There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice which is more than liberty;
There’s no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven;
There’s no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgement given;
For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind, And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own;
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.
If our love were but more simple, we should take him at his word;
And our lives would be all sunshine in the sweetness of our Lord.
An extract from the famous hymn of Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863)

DOROTHY’S STORY

It was lunch time at the workshop I was attending and the woman who sat alongside me was puzzled, confused, hurt and just a little angry. Knowing I was an evangelical Christian she wanted to explain to me the reason for her turmoil and to ask me some searching questions. I will call her Dorothy. Her story went something like this.

Dorothy had offered to do unpaid voluntary work in a local hospice and her twenty hour week combined general care of people’s homes with spending time with the dying and their families. Dorothy saw this as a way she could help bring what she termed ‘the will of the loving Universe’ to earth.

For some of the time Dorothy had worked alongside another woman who soon let her know that she was a committed Christian and attended a large local Pentecostal church. The two women got on well and Dorothy was impressed by the other woman’s caring nature and hard work. The only occasion on which Dorothy had felt an instant barrier go up was when she had innocently shared about her spiritual journey and the help she was getting from her morning meditation. Determined to get to the bottom of the other woman’s obvious reserve at this moment, Dorothy had asked her about her own spiritual journey and views. She soon wished she hadn’t.

Like a pent-up volcano the Christian woman had launched into a long and passionate explanation. Firstly she described how she had become a Christian. This part Dorothy actually found interesting and quite moving. It was what followed which had caused her turmoil. In the course of the next fifteen minutes she found out that, assuming the woman was correct, Christians, at least the evangelical/pentecostal variety, were the only people on the face of the earth who had or could have a real relationship with God. Unless the rest of the world came to God in the way prescribed by Christians they would spend eternity in hell.

All other religious paths, said the woman, were the result of deception by Satan’s demons. The only way ‘to be saved’ as she put it, was to ‘come to Jesus’. The final shock had come when the woman informed Dorothy that in God’s eyes it didn’t matter at all if a person had lived their entire lives in caring compassionate service to other people. If they didn’t ‘believe in Jesus’ and weren’t ‘washed in the blood of the lamb’, God would send them to hell as these ‘good works’, as she termed them, were in God’s eyes nothing but ‘filthy menstrual cloths’. Besides, when caring actions were performed by non-Christians they were merely ‘humanistic good works’ and counted for nothing with God!

I sighed, shook my head and felt a rush of grief and embarrassment as it wasn’t that long ago that I too would have held to these same beliefs. Perhaps I might have explained them a little less brutally, but the woman had at least laid out starkly exactly what it is, when it’s all boiled down, that we evangelicals are supposed to believe.

The challenge was to try to briefly explain to Dorothy how come such otherwise genuinely caring people believe such things and just how they have, in certain key areas, got it so tragically wrong.

This article is dedicated to precisely the same task.

(Note: For much fuller explanation, order a copy of my book Overwhelmed by Grace from this web site.)