Blessed are the Sex Offenders
August 28, 2008I was at Jack in the Box yesterday, when a lady who comes off and on from my church saw me and asked me to send out a prayer request to people in my church (if you are comfortable with it, please join me in praying). She asked me to pray for one of her sons who was going to reveal to his fiancee that he is a sex offender. This started me thinking…
I began to pray for him, but the prayer felt so recycled. It was the normal, “give him strength and wisdom/ soften her heart/ let them see eye to eye”. Then I began asking God for some understanding. How do we pray for somebody who has done something that society deems so atrocious? Can we honestly look into the mirror and say that we are okay with this because God can redeem it? I wondered these questions to myself as I walked out.
I know a few sex offenders, in fact, I am directly related to one. When I look at a sex offender, I try not to see an ugly person. I try not to see the broken past that they left behind for me or my family. One thing that I do see when I look at them is somebody that society has forgotten and the only way that they are remembered is when they have to check in with probation officers. Are these one of the least and lost that Jesus spoke of? Are even the sex offenders included in the Beatitudes? If so, then how do we love the Sex Offender? How do we show them compassion and grace without seeing the ugliness of their sin? These, to me, are the questions leading toward true Christianity…sometimes I find myself far from it.
Do you think god tallies up how many people pray for one thing or another? Do you think hes got a little book and in it he just added: “2 prayers from jack in the box for sex offender”. Is he waiting until he gets 10 prayers for this specific sex offender before he helps his fiancee see through his faults?
God made that person a sex offender right? Or did god give this person the choice to be a sex offender?
Or does god not care and is laughing at everyone over analysing every little thing trying to figure out what it is thinking.
People can do good things in life, and people can do bad things in life. whether you say god or satan or Zeus or the sun god is controlling that person is just how you cope with people controlling their own lives.
Do YOU think you could still be this persons friend after what they did?
In the church we tend to talk a lot about sexual sins, but we reserve our discussions for particular certain aspects of the topic.
While not all people exposed to internet pornography become sex offenders, most sex offenders can trace their problem to online porn. And this area is one of the ones that many churches don’t discuss.
I have more on this at:
http://www.thepornographyeffect.wordpress.com
Ross-You bring up great questions. I often wonder the same things. Is God really listening? Does he care? Yes to both. Will he only answer after “x” amount of prayers are recieved? no.
True, we have “good and bad” people. I don’t believe that God or Satan is “controlling” them. We have choices. Luckily, we also have redemption and grace. That is what helps me cope with my decisions and others decisions.
Do I think I could still be a person’s freind after what they did? Of course I can. I still love the family member who drove a wedge into my family with his decisions and actions against us. After reconciliation wiht them, I still hug him with feelings of love.
Maybe this is the question: How do we get to the point of reconcilation with the sex offender? what must we look past in order to see them as a person, not good or bad, just a fellow human being. As a christian, I am called to love God and love neighbor. Loving the Sex Offender is loving God. hmmm. I think that this is where the reconcilation begins.
My brother is a sex offender. He is no different than you and me on the inside. He did what he thought was true at the time. He was raised to believe that sex is related to love when in fact they are totally seperate. He is on the path to God and always has been deep inside. He has to live with the ridicule from misunderstanding people for the rest of his life. I love him and only see who he is and not what he is. Which is what God does. We are Love first and formost and our choices shape who we become. If you love the sex offender with the same love you love the saint, that offender will soon become the saint.
I became a minister so as to help the forgotten and unloved. If we all become God’s servants the way we are supposed to be and serve each other, we would know peace for all eternity in Heaven and on Earth. Stop looking at the actions and start looking at each other through the eyes of God.
One of the Apostles wrote”Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat him the way he could be and he will become the as he should be”.
And from Jesus “Love commands the universe. Man only resorts to control when Love is missing”.
where are these scriptures found?
I found those “scriptures” fascinating also, so I Goggled the phrase and guess what? It comes up on several blogs all posted to the comment section by the same person. An earlier one in 2007 connects to a Beliefnet Community profile that’s rather interesting, to say the least.
As Christians we may not have scriptures committed to memory as some in other faiths do, but at least we have enough discernment to spot a misquote a mile away. (If it were my blog, I’d delete it!)
First one from one of the “Apostles” is actually a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote.
Second one is on quite a few blogs who ask the same question for reference.
C’mon rev. Let’s hear it man. Otherwise, please don’t waste our time.
I have struggled with this topic for along time. After the brutal murders in our community of sex offenders who were living in a half-way house, I began wondering where do people with such offenses fit in? they are not welcomed in communities and finding a job and housing is very difficult for someone who might be trying to overcome the past. I have had an internal struggle of what acceptance and healing in this crime would look like, especially when the level of re-offense is so high. But I have found that many people do not even want to enter into the conversation. So thanks for even talking about what this all means. I would love to be able to begin to discover what God’s will is in this area.
I never knew where my fisrt quote came from since I first read it on one of my ministry sites and was actually stated by one of the Apostles. I didn’t know it came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
As to the beliefnet, I’ve never visited that site and when I did, I found the quote used by my mentor and teacher who stood by me while I was becoming a minister. That quote is from Jesus and you can find it in Glenda Green’s book called “Love Without End” through her conversations with Jesus while she painted His portrait.
I would never “waste your time” nor anyone else’s and I don’t care if my blogs are deleted. Blog’s have nothing to do with getting into Heaven and that is the path I’m on. Just because I made a mistake of where something came from doesn’t mean that the intent of what I wanted to get across is wrong, Intent is all there is in getting into Heaven.
Since this blog is about sex offenders, I just wanted to “throw those in” so that we would be better able to understand what God want’s in lieu of what people want.