Confronting Carefully
From 1 Timothy 5 – 21 I charge you before God and the Lord Jesus Christ and the elect angels that you observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing with partiality. 22 Do not lay hands on anyone hastily, nor share in other people’s sins; keep yourself pure.
Perhaps surprisingly given his humanist tendencies in The Story of Civilization series, Will Durant admits in his volume The Reformation, "Even the trust in reason is a precarious faith." His perspective is as enlightening as his metaphor, "We are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun."
Inspired Scripture would perhaps be more optimistic about itself and the confidence with which the Christian believer can tread where we follow its precepts precisely, by grace. Even so, within its pages, Durant's variety of caution and confession is not unknown. In 1 Timothy 5:21-22, the mentor Paul has been used in the book's opening salvo to charge Timothy with confronting and uprooting misbegotten spiritual leadership. Now that he works his way around to tactics for doing so in the letter's fifth chapter, he moves with a circumspection Durant would recognize.
There is enough darkness left in you, Timothy, Paul would seem to say, that you need to move cautiously as you grope for the sun, as you confront in order to reconcile, that the righteousness of Christ might shine forth more distinctly in Ephesus. Even in those biblically commissioned to confront, spouses, parents, pastors, elders, deacons, teachers, preconceptions exist. The tendency is present to justify ourselves in the process of pointing out the sins of others. As the veteran nurse said to the residents on the show Code Black, before helping the patients, we check our own pulse first.
In our eclectic stopover, Bob Dylan offers us some hope. In "My Back Pages," he looks back at a certain overzealousness with which he once preached to others. He takes a deep breath and reflects, "“Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.“ There is a renewal that comes from confessional experience. There is an even better, truer, more thorough renewal that comes from Christ. We are, in Him, ever younger, ever sloughing off the old man in order to press toward the mark, gladly, of being like Him. Along the way, others can benefit from our experience, be encouraged and challenged by our example and our touch.
Perhaps surprisingly given his humanist tendencies in The Story of Civilization series, Will Durant admits in his volume The Reformation, "Even the trust in reason is a precarious faith." His perspective is as enlightening as his metaphor, "We are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun."
Inspired Scripture would perhaps be more optimistic about itself and the confidence with which the Christian believer can tread where we follow its precepts precisely, by grace. Even so, within its pages, Durant's variety of caution and confession is not unknown. In 1 Timothy 5:21-22, the mentor Paul has been used in the book's opening salvo to charge Timothy with confronting and uprooting misbegotten spiritual leadership. Now that he works his way around to tactics for doing so in the letter's fifth chapter, he moves with a circumspection Durant would recognize.
There is enough darkness left in you, Timothy, Paul would seem to say, that you need to move cautiously as you grope for the sun, as you confront in order to reconcile, that the righteousness of Christ might shine forth more distinctly in Ephesus. Even in those biblically commissioned to confront, spouses, parents, pastors, elders, deacons, teachers, preconceptions exist. The tendency is present to justify ourselves in the process of pointing out the sins of others. As the veteran nurse said to the residents on the show Code Black, before helping the patients, we check our own pulse first.
In our eclectic stopover, Bob Dylan offers us some hope. In "My Back Pages," he looks back at a certain overzealousness with which he once preached to others. He takes a deep breath and reflects, "“Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.“ There is a renewal that comes from confessional experience. There is an even better, truer, more thorough renewal that comes from Christ. We are, in Him, ever younger, ever sloughing off the old man in order to press toward the mark, gladly, of being like Him. Along the way, others can benefit from our experience, be encouraged and challenged by our example and our touch.
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