The author of Hebrews says this about Jesus:

“You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.”

Hebrews 1:9, ESV

One thing we should keep in mind as church leaders is our tendency to be selective in the things we denounce. I have seen this tendency in myself and others and it has been a persistent problem for my entire church experience.

It is quite easy to find reasons to be angry about stuff that we don’t struggle with or stuff that we think we have straight in our own lives. We can fuss over our pet peeve and ignore some other things that God would like to see changed in us.

In my lifetime, I have heard angry rhetoric about the “culture war” and complaints about the erosion of morals in our country. While we may have a case that the sin we are condemning is truly condemned by God as revealed in the Bible, we also need to understand that our anger is not tempered, as it out to be, by the intensity of love that God has displayed through his Son Jesus.

The danger is that we can fail to admit to our own hard-heartedness and lack of love for those we denounce as sinners. When we do so our hypocrisy is on display for everyone to see, even if we fail to see it in ourselves.

We should constantly keep in mind Jesus’ parable about the log and the speck. My neighbor’s speck can only be confronted after the log is removed from my own eye. The trouble is that my log-eyedness is a chronic, not an acute, symptom of my sinful nature. So, I must admit that I have never been in a log-less state and am therefore unqualified to condemn anyone else.

Recognition of the logs in our own eyes should mediate the tendency to jump on the issue-of-the-day and keep us from being out of balance.

Yes, we should hate the things that God hates, but we don’t have the option of being selective in which ones we condemn.

Also, we are not in a good place if we do not at the same time love all the things that God loves. We don’t have the option of being selective in our loves either.

Perhaps this would be a good place to quote one of the most familiar of Bible verses:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

John 3:16 (ESV) (Empahsis Added)

In his book “Overcoming Toxic Parenting” Rick Johnson writes the following about having a positive attitude:

“Part of having a good attitude is developing gratitude for what we have. Do you have a faithful spouse and children who love you? Then you are blessed beyond words. Be grateful. Do you have a home to live in and food to eat every day? Are you physically healthy? If so, you are better off than most of the people in the world. Be grateful – rejoice in the blessings you have been given. If you are reading this book, you must be educated. What a huge blessing! That means you can change yourself. Be grateful for what you do have, not unhappy about what you lack.

I do understand that it is not easy to force ourselves to be happy. I don’t suggest this cavalierly. But our attitude is one of the few things we have control of. It is the one thing in life no one can take away from us. It’s

I find this helpful but also find this a challenge.

Much of the media that is available for consumption is specifically targeted to make us feel like we are missing something or that there is something that we need to do to improve our condition.

Advertisements breed dissatisfaction to prod us to buy a product. Talk radio feeds upon our sense that something isn’t right to get us spun up and keep us listening. Social media displays everyone else having the best time with the best people at the best places and this distorted view of reality can make us feel left out.

As I write this, I am reminded of the wisdom in the children’s song I learned years ago in Sunday School:

Oh be carefull little eyes what you see
Oh be carefull little ears what you hear
Oh be carefull little feet where you go
Oh be carefull little hands what you do

While strolling through Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, we could hear an amplified voice near one corner. From a distance, I could not identify the purpose of the speech, but I did have some idea that the speaker was angry about something. I was curious to see if it was a political protest or a speech about one of the hot button issues being debated on our society.

My curiosity turned to disappointment when I found out that the speaker was a street preacher who was spewing out condemnation on his listeners in the name of Christ. The preacher was using a combination of “hellfire and damnation” preaching combined with Don Rickles style abuse of the audience. When the preacher started verbally harassing a passerby for his style of dress, my disappointment became increasingly mixed with frustration at the misrepresentation of what it means to follow Christ.

Two errors in the preachers approach come to mind.

First, when confronted with a woman caught in the very act of adultery (see John 8), Jesus said to the woman “neither do I condemn you” before he commanded her to go and sin no more. The order of these statements is crucial to understanding Jesus and how we should go about the business of representing him in our culture. When we offer Christ to our culture, we offer him as the means of being accepted by a gracious and loving God. There is no need to be cleaned up before the offer can be accepted. Christ is more than willing to enter into relationship, no matter what the person has done or is doing at the time.

The preacher, on the other hand, implied that people need to clean up their act to be accepted by Christ. This is flat out wrong.

The second thought comes from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In Chapter 2 of that letter, Paul lets us know that prideful, religious law keeping is no more palatable to God than prideful, irreligious law breaking. Law keepers and law breakers are both in need of the grace of Jesus that comes through faith. Paul goes on in Chapter 3 to remind us that all of us, religious and irreligious, have “sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We are all in need of God’s grace.

The street preacher failed because he misrepresented the very Christ that he sought to proclaim. The whole message of the gospel is that everyone is in need of Christ; the religious and the irreligious, moral and immoral, share the same standing.