When I was a young boy, my brother and I walked out into the orchard that bordered our home. We found a bee’s nest. As boys will do, we shook the nest. The bees came out enraged, looking for the flesh of the intruders. We both got stung multiple times as we tried to run away from the bees’ fury.
That experience with the bees’ nest reminds me of what can happen when the Church discovers sin in its midst. While sin needs to be dealt with, how we conduct that exposure can be more important than the exposure itself.
The discovery of sin in the Church will create a fury. Because I have been around for a few decades, what we are seeing now is nothing new. It’s a repeated issue as the Lord matures and purifies His Church. In these times of exposure, we look to blame others who we think have done the same thing. During that discovery, people begin to sting each other in a fury of blame attaching.
In the fury, some are blamed for similar sins even though the blamers may have only secondhand information about their offense. This is a truly negative part of social media.
People are stung by their association with those who had sinned. The guilty ones need to confess their sins, make restitution to the victims, and begin to display a life of repentance. That repentance will not always allow them to return to the ministry they abused.
The pain the day my brother and I got stung did not last. The bees returned to their hives, and we went on to do other things boys do as our stinging wounds healed.
It reminds me of the rebellion of Korah and his followers against the leadership of Moses and Aaron. There is a critical understanding in that rebellion, “The Lord will show us who belongs to him and who is holy” Numbers 16:5). Only God can determine a person’s holiness. All of this happened because “Korah had stirred up the entire community against Moses and Aaron” (vs. 19).
We need to be careful what we stir up and why we continue to stir the nest because, in the end, only the Lord knows a person’s motives. If we do not follow a careful, restrained path of disclosure, we may follow a course of action that will destroy our testimony, just as it destroyed Korah and his followers.
Yes and amen. When I have removed the plank from my own eye I can the look at the speck in someone else’s 🙏💕