Separate from Sinners, Friend of Sinners: The Holiness That Draws Near
In the 1960s, the Christian world in the Netherlands came apart in a single generation. A nation that had been among the most churchgoing and religiously organized in Europe watched its churches empty almost to silence. The believers who remained watched people they loved — children, neighbors, lifelong friends — drift out of the faith and not come back. It is hard to overstate the grief of it — or the fear it left behind. And when a community is that frightened, it reaches, understandably, for the Bible verses that seem to promise safety: Come out from among them and be separate (2 Corinthians 6:17). Do not love the world or the things in the world (1 John 2:15). Whoever would be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God (James 4:4). And so, in the decades that followed, the walls went up: the children kept in, the world kept further out. In many places that impulse has since softened — but its mark remains, and the fear beneath it never entirely left.
And the Netherlands was only the most dramatic case of something far wider. The 1960s shook the whole developed world; church attendance fell across the West, and in country after country — the United States not least — devout believers watched the culture turn and — for reasons that were rarely simple, though a kindred instinct often ran beneath them — turned inward, building their own schools and institutions and subcultures, raising the walls against a world that seemed to be coming apart. The particulars differ from place to place. The instinct, and the fear beneath it, run through much of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian world.
That fear can be answered in more than one way, but the answers tend to share a shape. Some build the wall all the way up: the Amish and the Old Order Mennonites drew a visible line around the whole of life, a boundary you can see from the road. Most Christians would call that too far, and never go near it. But the same fear has a quieter answer — one that has shaped vast stretches of the evangelical and fundamentalist world without ever looking like a wall at all. Here the believer stays fully in the world: the job, the neighbors, perhaps even local politics. What he keeps is a distance of relationship — carried into every encounter with an outsider, so ordinary and so entrenched that no one thinks to call it separation. The contact is real but typically thin: a transaction at the counter, a task finished with a coworker, a conversation that, if it ever turns to anything deeper, rarely lasts long. And sometimes it ends there precisely because a little heat has entered it — a point of disagreement, a flash of controversy — at which the exchange is quietly closed. Stranger still, that friction is half-expected and even, in its way, welcomed; for many it is taken as the proof that the gospel was really shared, that faithfulness cost something. An encounter that sparks a little conflict and then ends quickly can feel more like witness than a long, warm friendship that produces no conflict at all.
And just here a deep ambivalence shows. These are not Christians who disbelieve in witness; the opposite is true. They revere the missionary, celebrate the dramatic conversion, press tracts into the hands of strangers, give sacrificially to send the gospel across oceans. Say the word witness and something in them stands to attention. But let witness take the one shape Jesus most often gave it — a long, unhurried, trusting friendship with someone outside the accepted community, the kind that shares meals for years and may show no visible result for just as long — and the same hearts tighten. The believer with Buddhist or atheist friends, friendships ten years deep, draws a certain anxious look, and sooner or later the questions come: is it bearing fruit — are they any closer to a decision? And beneath them the deeper worry, half-spoken: are you sure the influence runs the right way — that it is you shaping them, and not them, slowly, shaping you? The friendship is allowed, but on conditions: that it produce a result, and that it never appear to cost the believer even the beginnings of his faith. The church that applauds a man for crossing an ocean to reach a stranger will often wonder about the man who crosses the street and stays — stays for years, in the mess. For it wants the harvest and is uneasy with the field: real people come with objections that do not resolve on cue and questions that go unanswered for years, and the fear longs instead for a witness that is taken in like a presentation politely received — rapt attention, no pushback, a clean walk to the front. That, underneath, is what the whole posture is built to soothe: a reaching for control, for a version of obedience tidy and unmessy enough to feel safe. And if some version of that unease is familiar — if the thought of a years-long friendship with an unbeliever, no sermon scheduled and no baptism in sight, makes something in you quietly pull back — then this is not a description of someone else. It is the thing this whole article is trying to name.
Nowhere does the ambivalence show more plainly than in how such a community takes the news of somebody leaving the faith. Word comes that someone — a young person raised in the church, a friend away at university — has walked away from the faith, and that it began, as these stories often do, with friendships outside the church, sometimes a relationship that started as outreach and slowly ran the other way. The reflex is almost always the same: pull back, draw the line tighter, warn the young more, limit the contact further. It feels like faithfulness. But notice the question it is quietly answering — how do we keep ourselves safe? — and what it assumes without ever arguing the point: that safety lies in distance. What it rarely stops to ask, at the very moment it is watching someone fall away from Jesus, is the altogether different question his own life would press: how do we become more like him — not least in the way we meet those outside the faith? There is something sorrowful in that: a departure from Christ, in someone they loved, moves the ones who remain a quiet step further from the way Christ himself lived. The whole instinct rests on an assumption worth testing — that the wall protects. The rest of this article will try to show that it never did: that the holiness those verses call for was kept most perfectly not behind a wall, but in Christ himself, and that what he was is what he now works in those who are joined to him. The security was never a controlled distance from the world; it is union with Christ, and growing likeness to him — particularly in how we go to those outside the faith.
