When Christ accepts you, I will accept you.

I rejoice, because I have complete confidence in you.

2 Corinthians 7:16

This is a very significant sentence. It shows us how far and how completely Christians MUST trust one another. In this one short, encouraging statement Paul models for us what life in Christ together should ALWAYS look like in His church. Christians should think the very best of one another. And joy should be the dominant emotion that comes from our interactions.

Consider just WHO Paul is saying this about… the Corinthian church. He was confident in the Corinthians, of all people! This was a group of people with whom Paul invested significant time and relational energy together. And they eventually treated him with disrespect. They got divisive as a congregation, some even bragging that Paul had personally not ministered to them or been their leader. They were prideful in themselves. They had tolerated gross immorality in the church, flaunting the nastiest incest and celebrating their “tolerance”… doing nothing to correct anyone. They had turned the Lord’s Table (a celebration of the gospel and love of Christ) into a mess of favoritism, gluttony, and disunity. They fought and quarreled among themselves. Paul had to send a painfully worded stern letter of correction to them (1 Corinthians) threatening to come in full apostolic authority if they did not repent of all this stuff.

Yet in his second letter Paul is confident in this church, accepting their repentance as godly and genuine (2 Corinthians 7:10-13). He is not judgmental. He is joyful! He accepts them, affirms them, and encourages them… not because they were perfect people (they weren’t), but because they genuinely submitted in clear repentance to the gospel. Without reservation we should affirm even the most struggling sinner… never holding their past over them in judgment… but instead celebrating enthusiastically the grace of the restorative work of Christ! That is complete confidence… in Jesus!

I am so saddened when I see Christians unable to do this. I regularly talk with walking wounded Christians. Many of them show up at my church. These are people who have been hurt by abusive church leaders who clubbed them with doctrinal bludgeons. They were treated like second or third class members of the Body of Christ because their beautiful redemptive stories had messy components of substance abuse, or confused sexuality, or a dissolved marriage. If Jesus completely accepts them as His brothers and sisters, why would the church ever sinfully subjugate them to some standard lower than a redeemed child of God, joint-heir with Christ, and new creation of grace? How dare we think we know better than God! 

O Lord, forgive Your people for our insolent presumptive judgmentalism! Humble our arrogance! May Your church be people who have complete confidence that in repentance and faith we are all remade into beautiful new creations displaying Your majestic salvation and useful in Your kingdom.

Amen