Gatekeepers of Mercy

 

Gatekeepers of Mercy

I have spent nearly my entire life in church. All of it except for the first eighteen months.

Church is not something I discovered later in life. I do not have a dramatic testimony of wandering into a sanctuary one Sunday morning and finding something I had never known before. I was raised in this. Church has been woven into almost every season of my life.

Sunday mornings. Sunday nights. Wednesday nights. Revivals. Camp meetings. Youth camps. VBS. Conferences. Prayer meetings. Fellowship halls. Church vans. Pews. Altars.

I know this world. I know the language. I know what is preached from the pulpit, and I know the things nobody has to preach because everybody in the room already understands them.

I know when to stand. I know when to raise my hands. I know what people mean when they say they “prayed through.” I can usually walk into a church and, within a few minutes, understand the culture of the room.

I know how to look like I belong. And there is a comfort in that.

There is something comforting about being surrounded by people who speak the same language, share the same convictions, sing the same songs, and understand the same things as you. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Every family develops a culture. Every community has expectations. Every church has doctrine it is responsible for preaching and convictions and standards that it believes are worth preserving.

Don’t mistake me, I am thankful for the church. Eternally thankful. I am thankful for the people who taught me truth before I was old enough to understand why it mattered. I am thankful for preachers who opened a Bible and refused to apologize for what was in it. I am thankful for people who showed me what faithfulness looked like when nobody was watching. I am thankful for a place that allowed me to grow into what I have become. The church has given me more than I could ever adequately put into words.

But there is a danger in being somewhere so long that you forget what it feels like to be new. You can forget what it feels like not to know the words. You forget what it feels like to walk into a room and wonder whether everyone is looking at you. You forget that the things which feel completely normal to you might be completely foreign to the person sitting three seats away. You forget what it feels like not to belong.

Eventually, if we are not careful, familiarity begins to feel like faithfulness. We know what we perceive faithful people to look like because, conveniently enough, they tend to look like us. They talk like us. They know the songs. They know the rules. They understand the culture.

Then someone walks through the door who does not. And something happens in us.

I wish I could write about this like I have only watched other people do it.

But I cannot. I have done it. I have looked at somebody and made a judgment before I knew their name. I have noticed what someone was wearing before I ever wondered what hurt they were carrying. I have smelled cigarettes and weed and formed an opinion without knowing them. I have heard somebody use language I would never use and immediately started measuring where I thought they were spiritually. I have looked at people who did not understand church culture and thought about all the things that needed to change.

I probably justified it by calling it discernment. Usually, it was just judgment.

That is hard for me to admit. Judgment feels uglier when I have to call it mine. It is much easier to write about “the church” becoming judgmental than it is to admit that I have been judgmental.

But I have.

And I would imagine I am not alone.

Someone walks through the doors carrying the scars and burdens of a life we know nothing about. Maybe they smell like smoke. Maybe their clothes make us uncomfortable. Maybe they have tattoos all over their body. Maybe they have no idea when they are supposed to stand up. Everybody around them starts worshiping, and they just stand there looking around the room because they have never experienced anything like this before.

We notice. Of course we notice.

The problem is what happens next. Sometimes, without anyone consciously deciding to do it, we put people on probation.

We watch them. We wait to see if they come back next week. Then we wait to see if they begin changing.

Maybe the clothes change first. Maybe their language gets cleaned up. They begin understanding what happens in worship. They learn our terminology. They figure out the rhythms of the room. Eventually, they stop looking so different.

Then, somewhere along the way, an invisible line gets crossed. Now they can belong. Nobody announces it. There is no welcome home ceremony. But suddenly they are one of us. All because they now meet our standards of belonging.

I have started wondering what happened before that moment.

Were they not one of us while God was working on them?

Were they not worth knowing when they still smelled like the world they were trying to escape?

Were they not worthy of my friendship until enough of their rough edges had been sanded off that they stopped making me uncomfortable?

We say everybody is welcome. I believe we mean it.

I’m cynical, but I am not cynical enough to believe churches are secretly lying when they put “Everyone Welcome” on a sign.

