I condemn adultery, and my guess is anyone who’s been personally affected by its damaging effects will hate this particular sin with a special kind of hatred. I think I can land a book deal if I spend a year advocating death for adulterers, blasphemers, and Sabbath-breakers. What do you think?

I’m thinking about pulling a Christian stunt and going for a book deal, similar to Rachel Held Evans (A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master”) and Timothy Kurek (The Cross in the Closet). Held Evans’s goal was to spend a year following “all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year to show that no woman, no matter how devout, is actually practicing biblical womanhood all the way.” Kurek spent a year pretending to be a homosexual to “walk in the shoes of [the] very people he had been taught to shun.”

I condemn adultery, and my guess is anyone who’s been personally affected by its damaging effects will hate this particular sin with a special kind of hatred. I think I can land a book deal if I spend a year advocating death for adulterers, blasphemers, and Sabbath-breakers. What do you think?

Maybe I’m being unloving. I need to be more humane toward cheaters and walk in their shoes to see what it’s like to be condemned as an adulterer. I’ll spend a year living among them, pretending to be one of them, so I can relate to their sin. (Bonus sin: fornication!) Help me choose a title. I’m considering something like, A Year of Vow-Breaking: How a Hater of Adultery Found Herself Pretending to be Married and Arranging Illicit Meetings with Other Men or The Cross Under the Sheets.

Regarding the Old Testament laws, Christians know—or should know—that Christ, as the ultimate sacrifice, fulfilled the requirements of the sacrificial system and the ceremonial laws. They were signs pointing to the work of Christ. We don’t stone the homosexual or adulterer, but neither do we refuse to condemn the sin. And we don’t need to live for a year among practitioners of a specific sin, because we are sinners. We know sin. We are intimate with it.

Kurek told CNN that his yearlong experiment taught him “what it meant to be a second-class citizen in this country.” Sadly, he’s adopted the homosexual lobby’s language. In a country like the United States, mere disapproval of a lifestyle amounts to “second-class” citizenship. If you don’t like it and say so, if you call sin sin, you’re a homophobe oppressing homosexuals. And most unfortunate of all, Kurek no longer believes homosexual behavior, which sent Christ to the cross, is a sin.

Christ broke bread with sinners, but He didn’t join them in their sin. When asked why He associated with them, He said (with my emphasis):

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

Any “walk in the shoes” experiment is empty without the call to turn away from sin.

© Copyright 2012 World News Service – used with permission