Not a proof-text war, but a Person
It would be easy to answer a fear like that by turning to the Bible's other commands — the ones that send the people of God toward the world rather than away from it. Scripture is full of them: go into all the world (Mark 16:15); be the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13–14); seek the welfare of the city you are sent to live in (Jeremiah 29:7). There is no shortage of them, and they are every bit as much a part of the Bible as the verses the frightened heart holds onto. But a tug-of-war over proof-texts — these verses against those — helps no one. And it is not where the truth of this finally lives. The truth lives in a Person.
Which is the hinge of everything that follows, so let it be said once and plainly. None of this is a case for being dialogical, or a patient listener, or a faithful long-term friend, or for building trust slowly over years — only for their own sake, apart from Christ. Not because those things are small, but because they were never ours to begin with. They are his. He is the patient listener, the faithful friend, the one who builds trust and never breaks it — the perfection of every grace we are tempted to prize on its own, with no reaching past him in any of them; a creature who could out-love Love itself would be a second god, and there is only One. So we do not bring these virtues to Christ as our own and ask him to bless them. We receive them from him. Take him out, and even the finest friendship is a candle held up to the sun and called the light.
But keep him at the center, and all of it becomes something else entirely — his own life, lived again in us. The patience to stay in a hard conversation long past the point of comfort; the listening that aches to understand a person's doubt more deeply than the person has yet understood it; the willingness to sit inside another's anger — at God, at the church, at a faith that failed him — without flinching and without hurrying to fix it; the refusal to treat the man across the table as a problem to be solved rather than a person to be known. None of that is technique. It is what the love of Christ looks like when it enters one life and moves out toward another: a love that longs, with everything in it, for the other's deepest good — which is Christ himself — and longs for it without conditions, without a deadline, without drawing back if it never comes. This is not less eager for the person's homecoming to Christ than the anxious witness is; it is far more. It wants that homecoming too much to shrink the person into a project, or the friendship into a tactic — and so it can wait, and love, for as long as it takes. It is simply Jesus, going to someone who does not yet know him, through one more pair of hands.
Read closely, the Bible holds many things in tension — not contradiction, but tension: truths that pull in different directions, and must somehow both be honored. And again and again, the place those tensions are reconciled is not a clever rule. It is the life of Christ, who fulfilled both sides at once. Take one small, striking case. Proverbs says, almost in the same breath, Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself — and then, Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes (Proverbs 26:4–5). As flat rules, they collide. But watch Jesus in the hours before his death. Before Herod, who wanted nothing but a spectacle, he gave no answer at all (Luke 23:9) — he would not answer the fool on the fool's terms. Before Pilate, who was groping toward a real question, he answered plainly and told the truth (John 18:37) — so the man would not be left wise in his own eyes. Two proverbs that seem to contradict; one Lord who kept them both, perfectly, by knowing which moment was which.
And this holds even for commands that were not yet written in his day. Many of the verses the frightened heart reaches for were set down only after he had ascended — Paul's warning that bad company corrupts, James's that friendship with the world is enmity with God. Yet he had already fulfilled them, perfectly, in advance, the way a melody can resolve a chord that has not yet been struck. He is the harmonizing center of the whole book: the Law and the Prophets behind him, the apostles still ahead of him, every command in both testaments pointing the whole time toward the way he would live. The contradiction was never in the text. It was only ever waiting for the Person who could hold both.
The separation the frightened heart longs for, and the friendship with sinners that Jesus lived, are exactly this kind of tension — and this article is about watching him hold them both. For he did hold them both, without the smallest strain. He kept come out and be separate in full, and he kept it at the sinner's table.