But there is a difference between being allowed into a room and being welcomed into a life. There is a difference between somebody shaking your hand and somebody making room for you. You can sit on a pew every Sunday and still know that everybody around you considers you an outsider.

Sometimes I think what we really mean when we say everyone is welcome is: Everyone is welcome to come and become like us.

Become like us. That sentence bothers me. There are parts of “us” I hope people never become like. There are parts of me I hope nobody imitates. There is a reason we are called to become like Christ, not like Paul; become like Christ, not like your pastor; become like Christ, not like Michael Brian. I, and every other human who has ever walked the earth, have more flaws than we can admit. Don’t imitate me; pursue God.

I believe in truth. I need to say that plainly because conversations like this have a way of getting reduced to extremes.

I believe in repentance. I believe in holiness (biblical holiness, that is, not this legalistic version peddled by insecure screamers). I believe in separation from the world. I believe the gospel transforms people. I believe there are things Jesus calls us out of and things He calls us into.

But the gospel is not God patting us on the back and telling us to keep living exactly as we have always lived.

The gospel calls us to die.

It calls us into a new life.

There are things in me that had to die when I came to know Him, and there are things in me that still need to die.

I do not want a Christianity without conviction. I do not want a church so terrified of offending people that it becomes unwilling to tell anybody the truth. There is nothing merciful about watching somebody destroy themselves while we smile and tell them everything is fine.

But we have sometimes gotten the order wrong.

We expect people to show us the fruit before God has had time to grow the roots. We demand the outward evidence of discipleship from people who have barely begun to understand who Jesus is.

And if they do not transform on our timetable, we become suspicious of whether anything is happening at all.

That is where I have a problem.

Because transformation belongs to God.

I can teach.

I can preach.

I can disciple.

I can tell the truth.

But I cannot change a human heart.

I cannot convict somebody.

I cannot deliver somebody.

I cannot make somebody holy.

That is His work.

And somewhere along the way, I think some of us began trying to do His work for Him.

Years ago, I preached a message and said something that probably wasn’t original, but it has never really left me: You cannot separate holiness from love. The moment you do, you are left with legalism.

I believed it then. I believe it more now.

Because holiness is not just a list of things God expects me to do.

Holiness is rooted in who God is.

If I am pursuing holiness, I am pursuing His nature. That ought to affect what I wear and what I watch and what I participate in, yes.

But surely it also has to affect how I treat people. Surely becoming more like God should make me more patient with people God has been patient with. Surely holiness should change the way I speak to the broken. Surely the closer I get to Him, the more I should care about the things He cares about.

And He seems to care an awful lot about lost people. That is where my own theology has had to confront me.

Because if my pursuit of holiness makes me increasingly proud, increasingly suspicious, increasingly cold toward people who are far from God, then I need to ask myself a painful question.

Who and what exactly am I becoming like?

Because Jesus was holy. Actually holy. Not culturally holy. Not good-at-church holy. Not dressed-correctly-and-knows-when-to-shout holy. Jesus was perfectly holy.

And sinners could not stay away from Him. The people who should have felt the most uncomfortable around Him kept getting closer. A Samaritan woman with a life complicated enough that most religious people would have avoided her stood at a well and talked theology with Him. Zacchaeus was hated by virtually everybody around him, yet Jesus invited Himself to his house. Lepers came close enough for Him to touch them. Blind men screamed His name from the side of the road because they believed He might stop for them. Women with reputations walked into rooms where they knew they were not wanted because Jesus was there.

What was it about Him? What did broken people see in Jesus that made them believe they could come close?

It was not compromise.

He did not pretend sin was not sin.

Jesus had an almost terrifying ability to look straight through people.

He knew the secrets. He knew the history. He knew what happened last night. He knew what everybody else only whispered about.

And somehow people stood in front of a man who knew the worst thing they had ever done and still walked away believing there was hope.

That is absolutely incredible to me. Because sometimes I have known how to tell people what was wrong with them. I am not always sure I have known how to make them believe God still wanted them. I know that I definitely haven’t always treated them in a way that made them believe God still wanted them.

There is a world of difference between those two things.

