Dear Fellow Disciple;
I’ve been asked to follow up on a previous correspondence that the Lord sent to you regarding your attitude toward “sinners.” Of course, once I committed my life and mind to him, I have been committed to seeing other folks the same way Jesus does. On that point, I have never wavered.

Perhaps you felt as though the Lord was a little harsh on you, but let me remind you that it was only people like you that he was ever harsh with. You know your type, the religious, self-promoting, self-righteous types who liked to “lord” it over others. You should be glad you weren’t there when he put the Seven-Woes sermon on the Pharisees. Peter tells me that was a tough one. He called them graves, and snake pits and all kinds of horrible stuff. I guess he wanted to get their attention. You’d better be glad he thought he could get through to you with a little rebuke.

But believe you me, I know all of your tricks. I even know your motivation. You like the sense that you have accomplished something in Christ that no one, or very few ever have. You think you’ve conquered the flesh while the “sinners” have not. Whenever you get to feeling a little down-in-the-mouth, you just look around you and find another one of the unrighteous ones. Then, with a little wrangling and twisting of the scriptures, there you are – better than the next fellow.

It won’t work, you know. You can’t be good enough by being better than someone else. But the worst part of your little game is that you have worked it out where your sin wasn’t as costly to the Lord as those people you look down on. What kind of value do you place on your sin? How much of the Lord’s blood did it take to cleanse you of your sin? Would you say, maybe a few ounces? And what about the adulteress? What would it take (in your mind) to redeem her? Maybe a gallon? I hate to know how much it cost to wash a homosexual clean.
Whatever it is, you are wrong to think that your sin was any less responsible for the death of Jesus than anyone else’s. I don’t care what he or she did. It doesn’t matter. You were in desperate need of redemption just like anyone else. No more, no less.

If that is something you are “fuzzy” about, maybe you aren’t even a disciple after all. Think about what he said:

Anyone who does take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

If you’re still thinking that you can move yourself into a more advantageous position simply by jumping ahead of the other guy, you don’t have a clue what a cross is or what it is used for. I guess you missed the point about what I said when I wrote to the Romans:

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.

You need to get this on straight, just like the Lord told you. If you have crucified the old you, then you don’t have any business looking back on how “good” you were before. If you were good, you didn’t need him. If you didn’t crucify the old self, you don’t have him. And even if you did crucify the old man but are trying to be better than the next fellow by elevating yourself above him, you’ve lost him (Jesus, that is).

I won’t be seeing you until the resurrection, but you can rest assured that the Lord is looking at you. I know him to be a very understanding man, but he’s got little patience for the impatient, and I’m afraid you’ve fallen into that category lately.

I’ll be talking to you soon.
Paul (You might remember me as Saul)