Racial Reconciliation and the Gospel: A Nerve Has Been Struck

There have been many open letters recently. Letters that I hope have good intentions. But the judgment that I see in many of the comments and responses, of those who call themselves Christians, to those opening their hearts, is astounding and disheartening. And in some capacity, it all seems surreal.

I was at the TGC MLK 50 Conference 2018. I am a white male. And many of the messages were uncomfortable. But as I began to listen I could understand the heart of these men and women who voiced their frustrations, their hearts, their fears, their trepidations, their hurts, their viewpoints, their past, and their wisdom. Did I understand and agree with everything said?... I don’t know. I’m still processing. But as a Christian, it should motivate me to view things differently and act differently. Often, the truth will be uncomfortable. And I think a nerve has been struck.

Maybe we think that everything should be rosy and easy when we encounter truth and hard topics. The reality is that it is hard, it’s messy, it’s complicated and thus we should respond not with an equal or greater harshness, but a gentleness of a loving brother. We shouldn’t respond with quick single thoughts that compress everything down to hard concepts with no process of understanding what we might unknowingly see as minutiae. I think a nerve has been struck.

I think we should compose ourselves and listen before we interject our knee-jerk reactions to things that sound possibly counter to our cultural Christianity. Because the truth is that somewhere in our belief systems are ingrained ideas that are still counter to the Gospel. We might think and claim that we have it all figured out, but sadly we don’t. None of us has attained the unity of the body of Christ or the maturity of he who calls us. I think a nerve has been struck.

The Apostle Paul said that we are to submit to one another and focus on the unity of the body. Christ said that the world would know that we are his disciples by how we love one another. Someone has to be silent while another speaks. How long has the majority asked those on the other side of the unseen racial divide to be silent and let time work it out? Shouldn’t they also have a time to voice their hearts to the family of God? Each has to love one another before we even think of beginning to poke holes or find an error in another’s heartfelt communication. And in reality, we have to be as Christ and take the blows that we receive from a Brother or Sister in Christ. Hurt people tend to hurt people and if you haven’t noticed – there is a lot of hurt in this world. And we also need to realize that we might be the ones hurting others and not even know it. I think a nerve has been struck.

Recently, a white, leading, Gospel-oriented, Christian leader proposed that he has missed out on part of the Gospel. He lamented his unbalanced Gospel. I gathered from it that he was openly repenting of not giving equal action to social concerns and justice – his reorientation to racial reconciliation. That his view of the Gospel was limited. There has been a backlash towards him and also TGC– a virtual or actual mob of men and women seem eager to cast word stones at his supposed “heretical” Gospel and TGC’s supposed “liberal agenda” and new racial divide. But I wonder if the chastisement by these pundits seeks unity or seeks division–even if they say the other is causing the division. Where is the heart of this response? And was he really saying a different Gospel? I think a nerve has been struck.

This leader didn’t say that the Gospel wasn’t only through Faith in Jesus Christ. His life and teachings run counter to that. But there is also a living and physical process of activity that is lived out in the believer. This Gospel, when translated into Gospel living, is to be lived in a Gospel balance. It is probably James’ point, in his letter, when he redirects our vision of a life lived in faith of having a visible language of works– a form of a justified faith that isn’t alone. It is a balanced Gospel that is also a form of social and economic focus. These works aren’t concepts, they aren’t theological constructs, instead they are physical manifestations of the Gospel lived out. A Gospel that is lived out speaks and works out itself in spiritual and physical caring. The spiritual is always primary, but the physical is not absent. To say that we have a mind and heart of Christ and at the same time say that we can’t be concerned about voices crying out for social and economic justice is the heretical voice. I think a nerve has been struck.

God’s concern for the poor and justice and commands to do something for them is littered throughout the Old and New Testament. Maybe it is just that we haven’t noticed it because we have an unbalanced Gospel viewpoint. Maybe the Gospel with a so-called Faith in Christ isn’t really faith when it has no hands and feet in that it unknowingly avoids the calls to die to self, to sacrifice, to give up my goods for the poor, to share what I have, and to have compassion for the oppressed. I think a nerve has been struck.

Yes, we have to be careful with what and who we are yoked to, but we can also listen and come alongside other human beings and try to hear their voices and realize that our ears just might be clogged. The actual people we aren’t supposed to hang with are so-called brothers that are immoral, covetous, idolaters, revilers, railers, and swindlers. I think these charges could be leveled against American Christendom of the past and even today. I think a nerve has been struck.

