not my job

I wrote on Monday about how hard it is to confront sin when you can’t even agree on what words mean, with good reason: spiritual words are foolishness to people without the Spirit. As a minor point in that blog, I noted that I didn’t feel it was my place to hold those Spirit-less people accountable.

Paul reinforced that for me this morning, in 1 Corinthians 5:9-13: “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Yet that’s where most of my judgment goes. It’s hard to confront sin inside the church, because I like those people. It ends up being kind of hypocritical.

A recent study made a telling point – I can’t find it back so I won’t attempt to cite numbers. But it showed that statistically there’s no longer any difference in divorce rates between churched and unchurched Americans. The same is true for adultery and infidelity. Domestic violence is actually higher among church members. And cohabitation is increasingly seen as a reasonable alternative to marriage even among Christian young people.

Here’s the point: how can we decry gay unions as an attack on marriage when we church-going Christians have done so much damage to it ourselves? Why are we so quick to judge outside the church and so slow within it?

The same is true for almost any category of sin you can name. There’s plenty for us to work on at home, where Paul says our attention should be focused. Following the same principle a step farther, I should then be quicker to call myself to account than my fellow believers.