During the six years that I was serving as the pastor of a church, questions of this nature came up frequently. Each question needs to be carefully and prayerfully considered taking into consideration all of the available facts.
An acquaintance of mine who frequently fellowshipped with us had for several years felt a calling upon his life to become a Church of the Nazarene pastor. For four years he attended a Church of the Nazarene university, majored in religion, and graduated. He then applied for ordination as a minister in the Church of the Nazarene. By this time he knew all of the questions that ministerial candidates are asked, and he knew that one of those questions asked the candidates what their position was on speaking in tongues. The position of the Church of the Nazarene is that speaking in tongues today is definitely not of God, but my friend had been, from his point of view, speaking in tongues for the past few years. So this young man asked me how he should answer that question, and we talked this over in detail. A few days later he told me that he had been ordained, and that oddly enough that question was not asked.
Also during the six years that I was serving as the pastor of a church, a member of a very violent and vicious gang came to see me on several occasions and related to me details of very violent crimes. The most frightening thing, however, was that this man (whom I shall call Tom in this post) showed no remorse at all for his crimes. He told me of one man whose abdomen he had ripped open with a knife for accidentally knocking over his motorcycle, and I asked Tom if the man had died. Tom gave me a strange look and replied, “I don’t know, I never thought about it.”
One evening when Tom came to talk to me, a pastor friend and his brother were visiting me and I asked him to talk with this pastor. Tom, my pastor friend, and my friend’s brother went back into my office and talked for a long while. After they had finished talking, Tom and I went to another office and I asked Tom how it went between him and the pastor. He told me that
both pastors were really nice and that he liked them, but that they frightened him when they insisted that he was going to spend eternity in hell if he did not repent of his sins and receive Christ’s forgiveness and salvation. I told Tom that only one of the men was a pastor, and that the other man was his brother, an officer of the California Highway Patrol. Tom became exceedingly afraid, knowing that he had just confessed his crimes to an officer of the law, but I assured Tom that the officer would not turn him in.
Tom continued to come and talk with me, and each time he was more and more frightened of the prospect of spending eternity in hell. And then a period of several weeks went by and I did not see Tom. A group at the church was preparing to leave to go on a retreat, but my girl friend who was also going had not yet arrived and I was becoming a bit annoyed. And just at that moment she arrived and brought a young man, a stranger, into the church with her and told me that he needed to talk to me. I became all the more annoyed, took a look at the young man, and took him into my office for a talk.
The young man began to share with me what Christ was doing in his life, and I looked at this young man, and looked again, and I realized that this young man was Tom! His countenance had changed so much due to his radical conversion that I didn’t even recognize his face. He told me how a Christian judge was having his criminal record sealed and was petitioning the U.S. Marine Corps to seal his military record also. Accepting Christ as his savior carried the sentence of death by his gang, so the judge got Tom a job driving for a trucking company in another city, and Tom came to share with me that he had been saved and to say good-bye.
God is sovereign and we all need to remember that at all times and in every situation. God pays a lot more attention to our heart than he does to the technicalities of our manners. The Bible does not tell us everything about Jesus, nor does it tell us everything about the people in the Bible. Does that mean that God is a liar because he held back things from us that we are better off not knowing? Does that mean that Tom is a liar when he holds back details of his life that other people are not ready to deal with in the manner that God would have them to deal with it? I don’t think so. As Christians, we are not under the law, but under grace, and telling the truth is not always graceful and can destroy people’s lives. Grace does not give us a license to sin, but it does help us to have the wisdom necessary to deal with situations in a loving, constructive manner.
