What do you do when you realize that you are a referee, calling fouls on those who are playing the game?

Know that you are in good company.

When I realized that I sin more like a Pharisee than I do a prostitute, I felt embarrassed, ashamed, and stuck.  My view of repentance was only one-sided.  ”Sure,” I thought, “people who do bad things can be forgiven, but what about those who try to do good things for the wrong reasons?”  Thankfully I remembered that the person who wrote the majority of the letters of the New Testament was just in that position: the apostle Paul.

Paul, or Saul, as he was first called, imprisoned and threatened Christians because he thought he was doing God a favor.  He was God’s referee.  He would do what it took to get people to stop telling others about Jesus.  Didn’t they know that they were teaching false doctrine?  Didn’t they know that this Jesus character was dangerous?

Paul felt justified in hurting Christians; believers who were preaching to people far from God, because all he knew were the rules, and these men and women were breaking the rules by telling others about Jesus.

But Jesus showed up and knocked Saul down.  And that is how Jesus must deal with Pharisees, referees.  They think highly of themselves, but God grace knocks them low.  That is the only way God gets the referees to lose the whistle and join the game.

If you have been brought low and your old assurances and condescensions are laying lifeless on the floor, it’s not because God is trying to punish you, its because He is doing you good — a good that ultimately will extend to people far from Him.