Now, a thoughtful believer will raise a fair objection here: there are things about Jesus we are not simply called to copy. He could touch what would have defiled anyone else and remain undefiled; he could sit where we might be pulled under and never be moved. We are not sinless, and we cannot assume we would walk through every room unharmed as he did. That caution is true, and worth taking seriously — we will come back to it. And it must be said plainly, before anything else: Scripture does command a real separation, and sometimes a physical one. Flee sexual immorality (1 Corinthians 6:18). Flee from idolatry (1 Corinthians 10:14). Church members, in the church context, should not so much as eat with a man who bears the name of brother and lives in open, unrepentant sin (1 Corinthians 5:11) — the table in view being the church's own gathered fellowship, which in that day was kept in homes. It was not an ordinary meal that a Christian would have with someone outside the faith. Where God says flee, we flee, and the distance is simple obedience. But notice what those commands take aim at — sin itself, idolatry, corruption that has dressed itself as fellowship inside the church — and not the mere presence of an outsider who does not yet know God. That is the distinction the frightened heart loses: it takes the commands God aimed at our idols and at false teaching within the church and turns them on the stranger who needs him. So the objection does not dissolve the question in front of us; it sharpens it. Because if separate from sinners could be said, truly and without contradiction, of Jesus, the one man who spent his life among them, then whatever that command is finally asking for, it cannot simply be the blanket distance the wall takes it to mean. The deepest form of the separation these verses call for was kept, perfectly, by a man at the sinner's table. So what is it? That is what the rest of this is about.
Holy, and the friend of sinners
Begin with the word the frightened heart loves most: separate. To a believer worn down by the coarseness of the age — one who has read his Bible faithfully for years and knows these verses better than most — it seems to promise a quick, clean, quiet place to stand, up out of the flood. There is no shame in loving it. But set it beside the strangest fact in the Gospels. The one man who kept that command perfectly is the man Scripture calls holy, innocent, unstained, separate from sinners (Hebrews 7:26) — and the same man his enemies sneered at as a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 11:19). And tax collectors were no mere clerks. They were collaborators and extortioners, Jews who squeezed their own people for the Roman occupier and kept whatever they could strong-arm above the quota — backed, when needed, by hired muscle. They were about as welcome in a devout Jewish home as a mafia enforcer would be in ours, and widely reckoned traitors cut off from the worship of Israel. These were Jesus' table companions. He let a woman the whole town knew as a sinner — a prostitute, by every indication — weep on his feet in a Pharisee's own dining room (Luke 7:37–39). He told the chief priests, to their faces, that the tax collectors and the prostitutes were walking into the kingdom of God ahead of them (Matthew 21:31). Separate from sinners, and the friend of the very worst of them — in one seamless life. How? Because his separateness was never about where he stood. It was about what he was: holy to the depth of his being, a holiness all his own, so that he could walk into any room and come away unstained. That is the key that turns every lock. He kept these commands not by staying away, but from inside the room — and more deeply than any wall ever has.
Watch it turn, lock after lock — and watch not merely that each verse could be read another way, but that Jesus actually kept each one, in full, at the very table the frightened heart would flee.
Come out from among them and be separate (2 Corinthians 6:17) — and the verse says, in its own next breath, what the separation is for: that you shall be my sons and daughters. It asks not for a change of address but for a heart wholly God's. And no heart was ever more wholly the Father's than the Son's, who could say, I always do the things that please him (John 8:29) — and who said such things while the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to hear him (Luke 15:1). He was never more unmistakably God's own than at the table they were scandalized he would share. He kept the command to the full, and he kept it among them.
Do not love the world; whoever would be its friend makes himself an enemy of God (1 John 2:15; James 4:4). These are stern words, worth slowing down over. But John, in his very next line, says what he means by the world: not the people in it, but the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life (1 John 2:16) — the whole engine of craving and self-exaltation. And James is blunter still, calling friendship with the world adultery: You adulterous people! (James 4:4) — the word for a heart that has given to something else the love it owed to God. So the sin both name is a matter of the heart's deepest allegiance, not simply the company a person keeps. And no heart was ever less adulterous toward God than Christ's — which is the very reason he could recline with the world's worst and never, for an instant, become a friend of the world in the sense the verse forbids. The same John who wrote the command also wrote down the Lord's own prayer for his people: I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one (John 17:15).
Bad company corrupts good character (1 Corinthians 15:33) — the fear, put plainly, that corruption travels from the worse person to the better. But watch what happened when Christ drew near the corruption, for no one ever stood nearer it than he did. The leper's uncleanness did not pass to Christ; Christ's cleanness passed to the leper (Mark 1:41). The sick woman's touch did not drain him into her disease; healing went out from him into her (Mark 5:29–30). In him the current ran backward — because his holiness was wholly his own and could not be overpowered. The one place in all the world where corruption met something it could not corrupt was wherever he stood.
