Unbelievers Suppression of Memory

A few days ago I wrote “Question: Unbelievers spiritually blinded and also knows there is a God?”

It made me think tangent to the possibility of not only suppression of truth by nonbelievers but also the suppression of the memory of the act of suppression of truth.

A few years ago we had a guy in our church.  He was with our church for a few years.  He was in our small group, our Bible studies and I also had personal discipleship with him.  Then when he decided to take more college classes (after finishing his bachelors) he went through a turbulent time period emotionally and spiritually.

And one day he came out and said he just got saved.

Usual praise to God followed from others.  I mean “usual” in the sense that we know its the right thing to do, to praise God for saving sinners.

But a few days into this new found salvation things took a dark turn.  What got strange was that his narrative of his time at our church start changing.

He went to another church and told a pastor who went to the same seminary as I did that I was preaching legalism and didn’t preach the Gospel.  But he couldn’t stop talking about it and shared his opinion with everyone.  Worst was him sharing to the ones that weren’t doing spiritually well.

I met up with him for him for lunch and I hope to clear some misunderstanding but I wasn’t anticipating what he said next: he told me I never met up with him before.  And that was a bit of a shock for me.

I was the one who invited him to our church.  I picked him every week for Bible studies and church.  We read and finished books together: Owen’s Mortifcation of Sin, Sinclair Ferguson’s Grow in Grace, etc. Books I told him to pick to go over.  We talked about his interests in certain sisters he wanted to court, talk about his future, I paid for nearly all his meals when he was in Bible studies for years and it easily totaled thousands of dollars.  In fact we met so regularly that he automatically assume his meal is paid for and never needed to ask nor say thank you; but strangely he was thinking that as his pastor I never met up with him.

I bring this up is to say it was shocking that he would meet up with me, to only say I never met up with him.

I didn’t let it slide and said I disagree and gave him the many examples of one on one time we had and he seem genuinely shocked.  Surprised.  And I dare say even foolish.  He got silent and said he was wrong.

But afterwards he didn’t stop with his narrative about me.

He eventually sat down with me one last time and told me he didn’t understand anything from the Bible studies I taught over the last few months and said he need to leave.  I gave my blessing.

I would have forgotten about it if it wasn’t for another pastor a few years down the road pointing out to me that this individual was online being passive aggressive and saying “why haven’t the Church ever taught on the complicated subject of X.”  The other pastor asked me if during the time the guy was there at my church did I ever taught on that issue.  I said yes.  I reviewed, checked and saw I have sermon outlines on my hard drive and also the sermon was on Sermon Audio.  I then recalled that I was actually dealing with that subject as a series during the time when this individual was saying he didn’t get anything from the BIble studies and need to go to another church.  It was distressing to me to think when I met with him I often dumb things down, and perhaps I do go indepth in mid-week studies, but both was a problem for him.  The whole thing left me scratching my head.

I don’t want to be the guy that thinks someone is not saved just because I disagree with them.  But I share this is to make the observation that sometimes when I hear people say their former church never shared the Gospel to them I hesitate to believe them as eagerly as I once did before I met this guy.  I think when people are not saved they can suppress the memory of the time when people shared the Gospel with them or other biblical truths.  I know some might say nonbelievers might have simply forgotten; but in the case of the individual I mentioned it seems at times more is going on than simply forgetting, especially when they were in the thick of it with every activity at church.  Now I do think sometimes the person’s other agenda blinded them.  Here’s the danger of ulterior motive for going to church.  But that spiritual blindness is also lies told not only to others but themselves so much that they start believing it and forgetting their motives.  But even as they suppresses things, it never fully goes away and at times the truth confronting them of their spiritual condition, their true motives and their true state of affairs as well as how the believers truly love them is so overwhelming, they either repent to God or otherwise they go further down the rabbit hole.  With the years of ministry I have to come to believe the most powerful and ironically the most scariest words a pastor can ever hear is “I’m sorry…”  Most powerful because if they mean it from a contrite heart, its the work of God.  Yet its the most scariest when their apologies aren’t real and yet they still struggle with guilt and shame, Satan can use that to lead such disturbed individuals to try to rationalize away them being the sinner and into the victim instead; and from victimehood Satan can open doors for them to do things that even nonbelievers are shocked by, and the police can even pause and shake their heads.

So with all this what does this have to do with us Christians serving the Lord? We must not ironically suppress the truth (even as we don’t want others to suppress the truth).  We also must be real in that when we do ministry, ministry is hard and if what the Bible says about mankind is real, don’t be surprise at how dark ministry can get.  Ministry requires us to have big hearts but thick skin; and don’t confuse that with hardened hearts and thin skin.