Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. (James 1:22)
I sometimes get the impression that people who go to church
are supposed to be perfect. If you listen to folks who stopped going to church,
a common chorus is, “The church is full of hypocrites.” The idea seems to be
that if one doesn’t become perfect when one becomes a Christian, either that
one is not a Christian, or Christianity is a lie.
Of course, that is not the experience of the Christian.
When Dallas Willard describes the Church as a hospital, he doesn’t express a
new idea. In fact, one doesn’t generally get a real idea of how sick one is
until one has been in a church for quite a long time. Just as when one gets
married, there’s a honeymoon period. For some, it’s shorter or longer, but eventually,
people notice your flaws and you notice theirs.
And then there’s the reality that God generally does not
sweep the sin nature out of our lives the instant we become Christians.
Sometimes, He may do so, but in general, it’s a long battle. One of the reasons
for this is that human beings are not really simple. Even Freud understood
this, and wrote of the conscious, and the unconscious. He or other
psychiatrists wrote of the Ego, the Superego, and the Id.
The ideas these psychiatrists may not be accurate, but they
reflect a reality that we encounter at the end of every year (or the beginning
of the next.) “I resolve to…” and four days, four weeks, or four months later,
those resolutions tend to be forgotten. Some part of us resists the change that
our wills have announced.
Our bodies are hungry or tired. Our emotions are exhausted
and we deserve a pick-me-up or a slide-into-comfort. Isn’t that self-care? Our
minds won’t focus. How many times have we said we’re not going to do something,
and found ourselves doing it? How many times do we not even notice what we’re
doing?
Or discover that we’ve done
it?
For a church to be a hospital treating sin-sickness is a
dangerous, difficult thing. First, people love their sins. Giving them up is (like)
dying. Secondly, sometimes, the victim of a sin is the sinner. Sometimes, it is
a little child, a spouse, or other person. Do we close our doors to the woman
caught in adultery? To the man discovered to be gay? To the drunkard, drug
addict, or glutton? How can we permit some of these folks in? Do we walk our
children down the far side of the hall and tell them, “Stay away from that man,
he’s sick”? If we do, can we extend our hand in friendship? If we don’t, aren’t
we sinning?
I’m not claiming to have answers to those things, but let’s
make it personal. Each of us has stuff about us that needs to change. James
calls us to do what Scripture says, not just read it, but doing what Scripture
says is tough sometimes. Most of us don’t get the gift of “and I never even
wanted to ______ again.” Bad habits don’t melt away when we read the Bible. In
fact, they may become worse.
And we don’t want the “doctor” at our local church to know
about this or that symptom. We don’t want to submit to a thorough examination,
even at our own hands. But that’s what doing what Scripture says requires. And
so is taking the hand of another sinner either to help, or to be helped.
How do we treat our own sins? How do we treat those of others?
What does Scripture say?
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