaced trust.

Boy was he a prophet. It's embarrassing now, in retrospect, to see how many times I have been fooled. I am like St. Peter, who despite being warned by Jesus, "Three times you will deny me," went ahead and did it anyway. Forewarned is not always forearmed. Despite being warned to be more suspicious, I forgot the warning (or did not know how to implement it), and trusted liars.

I think a similar thing happens in situations where a good person winds up with a bad partner. Lacking a particular vice, you assumed the other person lacked it as well. Never in a million years could you ever cheat on a spouse, so you naturally assumed she would be faithful to you too. You're honest, so it never occurred to you that he was lying. You're industrious, so you never thought your sweetheart would leave you with 100% of the housework. You're frugal; you never suspected he would rack up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. You're nice; her cruelty came as a brutal surprise.

Rather than saying, "We accept the love we think we deserve", I prefer to say, "We naturally expect to receive back the love that we give." It is not an unreasonable expectation. We project the internal workings of our minds onto others, and assume that they are like us until a mountain of evidence indicates otherwise. The better and more innocent a person is, the longer it will probably take him to realize that the other person really isn't so nice after all. He will keep giving his partner the benefit of a doubt because he knows that a similar benefit, if given to him, would always turn out to be fully justified.

St. Paul wrote, "To the pure, all things are pure" (Titus 1:15). Pure people, till they are better educated and rendered cynical by disappointment, have the blessed ability to see more purity than what is actually there. If you wound up with a bad spouse, well, maybe your discernment was not all it could have been. But take comfort in this. Your blindness to your partner's faults may actually indicate good things about your character. Where evidence was incomplete or ambiguous, something inside you led you to assume goodness rather than suspect evil. That's usually a good thing. I applaud your naive assumptions. Please, just keep being good, and despite your griefs, resolve to be even better.

You Have To Go To Church Anyway

The other day my brother called to complain about the songs they sing at his church. He knows I will sympathize. I won't mention the songs here because God might have used them in your life to help you worship, and the contempt my brother and I feel for them might disturb you. I don't want to sin against God by wounding your spirit.

I'll say this: the songs involve lots of repetition. As they cycle the same few words the effect on people like my brother and me is mind-numbing alienation. We are not thinking, I am being drawn into contemplation of the wonders of God, but rather, Oh no, please. Make it stop.

The musical style reminds me of pop songs I hear at work all day. As I pack merchandise in a warehouse, speakers blare songs that I have heard 500 times in the past few years. Some of these must have been composed by tortured souls suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. They repeat mindless phrases like "Anything can happen" or "Sending out an SOS" until you want to kill somebody. As I endure a Groundhog-Day loop of hearing performers chant phrases they can't stop repeating, I thank God for giving me the grace not to take a baseball bat to the speakers, pound them to silent smithereens, and walk out the door never to be seen again.

Sometimes I try to engage co-workers in conversations about the lyrics, and in so doing I have noticed an astonishing thing: it seems that virtually none of them has paid attention to the lyrics of any song. Maybe listening to the words and contemplating their meaning is a rare quirk that my brother and I share. This tendency gets us into trouble in many churches. For example, we are likely to ask, "What in the world does 'My soul now to stand' mean? And why didn't the writer bother conjugating the verb?"

Then there are the sermons. Don't get me started on those. The homiletic tradition in churches of the sort my brother and I have attended has fallen on hard times. Reverent exposition of sacred text is rare, and regurgitation of thoughtless catchphrases is rampant. I know seven - seven! - preachers who told their congregations, "Nothing you can do can make God love you more; nothing you can do can make God love you less." See the August 30, 2012 post for my angry retort explaining what the Bible actually says about the love of God. Wearied churchgoers might be excused for asking, "What's the point of listening to a preacher who pays so little attention to the text of Scripture that he winds up spouting drivel?"

