Right Principle + Wrong Motivation =Stumbling Block
Church Without Walls (part 3)

Isaiah 57:14 ... "Build up, build up, prepare the road! Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people."

My father hated the Church, but loved God. He and my mother taught me to pray, but he may have prayed I would never be active in church. I know he was bitterly disappointed when as a teenager, I started going to church.

The single strongest factor for my dad's attitude towards the church was an experience he had as a child. His father died, leaving my grandmother alone with three children. Those were very different days with no social safety nets and perspectives about single mothers that would make us cringe. They were deemed incapable of working while caring for children.

My grandmother was part of a local church that cared about her needs, but acted on their concern in an uncaring way. Their "solution" was to take my father and his brother and sister away from their mother so they could be properly cared for. My grandmother's solution was to leave their little town in the middle of the night to escape the church's concept of care. My father spent the rest of his life trying to continue that escape.

Just a handful of misguided individuals were used as building blocks in the wall that my father started to build to keep the church out of his life. They were his mantra, his excuse for his negative labels he heaped on the church. They likely had no idea of the hurt they inflicted, and probably thought they had been rejected for their service to God.

It's unavoidable that each of us, in spite of good intentions, will sometimes do or say things that become a barrier to others following Christ. Perhaps the key to avoiding most of these painful situations, though, is simply asking questions. "How can we help, Mrs. Jackson?" would have been a way to show real compassion. "We'll take your children because we know that's the best way to help you." shows arrogance. They took a right principle, caring for the widow and orphan, and mixed it with wrong motivation. Right principle applied with wrong motivation produces bad fruit and makes stumbling blocks. When someone, like my father, trips over a stumbling block and is lying on the ground right next to that block, that stumbling block looks big enough to be a wall.

We must be careful to make a way, not a wall, for those around us.

Matthew 18:4 "Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 "And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.