There is No Scorecard

In the news recently has been a guy who wants to encourage Christians to vote. So he's created a scorecard with a maximum of 600 points. The purpose is for his political action group to reach out and contact them and inundate them with literature to get them to vote for the appropriate candidates: the higher the score, the more contact you get.

The problem is how he thinks Christians ought to behave and what affiliations they should have. According to the news report, you get points for fishing and enjoying NASCAR, home schooling your kids, being on an anti-abortion mailing list and a list of an organization that's fighting for traditional marriage.

So what if I'm a believer and disciple who'd rather play soccer than waste hours watching hunks of metal circle at high speeds going nowhere? What if I believe the community needs to be strong as a form of loving my neighbors and one way to do that is to support the local public schools? I'd rather get points for being in a small group bible study than because I'm on some church's mailing list as a regular attender. (Regular attendance is important, but being conformed in the image of Christ is more important.)

God's thoughts are higher than a person's thoughts. Just when we think we have it figured out as black-and-white, God upends our dichotomistic thinking for more holism. Touch the ark and die. Yep, that happened. Commit adultery and die. Nope, that didn't happen for Judah, David or the woman caught by the teachers of the law in Jesus' day. In fact, the earthly lineage of Christ comes from prostitutes, adulterers, foreigners and probably some other miscreants (like Abraham's multiple lies). If it hadn't been for adultery, David's lineage wouldn't have happened nor Christ's.

"So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time, we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!" (2 Cor. 5.16-17)

If we insist that other believers conform to our life, our old secular and non-spiritual life, than we are not seeing with God's eyes. We are seeing with human eyes. We would see Christ as the 'son' of a whore, a mere carpenter's son, who hangs out with drunkards, gluttons and other sinners. We would not see the life transforming and life-saving Messiah. We would be looking for a Dale Earnhart Jr decal on his pickup beside the lake while he casts his line fishing for fish, instead of fishing for people.

Group magazine a few years ago asked: DWKJWETKWHWD? Don't just ask what Jesus would do. Ask whether you know him well enough to know what he would do. "Not everyone who calls out to me, 'Lord, Lord!' will enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 7.22). This includes those who did great spiritual acts. Does setting up a voter point scorecard count, Lord?