Christian Pharisees

It took me an embarrassingly long time for grace to really start to "click" with me as a Christian. I languished for many years in functional (but not doctrinal) semi-Pelagianism: I trusted Jesus to save me back then, sure, when I accepted the Lord at 13, but today, right now, what keeps Christianity going inside me is me praying and really wanting the right things and repenting well and feeling the right feelings. It was only as God graciously allowed me to get to the end of my rope and despair of this approach that I actually started to throw myself onto grace, started to learn how not to focus on how well I was receiving grace and believing in it (which is another form of self-worship), but to look outward to the one giving it to me, who was faithful, who would not fail me.

I say this to show that I'm not at all intending to point the finger and condemn those people "over there." (Whenever I do that, I'm trying to distract attention from myself!) But it has been my observation--and I sure wish I had seen it earlier--that there are some very nice people who genuinely are Christians but who remain deeply unhealed, and who are functional Pharisees.

I spoke with a friend who helped me understand this phenomenon greatly. This friend explained that there are some Christians who really are Christians, but who feel so little of the grace and love of God for sinners, of his friendship and pursuit of and faithfulness to them, that they live constantly in an atmosphere of wrongness and anxiety and condemnation. (That describes way too many years of my Christian life too!) And the way they relieve that awful sense of condemnation is by off-loading it onto others: by putting others in the wrong, they can feel OK about themselves.

I had never taken Jesus' warning about the leaven of the Pharisees as seriously as I needed to: just a tiny bit of leaven warps and embitters a beautiful thing called Christianity into something ugly. And I had never taken as seriously as I should the warning about throwing pearls before swine. The sorts of condemnations which Christian Pharisees make are often so weird, and often made in total ignorance of their own sins, that it is extremely tempting to get into an argument and "rebut" the accusation. Of course there is a time to speak up for other Christians being attacked and to correct incorrect information. But if I start arguing with a Pharisee, I've already lost, because I'm already in their feverish world of accusation-and-acquital. And since Christian Pharisees see and hear potential accusations in everything, even very well meaning confrontation can spark even more furious attack from the other person. They can turn on you without even meaning to.

I share all this because it's been a bit of a revelation for me, and may be helpful for you.

From Scatterings