It’s late Sunday night, and my almost-three-year-old little girl just crawled out of bed for the second time tonight. She wanted another bedtime story, and she’s pretty hard for me to say no to when she asks real sweet like that. And yes, I know this will bite me in the coming years. But for now, I’m okay being a sucker, because I know I only have so many bedtime stories I get to read her.
In one of her books, she’s got the one about The Emperor’s New Clothes. You probably remember it: the Emperor hires two unscrupulous tailors who make a suit supposedly invisible to the stupid, incompetent or who are otherwise unfit for their positions. As a result, no one – from the Emperor on down the line – wants to admit they can’t see his clothes, so everyone ooohs and ahhs over the non-existent suit, until a child points out the obvious: the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
In Ephesians 4:17-5:21 (a big section), Paul writes quite a bit contrasting the old, dead, sinful way of living with the new, righteous, life-giving lifestyle God desires of us. Phil focused in on Paul’s message in this section today in his sermon: doing the stuff that everyone else does harms not only each of individually, but all of us together. When I sin, it hurts you, and when you sin, it hurts me. In light of that, it makes sense that Paul exhorts the Ephesian believers to confront sin in each other. He starts off by saying that – in order to help the church become mature – believers ought to “speak the truth to one another in love…” (Eph 4:15). Then he tells us bluntly to “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (5:11). He ends with some practical instruction that gets at our motives in 5:21.
There is a lesson in The Emperor’s New Clothes that struck me: confronting sin in others – calling a spade a spade – is very difficult to do well. It’s hard because deep down inside, we’re all afraid of being exposed ourselves.
In a recent book, Tim Keller quotes Christina Kelly, a writer for YM, Elle Girl and other pop culture magazines. Kelly wrote an article attempting to explain why we worship celebrities. One line from it has stuck in my mind:
“To be human is to feel inconsequential.”
This, as Kelly writes, is why we elevate celebrities to god-like status: “All the great things they have done we identify with in order to escape our own inconsequential lives.” Our own failures leave us feeling inadequate, and we feel like if we were examined, we’d be rejected. We cope with this in different ways – usually wrong – and this has terrible consequences for how we deal with the weakness and sin in the Church. We’re not good at “speaking the truth in love,” are we?
There are the obvious extremes to how “calling a spade a spade” works: on one hand, there’s the “blunt instrument” approach of whacking the offending individual over the head. For some, being blunt is easy. Most guys can (and will) say to another guy, “dude, you blew it.” Many women are also quite good at not wasting words in getting right to the point. On the other end, there’s the type who could never bring themselves to say a negative thing about another person’s choices, avoiding the conflict and hurt feelings that likely would result.
In both extreme cases, while the intentions are often good, the motives are not. In the first extreme, we’re happy to point the spotlight on someone else’s flaws because then it’s not pointed at us. Christians are notorious for “shooting their wounded,” so to speak. A pastor’s sin gets exposed on the nightly news, and we shred him, never mind the skeletons in our own closet. We’re fine telling the truth and exposing sin… so long as it’s someone else’s sin. Truth without love doesn’t exactly build up the body.
On the other hand, some of us avoid calling out sin in others because we know who we are, deep down inside. We know we’re just as big a spiritual failure as the person we see sinning – and so to call them out would be hypocrisy. So we ignore it. This isn’t truth or love – because it’s not loving to not correct someone when they’re doing something wrong, to help someone – and so in this extreme, the body also remains weak.
So then how do we “speak the truth in love” – and do it right? At the end of this section – in Ephesians 5:21 – Paul gives us the answer:
“Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ…”
Why are we told to confront sin in people we love and care about? Because sin hurts them – and because we love them, it hurts us, too. But we don’t address these failures in a manner that builds up the church because we’re too afraid of our own sin being exposed. But we’re all broken, we’re all weak, we’re all spiritual failures. That’s why Christ came! So when we see a brother or sister sinning, our first step needs to be to ditch the facade that we’ve got it all together. The love that made Christ die for your failures and mine demands that we love others enough to speak the truth to those who need it.
Remember, the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes could speak the truth because he wasn’t afraid of looking “unfit for his position.”
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