Several years ago I was eating dinner at the home of a friend of mine, a respected leader within the Body of Christ. During a momentary lapse in the conversation his teenage daughter told him of the recent moral failure of a local pastor with whom my friend was acquainted.
Being a guest in the home I was a bit uncomfortable with this dinner conversation. My initial thought was, “How will he react to the news about this man?” My friend’s response was far different from anything I expected. He simply looked up, smiled and said that he would not believe it unless the man told him himself. With that he continued eating.
I sat there silently wondering what would happen next. My friend’s daughter was dumbfounded. She objected strenuously. She knew the daughter of the man. This was not hearsay. It was rock-solid information. Besides all this, how could her own father doubt her word?
My friend calmly sat his fork down, looked her straight in the eye and explained, “Honey, it’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s just that I have chosen to believe the best about my brothers and sisters in the Lord in every situation. Unless he tells me himself I won’t believe it.”
I could have heard a thousand sermons or read hundreds of books on this subject and not have been as deeply affected as I was by seeing it lived out before my eyes. My friend had chosen to believe and speak the best in love and nothing—absolutely nothing—would persuade him otherwise.
The message was clear: Believing the best about our brothers and sisters in the Lord is of the utmost priority.
Before the iron curtain fell in Eastern Europe, one of the tactics of the Communists to destroy churches was to separate the people and tell them lies about each other. Often the believers refused even to listen to the lies, but occasionally some succumbed. They began to believe the lies and soon distrusted their own Christian brethren. What a tragedy that the people had not been taught this simple foundational principle: Always believe the best about one another.
Jesus said that the people of the world would know that we were His disciples by our love for one another (John 13:35). True Christian love “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails...” (1 Corinthians 13:7–8). As a part of our love for each other, then, we should always believe the best about our fellow Christians regardless of the circumstances.
In this country today we have no Communist leaders speaking lies to us, yet I see a similar willingness to believe lies and breed disunity in the American Church. For example, events of organizations like Operation Rescue are usually horrendously distorted by our national media. Reports of the same events by the Christian media seem so contrary to the secular media it is as though they are not even reporting the same event. Yet some Christians choose to believe the secular media's coverage and find fault with their brothers and sisters. What a shame.
I have seen the same thing on a local and national scale within the body of Christ. We are far too ready to accept anything we hear as truth, especially that which is negative, regarding our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is even more of a reality for those in “limelight” ministries. It is almost as though we want to see them fall. How tragic.
It even happens regularly in our churches. “Psst. Hey, did you hear what so-and-so did?” And we listen and believe it, regardless of how damaging or harmful. Simply accepting information as truth is damaging enough to the party being discussed. However, when we believe wrongly about a brother or sister, we are also harming ourselves. “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s inmost parts” (Proverbs 26:22). If we listen and believe we can destroy our own spirit!