Sin Beats Up Victims and Leaves them for Dead

Just recently an old friend came back into my life. I hadn’t seen Oscar (not his real name) for a coon’s age. He broke off friendship because he didn’t want me around while he was ruining his life and marriage by an all consuming addiction with alcohol. But like the prodigal he has seen the error of his ways; he is in process of a long and deep repentance. My heart thrills to see him returning to his God, to sanity, to sobriety. It is a long road and hard, but he is moving in the right direction. I cannot help but see however that the sin that consumed his time, money and most everything of value in his life has left him traumatized, wounded and bleeding.

Often we think of the sinner as rebel and lawbreaker and he is both. Perhaps less rarely do we see him as one who is himself a victim of his own folly. But it seems to me that after sin has had his way with us over a period of time that often there remains only a husk of a man or woman. At times they are so traumatized, beaten up, bleeding and emotionally wounded that they require major surgery or hospitalization just to hold life together.

I say all this to say that when we call people to cease from lawbreaking and rebellion that we are often speaking to very broken, and wounded ones who are in desperate need of compassion and love because of the tragic wreckage their life has become. It behooves us then to be gentle and kind and to show deep compassion, even though they have brought all this on themselves by their rebellious and foolish choices.
May God cause us to see sinners not only as rebels, not only as breakers of God’s laws, but as precious fellow travelers in whom dwells the image of God, and to whom we owe a debt of love and compassion. Let no one think that I depreciate the place of personal responsibility. In the end all of us are responsible for our choices. But let us at all costs avoid condemning these ones. Rather, let us love precious people who may have made wrong and immoral choices, but have not disqualified themselves by so doing from the care and compassion owed to them by a people called to love even as our Father in heaven loves.