January 10, 2012
Tolerance
Years ago my in-laws owned two Siamese cats; they also had a friend who
detested cats. Whenever Darlene came to visit the cats would look up at her
with adoring eyes, rub up against her leg and caress her with their swaying
tails. There is no doubt in my mind that the cats knew they weren’t liked and
they were deliberately trying to aggravate Darlene. I found the encounters
humorous because, quite honestly I wasn’t invested in the cats, nor was Darlene
my favorite person. I now have a Christian friend who reminds me of those cats.
She floats in and out of my life on a regular basis, is high maintenance and
irritates me beyond belief. I just know God is laughing at my discomfort and
forced tolerance.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----”Tolerance” is a word I grew up with. In my early days, kids referred to people like me as “motor heads”. I didn’t think there ever needed to be much more to my life than drag racing. And I was so idiotically infatuated with it that I never developed the better sense it took to actually race a car. But I understood what went into the building of one. This I pondered almost continuously. And one of the key terms necessary for doing an engine, transmission, or third-member right was “tolerance”. Moving parts must have a space between them to allow for heat expansion and then a film of lubricant. If you get the tolerance correct, then at operating temperature, the two parts will move side by side with neither any unwanted movement nor any actual contact with each other. Either unwanted condition would pretty much tank an engine burning five gallons of nitro-methane (1st cousin of nitro-glycerin) in five seconds at 10,000 RPM hurling a half ton car to 300 miles per hour from a dead stop within the same distance your old gym teacher made you huff and puff around the football field. The right tolerances were imperative.
-----The human mind is deeply metaphorical. So “tolerance” kept wanting to cross over into my new life. But something about it just did not fit here. And today I meet up with this long lived companion again being profusely mouthed from the senseless minds of liberals. What I so liked about “tolerance” is what liberals so half like about it too: it allows two mutually annihilating things to function side by side with a minimum amount of friction. And that is a good thing. Isn’t it?
-----In the world it is a good thing. Without tolerance, the profound lack of understanding there would level humanity into complete destruction. But tolerance in the church will eventually level it in debauchery. The basic concept of tolerance is to endure hardship or suffering while sympathetically and indulgently allowing a conflicting condition to co-exist. Christ certainly is not instructing His church through the Word to tolerate sin or even annoyance within it. But neither is He issuing licenses to hunt down and subject or eliminate any believer who sins or annoys in any way.
-----Sin must not stand in the church, annoyance shouldn't. But the “non-sinning” brother’s duty is only to warn, attract, encourage, and edify a “sinning” brother. The "sinning brother" must do the actual dealing with the sin through his own decisions and efforts duly joined by God's participation through His Spirit. So God and brother both participate in the lives of others. Yet brother is warned by God not to participate in the sins of the other. Tolerance evokes no such appropriate participation of the “non-sinning” brother, since it sympathetically allows or even indulges inappropriate behavior. Forbearance is tolerance’s counterpart within the church. It offers the same “put up with” as does tolerance, yet its attitude remains one at odds with and kindly at work against what it must also put up with.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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