For almost forty years, I stood behind pulpits with an open Bible in front of me.
I loved the people sitting in the pews. I wanted them to know God. Whatever situation they faced, my goal was to help them with my words.
But sometimes I hurt them.
I remember one Sunday when I preached about giving money to the church. I used the familiar passage from the Old Testament book of Malachi about robbing God. The message was simple. If you weren’t giving God what belonged to Him, you were stealing from Him.
I believed it.
Sitting in the congregation that morning was a man named Earl. He was struggling financially. Earl had stopped giving to the church, not because he didn’t want to give, but because he couldn’t. His recent divorce generated the need to provide large child support payments.
I can still see him sitting there.
As I preached, his chin dropped. He looked down at his hands.
At the time, I probably interpreted his response as conviction.
Preachers learn to do that. Someone bows a head. Someone wipes away a tear or becomes quiet. We interpret that to mean God is at work using our words. It’s easy to think, “I’m getting through.” Or, “the Holy Spirit is using this sermon.”
It took me years to realize I might be wrong. There was another possibility.
Maybe Earl wasn’t convicted.
Maybe he was crushed.
He had walked into church carrying a huge financial load. Unpaid bills were stacking up. The shame of not being able to pay his weekly offerings to the church added to his stress.
Then I stood in front of the congregation with an open Bible and told him he was robbing God.
Ouch.
I hadn’t meant to hurt him. That’s the part that bothers me most. I was trying to be faithful to my call to “preach the Word.”
As I’ve grown older, I’ve started looking differently at the Jesus I find in the Bible.
He seemed remarkably uninterested in making wounded people hurt more.
He touched people others considered outcasts. He let children get close. He ate with the outliers and heretics who made religious people uncomfortable.
When a woman was dragged before Him and surrounded by people ready to condemn her, Jesus didn’t add another accusation. He didn’t share His favorite memory verse. He didn’t preach a sermon.
He got down in the dust.
In recent years, I’ve thought about that a lot. I started paying closer attention to Jesus. How did He treat the people who had screwed up? What about the people, religious folks had already judged? The people carrying secret buckets of pain?
I began to see something I had missed.
Fear taught me to ask, “What did they do wrong?”
Jesus seemed to ask, “Where does it hurt?”
When I saw him sitting in my congregation staring down at his hands, I wish I had asked Earl that question after church.
Where does it hurt?
I can’t go back and change that sermon. There are other things from forty years of ministry I also can’t undo.
But I can decide which question I want to ask now.
When I meet someone who is struggling, wounded, doubting, divorced, angry at the church, frightened of God, or simply trying to survive, I don’t want my first question to be: What did they do wrong? I’ve asked that question enough.
These days, I’m trying to follow Jesus into a better question.
Where does it hurt?
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