Jesus could expose sin without making the sinner believe they were beyond redemption. He could call somebody into repentance without stripping them of their dignity.

His holiness was not fragile. He did not have to hide from broken people to protect Himself from becoming broken. He touched lepers. According to the law, touching what was unclean should have made Him unclean. But instead, the leper became clean.

That is what happens when the holiness of Jesus encounters brokenness. Brokenness does not contaminate Him. His wholeness begins restoring what is broken. Light does not stand at the edge of darkness screaming instructions into it.

Light walks in.

And everywhere Jesus went, religious people seemed to struggle with that.

They knew the boundaries. They knew who was clean. They knew who was unclean. They knew the respectable people and the people respectable people were not supposed to associate with.

They had spent generations drawing lines.

Then Jesus showed up and kept stepping across them.

He ate with tax collectors.

He talked to Samaritans.

He touched people nobody else wanted near them.

He allowed people with terrible reputations into His presence.

And the religious crowd complained.

One of their accusations was: “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”

They meant it as an insult.

I doubt they realized they were preaching the gospel.

“This man receives sinners.”

Thank God. Seriously.

Thank God He does.

Because I am one.

That is the part church people can forget. Not intentionally. It happens slowly. We have been cleaned up long enough that we forget what we looked like when mercy found us.

Maybe you never lived in a far country.

Maybe you did not spend years addicted to drugs.

Maybe you never went to jail.

Maybe your testimony does not make people gasp when you tell it.

Neither does mine. I grew up in church. But that does not mean I needed less mercy.

It just means my mess knew how to wear church clothes.

That may be more dangerous.

Because it is easier to see sin when it smells like alcohol.

It is harder when it smells like self-righteousness.

Pride can sit on a church pew.

Bitterness can clap during worship.

Judgment can quote Scripture.

Cruelty can wear a suit.

And sometimes we can become so good at identifying the sins we would never commit that we become blind to the sins growing in the soil of our own hearts.

I know that because I have seen it in mine. There is a Pharisee in me.

I do not like writing that sentence. But there is. There is a part of me that likes measurable religion. Rules are easier. Rules allow me to look across the aisle and compare.

I did this. They did not. I know this. They should know better. I have been faithful. Look what they did.

Mercy destroys that little scoreboard. Mercy reminds me that I am not standing because I won. I am standing because God did not give me what I deserved. He has been so much more patient with me than I have been with other people.

I have been wrong. Badly wrong. I have misjudged people's motives. I have said things that I thought were righteous and later realized were unnecessarily cruel. I have confused preference with principle. I have cared more about being right than I cared about the person standing in front of me.

There have been times I was defending Jesus with an attitude that looked absolutely nothing like Jesus.

That is a hard admission for someone like me. But it is true.

And if I could somehow sit across a table today from every person I have ever made feel small in the name of being right, I wonder how many faces would be sitting there. Probably more than I know. That bothers me. Because some of the people I hurt probably never told me.

I got to walk away believing I had made a point. They walked away carrying the wound.

There is a young woman I still think about from time to time. Years ago, she worked at a gas station I stopped at regularly.

We became friends. Eventually, she learned that I was Pentecostal. Her reaction was immediate. Please do not ever ask me to go to church with you. She had known Pentecostal kids growing up. She watched them go to school looking the part. They carried themselves as though they were better than everybody around them.

Then Friday night came.

Some of the same kids showed up at the same parties. They drank the same alcohol. They participated in the same things. Then Sunday came, and everybody cleaned themselves up. Monday morning, they returned to school and resumed looking down on the sinners.

She saw the hypocrisy. I cannot blame her for being disgusted by it. Why would she want what they had?

But we kept talking. Slowly, over time, the walls started to come down. We talked about God. We talked about Scripture. We talked about things she believed and things I believed. It was not some dramatic evangelistic moment. It was a friendship. There was trust growing. And I began to believe that maybe, eventually, she would walk through the doors of a church with me.

Then someone I knew said something to her about the way she dressed.

He meant well. I almost hate saying that because “they meant well” has excused a tremendous amount of damage in church. But I believe he did. He believed he was standing for holiness. He believed he was helping her.

