THE INTEGRITY OF A LEADER OFTEN IS SHOWN in the stand he takes for right against mistaken popular concepts—not to be different or difficult but daring to be right, avoiding the temptation to join in the swim downstream by challenging the direction of the flow, searching for the biblical right or wrong in each issue.
I heard the writer Chaim Potok say a true leader is never absorbed in the stream in which he swims. The Scripture would say he was transformed rather than conformed.
Our society is facing many positions that need biblical challenge and clarification. They include: relative truth, situational ethics, alternate lifestyles, personal responsibility versus rights, the acquisition and distribution of wealth, racial equality, political expediency, self-love as expressed in image and significance, and the power of peer pressure.
While these issues rage, values and ethics have become a hot subject in our society, almost to the point of becoming a cultural fad. Philanthropists are contributing big money to projects, higher education is developing departments, and social writers are taking the subject to the bestseller list.
I was one of the speakers recently at the Norman Vincent Peale conference on “value-oriented leadership.” The conference brought together several thoughtful academics, ceos, and consultants to discuss this subject with heads of businesses. Many fine points and illustrations were brought up and discussed. My talk certainly did not disagree with the need for right values and ethics.
However, I did point out that we need to root our human values in divine virtues or we end up controlled by our human desires and made variable by our selfish interest. To have complete authenticity and authority over our behavior requires that our values be rooted in divine virtues—not those that we have manufactured, but those we have discovered that are given by God. Our authority needs to be outside ourselves. Christ based his values in God.
Just as Newton did not create the law of gravity but discovered it, so we cannot create virtues but can only discover them and make them the source of our values. Let me illustrate the danger of a manufactured virtue by examining “tolerance,” which has been elevated by our society to a universal virtue.
Fruit inspectors
Intolerance has become society’s unforgivable sin. We hear “only bigots are judgmental.” Seemingly the intolerant do not deserve to be tolerated.
Tolerance is attractive to our society because it is permissive. It is pleasant because it doesn’t require hard thinking. Clichés and bumper stickers can deal with it. Best of all, it’s nonconfroncational. Our society has lost the willingness to confront error in search of truth. These benefits are all given by Satan as an allure. As usual, sin gives the benefit first and extracts the price later. Blaise Pascal warns us, “It is false piety to preserve peace at the expense of truth.”
We must ask, “Is tolerance a divine virtue or a contrived value that accommodates our present society?” I am convinced that the way in which society now practices tolerance is a manufactured value that, when practiced to excess, will ultimately prove harmful.
Probably the worst thing that can be said about an individual today is that he is “judgmental.” When being judgmental is based on self-righteousness, it is a sin. Scripture warns us repeatedly against judging others as if we were better than they. Christ condemned the Pharisee who was judgmental toward the publican. Paul laid down the principle that even small sinners are not to condemn big sinners, since we all are sinners. Oswald Chambers tells us that we are not to see the wrong in others in order that we might criticize them, but chat we might intercede for them.
One of the most saintly women I’ve ever known was also one of the most sophisticated. She showed spiritual discernment when she said, “Fred, there’s not a sin of which I am not capable. I could be a prostitute. I could be a drunk. I could be a murderer.”
I thought that was a humble thing for a saint to say, so I condescendingly said, “You’re being very humble.” She said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”
I said, “No.”
She said, “If there’s any sin that anyone has committed of which I am not capable, then I’m incapable of loving that person. The same sin that is in him is in me. The God who loves that person has told me that I must love him too.”
Rather than being judgmental, we are to be discerning. Howard Butt, Jr., founder of the Laity Lodge and a lay minister, preached a great sermon in his early years, proclaiming Christians to be fruit inspectors rather than judges. We are told to inspect the fruit of others, not to belittle them or to demean them—even to the point of being told not to call them fools for fear of judgment. Yet we are told in Scripture, “By their fruit ye shall know them.” It is one thing to know fruit, another thing to judge individuals. Fruit inspection is our job; judging is God’s.
I believe that discernment is one of the spiritual gifts, and if we were not to be able to tell the differences between good and evil, there would be no point in our ability to discern. When we accept total tolerance as our rule, we deny discernment as our gift. Discernment is not given to us so we can criticize but so that we can coach; it is not given to us to point out weakness but to help build up strength and to avoid error.
Our fruit inspection must always be according to the principles of Scripture, which we did not author but under which we live, the same as the person we are observing. When a minister holds the Bible up to an audience and says, “The Bible says,” he is not pronouncing his judgment but God’s judgment. He is not the author of judgment, he is the reporter—and under the same judgment.
