Guilt or Influence

"And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom."  1 Corinthians 2:1

How do you go about getting people to do work of ministry?  That is one of the age-old questions.  I would dare say that it will be a question that will continue until our Lord Jesus makes His grand re-appearance at the end of the age.  And until then, we human creatures will continue to work to engage people in ministry in better and in poorer ways.

Up front, I'm going to say that I don't have the best solution, or anything like that.  What I am going to say is that I can see how certain motivations are more powerful than others, and some are called for in one situation, but not in another.  So this topic, like so many others, is more varied and dynamic than we might typically want to approach it.

To start off this discussion, though, I want to focus on one primary area.  Do we communicate that we want people to engage in ministry by making them feel guilty for their current level of engagement, or do we seek to influence them to greater engagement?  I realize that guilt is actually one means of influence, and I will argue that it is one of the weakest ones, especially in our day and age. 

Guilt, I would suggest, is never the ideal means of engaging people in ministry.  At the best, it may promote a time period where they are engaged, but since it starts off from a negative emphasis (i.e., you should be doing more), it simply cannot help but arrive at a relieved end.  Once the level of guilt has been "covered", then it's back to where the person was before.

Influence is a whole other line of thinking.  Influence means that you don't have some way of coercing people into ministry engagement; you have to be persuasive.  You can't just say, "Do this,", but you have to demonstrate what you want them to be engaged with, and how to go about doing it.  Yes, this takes more effort and time, and the working of the Holy Spirit, but in the end, influence would seem to bring about more lasting engagement in ministry, and even more joy.

Guilt, or influence?  I think we would mostly agree that influence is better, but in practice, find it much easier to fall back on guilt.  But maybe today is the day to start making that change in approach. 

A Challenge: Are You Morally Good by Nature?

There seems to be a popular conception out there that humans are morally good.  Yes, I know, I wrote about this about a week ago or so, but since I failed to pick up the ball afterward and continue the thought, I want to revisit it for a few moments.

Let's start off by thinking about what may seem to be good about thinking of ourselves as good by nature.  That means that we can start off feeling good about ourselves, right?  After all, if we're all good by nature, then everything is good in our world.  We're going to do the right thing, treat each other nice, and everyone will simply get along.  After all, we're all good by nature, right?

What happens, then, when this isn't want happens?  As we go through life, we tend to experience the reality that people are not always good or nice.  People can be downright mean sometimes.  Who hasn't been the teenager that got mocked because you were different than your friends?  Who hasn't had something of value taken from you, and the other person didn't give it back?  Why did our parents have to teach us that it's not good to talk to strangers, since they might not be trustworthy people?  And in the back of our minds, we should have been shouting, "BUT WE'RE GOOD BY NATURE, RIGHT?"

That's the problem with this thought.  What happens to it when we see people that aren't good?  What happens to us when we do something that isn't good, such as when we spread that message that hurts our friend, or when we are tempted to do something that ends up bringing hurt?  The refrain "But we're good by nature" seems to be more of a cruel taunt than a reality.

That's when we start to suffer from the common malady of "low self esteem."  We're good by nature, but something isn't right, and I don't feel good about it.  The other thing this starts up within us is the desire to find out what is causing us to feel bad.  But here's the rub.  It can't be us.  We're good by nature, after all.  It simply cannot be our fault.  So we have to find fault in others who we profess to also be good by nature.  The only thing is, they're now the ones with the problem, not me.

There's another deadly side to this.  If we're good by nature, but we start doing things that aren't good, the other thing we can do is give up our hope.  We can't reconcile that we are good by nature and yet, we find it so easy to do bad things.  We start to internalize the problem.  We start to see ourselves as the problem, and this creates a huge dilemma within us.  If we're good, but we do bad things, then we feel so bad that we may even think about ending this existence.  The root of suicidal thoughts cannot be far behind if we find ourselves faced by this reality.  Either suicide, or we seek to find our escape through addictive, harmful ways.

If you can't tell by now, I don't hold to this belief.  It leaves way too many problems for what the real human situation is.  However, I see that this belief continues to be held by so many in our world.  In coming posts, I hope to present a better, more realistic approach.  Oh, and please don't be surprised to find that this approach is one that comes from what God says in the Bible.

How guilty do you feel?

Okay, who ever likes to feel guilty?  I can't think of a single person who really enjoys having their guilt pointed out to them.  I know of a few people that seem to take some kind of joy in pointing out other people's guilt, but usually they aren't really trying to build up the other person.  Instead, the effort seems to be more inclined toward tearing them down in some way.

One fairly significant part of our human nature is that we are all guilty.  Who of us was a perfect child growing up?  Who of us has never told a lie to another person?  Who of us has never said something hurtful to another person?  Who hasn't taken something that didn't belong to you?  At quite a few times in our lives, we inevitably have to feel guilty about some of the things that we do.

For some people, this guilt can be tremendous.  It may have been something that really did bring a great deal of hurt to another person, or that they did something that has negatively affected quite a few people.  The knowledge that such pain came because of their action can create doubt as to that person's ability to ever be forgiven for what they have done.

The funny thing is, God actually wants us to recognize and own up to our guilt.  It's not that He takes pleasure in our suffering, or in seeing us squirm. Rather, God wants us to own up to our guilt and acknowledge it because He wants to take it away from us. He doesn't want it to weigh us down and bother us any longer. He wants it to be forgiven.

That's ultimately what the cross of Jesus is all about.  There, God has forgiven and dealt with your guilt.  It doesn't matter how big or small, how recent or long ago.  It's been taken care of and dealt with, once and for all.  While we may still struggle with the after-effects as long as we live, from God's point of view, our guilt has been dealt with and no longer comes between us.  That's a good thing. 

I'll be talking a bit more about dealing with guilt between ourselves and other people in future posts. But know this for sure. God has forgiven your guilt because Jesus suffered, died, and rose for you.  In God's eyes, your guilt has been forgiven.  That's a reason to give thanks!