Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!

Yesterday I was on the Shasta College campus here in Redding sharing the gospel with students to whom I hand out leaflets raising questions about Jesus Christ. It's easy because many of the students who pause to take a look at the leaflet are willing to volunteer their opinion of who Jesus is in response to my inquiry. By asking questions and listening first, I find that many students are willing to listen to what the New Testament says about sin, salvation and the Savior. And about every other time I go out there, at least one of the students has been prepared by the Holy Spirit to confess Jesus as Lord.

That didn't happen yesterday, but a couple of young men were willing to read from the Scriptures what the Bible says about Jesus and our salvation and let me pray for them. After several hours of leafleting and sharing, I went upstairs to a room off the balcony above the cafeteria where InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IV) was having a Bible study. We started small but soon an alumnus of Pelican Bay State Prison showed up with his guitar. The IV group leader seemed to identify with the visitor and mentioned that he was a former drug addict and a graduate of the Redding Mission's recovery program. A couple of black brothers came in and I found myself sitting beside a lovely young woman from Bethel's school of ministry who was from Romania and was reading the scripture from a bilingual Romanian-English Bible.

The Bible study was from Matthew 12, a chapter in which the Pharisees criticized Jesus disciples and Jesus himself, calling them Sabbath breakers because Jesus' disciples plucked some stalks of grain and ate the still tender grains and because Jesus insisted on healing the man in the synagogue with a withered hand on the Sabbath Day. Jesus defended his followers and himself summing up his argument by saying, "If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice' (Hosea 6:6), you would not have condemned the innocent" (Matt. 12:7).
The main point of the study seemed to me to be that God was more interested in our heart attitude towards him and towards our neighbors than in ritual obedience.

After discussing the Scripture, we joined in worship songs with help from the visiting guitarist and the young woman from Romania and prayed for one another. I went out to my table on the quad in front of the cafeteria to eat my lunch and distribute a few more leaflets. Almost immediately, I was tested on the study: Would I put mercy ahead of ministry?

A lovely young woman approached and since I didn't immediately recognize her, she reminded me of her name (say, Natalie) and that we had discussed the teachings of the Jehovah's Witnesses with whom she has been studying. I instantly remembered her and began my apologetic demonstrating that Jehovah's Witnesses are polytheists. Their calling Jehovah "Almighty God" and Jesus "mighty god" (Isaiah 9:6) and "a god" (John 1:1, New World Translation only) leaves them with not one God, but two, a high God and a lesser god. This is rather like the situation of Greek mythology with Zeus as the high god and other lesser gods like Hermes. The Witnesses limit their god count to two, but they are, nevertheless, polytheists, not true monotheists.

But providentially, Natalie was interested in bigger game. She innocently asked me why we believe in the Trinity. Now I was ready to lead her to biblical answers to that question, but our guitarist, my brother from Pelican Bay, appeared and offered to help us out. I was none too pleased with his interruption of an ongoing witness I have been working on for a while, but he had a Scripture and Natalie wanted to see it. When I saw that he was taking us to 1 John 5:7 in his King James Version, I lost it.

In anger I told him (the truth) that the Jehovah's Witnesses would chew him up over that verse because it is not in the ancient Greek manuscripts (and therefore not in the original). He stood firm on his King James Bible, but in my anger I succeeded in driving him away. Amazingly, Natalie seemed not greatly affected by our altercation and I continued with my defense of the Trinity by pointing out that the Scriptures refer to three distinct persons as God and yet insist that there is but one God. Thus, God differs from us in that while there is but one person in the unity of each human being, God exists on the high order of Trinity in which there are three persons in the unity of the One Divine Being. I also shared on the personhood of the Holy Spirit from Acts 13:1-4 and on Jesus' claim of divinity in John 8:58 ("Before Abraham, I AM.") by identifying himself by the name God revealed to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14.

Indeed, I was so caught up in my ministry to this endangered soul that it was not until she had left and I was ready to head home that I began to realized that I had just been tested on the teaching at the IV meeting. And that I had flunked the test bigtime. I had put my ministry ahead of mercy. What my brother needed was a little mercy from his more knowledgeable brother. Instead, I beat him up verbally and got rid of him.

Today, I went back to the college to see whether I could find my offended brother and ask for his forgiveness--to no avail. I pray that God will comfort him and that I will be able to find him next week to seek forgiveness and reconciliation. Meanwhile, I find myself to be the one most in need of mercy. Thanks be to God whose mercies never come to an end.