I'm in the process of reading The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after seeing a documentary about him a while back. I'm reading a chapter a day as part of my morning devotions, and am currently up to the section concerning the Sermon on the Mount.
Anyway, this morning Bonhoeffer was dealing with Matthew 7:1-12, which he considers under the rubric of "The Disciple and Unbelievers". Which is interesting when you think about it: the wonderful promise, "Ask and it will be given to you", is given in the context of our relationships with non-christians. And he makes the point that we can't force people to believe. In fact,
Every attempt to impose the gospel by force, to run after people and proselytize them, to use our own resources to arrange the salvation of other people, is both futile and dangerous.
And even more poignantly,
[The] restless energy which refuses to recognise any limit to [one's] activity, the zeal which refuses to take note of resistance, springs from a confusion of the gospel with a victorious ideology.
Lastly, he does a masterful job of answering the age-old question of whether or not a Christian should rebuke her unbelieving friends over particularly heinous sins:
If I condemn his evil actions I thereby confirm him in his apparently good actions which are never yet the good commended by Christ.
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