Blessed is the man who does not sit in the seat of scoffers (Psalm 1:1): this forbids the scoffer's seat — taking his sneer for your own — not the sinner's table. And Jesus was always at the table, never once in the scoffer's seat. It is the same with the light that has no fellowship with darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14): the very reason light stays wholly unlike the dark is so that it can be sent into it — for a lamp shut in a cupboard to stay clean has only stopped being a lamp.
One honest word keeps all this from turning into a lie: we are not Christ. He could not be stained; we can. And yet his own sinlessness was not a frictionless thing, carried easily because he was God. Scripture says the Son learned obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 5:8) — that in his true humanity he was tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), and grew, through that long testing, into the fullness of his obedience. To go among sinners and love them to the end without once being drawn into their sin was part of what he learned, and it cost him; his flawless witness among them was not something separate from his holiness but the very shape of it. Which tells us what to expect for ourselves. Likeness to him is not seized in a day or manufactured by will; it is grown in us slowly, by the long work of sanctification, never finished in this life — and never our own achievement, only his life worked into ours as we abide in him. The governing direction of a maturing faith is not toward a safer distance from the people around us, but toward his own uncorrupted nearness, deepening in us year by year.
The blueprint for tearing the wall down
Held up against the life of Christ, every one of these verses turns out to ask for more, not less. Where they do command distance, they command it of personal idols, of false teaching within the church, of corruption that wears the name of brother in our churches — not of the outsider who does not yet know God. So the separatist has not honored them too much; he has honored them too little, and aimed them the wrong way — taking the glorious thing they asked for and quietly trading it for a smaller thing, one he could manage without being changed. (What that trade costs a whole community, over generations, is the burden of another article in this series.)
And here is the hardest and most wonderful part. Read the way Christ lived them, these verses do not send you away from the sinner at all. They send you toward him. Be separate — so separate, so wholly God's, that you are free to go to him. Do not be corrupted — be so in union with Christ that you carry his name into the room. Do not take the scoffer's seat — so sit at the sinner's table instead, and love him there. The very verses the frightened heart uses to build its wall are, read rightly, the blueprint for tearing it down.
The subtler trap
There is a danger on the other side, and it should be named: a nearness that is no longer Christ's at all — that simply drifts into the world's loves and calls it love. That is real. But the subtler trap is the wall-builder's, because it wears the look of faithfulness, and a life organized around not being like the world — retreating from the world, and from Christ's own supreme example of witness — is still being shaped into something. Do not be conformed to this world, says the Scripture — but be transformed (Romans 12:2), into the image of God's own Son. The question was never whether we would be conformed, only to whom: to Christ, or to a separatist church founder, a separatist, or a wall-building tradition.
The basin and the betrayer
If you want to see all of it in one place, go back to the upper room, on the last night before Jesus died, and watch him kneel in front of Judas.
He had chosen the man knowing — knowing from the first that this was the one who would sell him (John 6:64), knowing he was a thief (John 12:6), and keeping him close, and handing him the purse, for three years. And on the last night, with all of it in full view, Jesus takes a basin and a towel and washes the feet of the man who has already arranged his death (John 13:4–5). He cradles the heel that is, at that very hour, raised against him. He dips a piece of bread and hands it to him — in that culture the morsel of honor, the piece a host saved for his most welcome guest (John 13:26) — though here the gift does more than honor him: it marks Judas out as the betrayer and releases him to his work, Jesus telling him, What you are going to do, do quickly (John 13:27). And hours later, when Judas leans in to betray him with a kiss, the last word Jesus speaks to him is not a curse but friend (Matthew 26:50). The Greek is not philos, the warm friend of the heart, but hetairos — nearer to companion — and the restraint is itself telling: Jesus neither pretends the betrayal away nor throws the man off. Even here, Judas is addressed and loved, named a companion. There is the whole harmony in a single relationship: the holiest man who ever lived — perfectly separate, utterly uncorrupted, never for an instant in the seat of the scornful — and a faithful friend, to the bitter end, to the very worst of sinners. He did not have to choose between the verses and the love. He never once did.
The face in memory
So turn, last of all, from him to the people who still carry his name — and let the mirror come.
Almost everyone who has loved God carries a face in memory: someone who once believed and slowly stopped. The dread of watching that again, in someone you love or a child you are raising, is among the most human dreads there is; it was a dread like the one that ran through the Christian believers of the Netherlands as they watched their churches empty, and it is impossible not to feel for the people who lived through it. It was love, frightened. But that same frightened love is what quietly builds the softer wall — and goes on professing a longing to reach the world while making sure it never has to draw near to anyone in it. It will tell a stranger about the friend of sinners. It will not become one. So ask it plainly, of yourself: who are you truly close to? Not the people you work beside or nod to across the street, but the ones you would give an evening to — and how many of them, if any, are far from God? And if the honest answer stings, look underneath it. What you will likely find is not coldness but this: you are no longer sure you would know how, and you have not done anything like it in decades. That is more than a private shortcoming; it is a real deficit in Christ-likeness — though one a whole way of life has trained into us, a capacity that falls out of use behind a wall nobody remembers building.