Now in writing this, I might be labeled a “liberal”. The Gospel I purport might be re-examined and called a “social” Gospel. My motives might be tested and scrutinized. And I might even suffer for this. But then again, this also happened to Christ. And as Ligon Duncan said, at the 2018 T4G Conference, “This is a 2nd Commandment issue.” I think, no, I know a nerve has been struck. An idol is being exposed and it will hurt for awhile. Because there are always rumbles and shrapnel when an idol comes crashing down.

Gossip and Mistrust: The Great Scandal Out of Matthew 18:15-16

Your friend has an issue with someone else. You want to help them and you want to counsel them. You hope to encourage and build them up – point them in the right direction. They desire counsel or friendship on the matter. And they want to describe the situation and conflict with you. But sometimes there is a fine line between helping and harming. There should be a boundary between addressing them and the actual issues they have with someone else.

One of the most precarious elements of discipleship, counseling, and friendship is when we open the dialogue for our friends or brothers and sisters to address the issues they have with someone else. There is a dangerous slippery slope of gossip, slander, and disunity that can come about in the information that your friend exposes to you.

How so? It's truth and good counsel, isn't it?

Any whisper about another person, whether true or not, isn’t wholesome, for building up, or what Jesus desires in His people. Grace is often mugged in back alleys of gossip mislabeled as good counsel. 

Instead, we must disciple and help our friends to see the Gospel, apply the Gospel, confront their sin, understand grace, work on their own actions, and teach them to act within Gospel truth.

Jesus says in Matthew 18:15-16:

"'If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.'"

Did you see the first phrase there, "go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone"? 

Jesus specifically commands that when we have an issue, we don't tell anyone else. That bears repeating – We. Don't. Tell. Anyone. Else. It is between you and the other person alone. We are to only go to that person first. 

As an important caveat, if there is an issue of abuse or fear of violence or something of a similar nature, then that is grounds for a different direction and form of help.

Aside from the extremes, when we don't follow the model of going and discussing the issue with the one we have an issue with first, then we violate Christ's teaching, we violate love, and we create gossip and slander. 

How is that? Think about the following:

1) Miscommunication: If you don't go back and communicate with the one you have an issue with, then you haven't found out all of the information. You may have miscommunicated something or misunderstood something. The whole issue might be overblown or nonexistent. You will never know the truth or have an issue that actually needs counseling until you have determined the actual problems and confronted them. In love, we should be trying to understand the "why" and "what" of those we are trying to love. We are to be quick to listen and slow to speak (I feel heavily convicted here).

As Paul David Trip says, in Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, "Thanks to your assumptions, the person you think you are helping may exist only in your mind." Likewise, our assumptions of situations and hurts will often construct personas and create solutions and dialogue to issues that don't even exist.

2) Misplaced Love: You aren't loving the other person that you have an issue with more when you go to someone else, instead you are loving yourself supremely. You are going to someone else first, avoiding the other person, and loving your own side of the story. Humbleness is a hard but necessary road back to reconciliation.

Or you aren't loving the other person enough to go to them first – which demonstrates to everyone a lack of love and connection with the other person. This creates disunity and breaks down a loving community. If you truly loved the other person, then you would go to them to work things out. It is often an out-of-joint connection when we go to someone else about someone else.

Love IS hard. But it IS worth it because Christ IS worth it. It's our call and who God is, according to 1 John. And if we lack love or don't love our brother or sister, then how can we call ourselves members of Christ's body?

3) Bad Testimony: Telling others about your issues with another, before the other person has a chance to explain, apologize, or even for you to apologize and repent, creates negativity in the person you are telling. 

Whether you mean it or not you are spreading information and allowing others to create opinions of someone else that you are supposed to be loving, honoring, and building up. You are allowing possible false information to be spread and poisoning the hearts of others around you. You have now broken down someone's opinion of someone else. You have torn down a temple of the Holy Spirit in the heart of another believer.

And even if the information is true, their sin is now being spread abroad. Whispering seeds that are easily blown in the winds of insecurity and judgment. 

Or the person you are telling now bears a bad testimony of how you deal with issues. The only thing we are to spread is the Gospel. The spread of bad seeds doesn't grow anything but bad and rotten fruit, which spoils the whole batch.

4) Growing Conflict: You have now created a situation where forgiveness is even more difficult. Because even if you reconcile with the person you have an issue with the other person you told now bears and holds that sin, whether imagined, misunderstood, or true in their minds and hearts. 

