He who corrects a scoffer gets shame for himself,
And he who rebukes a wicked man only harms himself.
Do not correct a scoffer, lest he hate you;
Rebuke a wise man and he will love you.
…
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
Proverbs 9:7-8, 10
These words just really grabbed me as I was reading the other day. It was an “Oh my gosh! Why have I never noticed this before?” kind of thing.
I think, as a Christian who feels compelled to live a certain way, it is sometimes easier to preach our moral ideas to unbelievers, than to just share the love of Jesus. But in these verses we are warned so clearly not to do this. “Do not correct a scoffer lest he hate you.”
If someone is not living with the knowledge of the Holy One, then they are without understanding, and all of our rambling about what moral choices they should be making are useless.
Convincing someone to live a “moral” life without Jesus is good for nothing. We are justified by Jesus, not our “good” life. Of course our lives will change once we choose to follow Him, but the choice for Him has to come first.
Reading these verses was just such a huge encouragement to me: quit worrying about fixing people, and just share the love of Jesus. He will fix them, in His perfect time, and my only job is to point them to Him.
I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke.
Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light.
But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it.
They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.
~C.S. Lewis