Well, I figured out a way to cut off the last tendon of my hand and think I finally really threw it away. Not to say there won’t be the temptation to go rooting through the trash tomorrow or next week or next month, or sometime down the road to try and find the landfill it ends up in, but I have to lean on God to avoid giving in to that temptation. He’s the one who knows the next step and the one after that, and He’s the only one who can teach me how to live this new life He has planned for me.
There is however, another side to this—the fact that the hand that I had to cut off was another person, another child of God, not just a nameless sin. Yesterday, I quoted Matthew 18:8 in reference to cutting off the hand that causes me to sin. But there’s also scripture that says we need to reconcile with our Christian brothers, and I’m really wrestling with the meaning of it all.
I knew that God’s perfect will is for me to reconcile with those whom I have hurt and to repair relationships that I have damaged, and it didn’t compute that the way to do that is to write another person off—another Christian—and erase them from my life.
So if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God. (Matthew 5:23-24, NLT)
God can’t tolerate broken relationships—as I read this verse, any broken relationship among Christians interferes so much with our worship that He tells us to go immediately and repair the relationship before trying to worship. But I’m beginning to realize that in this real world, it is possible to shatter a relationship so badly that there can be no reconciliation in human terms—that the only reconciliation possible is between us and God, and that depends on our faith in Christ and in God’s love for us. Interestingly, just a few verses after this one, Matthew repeats Jesus’s command to cut off your hand if it causes you to sin, so I think Jesus knew that there was a practical reality to contend with besides the spiritual ideal.
I still feel the conflict between the two commands—reconcile with your brother, but cut off the hand that causes you to sin—love one another, but flee from temptation. Like I wrote yesterday, I tried to do both. But it’s not possible—and only God can show me how to manage both sides of this equation. I have no answers, and I suspect they will be a very long time in coming.
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