After pondering this question for a few
minutes, I realized that, while John’s role was to prepare
the way for the Lord,[ii]
ours is to reflect it.
God doesn’t need us to lead
people with lectures; He wants us to serve them in love.
We know this from 1 Peter 4:10 where the apostle tells us to
use whatever gifts we have received to serve others as we
faithfully administer God’s grace in its various forms.
God’s grace was nowhere in the
message delivered by the men holding the protest signs.
There’s a line between being
holy and holier-than-thou and, by crossing it, the picketers
pushed away the very people they were trying to reach.
God wants us to get close to
other sinners, not close the book on them.
Knowing that these pious preachers were in direct violation
of Colossians 4:6—which insists that our words be full of
grace and seasoned with salt—makes me wonder: What would
Jesus say if he had been standing in their place?
Although the fear of the Lord is
the beginning of wisdom, I find it hard to believe that
Jesus would have condoned such scare tactics. God’s love,
not fear, opened my eyes to the gospel. And it was not my
mistakes, but being loved in spite of them, that led to my
salvation. I guess that’s why I think Jesus would have
turned, not to the fans, but to the religious fanatics to
say: “As long as you keep scaring people away, you’ll never
lead them to me.”
For most of his adult life, Denver
Moore scared people away as he did what he had to do to
survive. One of the things he had to do was fight people who
tried to steal his possessions; and all eyes were on the art
dealer as Ron talked about the day he saw one of these
brawls firsthand. To preface his story, Hall shared a
conversation he’d with his wife a few days before.
“I had a dream last night,” Debra
announced.
“So what was it about?” Ron asked.
“I saw the face of a man. He is a
poor man. He’s a homeless man and he is a wise man, and by
his wisdom, he’s going to save our city.” Debra explained,
“Our city’s going to be changed. And we need to find him.”
“You really… saw a man?”
“I saw his face,” she stated, “and
I want you to go with me and help me find him in the inner
city.”
Reluctantly, Hall drove his wife
into Fort Worth to look for the other man of her dreams. The
couple began serving at the Union Gospel Mission and it was
there that Ron saw Denver get into a scuffle over a stolen
pair of shoes.
“As the fight was winding down,
there was one man left standing and he was in some raggedy
old britches. And he had no shoes, no shirt, and he was
screaming, ‘I’m going to kill whoever done it! Whoever stole
my shoes, I’m gonna kill him!’” Ron went on to explain how
his wife started jumping up and down “like a cheerleader …
whose team has just scored the winning touchdown.”
“That’s him! That’s him!” she
cried.
“That’s who?” her husband asked.
“That’s the man I had the dream
about.”
“Which one?” he probed while
glancing fearfully at Denver. “Him?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “And I think
God told me that you have to be his friend.”
I can imagine how afraid the art
dealer was when he calmly replied: “Debra, I was not at that
meeting you had with God.”
Hall did eventually become friends
with Denver and, as I listened to the divine circumstances
that brought these two men together, I realized that I was
judging Denver in the same way that the street evangelists
had judged me.
Hearing about what this
homeless-man-turned-author went through and how God
delivered him from his circumstances made me believe that
Denver preached, not with a holier-than-thou attitude, but
out of gratitude for how God had worked in his life. Like
the lectures of my childhood, the words I had taken offense
to had nothing to do with me at all.
Every one of us has a past that,
on some level, influences how we see people in the present.
And as difficult as it was to admit, I have a long way to go
if I want to be like Ron’s wife who saw through Denver’s
poor behavior and walked up to him just days after the fight
to say: “You are not a bad man. God has a calling on your
life and you’re going to live to see it.”
Denver wrote about this
conversation on pages 92 and 93 of Same Kind of Different
as Me when he said: “She was the first person I’d
met in a long time that wasn’t scared of me. Seemed like …
she had spiritual eyes: She could see right through my skin
to who I was on the inside.”
Although it’s easy to forget, God
has a plan for all of us—the pious and penniless included.
Part of the plan is realizing that people can perform in
unacceptable ways for understandable reasons. When we see
through the bad behavior and make a conscious choice to
befriend and not belittle them, we show picketers that love,
not lectures, lead people to Jesus; and we’re not so
different after all.
Quotes
to Grow On