Instead, in a few sentences, he reduced everything God may have been doing in her heart to what she looked like on the outside. I watched her shut down. I watched a door that had been opening slowly slam shut. It never opened again.

My fear is that that one stupid statement, that one flippant remark, might have sealed the condemnation for eternity.

Have I done the same thing? I can’t help but wonder how much destruction resides in the wake of my good intentions.

I do not tell that story because I believe one stupid statement can overpower the mercy of God.

It cannot. I do not know where she is today. I do not know what God has done in the years since.

But I know what I saw. I watched someone who already had every reason to distrust Christians begin to reconsider. Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe there were people here who actually cared about her. Maybe there was room for her before she had everything figured out.

Then one conversation confirmed the fear she had carried all along.

You are not enough.

Not yet. Come back when you look more like us.

That memory still hurts.

But here is the part that hurts worse:

I cannot pretend I have always been the good guy in that story.

Maybe I did not make that particular comment. But I have had that spirit. I have been the person measuring. I have been the person deciding how far along somebody should be by now.

I have looked at people through the lens of what they lacked instead of what God might be doing in them. How many times have I been the person in somebody else's story that made Jesus harder to see?

I do not know. That question scares me.

How many people have walked away from a conversation with me feeling smaller? How many times did I make somebody feel like a project instead of a person? How many times did someone need mercy and I gave them a self-righteous evaluation?

I cannot undo those moments. I can repent of them.

And I can refuse to keep pretending this is only somebody else's problem.

Because this is how gatekeepers are made. Not usually by waking up one morning and deciding we hate lost people. Most gatekeepers probably believe they are protecting something important.

They are protecting truth. Protecting standards. Protecting holiness. Protecting the church.

Then one day we look up and realize we are standing between broken people and the God we claim we are trying to lead them toward.

That should terrify us.

We begin acting like mercy needs our approval. Like God is waiting for us to decide whether somebody has suffered enough. Repented enough. Changed enough. Like we have been given some spiritual clipboard and told to stand at the door and determine who is ready to enter.

But mercy was never ours.

We did not invent it.

We did not purchase it.

We did not earn it.

God is the one who is “rich in mercy.”

Rich. I love that word.

There is no shortage in Him. God is not worried He is going to waste mercy on the wrong person. He is not rationing it. He doesn’t worry about running out of it. He does not stare at the prodigal coming up the road and think, “I wonder whether he has learned enough yet.”

He runs.

That is the scandal of the story.

The father runs.

The son is coming home carrying the stink of everything he has done. He has blown the inheritance. Embarrassed his family. Destroyed his reputation. He has his speech prepared because he knows he does not deserve restoration.

Then the father sees him.

And he runs.

He does not wait for the son to make it to the porch. He does not let him finish the speech.

He puts a robe on him. A ring on his finger. Shoes on his feet. Then he starts a party.

And while mercy is running down the road, the older brother is standing outside arguing about fairness.

I understand the older brother more than I wish I did. Because mercy feels wonderful when it is being poured out on me. It becomes more complicated when God starts pouring it out on somebody I think should know better.

Someone who hurt people. Someone who walked away. Someone who failed again. Someone whose mess became public. Something in me wants there to be a waiting period.

I want them to prove it. I want consequences. Some of that can be wisdom.

Trust does take time to rebuild. Leadership carries requirements. Restoration is not the same thing as pretending nothing happened. There are consequences to our choices.

But I am also learning enough about myself to know that sometimes what I call wisdom is not wisdom. Sometimes it is resentment. Sometimes I do not want restoration yet because I am still angry. Sometimes I want God to be merciful, just not that merciful.

There is the older brother. Standing close enough to the Father's house to hear the celebration but too angry to go inside.

The younger son was lost in a far country. The older brother was lost at home.

I wonder which one is harder to reach. At least the prodigal eventually knew he was lost.

Religious lostness is different. You can be lost while doing everything right. You can be faithful to the house and completely misunderstand the Father. You can know the rules and miss His heart.

That possibility frightens me far more now than it used to.

