What. Is. Wrong. With. YOU?
Have you honestly never read the following passage in the Bible?
"I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.
"For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?
"But those who are outside God judges. Therefore 'put away from yourselves the evil person.'" (1 Corinthians 5:9-13, NKJV)
Oh, it's in there, all right. Yet you persist in doing exactly the opposite. You judge non-believers like there's a reward for it, yet leave professing Christians to commit the most heinous crimes imaginable, rallying 'round when someone actually dares to call Christian sinners to account.
Another thing -- and hang on to your hats because we're about to get intellectual up in here -- the subtext of this verse damns you all the more.
The subtext is what the apostle Paul says without saying it. You'd have to go out of the world to avoid sinners who don't profess Christianity, he says, and his implication is that we cannot and should not go out of the world. In fact, Jesus said to go into all the world (You know: Great Commission. I'll let you Google it).
So when (gasp!) an unbeliever asks you to hang out or -- heaven forfend! -- offers to help you with something, don't be the high-handed jackass who quotes John 15:19 or Romans 12:2. The former is about how the religious establishment would feel about you if you were really following Jesus. The latter is about your behavior; not the behavior of non-believers.
Non-believers don't have some sort of spiritual cooties. And you don't have the authority to either judge them or spurn them. Get right with God!
Oh (spit take), that's what non-believers are supposed to do? Well, let me send you off with a quote from Frederick Buechner to help clarify just exactly who non-believers are:
"Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't."
Which camp do you fall into?
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