scwguild.com

Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life— 1 Timothy 1:16.

Most of my Christian life I’ve had a love hate relationship with the church. Easy to love when Jesus slipped the engagement ring on my finger, and I believed the church, his body on earth, would love me in every way my family failed to love me. As the innocence of spiritual infancy faded into reality, my prayer time turned into complaint time.

“Jesus, why are your pastors so hateful?”

Some abandon the church and God when they get hurt in the church. I’ve never desired to abandon God, but I have entertained thoughts of abandoning the church. But Jesus never abandoned his church, so I searched for reasons to stay.

According to the Bible, the devil plants weeds in the church. God does not want us to uproot them. Doing so has the undesirable effect of uprooting the good seed with the weeds. Jesus will deal with the weeds at the end of this age. His angels will cast out those who do evil in the church.

Causing pain in the church does not destine you for eternal damnation. Spiritual maturity is slow. Those with legitimate callings to ministry operating by their clock instead of God’s cause some hurt. Others enter ministry to pursue selfish ambitions. My impatience with them reflected my own spiritual immaturity.

For a long time, my zeal for God convinced me “they” were not allowed to be flawed. But they are not Jesus, and I was no better. If Olympic Medals were awarded for lack of compassion, I would have easily taken home the gold. Not that I was devoid of all compassion. Drug addicts, prostitutes, drunkards, and anyone else caught in obvious sins were gently loved into the kingdom. Pastors were held to godlike status of sinless perfection, but all God’s people are susceptible to temptation and sin. Their sins blind them to the pain they inflict on the church. Our sins blind us to the pain we inflict on ministers trying to obey God.

Jesus has a solution for dealing with the sinners in the church. In fact, he did more than tell us what to do. He set an example for us to follow with his treatment of Saul. New Testament Saul, not the Old Testament King. Saul believed in the same God that the Christians believed in, but not in their method of worshipping God. Especially their clinging to a troublemaker from Galilee.

Saul had convinced himself he knew what God wanted. He had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the most respected teachers of his day. Being a son of a Pharisee indicated generations of family devotion to God. His father circumcised him as a sign of their covenant with God. Saul could trace his ancestry to the tribe of Benjamin. His heritage excluded him from being a priest qualified to serve in the temple, so he did the next best thing. Followed in his father’s footsteps to become a Pharisee faultless in keeping the law. His burning zeal for God drove him to destroy anyone who dared pollute his religion.

Saul qualified as a doer of the word, not a hearer only. There was one problem. He had embraced the traditions his ancestors developed that made the worship of God vain. He loved the image of God painted with brushes of man-made rules. Saul, the Pharisee, believed he worshiped the one true God who created the universe when he was really worshipping an idol fashioned by the vanity of human thought. 

Being a good Pharisee, he obtained authority from the high priest to cleanse the synagogues in Damascus of sinners who followed Jesus. On his way to Damascus, a light from heaven flashed. Saul fell to the ground and heard, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul did not have a clue who the voice belonged to, so Jesus spoke with a little more clarity. “I am Jesus, who you are persecuting.”

Jesus’s treatment of Saul set the example for the way we should treat sinners wreaking havoc in the church. He gave Saul more than an opportunity to repent. He redirected the zeal Saul already possessed for the things of God into the truth and made him a preacher of the gospel he sought to destroy. Saul’s ministry flourished in Damascus until the Jews plotted to kill him. Barnabas spoke on his behalf before the apostles at Jerusalem and Saul’s ministry flourished again. Until the Jews sought to kill him again. The church decided he should return to his home in Tarsus for his own safety. Ten years later, Barnabas invited Saul to a Gentile church in Antioch, which launched his ministry to the Gentiles, and gave him a new name, Paul, for the new man he had become.

Jesus and Barnabas salvaged the life of a man who thought religious practices made him a good man. Decades later, Saul, now called Paul, reflected on his life in his first letter to Timothy. He deeply regretted his persecution of the church and called himself the worst of sinners. Today, the worst sinners are defined as the homosexual, adulterer, drug addict, or drunkard. We think people who do not attend church are sinners, and they are. But the worst sinners are probably sitting on the pew next to us or standing behind pulpits, preaching to us.

The sinners in the church that create pain in our lives are not a lost cause any more than Saul who became the Apostle Paul. We should follow Jesus’s example in dealing with them. Be merciful. Many act in ignorance of the truth. We must be patient until Jesus breaks through the darkness that blinds them because he came into the world to save sinners.

(Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43, 1 Timothy 1:12-17)