Friend of Sinners

9/16/18              Mike  (video)                 53

Being a good listener in Gospel outreach conversations often means holding my tongue, being willing to overlook outrageous beliefs and false accusations against my own, at least temporarily, while trying to assess the beliefs of others and get to the heart of their unbelief or misunderstandings. From the nature of my question about eternity, however, most people realize that I have some sort of spiritual interest and they usually have enough “spiritual correctness” to tone down their profanity and references to immoral activities.

Not so much for a man named Mike, 53, who pretty much “put it all on the table” during a conversation at the park recently.  At first I was kind of surprised, but eventually I realized he really believed his sinful patterns to be insignificant as he proclaimed himself a good person nonetheless.

I struggled to explain what repentance and belief might look like for Mike, because I wasn’t quite sure where to start or how far to take it.  His blatant disregard for “spiritual correctness” left me wondering how to help him see his need forgiveness in Christ without overemphasizing repentance to the point of legalism, or underemphasizing it and cheapening the grace that saves us. 

But Mike did this for me.  Without trying to he reminded me it’s not about finding the right balance, its about finding Jesus.  It turned out I knew that his mother, and she is a godly woman who prays for her wayward son.  Between her influence and a recent Bible movie he had seen Mike brought up the incident of Jesus at Levi tax collector’s house, and another story of Jesus with the sinful woman who perfumed his feet.  Mike confused both of these stories and mixed them together, but generally knew that they demonstrated that Jesus is a friend of sinners like himself.

In fact, Jesus is more a friend of sinners – those who might be the kind of people that “put it all out on the table”, than the kind of people who self-righteously hide their sin under the table. 

People like Simon the Pharisee – the man at whose house Jesus ate when visited by the sinful woman.  This was the man of whom Jesus told his pointed parable about indebtedness, forgiveness and gratitude, ending with these words to Simon in Luke 7:  “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

On the table or hidden under it, we all have a great sin debt that Jesus paid for at the cross, and we all need not only salvation but sanctification, the gradual process of maturing in faith and obedience which brings us out of our sinful habits and more like Jesus. 

Maybe I didn’t need to worry so much about how much to emphasize grace and repentance with Mike – the same Holy Spirit who brings people to faith and repentance can be trusted to bring them through the process of sanctification.  Maybe I just needed to be a friend of sinners, like Jesus.

PS – Mike graciously allowed me to record our conversation, which can be seen in its entirety HERE