Now let me enter a qualification at this point. I believe there is a difference between what you will endure as an individual in this area and how you would approach it on behalf of someone else. When you are the one being cheated it is better to allow such injustice to happen and trust God for the outcome, rather than to pursue it in some way. Count it as a loss and move on in a righteous way from there. That is an entirely appropriate behavior in that case. But if somebody else is getting cheated by another, it is not right for me to stand by and allow it to go on and not try to help the situation get resolved in a correct way. In that case I should enter into the fray in order to try to get justice for the Christian being harmed.
Harry Ironside once told a story that is helpful for this kind of church problem. When he was a young boy in Canada, his parents told him that they wanted him to come to a dispute at a congregational meeting to see how it ended up. I suppose they thought it was going to work out well. However, when they got there, it did not seem to be going very well at all. You may know that sometimes some of the most unpleasant things you see in life happen in congregational meetings. In this particular church there was a tremendous battle going on between two of the leaders. Finally, one of the leaders stood up, shaking in anger. He said, “There are certain things I will not tolerate, and one of them is to be defrauded of my rights.”
There was a Scottish brother there who seemed to have been hard of hearing or at least he was pretending to be. He said to the angry man, “What was that? I didn’t quite hear that.” So the man repeated it again: “The one thing I will not tolerate is to be defrauded of my rights!” Once again the Scotsman asked, “Pardon me, I didn’t quite get that. Would you say that again?” And he made the angry leader say it a third time. But you know, it is harder to repeat something in anger a third time. Finally, this old and wise Scotsman said, “Yes, I thought that’s what I heard you say. Is it really the pattern of Christians not to be defrauded of their rights? Jesus came to this earth not to get His rights but to get His wrongs.”
At that point, the man who had shaken with anger began to shake in contrition. He broke down and began to weep, and replied, “Yes, that’s correct, and I am wrong. I withdraw the objection.” What a marvelous way to have disputes resolved. That should be the pattern in the Christian Church.
Now I want to say something about the role of the state because although Paul does not develop it here, it is part of the total picture. What is the role of the state? Does the state have a legitimate authority even over the lives of Christians not necessarily in antagonism between themselves? One of the great illustrations of the proper role of the state is found in the trial of Jesus Christ, recorded in John 18 and 19. It was significant not simply because it was Jesus who was on trial, but because Jesus stood there in that capacity as the head of the Church before Pilate, who was a representative of Caesar.
The issue was that of authority. Jesus was accused of being a king, and so Pilate began to interrogate Him on that point. He asked Jesus, “Are you a king?” Then Jesus proceeded to explain the nature of His kingdom: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent by arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place” (18:36). Jesus then went on to say that His kingdom was marked by truth, and the reason He came was to testify to it.