Forgiveness and grace mean we let things go and don't hold it against someone, but when we tell someone else first, then we withhold and destroy the forgiveness. It isn’t being let go of. It is now being held captive by another– the other person you told– who now has a bow hearsay and arrows of assumptions. You have weaponized and created a totally new conflict. 

5) The Goal is to Gain: Not going to the other first (and only them first) is a lost moment, a lost opportunity, and may cause a sister or brother to be lost. Trust is more important to the ones that have the issue between them. 

Your relationship with the person you are going to is Christ's goal and His desire. Going to someone else breaks that goal and makes gaining them secondary. If the other person finds out you talked to someone else, then you have created shame and mistrust between you both and now you have another issue to deal with. 

In the process, you haven’t gained a friend but identified yourself as an enemy and untrustworthy. You have hurt them. And now the road to gaining them back is full of potholes of doubt and mistrust.

6) Which is the greater sin or issue? You might have an issue with someone, but not following Christ’s specific teaching to go to the other person, in love, might be a greater violation and issue. In some ways, this points to you claiming to see a splinter in your brother’s eye and you having five sheets of plywood in yours. 

7) Bad Witness: If you were to approach and tell someone who isn't actually a believer or a nominal believer about another, then you have created an image of a dysfunctional Gospel family. You have produced the trifecta of a gossiping Christian, stained Christians with condemnation labels, and relationships that are hypocritical. 

Our witness, not only to the world but to one another, is the Gospel of Grace. We are to witness to the world how Christ can change everything – even our methods of conflict resolution. We are to love one another as Christ loved us. We are to witness to one another the love of Christ. We are to produce and live out the trifecta of truth, grace, and love.

8) An Awkward Bigger First Meeting: Since you jumped the order, you now have to take along everyone you told to your meeting with the person you have an issue with. This means having to come in greater humbleness (and repentance) and make the others feel ashamed or awkward.

Can you see and understand why it is important that exposing issues is and should be labeled as sin, gossip, slander, hurtful, unChristlike, evil, and part and parcel with the enemy? 

Yet, it is one of the enemy's greatest weapons amongst Christianity– gossip– easily mislabeled as something else and quickly used.

Hear this teaching from Christ:

Matthew 5:21-25: "'You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.'"

If every day of our lives, in light of his mercy, we are living it out as gifts on the altar of God, then we are called to view issues we have with one another of paramount importance. We are called to pause all other duties of living sacrifices and not go to someone else, not let it go, but go and be reconciled to them before we go on doing anything else we consider as worship of giving to God. Our issues and pride have to be sacrificed also.

So what do we do when we encounter the situation of a friend, brother, or sister wanting to expose the issues they have with another?

I believe the answer to this question within counseling, discipleship, and friendship is:

1. Tell them that you don’t want to know anything about the other person if they haven't gone to work it out with them first.
2. Point them to quickly address it with the other person. Teach them Matthew 18:15-16 and 5:21-25.
3. Let them know that you can only talk about the issues between them when and if it doesn’t get resolved between the two of them. And then you will have to meet with them both so that the issue is hopeful resolved and uncovered, quickly.
4. Have them talk about their heart, their own motivations, their own possible sin, and Gospel actions. 
5. If this is a repeated offense, then you can also confront, and lovingly rebuke them (if they are Christian) on the issue of why they aren’t going to the other person first (Matt. 18:15-16). Seek them to see a possible pattern of sin and a need for repentance in their hearts.
6. Remind them of Grace. Remind them of the great grace that Christ gave us when we had an incredible dividing issue with Him – our sin – and He came to reconcile with us. If this Grace has any worth, and beauty, then we will see the great gift and importance of being reconciled one to another. We will value being image-bearers of God's great grace and redemption. Praise God!

Ministering to the Obstinate Child While Glorifying God

Whatever stage of life our children are in it's hard being a parent. It's especially hard when we miss the point in parenting and even life itself. When I first became a parent I was naive and admittedly focused on myself (I probably still am). My common mantra was "there isn't a manual for parenthood." The reality is that there is – God's Word. And more importantly, there is a point in our parenting and all aspects of our lives.

So, how do we react, as a parent to the "terrible twos", "the teenage years", and all that comes with the personalities and lives intersecting? How do we minister to the mother faced with an obstinate two-year-old child flexing his self-will?

Admittedly, I failed. I failed most in reflecting Christ in my parental actions. Thank God, for grace. However, I think that I, and many others in the faith of Christ, can learn and pass on that lesson to other parents so that they too can grow.

