We all have a past. We all have things we are ashamed of or wish we could change about ourselves. We all have people in our lives who have hurt us, rejected us and played a role in forming who we are today. The degrees of our brokenness varies based on our past, our wounds and our current circumstances. But no matter who you are or what you’re going through, you feel like your pain and your unhappiness is the worst and no one else can possibly understand.

And so we seek happiness. We want to put our pain, our regrets, our shame and our mistakes behind us and wipe the slate clean. We believe that if only (fill in the blank) could happen then we would be happy. And sometimes it happens and we are happy, for a moment. But then we find that the happiness doesn’t last so we seek something else that we believe will bring us happiness. And many of us spend years, some their entire lives searching for that one thing that will bring them the peace and happiness they so desperately desire.

And we know those people and we know their struggle and we hurt for them and we desire for them to find their happiness. We love them through their darkest times as the Bible calls us to. Even when we know that what is really making them unhappy and the real reason they can’t find peace is because the sin in their life has caused them to be separated from God. But we love them and continue to point them toward the answer they seek but are blinded to.

They are blinded because until they find their identity in Christ, they will be in a constant state of trying to discover who they really are. And that desire to be someone other than who you currently are stems from not knowing who you are in Christ. God designed us to seek our identity so that in our search we will eventually be pointed toward Him. And He is where true happiness is found because apart from Him there is no such thing as true happiness.

But in our love for the hurting and our compassion for them in the midst of their struggle, we cannot lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day they don’t have a happiness issue, they have a sin issue. They are lost and are in desperate need of a Savior. My concern is that we are out of balance as Christians and in our attempt to love people and have compassion for them, we have become desensitized to sin and the things that God says are wrong. We are becoming over sensitive to our fear of not wanting to offend people and in turn it’s causing us to become soft toward sin.

This is a subtle way that the enemy is deceiving Christians. We must have empathy and grace toward the lost sinner. But we cannot be deceived into simply feeling bad for their struggle and forget that at the end of the day the real issue is that they are a sinner in desperate need of a Savior. We can feel bad for all that someone has been through but we can’t forget that what they are doing is still wrong. Their sin is not their right. It’s not what they deserve to make them happy. It’s sin.

Let’s love them, but let’s love them to Christ.