“I can differentiate the sin and the sinner. Hate the one, yet love the other,” he told me.
“But, how can you prevent the hate from spilling over into the love?” I wondered.
“If everyone would only follow the rules and change their behavior,” he replied, “then the world would be a better place. That’s why we need to get the government to pass more laws making more behaviors illegal.”
“But, would that not just be a mask hiding that which is underneath?”
That is why we start with ourselves. What changes first is not behavior but our soul. Our inner life.
The Apostle Paul asked God in his letter to the church in Philippi to complete the work he began in his followers. For it is in the process of spiritual maturity that we begin. Our own, that is.
Then our work is to help others cultivate the Spirit and change the entire path of their lives. We can live a bountiful life in the Spirit, or we can live a shriveled life of counting mistakes of others. Or in feeling guilty about our own shortcomings all the time.
The cycle of counting the errors of our own lives and the lives of others and then condemning ourselves and others for those errors is spiritually and emotionally unhealthy.
Better the life of the Spirit.
When we have fully absorbed grace and the spirit, then we can understand how to hate the sin within us and with others. Then we guide in the spirit, not by piling useless rules one atop the other.
First see to the plank in your own eye, then to the speck in your neighbor’s.
Faith Venture 
June 11, 2019 at 7:11 am |
Amen! So convicting and true.