May 11, 2009 issue
Wider grace
By Ray Elvin Horst Harrisonburg, Va.Several writers to Viewpoint (April 20) share concerns about allowing “sinful” practices into the church. Have we forgotten the days when people who divorced and remarried were “living in sin” and when interracial marriage was illegal in many states and was also believed to be “sin”? While many churches in those times refused church membership to persons involved in such circumstances, today most Christians believe that God’s grace is wider than we formerly understood it to be. The hymn “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” says it well: “For we make God’s love too narrow by false limits of our own” — limits which we base on narrow interpretations of the Bible, as did the Pharisees.
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