Sin, Death, Love, and Lazarus

I think that if we are to be successful in ministry, we must understand the world that we are dealing with and the true state of the human soul. I have witnessed very frequently (in myself as well as in others) compassion for things that true love ought to hate and rebuke, and hate for what true love ought to have compassion for. I have seen us going about things all wrong. I believe the root of the mistakes that I have seen and made in ministry lies in a misdiagnosis of the human soul. We may think of it as rotten, gimpy, broken, injured, or otherwise damaged. To us, our souls are severely handicapped, perhaps even in the ICU, but even this view does not get to the truth. People are not hurt, injured, or struggling, they are dead. One hundred percent dead. There is no in between, you are either dead or alive, and people are dead without Jesus.

This changes our treatment tremendously. If someone has the spiritual equivalent of a knee-scrape, we might treat it with encouragement and kind words. If someone is on spiritual life support, we might offer a spiritual IV. What do we do for someone who is dead? Who has a cure for that? The truth is that only one can give life, and this is not by encouragement, but only by the breath of God! He must speak us into life. How was the world created? God spoke life into it. How was I created? God spoke life into me. How was I reborn? God spoke life into me. And the only hope I have is in the life that He gives.

So let’s go back to the compassion that should be hate and the hate that should be compassion. John 11 chronicles Jesus raising Lazarus from a bodily death. In this passage we see very clearly that God does care about our pain. Jesus knew that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, and yet he saw the suffering of his family, he saw that Lazarus was dead, and HE WEPT. He knows the end, He IS the life, and when He sees the effects of death…He cries. However, He has no compassion for death itself. He has no compassion for the things that cause it. He spits in the face of death by overcoming it, and saying “Lazarus, come forth!” He does not say, “Lazarus, I know you’ve been struggling with death lately, and I want to be sensitive to that, but I also want to encourage you in your fight against it.” He hates death and He calls Lazarus out of it. This is the way we ought to deal with sin. We should hate it. We should not tolerate it because it is death, and we don’t want death in the lives of our friends. We must call people out of it because of our compassion for them, and our fervent hate for sin.

It is my prayer that we would rebuke and disown the work of Satan, which is death, and call one another into the true life by the faith and authority given to us by the grace of God.