So You Think You Are Normal? The Damaged Soul in Church Life

Then there is the weird nut who, in the midst of all of this, is the person who thinks—I don’t know why he thinks this, and I can’t believe that anyone would get this impression—but he gets the impression or feeling that he is the only person in the group who is being tempted by sin. That he is the only person who is weak toward temptation and sin, and when he finds out another brother has lusted or another sister has lusted, he is horrified that anyone else on earth would ever do this or be this. He thought he was the only one, and he had kept it a secret all these years. And you wonder where this guy came from.

And there’s the officer, right in the midst of all this that is going on, and there’s the self-righteous nut who thinks he has never sinned in his life and that he is perfect, and he is looking down his nose at all of us, alright? So, he’s the blamer. He’s a person who gets up in the morning, throughout the day, and until he goes to bed at night, he blames everything that happens to him on someone else. He simply is not involved in anything. And by the way, that is a very large picture of what is done by almost all of us. We become blamers. “It’s your fault. You did it. I didn’t do that. No, that was your fault.” It’s one of the worst things that can happen in a marriage…the blamer.

Well, then there’s the Christian who is driving absolutely everyone mad. Let’s take the illustration of perhaps a group of sisters living together, with one of them driving everyone mad with her conduct. But you cannot approach that girl to correct her. She absolutely rejects and refuses all corrections. There’s only one thing in the world you can do: you can either live with her, or you can excommunicate her, and you have no grounds for excommunicating her, do you? I can’t think of any. I have tried. And so, this person continues just wreaking destruction in the lives of every person that they live with, and there is nothing you can do about it. Then, if they finally come to the place where they can only live alone, they blame everybody in the church for this lack of appreciation.

There’s the fellow who never works, but he just got a job. And in the midst of all of this, there is that dear saint who walks up to you and says, “Gene, you’re not doing enough. You’re not taking care of the needs of God’s people. You ought to spend more time with the Lord’s people. You ought to help these folks more. Can’t you see all these problems around here? Why don’t you help these people?” And then just about the time that person walks off from you, someone else walks up who says, “Oh, you’re just too busy. Why don’t you stop long enough to smell the flowers? What you need to do is just walk up and down the street and greet people, stop to the guy who’s painting the house and talk to him, and pet the dog,” and so forth.

The girl who comes to your group, and you know good and well, the only reason she’s there is to look for a husband. She is even willing to go so far as to get a boy in trouble—that’s the term we always use in the South: she got him in trouble—in order to put him in a situation where he has to marry her. There’s the woman in the church who, at this present time, wants to divorce her husband, in this group of 100 people, who wants to divorce her husband because he has never given her “romantic love.” Somewhere, she got the impression in reading some romantic novel that this is what marriage was, and nobody talking to her on the face of the earth can convince her that that is not what a marriage ought to be, that she should be showered with romantic love. Her husband didn’t give it, and on that basis, she is about to divorce him.

Then there’s the suicidally inclined, those who think about and talk about suicide because of, who knows, many, many reasons, and you can expect one suicide in these hundred people about every four years. You can also expect about one murder every decade, and you can expect about five attempted murders every decade, or on average, one every two years. And in the midst of all this is this wondrous thing called a single brother who is living day to day, and he doesn’t know any of this is going on. I would even go so far as to say, even though living in community, half of the people don’t know any of this is going on. Maybe four or five know it’s going on.

Okay. There are the guilt-laden, those who are absolutely just covered with guilt. I’ve already said that one, haven’t I? There is the person who is the oppressive perfectionist, whose life is a living neurosis in an effort to do one thing perfectly, whereas everything else in their life is falling apart. They are obsessed with perfection, and I mean it is almost clinical. There’s the person who is obsessed with failure. They feel that everything he or she has ever done has been and is a failure. There is the rebel. He has come among us. He is living with us, but he is waiting to find something he does not like so that he may rebel against it. And not only that, but he also…if a rebellion starts, it doesn’t matter what it’s about or how trivial…he’ll be sitting in the front row, willing and ready to be part of that rebellion. He needs to rebel. He needs to test authority. He needs to cause problems. He sees any kind of leadership whatsoever as either some sort of threat or some sort of evil, and he lives with you, something like a thorn in the flesh, and he will not go away.

