How to Love the Sinner!

This sermon can be watched or listened to at www.templebaptistchurch.ca!

How do you love the sinner? I recently asked our leadership team what issues that our church was wrestling with that we need to address and there was consensus that this was the one of the top questions – how do you love the sinner? Maybe it is that family member, co-worker or classmate that you are having a really hard time loving? You are in good company if you struggle with loving others. This weekend in Canada we honour Queen Victoria, who reigned over England from 1837-1901. Here was a woman who influenced the world for good because she was a Christian. History tells us of her thoughts of Christ. “When Canon (later Dean) Farrar served the Queen as chaplain, he visited her when she was sick. She had been reading a leaflet on the return of Christ and said, “Chaplain, what do you think about the return of Christ?” It is not known what the chaplain answered, but when he left he said, “Your Majesty, why have you asked me that?” “Oh,” she said, “I wish that He returns while I am still alive, because nothing would give me more joy than to pass on the crown of Great Britain and India to Him with my own hands.”[1]

Victoria’s influence was greatly felt, “At the end of the nineteenth century, illegitimate birth rates in the slums of London stood at 3% compared to 70% in underprivileged U.S. neighbourhoods today. The crime rate dropped by half during the Victorian era.”[2] I realize that some, including myself, would take issue with her colonization policies, but it does show that we as Christians can have great influence on society. You might think it was simply because of her position as Queen that she was able to cause these great changes in society. Certainly that was a factor, but reality is that you can’t legislate morality. Queen Victoria led by love. But she had to overcome her disgusts. That disgust was aimed at her overbearing mother. “Though queen, as an unmarried young woman Victoria was required by social convention to live with her mother. Her mother was consigned to a remote apartment in Buckingham Palace, and Victoria often refused to meet her. When Victoria complained to Prime Minister Melbourne that her mother’s close proximity promised “torment for many years”, Melbourne sympathized but said it could be avoided by marriage, which Victoria called a “shocking alternative.”[3] However, she overcame her disgusts of marriage and united with Prince Albert. Their subsequent nine children showed she got over her reservations and their marriage was one of love and faithfulness.

As much of a world-changer as Victoria was, there is a greater world-changer who demonstrated how to love the sinner. Who am I talking about? Victoria’s King! The Eternal Monarch Jesus Christ! He is the one who teaches us how to love the sinner and I think one of the best examples of how He loved the sinner is found in Matthew 9:9-13 when he encounters a man by the name of Matthew. Matthew was a tax-collector! Even in our culture, those who work for our nation’s revenue agency are not the most popular people, but in that day, tax-collectors were despised. “They were traitors to their own nation because they ‘sold themselves’ to the Romans to work for the government. Each tax collector purchased from Rome the right to gather taxes; and the more he gathered, the more he could keep. They were considered thieves as well as traitors; and their constant contacts with Gentiles made them religiously suspect, if not unclean.”[4] So let’s see how this unclean and hated tax-collector is loved by Jesus and how we are to love sinners as well by reading Matthew 9:9-13! Read Matthew 9:9-13!

How do you love the sinner? Here are three ways you love the sinner: 1) “Lead with embrace.”[5] (v. 9) 2) Overcome disgust of sin with love (v. 10-11) and 3) Remember your own sickness (v. 12-13). The first way we see how Jesus loved sinners was to embrace them. We know from the context that He was in charge. Earlier when Jesus was questioned by the scribes about His ability to forgive sins, Jesus responds Matthew 9:6-8, “’But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,’ – then He said to the paralytic, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home.’ And he got up and went home. But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.” Notice how Jesus is a different kind of leader. His leadership involves helping people, paralyzed by sin. And Jesus heals them. He also heals people paralyzed by their need for security and control. Matthew is sitting at his tax collector’s booth paralyzed by his need for money and power. Though he didn’t act paralyzed. He had the guts to be different and collect taxes despite what people thought about him. But deep down, Matthew knew something was wrong. He just didn’t know how to change or should I say who could change him. But then he meets Jesus. Jesus walks over to him and says, “Follow Me!” And like the paralyzed man, he got up and followed Him.

Now my question is why would Matthew just up and follow Jesus? If I said, “Follow me!” Most of you might first ask, “Where are you going?” But Jesus was different and Matthew knew it. Why? Everyone else who came to Matthew, did so reluctantly. They were forced to pay their taxes. Jesus though chose to come to Matthew without owing any taxes. He only wanted Matthew. Can you imagine if we treated that government worker or restaurant server or parent or teacher or principal as a person rather than a path to walk over to complete our task? What if we took an interest in their personal life? Jesus did! Jesus led with embrace! And Jesus’ embrace was and still is compelling. No wonder why Matthew got up and followed Him. Nothing would intrigue him more!