So some Christians just stay home on Sunday morning. They have their reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the things that annoy my brother and me. Famous preachers A. W. Pink and A. W. Tozer both stopped going to church when they retired. One uncharitably suspects that the thing they had most liked about church was hearing themselves talk. Best-selling author Donald Miller recently caused a stir with a blog post explaining why he avoids church. His reason was cheerfully narcissistic: going to church does not benefit him. "I don't connect with God by singing to Him," he writes. "I don't learn much about God hearing a sermon...So, do I attend church? Not often, to be honest. Like I said, it’s not how I learn."

The childlike, unreflective self-centeredness of these words takes one's breath away. I'd like to ask Miller, "Do you do anything, anything at all, out of a sense of duty? Simply because it's the right thing to do? If you saw a crime victim lying unconscious beside the road to Jericho, would you stop to help him, or would you say, 'I don't connect with God by being a good Samaritan - that's just not how I learn'? Or maybe, 'Staying faithful to my wife is not one of the ways I build intimacy with God - I connect with him in other ways'? Miller, do all decisions that govern your behavior get filtered through the 'How will-it-benefit-me' grid? If so, then for heaven's sake please shut up and go pick a different religion. Christianity is not for you. To adapt a metaphor from Lyndon Johnson about J. Edgar Hoover, go pee in some other religion's tent."

Going to church is like showing mercy to the downtrodden, or giving generously, or living a life that is sexually chaste: it's one of those things you are commanded to do. Whether you like it or draw some benefit from it is quite beside the point. Hebrews 10:25 commands us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Jesus commanded his followers to break bread together in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19). The Old Testament is filled with commandments to worship God in the company of his people: "Come let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our maker" (Psalm 95:6); "Magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together" (Psalm 34:3). Note the plurals and the "with me's" and the "together's". Some of our worship has to be corporate. You are not asked to like it or be enriched by it. You are commanded to do it.

It is good for us to be given some commandments that are troublesome to obey. If we only did what came easily and naturally to us, how could we indicate to ourselves and others that we love God? A person who says "I will obey God as long as I happen to like it" or "as long as I see that it benefits me personally" really has no love for God at all. She loves only herself. A person who loves God will obey his commandments - when they are easy, yes, but especially when they are hard. That is the real test of love. "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments" (1 John 5:3).

But what if you are too physically ill or mentally troubled to attend church? Ok, you're excused. Just today I read a post from a woman whose disturbing church experiences left her "physically unable" to go to worship services. She writes, "I shake, I cry uncontrollably, my skin crawls, I am unable to speak. It’s pretty difficult to be a part of a community, broken or not, with all of that going on." Agreed. Sometimes you have to heal. Far be it from me to put pressure on a bruised reed, or to snuff out, with harsh words, a smoldering wick. Jesus wouldn't do that: "A bruised reed he will not break; a smoldering wick he will not snuff out" (Matthew 12:20).

But I do want to put lots and lots of pressure on all those healthy narcissists who call themselves Christians but who think that church-going is beneath them. Look, get over yourself. Obey God. If the songs and sermons at your church stink, fine, go somewhere else. Keep looking. Though I'm as Protestant as they come, I say, if need be, go to a Catholic Mass! At least you'll hear Scripture and participate in corporate worship of the Triune God. Just bite your lip when they say those prayers to Mary.

What Never To Say To A Divorced Person

"We do not judge you."

I heard three pastors of the same megachurch say this to their group over the course of a few weeks in the spring of 2009. They were addressing divorcees. "If you are divorced, we want you to know this: we do not judge you." No doubt many divorced persons heard these words with gratitude. Having felt condemned elsewhere, they were assured that here they would be received with grace. The refusal to judge seemed intentional and premeditated. Since three pastors said it over a short time, I assumed that the senior pastor must have given the order at a staff meeting: "Get this message out: we do not judge divorced people."

Who could have a problem with that?

Me. I have a problem with it. It is wrong on two levels.