The cost of cowardice
There is a harder word here, and it would be unkind to leave it out. The fear is sure that withdrawal is the safe choice — that if boldness carries risk, timidity at least keeps the soul out of harm. Scripture says the reverse, and says it starkly. The servant handed one talent who, being afraid, buried it to keep it safe is the one the master calls wicked and slothful and casts into the dark (Matthew 25:25–30); his sin was not that he lost what he was given but that he hid it. In the parting of the sheep and the goats, those sent away are condemned not for cruelty but for the good they would not do, the need they would not go toward (Matthew 25:41–45). And when Revelation lists those who remain outside the city, the word it puts first should make every quiet heart sit up — not the murderers, not the idolaters, but the cowardly (Revelation 21:8). And a timidity too afraid ever to be seen with Christ before the world is no small thing — it has begun, somewhere underneath, to wonder whether it is his at all.
This is not written to crush the merely timid; a trembling faith is still faith, and the One who will not break a bruised reed is tender with fear that wishes it were braver. It is written to break the lie that hiding is harmless. There is no safe burial of the thing entrusted — the withdrawn life is not the cautious life but the endangered one. And the courage required of us was never bravado worked up from within. Greater works than these will he do, Jesus said, because I go to the Father (John 14:12) — not louder miracles, but a harvest wider than his own earthly feet ever walked to, gathered through ordinary, frightened people by the Spirit of the risen and ascended Christ. The boldness is his, lent to those who are his. Which is simply this whole article again, in one word: the answer to the fear is not to capitulate to it, but to be joined to the One in whom all courage already lives.
You do not have to be this afraid
The fear was never simply wrong. It was love that had lost its nerve, aimed at a real danger. But it was aimed at a danger that distance cannot stop — and that nearness to Christ already answers. What keeps a soul is not the height of the wall around it. It is whether that soul belongs to him and is held by him, the way those eleven failing disciples of Jesus were held, by a hand that would not let go. The deeper a person is joined to Christ, the less he has to fear from the world. Not because the world is harmless, but because the grip on him is stronger than the world's pull — and because, in Christ, holiness is the stronger thing. The leper did not defile Christ. Christ cleansed the leper. That has never changed — and if you are his, that same cleansing life is at work in you: not a holiness of your own, carried under your own power, but his, moving through you as you are in union with him.
This is why we have spent so long looking at him, and not at ourselves. We do not look at Christ to be scolded into trying harder. We look at him to be changed — because beholding him is the very thing that changes us. We all, beholding his glory, are being changed into the same image (2 Corinthians 3:18). Look long enough at the one who knelt and washed his betrayer's feet, and you will not come away lectured. You will come away wanting, more than you want your own safety, to love like that.
And if somewhere in this you have felt the ache of that empty place where the friendships should be — and thought, but I wouldn't even know how — then hear this plainly. The power to love a stranger is not a gift some people are born with and the rest of us lack. It is simply what a life joined to Christ does: his own love learning to move in you again, the way it moved in him. And if that love had to grow even in him — if the Lord himself increased in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), maturing in his true humanity into all he would become — then the believer who has not made a real friend outside the faith in twenty years is not disqualified. He is not past it; he is only at the beginning. For the love that must do the work is not his own dwindling supply but Christ's, which never ages and never tires — so however many years have gone, he stands at the start of it, not the end. The love in Christ that always went out toward those far from God is ready to move through you again — at any age, however long it has gone unused — because Christ, to whom you are joined, never lost the ability; it was never merely a skill in him but the very bent of his nature, and he never once stopped going out after those far from him.
A greenhouse for a counterfeit
There is one more turn to this, and it is where we will go next.
For the fear does not stay in one heart. Give it a whole community, and walls, and budgets, and a theology to wear, and a few generations to work, and it builds something — a sealed and tended place that promises to keep everyone safe, warm and clean and far from all danger. And that place, it turns out, is a remarkably good place to grow the very thing it was built to prevent. A greenhouse, after all, is the perfect climate for a counterfeit.
But that is the next article. For now it is enough to kneel, in the mind's eye, beside the basin in the upper room — to watch him take the feet of the man who would sell him, and wash them, and call him friend — and to let the looking begin its slow and gentle work.
