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The Challenge to Preserve the Christian Family Part 5:
Helping Those Who Have Been Hurt
by Norman and Ann Bales
All About Families


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The church needs to reach out with compassionate and loving arms to those who have been hurt by sin. We are against divorce. We can give you any number of reasons why divorce is wrong, destructive and detrimental to human happiness. We can give you Biblical reasons. We can give you practical reasons. We can quote statistics. We do everything in our power to persuade people not to divorce.

It is true that God hates divorce according to Malachi 2:16, but God does not hate divorced people. In John 4, Jesus offered salvation to a woman who had gone through five husbands. Can we do any less? Those of us, who haven't been divorced, don't realize the tremendous pain that people experience when they go through a divorce. Some people tell me that it is even more painful than death, but by and large, the church is often the very last place that people go to find support, help, encouragement and love when they've been divorced. We have known people, who didn't want a divorce, would have done anything in their power to prevent divorce, yet they were married to someone who didn't want to keep the marriage together. Sadly, the person who didn't want the divorce was stigmatized, shunned and abandoned.

It's not just the divorced person who needs encouragement. It's the children of single parent families. It's unwed mothers. Do we approve of fornication when we try to help an unwed mother? Of course not. What about those young ladies who have had an abortion? There may be a large number of young women in your church who have had an abortion and you don't even know about it.

Some of those young women who have aborted children are defiant and unrepentant. Others feel an enormous amount of guilt and shame. Some wonder if God could ever love them when they've done such a terrible thing. Are we giving our consent to abortion when we try to help someone like that? Absolutely not. We're doing the same thing that Jesus did when he sat down to eat with tax collectors. There'll always be some people who will never understand how you can hate the sin and love the sinner, but that's what Jesus did and that's what we are called upon to do. The challenge to preserve Christian families also includes ministry to those whose family cohesion has been damaged.

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