A House Divided

When Thing One was a baby, I sought after the ideas and opinions of Christians so vastly different than the ones I was accustomed to. I was questioning the hard line that had been drawn in certain areas of my life and I craved another perspective.

Oh, and I was also a little bitter against my traditional upbringing.

And I found a haven for that bitterness. There is no shortage of Christian blogs that spend a tremendous amount of time judging the church. Their own brothers and sisters. But at the time, I was feeling plenty judged for having questions about what had always been presented as truth to me, so I jumped on it.

I wasn't interested in restoration or edification or loving difficult people.

I was interested in validation.


And I easily found it. I read volumes on all the problems that evangelicals had created. I found justification in feeling right, in being more spiritually enlightened than all those pitiful legalists.

I am so thankful for my family. Because of their balanced approach to extreme ideas, I was able to see that neither side is really right. I'm not really a follower by nature. I can't think of a single famous person that I'd love to meet, and I'm not a very loyal fan of anyone (not since teenagerdom, anyway). But I do respect and value the opinions of my parents and sisters, and more than that, I listen to them probably above all others.

And my family agreed with a lot of what I felt in the area of legalism, but never did I find them ready to denounce a brother in Christ. It always came back to love. Love heals sins. Love inspires change. Love governs attitudes.

Love doesn't gossip or publicly humiliate or seek to make one's self appear superior to someone else.

Even if they are wrong.


I'm not interested in being an extremist. And while I may find both sides of the pendulum rather frustrating at times, grace is for them too. I'm still working on that.

It breaks my heart when I see the church attacking itself. When bloggers spend their time trolling the "enemy's" site for easy blog fodder, it shames the name of Christ. Public calling out is so very rarely necessary. If these writers were interested in change, they'd privately seek genuine relationships and conversation with the people on the other side of the aisle. Writers should stick to the sin they deal with in their own hearts, because when you spend most of your time calling out someone else, people start to notice the underlying bitterness. Even if you wrap it up in a victim mentality, it doesn't do much to further the gospel. It only separates.

People, we're all victims of something. And we're all perpetrators of much more. But the beautiful thing is it's not about us. It's not about our experience or our mistakes or our good intentions.

It's about Jesus.

Not the conservative Jesus that judges harshly or the liberal Jesus that winks an eye at sin.

But the actual Jesus found in the Scriptures.

The Jesus that can point out your sin with spot on accuracy, but then give you a way to "go and sin no more".

The Jesus that finds you as a leper and leaves you whole and clean.

The Jesus that takes your cross and nails and conquers it in a way you never could.

Let's talk about him. Not about all the different ways we can disagree. Let's focus on loving Jesus and he will teach us to love each other.

"...How wonderful and how pleasant it is when brothers live together in harmony!" Psalm 133:1