Loving Sinners

Loving Sinners
by John Fischer

Sinners are hard to love, especially when you are trying so hard not to be one.
You've heard it said, "Hate the sin; love the sinner," but sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two. It seems easier to just hate the sinner and the sin and try and steer clear of both. But Jesus befriended sinful people, which raises the question: How do you do that? How do you love sinners when you are trying so hard not to be one?
Well actually, that's the problem. You can't love sinners when you're not one yourself. Loving sinners begins in the mirror. Sin, in order to be more than just a concept, has to have a face on it, and the most accessible one is seen in our own reflection.
Let's back this up just a bit. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. That last part about loving yourself is commonly overlooked. It's generally thought that self-love is a given, but this is not the case at all, especially for Christians. Most Christians I know, myself included, are so steeped in guilt that it is impossible for them to love themselves. And even though we keep hearing and even preaching the gospel that we are all sinners and no one can please God except by His grace, we refuse to believe it for ourselves. We can't let go of the thought that we are just a little bit better than common, ordinary sinners -- that we don't need this grace quite as badly as the next guy. It's actually a case of very bad amnesia: we are constantly trying to prove ourselves worthy of being Christians when we forgot what a Christian was in the first place -- someone unworthy to be one were it not for the grace of God.
So instead of just admitting our sin and putting ourselves in the same boat as the rest of humanity, we choose to think that we are just a short step away from having it all together, and thus we live with the guilt of knowing that we aren't. And in doing so, we lose our ability to embrace sinners, because to embrace sinners, we have to embrace our own ugliness, and we can't do that because we never have. What sad, desperate people we are! No wonder Jesus had it in for the Pharisees. They cut themselves out of the blessing. They chose their guilt over His grace, rather than identify with sinners.
Loving sinners starts with being one. And no one has to go out and sin to discover this. Just look in the mirror, accept that scoundrel you see there for who he or she is, accept God's grace and forgiveness, and then start hugging all those other sinners out there who don't know the good news yet. It's really not all that complicated.