My technologically resistant wife has suddenly found a level of
expertise since she got an Apple computer earlier this year. After we both
installed Kindle Reader on our computers, she discovered that a lot of free books
are available online. She began to scan various sites for free books, and she
now receives regular emails listing a wide variety of books available for
downloading without cost. She looks carefully at the description of the book;
and if it looks interesting, she downloads it. Since we share our Kindle files,
I now have access to a lot of books that I probably would not have looked at
otherwise. I’ve ended up reading a wide variety of books, and many of them have
been pretty good reads.
Right now I am reading a book by J. J. Hebert titled Unconventional (Mindstir Media USA). The book features a high school
graduate, James, who works as a janitor in a school but who has a special gift
for writing. He meets an upper-class Christian woman, Leigh; and they fall in
love in spite of the objections of her parents. Her hyper-Christian parents make
a quick judgment that he is far less than what their daughter deserves. They
openly abhor him, and they do all they can to protect their daughter from
making a monumental mistake. I’m at the point in the book where Leigh is sympathetically
sharing the plan of salvation with James. I was stopped in my tracks when she
testified, “The Book of John says this: ‘For God so loved the world, that he
gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn
the world; but that the world through him might be saved.’”
The “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world” took on a
new meaning for me when I saw that statement in the context of the condemnation
that the outsider James was receiving from Leigh’s parents. I suddenly was
reminded that too much of our Christian witness is directed toward condemning
the world, and too little of it is directed toward so loving the world that we
are willing to sacrifice our very lives to show love rather than condemnation.
I have read that “God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world”
numerous times, but I never had thought of that statement in the context of the
condemnation we subtly and sometimes not so subtly direct toward “the world”
and the worldly.
We sometimes adopt the stance of “love the sinner, but hate the sin,” but
even that places hate in parallel with love; and the sinner cannot see love in
the condemnation of who the sinner is and what the sinner does. We need to
rediscover that “the world through him might be saved” is most clearly seen in
sacrificial love rather than in condemning judgment. Condemnation comes at the
end when lack of faith in a loving God is the focus, not the sins that all us
have committed. Our
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