When dealing with a subject like this, a leader can be exceptionally emotional or exceptionally logical. I prefer logic to emotion—not raising my voice, being demeaning, or trying to make fun of the other side. Such antics only solidify the opposition. I’ve got to avoid the accusation that I’m judgmental. I can’t say, “Don’t be self-righteous,” and then be so myself. I can’t insinuate that everybody with intelligence holds my position. At times I will even say, “Now, I changed my position here after rethinking it.”
Another reason for fruit inspection is that we might see our own sins in others and correct our sins, not theirs. Paul constantly reminded us chat as we see the other person’s sin, we are really seeing our own. Again, Paul says, “He who is spiritual judges all things.” He did not say all people.
In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the elder brother got mad because his self-righteousness was not recognized as superior to his younger brother’s repentance and rewarded accordingly. I think he would have gladly let the young man come back as his servant, but the father didn’t want a servant, he wanted a son. A servant received wages; a son received love and acceptance.
Those who brought to Christ the woman caught in adultery wanted to see her punished, and Christ made them conscious of their self-righteousness. He repeatedly opposed the “white sepulchers” of the religious leaders.
Three tests of tolerance
I see three tests a leader can use when evaluating the concept of tolerance:
1. Is it taste or is it truth? I wrote a friend recently, “You’re tolerant in your taste, but you’re intolerant in your truth.” It was a compliment. Christ said, “I am the truth.”
But in matters of taste, we should be tolerant. Too often we ritualize our taste into orthodoxy. I cannot worship in an atmosphere of contemporary music, even though many times the words are actually more scriptural than some of those in old hymns that I feel I must hear while worshiping. It is a matter of taste, not of truth. Therefore I should not criticize the young people who find in contemporary music their worship, so long as it contains truth.
Recently I was in Quebec, attending an Episcopal service. The three priests were garmented ecclesiastically, while the young man who read the Scripture from the pulpit was in shores and the young lady who took the offering was wearing jeans. Their taste was different than mine. So long as the truth remained, I had to agree with their truth while differing with their taste.
Many times I have been tempted to refuse a perfectly good load simply because it came in an unattractive wagon. The wagon is not the focal point, the load is. I’ve always admired the admonition of the minister who said that when we are feeding on truth and run across a thorn that we do not believe, we should at least have the sense of a mule, which, while eating hay and discovering a thorn, doesn’t stop eating the hay; it simply pushes the thorn aside and keeps on eating.
2. Is it preference or principle? Our preferences can vary; our principles cannot, because our principles must be scriptural.
In controversial matters I have to be sure I’m not practicing my preference rather than biblical principle. Style and cultural habits are largely preference, not principle—forms of worship, translations, vestments, rituals, and the like.
When I first became chairman of Youth for Christ, I began meeting a lot of young people who shocked me with their long hair, jewelry, and cloches. As I got to know them, I found they were much deeper Christians than many of my friends with short hair, less jewelry, and three-piece suits. Our spiritual life doesn’t depend on the barbershop.
Once I was listening to a jazz group from South Africa that was being interviewed on television. The leader was asked if they had racial problems, since half of them were white and half were black. He said, “No, we got over the racial issue a long time ago. We still have our cultural differences.” That was illuminating to me. I may have preferences, which I want to maintain, but they are not matters of principle.
3. Is God tolerant in this area? I think we can be tolerant where God is tolerant, and we cannot be tolerant where God is not tolerant. In my study of Scripture, I’ve not found God to be tolerant. He is patient, merciful, kind, loving, and forgiving—all qualities that handle our human problems so much better than tolerance. His judgments are always the same. That is why Christ died, that he might have mercy and grace with justice.
Here are two of the primary things society expects us to be tolerant about where God is intolerant: First is the false teaching that “all religions are the same: all are different roads leading to the same place.” This teaching humanizes God and deifies man. It makes the Cross unnecessary, with Christ dying as a martyr, not a sacrifice. It indicts missionaries as presumptuous.
Stanley Jones in a college chapel told how he went out as a missionary and came back not seeing a difference in his belief and others’ until he read the Scripture: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In other religions the word remained the word, while in Christianity the Word became flesh.
If all religions are the same, then the martyrs are fools. Yet the Scripture has a special place at the throne for them.
Moreover, if the Cross is unnecessary, the missionaries presumptuous, and the martyrs foolish, then Scripture is untrue, for it says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father except by Me.”
I always have a twinge of conscience when I quote that, for I remember walking down Fifth Avenue in New York one morning with an unbelieving executive friend who said to me, “Fred, do you believe that anyone who doesn’t accept Christ will go to hell?” When I cold him I did, he said, “If I believed that, I’d crawl on my hands and knees and tell every friend I’ve got.”