First, the overt pledge not to judge divorced persons fails to understand just how victimized some divorcees have been. To say to them, "I do not judge you" is like saying, "I forgive you" to someone who hasn't done anything wrong.

To illustrate: suppose a good woman has been beaten senseless by her evil husband. She is in the hospital in intensive care - concussed, straining to breathe because of broken ribs, struggling to talk through missing teeth and swollen lips. What would you think of someone who went up to her, touched her hand and said sweetly, "Megan, listen to me. I just want you to know that I do not judge you."

What? You don't judge her? Oh, good for you! How can the idea of judging such a person register enough plausibility that the temptation to it must be nobly dismissed,and the victim assured that she will not be looked down upon? Good heavens, of course you don't judge her! You don't even think of it, much less mention it. The thought of judging her is so offensive that its conscious rejection is troubling rather than reassuring. If you say to someone who has been gang-raped, "I don't judge you," you deserve a contemptuous glare and a "Go away!" rather than a "Oh, thank you so very much."

I am not equating divorce with torture and rape. I am simply pointing out that no victim of any kind is comforted by the assurance that his condition will not call forth judgment. Of course it won't. It is inappropriate to bring it up.

Three true stories, names changed:

Ann loved her husband Bill and raised three children with him over 25 years. A few months after her mother died and their 20-year-old son was murdered, Bill abruptly informed Ann that he had been having an affair for years and he was going to divorce her. Meanwhile he had run his business into the ground and their house teetered on foreclosure. Ann attended the trial of her son's killer alone. Newly impoverished, she scrambled to find work as a daycare assistant and janitor. An old high school friend, now drug-addicted, let her move in so she could have a place to stay.

Carl and Diane were married for 20 years and had two teenage boys. Half way into their marriage Diane got two Masters degrees. She "went college gay" (her own words, later), and secretly cheated on Carl with lesbian friends while treating him with contempt and neglect. Without warning she sprang divorce papers on him. Carl is a religious man who does not believe in divorce, but to his shock he suddenly found himself a penniless single dad divorced against his will.

After 30 years of marriage, Edward left his faithful wife Felicia for a stripper half his age whom he had impregnated. Felicia was left with the two teenage boys they had adopted as toddlers and who manifest profound behavior disorders. The divorce left her financially strapped. Felicia despairs, and struggles to make it through the day.

It is not right to say to Ann, Carl or Felicia, "We do not judge you." That is something you might say to a person who merits judgment but to whom you have decided to extend grace. It is what Jesus is reported to have said to a woman caught in adultery in John 8:11 ("Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more."). But it is not at all what the Good Samaritan would have said to the beaten-and-bruised crime victim he found by the side of the road (Luke 10:30-35). Do not say to victims, "I don't judge you." Instead, bear their burdens and bind their wounds.

I said that telling divorced people you won't judge them is wrong on two levels. The second level is the flip side of the first. Suppose that one of the scoundrels above - Bill, Diane or Edward - walks into your church with their current partner. In their wake they have left abandoned spouses and neglected children and ruined lives that you know nothing about. They feel no guilt. Their charred consciences are insensitive to self-accusation. They have worshiped so long at the temple of self-indulgence that nothing will hinder their narcissism from wreaking future havoc.

Would you really say to such people, "We don't judge you"? What music to their ears that would be! These scum-mongers have never judged themselves, but they sure have gotten sick and tired of moralistic prudes looking down on them and disapproving of their behavior. When you tell them they won't be judged, they think, "Finally! It's about time! It's been hard to find a group that will let me go around destroying people without making me feel all guilty about it." Their cold-hearted, reptilian drive to exploit and discard others will meet no resistance in your preemptive, ill-conceived determination not to judge them.

No two divorces are alike, and no two divorcees are alike. Some cry out for judgment, rebuke, repentance, and demands for restitution. Others call for charity, compassion, and comfort. Till you know more, say nothing about judgment.