Sometimes what is obvious in a person’s life is sin, but the real problem is suffering, and sometimes what is obvious is suffering but the real problem is sin. This requires you to proceed carefully, with humility and patience, as you come to know people. When in any doubt, lead with God’s compassion for those who have suffered.

You are watching a movie. There she is, right on cue. The archetypal seductress appears. The prostitute of Proverbs (6, 7) comes to mind. Follow this siren to your peril because she is taking you straight to her home in the grave. How easy it is to assess her and her motives. Everything is so blatant.

But the story is not over. Later in the movie, you learn that she was sold into sexual slavery as a child and degraded and beaten too many times to remember. Sex for favors is the best life she can imagine. Now, those Proverbs passages no longer seem relevant. They would only compound the violence done against her.

This is the challenge that we have in ministry—we could call it discernment. Sometimes what is obvious in a person’s life is sin, but the real problem is suffering, and sometimes what is obvious is suffering but the real problem is sin. This requires you to proceed carefully, with humility and patience, as you come to know people. When in any doubt, lead with God’s compassion for those who have suffered.

Let’s say you meet a woman like the one in the movie, someone who is flagrantly and proudly promiscuous. Her pattern is one-night stands, fueled by alcohol. Everything about her lifestyle is contrary to Scripture but also anticipated by Scripture’s various observations of godless descents into debauchery (e.g., Romans 1). How many of us would still be around by the time she said, “After I was raped, I didn’t care what happened to me. I was all used up”? How many of us would even be trusted with this? We must be aware that this kind of violence can lurk beneath blatant and self-destructive sins.

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