Anonymous Asks (381)

“Is it unloving to confront somebody about his sin?”

As in so many situations Christians encounter in this life, motive is more important to the Lord than the actions it produces. Some people just can’t get their heads around that. We generally call these people legalists. They value actions and outcomes more than the heart and mindset that produces them.

The Lord just … doesn’t.

Motives and Outcomes

Now, in some cases, looking for a particular outcome or action in others has merit. James looks at faith and works and tells believers the former is dead without the latter. Where there are no works, we can have no confidence that faith even exists. In that instance, the acts faith produces are very important indeed. As someone has said, it’s faith alone that saves, but the faith that saves is never alone.

Still, the fact that we can observe good works in progress is no guarantee that faith is what has motivated them. Man looks on the outward appearance, but only God can see the heart. All kinds of other less worthy motives may be in play: pride, duty, habit, tradition, peer pressure, the desire to have God in one’s debt, the desire to be seen and admired, and so on. More than one of these may be in play at any given time. We may even be deceived about our own motives.

Clean Up Your Act

So then, when it comes to confronting someone about sinful behavior, we always need to bear in mind that we have little or no idea why people do the things they do. We tend to project from personal experience, and assume that everyone else does the same things we do for the same reasons we do them. That may not be the case at all. I have found myself attributing motives to people that turned out to be quite unfair, and giving undue credit to people whose motives turned out to be craven and awful. Thank the Lord we are not in the position of the Judge of All the Earth.

We also need to bear in mind that pointing out sins in others when we are currently doing the same or worse is hypocrisy. Yet the Lord does not say, “Never confront sin because you’re a sinner too.” Instead, he says, “Clean up your act in that department first.” Again, he says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault.” If confronting a fellow believer about his sin were an intrinsically unloving act, surely we would be looking at a different set of instructions.

Doing It Right

The New Testament writers confirm and add a few adverbial qualifiers to the Lord’s teaching. Paul commands his understudies Timothy and Titus to correct their opponents gently, scripturally, patiently and authoritatively. In certain situations, Paul writes, it may even be necessary to rebuke a fellow believer sharply, the objective being to help him become sound in the faith. None of that sounds unloving to me.

So then, is it unloving to confront somebody about his sin? Not necessarily, provided you do it the right way out of the right motive. In fact, sometimes failing to confront sin is the unloving way to go. David writes that the rebuke of a righteous man is a kindness to the sinner. We wouldn’t want to withhold that, would we?