I have never lost the sting of that.
One of the great ministers whom some would consider a liberal was standing at a busy intersection in New York with another of my friends. He turned to him and said, “Do you believe that all these people who don’t believe in Jesus are going to hell?” When my friend said he did, the minister said, “You don’t live like it.”
Second, society expects us to be tolerant about sin, to embrace moral relativism. God is not tolerant toward sin. “The soul chat sins shall die.” The Good News is that God is not tolerant but forgiving. We as humans have to tolerate the person in his fallen condition, but God can restore us to newness of life when his conditions are met.
How much better to be forgiven than tolerated!
Recently I was sitting at the head table of the Bill Glass annual dinner for his prison ministry, and at the first table in front of me was a man whose face shone with glory. In the middle of his talk, the speaker stopped and said he wanted to introduce someone to the audience. He called this man up, and as they stood at the microphone the speaker said to him, “George, I’m going to tell these people what I said to you the first time I met you, and you’re going to tell them what you said back to me.”
With this the speaker said, “George, I understand you’re an ex-convict, you’re an ex-druggie, you’re an ex-pusher, you’re an ex-mean dude. And what did you say?”
The man whose face shone said quietly, “Sir, I said, ‘I’m no ex-anything. I’m a new creation in Christ Jesus.’ “
The Good News is, we can be changed; we can be clean, not just tolerated.
Contrast chat with a politician who recently spoke to a gathering of lesbians and said, “We must broaden our imagination.” The saints of old always warned against trying to broaden the narrow way. It’s human nature to want to broaden the narrow way, but it can’t be broadened, because truth can never be broadened.
Error can be subtle, truth is absolute; truth cannot contain error, but error can contain truth. You can have 1 percent error and 99 percent truth but still have error. Or you can have 99 percent error and 1 percent truth and still have error. Satan has a broader choice of subtlety in his error than we have in truth. That’s why it’s so important we have an authority for the truth; we cannot be our own authority for truth. Scripture says our minds are deceitful. I cannot be my own authority for challenging such a big position, and I have to state that authority and be under that authority.
God goes beyond tolerance. He loves. Tolerance ultimately is a total disconnect. Love is a total connection. Tolerance is apathy toward others. It may even be controlled hostility. To tolerate is passive, to love is active.
Love doesn’t ignore the other for its own convenience. It disciplines, it suffers, it challenges, it corrects. The Scripture tells us that God’s correction is evidence of his love.
Today we are told that sexual experience between consenting adults is exclusively their affair. That assumes that no one loves either of them. There is a responsibility to loving, and maybe a greater responsibility to being loved.
My friend Ray Stedman was telling me how he went to a homosexual gathering on the campus of Stanford, where a gay minister and a lesbian were chiding the church about how judgmental it is. The lesbian pointed to how Christ didn’t judge the woman at the well. Without disclosing that he was a preacher, Ray simply said, “But she was never the same after she met him.”
Likewise, the Christian obligation is not self-righteous judgment but self-sacrificing love.
The implications of complete tolerance for the social order are chaos and decadence. This was pointed out in Judges: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Tolerance is in the end social hypocrisy. A lasting community cannot be built on it. Love, not apathy, is the glue that holds a group together. On the other hand, social tolerance is a narcotic. It anesthetizes us to reality. Like a drug, it gives a short-term benefit and a long-term liability.
When our body becomes tolerant to disease, we are in the process of death. Just as the body fights its enemies so we should fight those things that destroy us—not in the spirit of meanness but for survival and health.
I was listening to an interview with Eddie Robinson, a football coach at Grambling for fifty-seven years. He said winning the game was never as important as winning the man. He was not a tolerant coach. There never has been a championship coach who was tolerant.
Recently I was talking with the best-known jewel thief of our time, “Murf the Surf.” He did the eulogy for famed Chaplain Ray of prison ministry. I asked him what Chaplain Ray had that was so attractive to prisoners. Murf replied, “Chaplain Ray never saw you as a convict. He always saw you as who you could be with Christ.”
We must be careful that we don’t sacrifice truth on the altar of popular acceptance. Horatius Bonar says it better than I:
True Christianity calls sin sin in whomever it is found and would rather risk the accusation of being motivated by a bad spirit than not discharge explicit duty. It does not fear to speak the stern word of condemnation against error nor to raise its voice against surrounding evils knowing that it is not of this world. It does not shrink from giving honest reproof lest it come under the charge of displaying an unchristian spirit. The religion of both Old and New Testament is marked by fervent, outspoken testimonies against evil. To not do this is a betrayal of the cause of truth and righteousness.1
Copyright © 1998 Fred Smith, Sr.