Now, what if we started to lead with embrace? Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, lives in us. It is possible, actually expected by Jesus that we lead with embrace. But some of you might be thinking that people need to believe and behave a certain way before they can belong to us. What we need to remember is that Jesus led you with an embrace too, before you had your theology all correct and your behaviors all in line. Actually, I think that we need to humbly say that our theology is still a work in progress and definitely our behaviors need to be more aligned with Jesus.

Part of Jesus’ theology and behavior was embrace. Recall Romans 5:8! What does it say? “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were YET sinners, Christ died for us.” You see, “embrace is theology.”[6] This has been true from the beginning. Psalm 25:10 (NLT), “The LORD leads with unfailing love and faithfulness.” The love of God teaches us more about belief and behavior than anything else. And so we can conclude that we start with belonging. We welcome people into our lives and let them know that we can journey together. Let’s follow Jesus together. What if you start saying to others, “I accept you! I may not approve of what you are doing, but I’m not trying to change you! I can’t change you (as any newly wed soon finds out), but let’s discover what it means to follow Jesus.”

But you may be wondering what if they don’t change? I have the audacity to believe that following Jesus changes a person more than anything. Love changes people! I have seen this to be true in my own life. This is why leading with embrace is the first way we can love the sinner. But you might be thinking, Jon, to be honest they disgust me. I actually have visceral feeling when I encounter somebody who is very impure. It could be the pedophile. It could be a homosexual (which is not the same thing). It could be an adulterer. It could be a homeless person. It could be a drug addict or a diseased person. In reality, we should be just as disgusted with gluttons and gossips, but it is usually with those who have broken our purity codes. Richard Beck calls this “disgust psychology.”[7] We see disgust psychology at play in the Pharisees. Verse 11 records their thinking, “When the Pharisees saw this (meaning that Jesus and His disciples were dinning with tax collectors and sinners), they said to His disciples, “Why is your Teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?” Notice the use of shame the religious leaders employed to divide the disciples from Jesus. That is still a tactic by the religious today. They whisper, “What will others think? You better avoid that person, so that we will accept you.” You then are forced to pick whether you will go with the more attractive or popular person rather than those everybody avoids.

Picking and choosing people who we love is not the Jesus way. Choosing people is for picking teams on school playgrounds, which is always an exercise about selfishly advancing our own agenda – so that you can win and others lose. But those who are picked and rejected are hurt and eventually may become bitter. We see this happen, especially amongst those who have been rejected by their family, usually picking their sibling over them. Unless adopted, families don’t get to pick who belongs to them. We all are just born into a family. Each kid contributes to the family their talents and temperaments, their passions and peculiarities. This is also true of the church! God calls people to Himself and forms a church that brings people together from all backgrounds and all personalities and makes them a forever family. Which is why the greatest rejection one can feel is to be rejected by family – your biological family and spiritual family (and often those are the same people if you grew up in the church)! The rejection seems greater when they feel our disgust!

And what we are seeing today is that our disgust with those who have broken our purity codes is being met with a counter disgust, especially by those in the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual & Transgender) community. What you might not realize is that there is a disproportionate amount of former church attenders in the LGBT Community. I have never met somebody who struggles with same-sex attraction that doesn’t have some type of church background. But they have been hurt by the church, which is why they are “shouting” at us according to Deb Hirsch. They are disgusted at our disgust, when they know that the Jesus we portray to them not match up with the Jesus they see in the Bible. They are “shouting because we are not listening”[8] according to former lesbian Deb Hirsch. That is what happens when people don’t listen to you, you just get louder. The Church is like a parent of teenagers who feel ignored or abused. No wonder there is rebellion and hatred, which has led to a shouting match! I know I take a risk in even saying that because you might think I sympathize with those of same-sex attraction. I can’t sympathize with them as a heterosexual, but I do understand that yelling at each other is not working. I understand that they need Jesus as much as I do. And “the gospel of Jesus is wonderful news for someone who experiences same-sex attraction.”[9] Jesus will be the only man who will love you and you can love in a holy and appropriate way and who will not abuse or reject you.