Because I know how to do church. I can speak the language. I can look the part. I can preach. I can pray. I can quote Scripture. But none of those things automatically mean my heart looks like His.

Jesus once looked at religious people who knew sacrifice, knew Scripture, understood the rules, and told them: “Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.”

Go learn mercy.

What a brutal thing to say to religious people.

You know all this. Now go learn God.

That verse has teeth. There is a bite to it. It should prick each and every person who has ever sat on a pew. Because it means I can know doctrine and still misunderstand His heart. I can be technically correct and spiritually ugly. I can win the theological argument and lose the person. I can defend holiness while acting unholy. I can say something completely true in a way that completely misrepresents the Truth.

That is why mercy cannot be treated as some soft accessory to Christianity.

Mercy is part of the revelation of who God is.

It does not make truth weaker. Mercy is what keeps truth aimed at redemption. Truth without mercy becomes a hammer in the hands of people who simply enjoy hitting things. Mercy without truth leaves people trapped.

Jesus carried both.

That is what I want.

I want a church that still knows how to preach repentance.

I want holiness preached.

I want sin called sin.

I want people delivered from things that have held their families captive for generations.

I want the addict to be set free.

I want marriages restored.

I want people filled with the Spirit.

I want lives transformed so completely that people who knew them before can hardly recognize what God has done.

I want all of it.

But I also want the addict to know he can walk through the doors while he is still an addict.

I want the woman whose life is falling apart to know she does not have to get everything back together before she sits beside me.

I want the person who reeks of last night's mistakes to find people who are more interested in helping them reach Jesus than making sure they understand how badly they smell.

I want there to be room for people who do not know the rules yet.

Because if there is not room for them, what exactly are we doing?

If a church becomes a room full of people who already know how to look saved, who are we reaching? I do not want polished pews and empty altars. I would rather have the mess. Give me the person who has no idea how to dress for church. Give me the person who asks uncomfortable questions. Give me the person who walks in carrying twenty years of baggage and does not know where to put it.

Let them come. Let them get close. Let Jesus do what Jesus does.

Teach them. Disciple them. Love them enough to tell them the truth.

But for the love of God, give them time to become.

God gave me time.

He is still giving me time. I am still becoming.

After nearly an entire lifetime in church, I am still finding things in me that do not look like Jesus. Pride. Impatience. Judgment. Selfishness. Things I thought I had surrendered years ago suddenly show up in a different form.

And God keeps working. He corrects me, but He does not discard me. He convicts me, but He does not humiliate me for sport. His mercy gives me room to repent.

So how can I receive that kind of patience from God and then become impatient with somebody who has known Him for six months?

Who made me the gatekeeper?

Nobody.

Nobody appointed me to decide who God is allowed to reach. Nobody asked me to ration His grace and mercy. Nobody gave me ownership of the Father's house.

I am a guest here too.

That may be what I need to remember most. I did not build this house. I did not purchase my seat. I did not save myself. I was invited. I was washed. I was forgiven. I was given mercy I could never afford. And somewhere along the way, if I start acting like that mercy belongs to me, I need God to break something in me again.

Because I never want someone to have to get past me to get to Jesus. I never want my attitude to become another obstacle between a wounded person and the altar. I never want somebody to mistake my judgment for God's voice.

And I know enough about myself now to know that I am capable of all of those things.

So this is not an accusation.

It is a confession.

I have been a gatekeeper.

There have been moments when I guarded things God never asked me to guard. There have been people I measured when I should have loved them. There are wounds I caused that I will never know about.

I cannot go backward and repair every one of them. But I can ask God to make me different. I can ask Him to give me His heart for people. Not a vague love for “the lost.” Real people. Annoying people. Complicated people. People who relapse. People who disappoint me. People who move slowly. People whose lives do not fit neatly into my categories. People like me. People Jesus died for.

I do not want to stand in the Father's house with my arms crossed while He runs toward somebody I had already given up on. I want to recognize His heart when I see it. I want to run too.

Mercy was never mine to guard. It was mine to receive.

And after all the mercy God has poured over my life, I think the least I can do is stop standing in the doorway.