We received this short comment from "Anonymous" concerning our previous post about gay sensitivity training in church.
"There are many ways to hate people. Ask yourselves this - would Jesus hate them too? No (need it be even said...) Love them; it’s harder but better for all in the long run."
This is our response:
Thanks for commenting. May we suggest that if you're going to invoke the name of Christ, you better know what he is really about.
There may be many ways to hate people, but there is only one way to truly love them. The one most pure and correct way, the way Jesus loves us, is perfectly patient, but does not enable our stagnation, errors, sins, or self-destruction. We are called upon to put off the natural man inside us who is so prone to wander away from God and His goodness. He invites each of us to become a new, selfless person intent on doing God's will, which will at some time or other mean putting aside our own will, as Jesus exemplified by His life and Atonement. And of course it’s entirely up to each of us. If and when we accept Christ as our Savior we are obligated to share the good news.
Most people neglect to separate people's infinite worth from the things they say and do. By making this mistake, they make more mistakes, among them, tending to embrace people’s wrong ideas and behaviors while forgetting to truly value the people. Would you encourage your friend to chain smoke or abuse drugs? No. And yet this is what gay-sympathizers are doing. They are encouraging an unnatural and extremely addictive and risky lifestyle. It doesn’t have to be this way. With a little courage you can value and love people and disapprove of the things they do come what may. Society does it all the time. Parents do it every day and correct their children. God gives us an unchanging standard to go by.
You say it is hard to love them but better for all in the long run. But your "love" and your "long run" are different than Christ's. Yours are based on comfortable human relations and the now, his are based on a relationship first with God the Father and with eternal growth and progress for His children. You say it is "hard" to love them; but it is always easier to go along with wayward people than to take a stand and truly love them. What you call love accepts people's unnatural self-determined sexual orientation (without even wondering what travesties may have caused it) because you would rather enjoy "peace" and be liked than do the difficult, right thing. What you call love does not take into account the person's temporal or spiritual safety, health, well-being, progress, and posterity. Rather than any kind of pretense of love, that sounds more like one of those many self-interested ways to hate.
C. S. Lewis put it so well: "Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them; but Love cannot cease to will their removal . . . Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
1 comment:
What I said on the last post applies here. I love my children but do not approve of them kicking or hitting or swearing. They have consequences of these actions--at home and at school or wherever they are. I'm trying to teach them because I love them. In this issue, where people identify themselves by their behavior, it is hard to separate the person from the behavior. We can love one without approving of the other.
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