Within the context of parenting, there are two persons or aspects to be observed and addressed in the relationship and interaction of needed discipline. The first is the inherent representation of our sinful nature in the obstinate two-year-old child flexing his self-will. The second is of the opportunity for Gospel response and example that the mother can display in her Gospel-oriented correction, grace, and love.

The truth of the inherent rejection of God’s Glory

The two-year-old, let’s say his name is David (highly appropriate), is operating in a human, sin-based, self-focused, and hard-hearted motivation. His words are often, “No,” to his mother’s promptings. He wants to do his own thing, regardless of what he is told. Oblivious to any danger he might be to himself he processes his primal and assumed needs. They are pure idols to him. What Tommy wants, Tommy will try to get, to the point of full-blown tantrums, screaming, and flailing.

However off-putting this behavior is, it is reflective of our own sinful humanity, even as adults. We might not have a tantrum in the same manner, but our emotions, impulses, and desires are often the same. What we want is what we will try to get. Our happiness, comfort, convenience, and pleasure is our idol. Our tantrums are manifested in our displeasure, discontentment, anger, bitterness, and lack of love for others. It is reflective and reflexive of how often our definition of God is in relation to ourselves.

In our sinful state and in this two-year-old’s mentality, our lives are not lived for God’s glory. Our reference point is often not on God but on ourselves. We tend to gravitate to living for our glory and our own rule.

The truth of a Gospel viewpoint in the life lived for God’s Glory

As a child, Tommy is being taught at every moment and can be properly disciplined to see what is good, what is right, and what correct focus should be through a parental example and the Gospel community around him. A life worth living, as a parent, is one that exemplifies the Gospel and the glorification of God.

How you react as a parent will reflect your true worship of God. Every aspect of our lives is to be lived for God’s glory. And every behavior or situation is an opportunity for the Gospel to be lived out and contextualized. It is our reasonable sacrifice and service in light of the Gospel. And how we, as parents, discipline our children can glorify God.

Our children see every move, hear every word, and notice our every behavior. This reality could turn us into legalists and moralists– where we try to do good at every moment, but this misses the point. If we are living our lives to demonstrate to others a morally good life, then we miss the glory aspect and the Gospel foundation. This approach places the glory on us and not on Christ and His work.

So, what would Gospel living look like?

The Apostle Paul teaches, in Colossians 3: 17, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” This is a heart that is not focused on the relationship of behavior to a situation, rather on the realities of God as our god, Christ as our Lord. A life lived for God’s glory is a life that anticipates eternity, understands the treasure in Christ and recognizes our issue is our desire to be a god like God – the original sin.

What we treasure and where our hearts are will be exposed in moments of stress. When God’s glory is our reference point we begin to fully understand the impact of the Gospel. We realize our dependence on God for everything. We see the immense love and grace of God. We are transformed and are different from our old self. Our treasure will be His glory.

How you respond, how you communicate, and how you relate to a child will reflect your reference point. But it’s not easy and we can’t do it on our own. In fact, that is what you have been trying to do already. The good news is that Christ can do the work for you. It is only by the grace of Christ that we can glorify God in our lives and have the strength to do it (James 4:6.)

Using God’s glory as your reference point

Here are some concepts to think about and implement in your discipline while worshiping God:

Buffer the Anger and Frustration

Instead of being mad and frustrated, glorify God in His grace to you. Glorify God and give that same grace back to your child. Remember how you were once unruly and an enemy of God, yet He still loved you, humbled himself, and died for you.

Gospel Discipline

Instead of demanding that your child obey and worship your rules, glorify God in His rule. Move the worship from your lordship to that of Christ. Follow the law of Christ – love. Don’t be led by your sin, but by the Spirit in peace, patience, kindness, goodness, joy, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and love.

Ensure that the rules and structures that you are implementing are God-glorifying. Allow your discipline to be saturated with the fruit of the Spirit and love your child, rather than judging and laying down the law on your child.

Refresh and Gain Strength from God

Instead of retreating to your inner self or your sin during moments of stress, glorify God in His strength and providence. Have faith that he will give you strength and is using these trials to grow you deeper within Him. Abide in Christ and His rule. If God is truly God, then His abilities, power, and foresight are much more powerful, good, and wise than any of our abilities or the things of this world.

Be a Gospel Community

Instead of trying to do it all on your own and in your own kingdom, glorify God through His Gospel Kingdom community. Allow other believers to help you, carry your burdens, pray for you, and help disciple the child you have been given, by God, to steward and raise up. You are not alone. Part of glorifying God is loving His body – believers and living life with, for, and along-side of them.