There’s the person who is bitter; when you meet them, all you feel and sense is bitterness and cynicism. They have been hurt, and they cannot get well. Something has hurt them. There is again the nut who lives among you, who, in the midst of all this, believes that he is the norm, that he is the normal person with the normal type, the normal personality, and that’s all right if that’s where he would leave it, but he believes everyone should be like him. If he is emotional, he thinks everybody should be emotional. If he is cool, he thinks everybody should be cool, and everybody else is strange except him. And then, praise the Lord, there is someone else living in the midst of all this, and that is the person who sees this carnage, sees this wreckage, and who knows and is convinced that this group of people is living under a curse. I want you to know, I am about ready to join them in that belief. How could 100 people have so many problems? But that person believes that they are cursed, that God is not with them, and the problems are proof of it, and sometimes that person will leave, and sometimes that person, man or woman, whoever he is, will stay and tell everybody, “This is just not right, this can’t be, we’re living under a curse, you’re living under…something’s wrong, we need to all repent, this oughtn’t to be.”

It becomes a shocking thing to begin to discover the enormous problems other people have, because my list can’t get long enough to describe what’s really going on. I can only impress you with this fact: those people are not under a curse. What I am telling you is normality. It is the norm. What’s that thing they say they use when they talk about it in a test? It’s the median. This is the ordinary. This is the average.

There is, or will be, or has been the person who is there to split the church. He will split it. He is a compulsive splitter. Then there’s somebody else whom I can’t stand. He drives me crazy. I wish you would leave. I don’t want you here anymore. I cannot handle you. I dislike you. I don’t want to see you coming. I wish you would stay out of my life. You are: the peacemaker. You want to take me by the hand and take me down the street and make sure that I reconcile with every human being who has at any time ever had a problem with me. You want peace, and you want to make sure that I spend most of my life going around reconciling myself with other people. You feel that I’m not being scriptural because I’m not making peace with all those people who don’t like me. “That man down there said something about you; go see him, talk to him. Y’all are brothers, and you better have peace with one another.” Oh my. May I say a word to you? I know you got the right verse; you got the wrong planet. You’re asking me to go through the greatest drainage of energy a human can go through, and to do it constantly, in order to have peace, and it can’t be done. Do you not understand what an enemy is? An enemy is someone who doesn’t want peace. He either wants you dead or defeated or destroyed or done in, but he doesn’t want peace. He wants you to believe as he does. I can’t live long enough. I don’t have enough strength in my body to come to peace with everybody that I should be reconciled with. Now that sounds shocking, doesn’t it? Does that sound shocking? That sounds so unscriptural. There’s nothing new about it. It can’t be done. I wish that person would go out and become some sort of a large, slow target, a leader, and let them spend their whole lives bringing peace and reconciliation in their life.

Then, just as this person walks off, and just as you are weighed down in all the chaos that’s going on, and there are a hundred brushfires around you and a hundred more being reported, somebody walks up to your door and says, “Oh, I really believe that we’ve got to reconcile with all the other groups of Christians in this city, that we should all live as one, and the Baptists and the Pentecostals and the Catholics and the Mormons and the Jews and the Muslims—or I don’t know what you may feel—but that we should all be together.” And this brother starts a crusade of one, and his first victim is you. He wants you to go meet with all the other ministers in the city and try to have one church in that town where we’re all meeting together.

Then there’s the Christian who hears voices. There’s the Christian who walks into the room and literally believes, “That person is talking to me. Oh, that’s what he wants to tell me. Oh, that’s what he wants to tell me. That girl is in love with me,” or if it’s a girl, “That boy is in love with me.” This is the person who takes Scotch tape and goes around, plugging up all the electrical outlets, because electricity is leaking out. This is the person who believes that everybody in America has had radiation from atomic fallout, and therefore everybody in America has developed mental telepathy, and she or he can sit in the room and listen to and hear what everybody else is saying and thinking. This person comes to you and begins telling you these things and does it with a straight face, and you get to the point where you actually begin to believe them. This person is clinically psychotic. You will also have, from time to time, once or twice a year, a person who becomes paranoid or schizoid or depressive or suicidal or homicidal or something like that. It happens. It’s normal.