Lent Day 17: Complicit sinners

"They're sleeping together," my friend said about her daughter and the boyfriend. She shrugged. "At least we know about it. I hope they're being careful."

My grandma would have marched over to her child, pulled two apart kicking and screaming (she and the couple, if necessary), and fallen on her face before God to fast and pray for the sinners.

My parents' generation would warn and pray, asking God to intervene. They would probably extend God's love to such a couple, and ask God to convict, knowing that all of us make our own choices with consequences.

My generation is so dulled by the adultery and bad marriages around us that we are at the shrugging point. Most of us would not venture a judgment to the couple. "Well, everyone chooses their own path, and they know better."

Does that make us complicit in their sins? We know we ourselves are so broken that it's hard to "cast the first stone," even before conviction strikes. Jesus said the person without sin was to begin the punishment on a woman found in adultery. I couldn't throw that first stone.

However, he never hesitated to say, "Go and sin no more." When am I willing to follow his example, and when do I look the other way, knowing the price he paid to offer us new life?

Read more:
*The LORD reigns; let the peoples tremble! He dwells between the cherubim; let the earth be moved! The LORD is great in Zion, and He is high above all the peoples. Let them praise Your great and awesome name — He is holy. Psalm 99:1-3 NKJV

*"Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool." Isaiah I:18 NET

*Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 NIV