Last Sunday morning, I was a guest speaker at New Carlisle Church of Christ, just north of Dayton. Our meeting theme was "Faith in the Public Square.” This lesson challenges us to consider the need to balance our convictions with compassion and love for those who are walking a pathway apart from Jesus. I hope it helps you as you think about the ones you love who are struggling spiritually. As long as they are with us, there is hope.
Most of us have a list.
We don’t call it that. We’d never say it out loud. But if you’re honest with yourself for ninety seconds, you can name them. The grandkid who’s deconstructing. The brother who said the thing at Thanksgiving three years ago. The friend who walked away from the church and hasn’t looked back. The cousin whose Facebook posts you stopped reading because you couldn’t stomach them anymore.
You used to bring those names to God. You used to lie awake thinking about them. You used to pray real prayers — not throwaway bless them, Lord prayers, but the kind where you actually wept on their behalf.
Then somewhere along the way, you stopped.
Maybe it was too painful. Maybe you decided they were too far gone. Maybe praying for them required you to feel something you didn’t want to feel anymore. Whatever the reason, the prayer quieted, and in the silence something else moved in. A verdict. You didn’t announce it. But it got rendered all the same. That one’s done. That one’s not coming back. That one made their choice.
And here’s what I’ve learned, both as a preacher and as somebody who’s done this in his own life. Once that verdict is filed, you can’t weep with that person anymore. You may still talk to them. You may still send the birthday text. You may still sit across from them at Christmas. But the tears are gone, because you decided the case before God did.
And here’s the trouble. God didn’t.
Listen to what He says through Ezekiel:
As I live — this is the declaration of the Lord God — I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked person should turn from his way and live.
—- Ezekiel 33:11 CSB)
Read that twice. The God of heaven, who has every right to file every verdict on every wandering soul who ever lived, says He takes no pleasure in it. None. He’d rather they turn and live. If that’s God’s desire for the people we’ve written off, what in the world are we doing with the case files we’ve been keeping in our heads?
Look at John 11.
Jesus stands outside the tomb of His friend. The sisters are wrecked. Mary falls at His feet and says the same thing Martha already said: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. That sentence has some accusation buried in it. Where were you? You knew. You could have come. You didn’t.
Now here’s the part that should stop us. Jesus knew what was coming. He knew Lazarus was about to walk out of that tomb in roughly ninety seconds. He had the answer in His mouth before He ever stepped back into Bethany.
And He wept anyway.
The shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. (John 11:35) Two words we’ve quoted a thousand times and drained of all their weight. He didn’t fast-forward past the grief because He had the resolution coming. He didn’t tell Mary to pull herself together. He didn’t lecture the crowd on the doctrine of resurrection. He stood there, tears running down His face, for a man He was about to call out of the grave.
That’s the Jesus we follow.
He held the truth — I am the resurrection and the life — and the tears in the same body, on the same day, in the same conversation. He didn’t pick. The conviction didn’t dry up His compassion. The compassion didn’t soften His conviction. Both, at full strength, in the same human face.
The Christian who has the truth but not the tears is not following the Jesus of John 11. He’s following somebody else. Maybe a Jesus he made up. Maybe a Jesus the news cycle made up for him. But not this one. Not the one outside the tomb.
And here’s the thing about tears. You cannot manufacture them. You cannot work them up. They come from somewhere down underneath, and they only come when you’ve actually let yourself feel the weight of who that person is and what’s at stake for them. Tears are evidence that you have not yet filed the verdict. They are evidence that the case is still open in your heart.
Which is why a lot of us don’t have any.
Paul puts the question to us this way:
Or do you despise the riches of his kindness, restraint, and patience, not recognizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
—- Romans 2:4
Stop and let that one land. The thing that brings people home — including you and me — is God’s kindness. Not His verdict. His patience. His restraint. The slow, faithful refusal to write somebody off when every reasonable accountant in heaven would have closed the books years ago. That’s the kindness that got you here. Despise that kindness, Paul says, and you forget how you got in the door.
James drives the same nail one swing harder:
For judgment is without mercy to the one who has not shown mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
—- James 2:13
That’s a verse to read with the lights on. The case file you’ve been keeping on somebody else cuts both ways. The mercy you withhold is the mercy you’re forfeiting. The verdict you file gets filed back. James is not threatening — he’s warning. The verdict-filer is not in a safer place than the person on the receiving end. He’s in a worse one.
Eight hundred years before Jesus walked through Galilee, Micah said it like this:
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
—- Micah 6:8
Most of us read that as a checklist. Three boxes. Check, check, check. But it isn’t a list. It’s an equation. The third verb — walk humbly — is what holds the first two from falling apart. Without humility, justice turns into contempt. Without humility, kindness turns into cowardice. The third verb keeps the other two from becoming what the world has already seen too much of from people wearing the name of Christ.
Filing a verdict on somebody is what justice looks like when humility is gone. It still uses the language of conviction. It still feels righteous in the moment. But there are no tears in it anymore, because there is no humility in it anymore. You stopped seeing yourself as somebody who got loved off a list, and you started seeing yourself as somebody who gets to keep one.
Let me give you two questions to take into today.
First — whose face do you need to see when you think about that issue you’ve been so sure about? Not the issue. The face. The name. Because the moment that issue has a face attached to it, your conviction has to learn how to walk with your tears. And if it can’t — if the face changes nothing about how you carry the conviction — something has gone wrong somewhere upstream.
Second — whose name have you stopped praying because you’ve already decided how the conversation goes?
You know who.
There’s a person you used to carry to God on your knees, and somewhere along the way you stopped. The verdict got filed. The case got closed. The tears dried up. And now when their name comes up, you feel something that isn’t grief and isn’t love. It’s just the cold quiet of a decision you made when nobody was watching.
Pick that name back up this week.
Bring them back to God. Don’t argue with them in your head. Don’t rehearse what you’re going to say next time. Just bring them. Sit with them in prayer long enough that something in you breaks again, the way it used to break, before you decided you were done.
Cry first. Then go have the conversation.
You can’t weep with someone you’ve already filed a verdict on. So go un-file it. Then weep.
Then you’ll be ready to talk.
