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Unsettling Thought
I don't remember the question, but it came from a male voice with an extremely effeminate tone.
I looked up to see a man in his early 20s. His hair was very short, dyed in an almost orange blond and spiked up front. His eyes were heavily delineated with black eyeliner. A cropped, sleeveless white top revealed his pierced belly button adorned by a silver ring. And there he stood, arm bent at the elbow, hand pointed down with the pinky sticking straight up.
You're putting me on, was my initial reaction.
He repeated his question somewhat annoyed that I had not answered the first time.
No. He wasn't acting. This was real ...
I'm ashamed to admit that everything in me recoiled, and that it took effort to answer him the same way I would have anyone else.
As I watched him walk away in what up to then I'd thought was a Hollywood exaggeration of a gay walk, I wondered... How do you do it? How do you hate the sin but love the sinner?
Yes, I know. Touchy subject. Political correctness requires that we not refer to homosexuality as a sin. Yet the Bible does. So ... back to my question, how do you love without condoning? Christ did it. He ate with prostitutes and unscrupulous tax gatherers. And there must have been something about Him that made them feel welcomed. I doubt they would have stuck around for dinner if they had felt they were being judged.
I can't help but wonder... are they drawn to us?
I think part of the problem is that we tend to think of sin in terms of degrees. We haven't sinned that much... But isn't that like saying we're just a little bit pregnant? Sin is sin. Is it not written that, "Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it"? (James 2:10, italics mine).
Now, here is another unsettling thought: If Christ is in us, then He can still draw sinners to Himself through us. Maybe we are the ones that are getting in the way with our own reluctance, our own judgment, and our own fear.
There is still another aspect to consider. Christ may have drawn sinners with chords of love, but He never did say, "It's okay. I understand." It was always, "Go, and sin no more." He didn't look the other way. He didn't excuse or condone their behavior. He called sin by its name. .. at the right time. There really is a time for everything.
Acceptance, forgiveness and exhortation to a pure life... I think that is how He demonstrated how to love without condoning.
-- Maria Lund