But church, what if you are disgusted by the sin? We are to hate the sin. So on one level hating sin reflects God’s hatred for sin. But don’t let the hatred for sin cause you to hate the sinner. If you are disgusted with something or somebody, only love can overcome that disgust. For example, we have noticed that there are these grackles that are pooping all over our pool. We looked it up and found out that “the blobs are fecal sacs, which the babies produce in a neat little bag so that the parent birds can remove the droppings from the nest in a tidy manner. Most nestlings produce fecal sacs, which is a remarkable disposable system. The babies will continue to produce these sacs while they are in the nest, but as soon as they fledge, the problem will end.”[10] In contrast, when our sweet, precious daughter was a baby, she did something very disgusting too. She filled her diaper with her waste! It was gross! But how did I overcome my revulsion. I loved her! I saw her state and had compassion on her! And now, does she still make messes? I’m not telling. Certainly, not the kind she did when she was a baby. But think back if we didn’t change her diaper. She would have died if I didn’t care and left her in her mess. I am really glad that Jesus came and cleaned up my mess. This is why we lead with embrace and overcome our disgust with love. And how do you get this transformative love? From God! Love comes from God (1 John 4:7) You remind yourself of what Jesus has done for you.

Which leads us to the third way to love the sinner: remembering your own sickness. Jesus responds to the Pharisees disgust by acknowledging Matthew and his friends’ wrongs, while brilliantly encouraging the Pharisees to examine their own wrongs. He replies in verses 12-13, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice, for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” Now, don’t let your mind begin to think that there are two categories in the world: sinners and non-sinners! That is not what Jesus was saying. He was telling them that the religious were sinners too! He does this by quoting from Hosea 6:6. Hosea was the prophet who God told to marry a prostitute to show Israel how they had committed spiritual adultery by chasing after other gods. This couldn’t be lost on the Pharisees who knew their Old Testaments very well.

But Jesus wasn’t just trying to win the argument, but I believe the people, including the religious. Jesus’ invitation to follow Him was not just for Matthew, but for all the sick – the religious and irreligious. The sick just need to know they are sick so they will go to the doctor, to the Physician. And here is the good news from the Great Physician: Jesus promises that the spiritually sick will get healed by Him. The problem is that we don’t like to go to the doctor. We don’t like to admit when we are wrong. However, I believe a true encounter with Jesus will transform you. Think about Matthew! “Matthew opened his heart to Jesus Christ and became a new person, even a writer of the first Gospel in our New Testaments. This was not an easy decision for him to make. He was a native of Capernaum, and Capernaum had rejected the Lord (Matthew 11:23). Matthew was a well-known businessman in the city, and his old friends probably persecuted him. Certainly Matthew lost a good deal of income when he left all to follow Christ.”[11] And he had to admit that he was sick.

I believe if you start with the posture of recognizing your own sickness, then loving the sinner will not be as difficult. You will see the sinner, the person that disgusts you, as the person staring back at you in the mirror because you could easily be that person. As Tim Keller says, “Churches should feel more like the waiting room for a doctor and less like a waiting room for a job interview. In a doctor’s waiting room, we assume that everyone there is sick and needs help.”[12] And yet, sometimes as we wait in the doctor’s waiting room, we go over to the corner where nobody is because we think we are not as sick as others and don’t want to catch anything. You will not be healed until you realize how sick you are. Your temptations might be different, but not better than others. As Russell Moore reminds us, “The Gospel doesn’t define us by our temptations, but by the righteousness of Christ.”

But maybe we have the opposite problem. We are sick and don’t want others to know. Our disgust and hatred toward another person is really aimed at ourselves. We speak out against certain types of “sinners” because their sin is our own struggle and we are trying to create a wall so nobody suspects it. Think about former pastor Ted Haggard who vehemently opposed gays, when he actually struggled with same-sex attraction. It reminds us of what Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, me thinks!” Those making a big stink, usually have something smelly they are trying to cover up!

The only way to love the sinner is to see ourselves as fellow sinners. But this may lead to despair if we have latent similar sin until we remember our Saviour, Jesus Christ, who led with embrace, who loved us in our disgusting state and sickness and we belong to Him. And because of Jesus we can and need “to love sin out of people.”[13] That is how we love the sinner! This is the way we will win the sinner to Christ!

[1] Source: https://www.cai.org/bible-studies/queen-victoria. Accessed May 11, 2015.

[2] Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 161.

[3] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria. Accessed May 11, 2015.

[4] Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary – Volume 1 (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1989), 12.

[5] Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2015), 145.

[6] Hirsch, 145.

[7] Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality and Mortality (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 7.

[8] Hirsch, 176.

[9] Sam Allberry, Is God Anti-gay? (Croydon, England: The Good Book Company, 2013), 10.

[10] Source: http://www.enature.com/expert/expert_show_question.asp?questionID=17225. Accessed May 17, 2015.

[11] Wiersbe, 12.

[12] Source: http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-can-church-help-battle-same-sex-attraction. Accessed May 14, 2015.

[13] Allberry, 75. The direct quote is, “We need to love those with same-sex attraction more than their gay friends do and we need to love them more than they love their homosexuality.”

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