It has
become something of a meme in some circles of American Christianity for
preachers and ministry leaders to tell their congregations or youth groups or
Sunday school classes, “God loves you just the way you are.”
I
remember one rally I attended just a couple of years ago at which the keynote
preacher was the Rev. Derrick Lewis-Noble, a Methodist from New York. I had
heard him preach before and have always learned a lot from him. That “God loves
you just the way you are” was an emphatic proclamation of his. I am forced to
admit, though, that with each repetition I became increasingly uneasy. It’s not
that the claim is wrong, exactly, it’s that it is irredeemably incomplete. For
if the statement is understood as a complete theology of redemption and salvation,
it poorly represents the Gospel and, indeed, puts at risk the potential of a
person’s salvation at all.
Writer
Zack Hunt put it this way,[1]
[T]his
one liner has become a core tenant of modern, American evangelicalism. … There’s
a problem with that line of thinking, however. … If Jesus loves us just the way
we are, then why bother with all that crucifixion mess? After all, if Jesus
loves us just the way we are, then dying for our sins was just a terrible waste
of time.
Ironically,
if Jesus loves us just the way we are, then the church … has no reason to
exist.
That God
does love, of course, is not the issue before us. God is love, so the pertinent
questions Lent asks us to ponder are:
·
What is the nature of God’s love?
·
What does God love?
·
Whom does God love?
In this,
we must not be led astray by our own fallen culture, which maintains that love
is either sex or a warm, gooey sort of emotionalism or perhaps just enthusiasm
for a thing or activity – you know, I just love
chocolate ice cream.
But the
love of God is not any of that. The love of God is a combination of desire and
ability. God desires the best that is possible for his creation and God, being
God, is able to bring it about. And this combination is what we really mean, I
think, when we say “redemption” or “salvation,” that what God knows is best for
you and me is what God is indeed accomplishing. This is what we call the will
of God and it may be helpful to consider that God’s will and God's love are
indistinguishable from one another.
What God
loves, then, is anything that accords with his intentions for creation. That’s
why the Bible has a lot to say about righteousness and virtue, because the
character of human beings either helps or hinders God in the working of his
will. Simply put, righteousness is partnering with God in his love while sin is
doing something else.
So who
does God love? We immediately reach for the self-satisfying answer that “God
loves everybody.” Well, not so fast. Psalm 5.5 says that God hates “all who do wrong,” God destroys “those who tell lies,” and God detests “the bloodthirsty and deceitful.”
Pretty hard words!
But such
passages are far overwhelmed, both numerically and in emphasis, by those that
explain God continually, unrelentingly calls to all people to receive his grace
and cooperate with him in working his will and his love. The wrath of God is
always presented conditionally. The love and saving righteousness of God are always
unconditional. God's love is not presented as dependent on some prior status on
our part. God's love is always prior; do we not confess this every Communion
service?
“But God
shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
British cleric
Erroll Hulse wrote, “We are left in no doubt that the desire and will of God is
for [our] highest good, that is, [our] eternal salvation through heeding the
gospel of Christ.”[2]
He continued,
We will not be disposed to invite
wayward transgressors to Christ, or reason with them, or bring to them the
overtures of the gospel, unless we
are convinced that God is favorably disposed to them. Only if we are genuinely persuaded that he will have them to
be saved are we likely to make the effort. If God does not love them it is
hardly likely that we will make it our business to love them.
Biblically,
we cannot escape the conclusion that God’s benevolent, merciful love is
unlimited in extent. He loves the whole world of humanity.
In that
sense, then, God does indeed love you just the way you are. God loves you in this
moment. It is God’s wrath we have to earn, not his love. If we understand that
“God loves you just the way you are” is a beginning
point of the Christian proclamation then we are on solid footing. But
unfortunately, it seems that many evangelists seem to present it also as the
ending point, or at least, they don’t move off the starting point to what must
follow if we are to partner with God in in his love and in faithful
discipleship.
Reverend
Lewis-Noble did tell a true story of his own church that helps illustrate this
point. One Sunday morning a woman came in who was dressed exactly as if she had
just got off the night shift at the downtown strip club. She was in evident
emotional distress and before long two or three ladies of the church came and
sat beside her during the service and helped her pray.
As it
turned out, this visitor was indeed employed as a stripper. She came back the
next Sunday, dressed the same way, and a third Sunday, at which some people in
the church got together and bought her some decent clothing. Through their prayers,
generosity and faithfulness to the call of Christ to love their neighbors as
themselves, this woman came to confess Christ. She left the nightclub life and
now works full time as the secretary of the church.
You see,
God loved her just the way she was. Just as crucially, God loved her through
the hearts of those who already followed him. But God, through the ministries
of the church, was not endorsing the
way she was. To say that God loved her just the way she was is definitely not to say that God approved of the way she was. In fact, it
might be more accurate to say not that God loved her just the way she was, but
that God loved her without regard to the way she was, or that he accepted her
confession the way she was. But God did not leave her the way she was.
There is
the story in John’s Gospel of the woman caught in the act of adultery. As some
men were preparing to stone her to death, a few of them asked Jesus his advice.
He told them to go right ahead, but only a sinless man could throw the first
stone. So they grumbled and left. Then Jesus told the woman two things:
First,
“I do not condemn you.” Which is to say, even though you are a sinner, I still
love you.
Second,
“Go and sin no more.” This was not a suggestion, it was a command, and in
John's Greek it is pretty rough and direct. Jesus brooks of no dissent. And
this command is wherein lies my unease with the mantra, “God loves you just the
way you are.” For the love of God is not to be accepted passively on our part,
not to be confused with God’s endorsement of our sinful state, sinful deeds and
sinful tendencies.
I said
earlier that, “God loves you just the way you are” is not really wrong, it is
just incomplete. So let’s try to fill in the rest. What do you think of these
accords with God’s character and commandments?
·
“God loves me just the way I am – and I don’t
have to change a thing.”
·
“God loves me just the way I am – and there’s a
few tweaks here and there, a few rough edges that need attention, but otherwise
I’m pretty much in Christian perfection now.”
·
“God loves me just the way I am – and my next
step is to repent of my sins, confess Christ as risen Lord, to be inwardly transformed,
to set aside habits of sin and death, and to devote myself to Christlikeness
every day.”
God's
love is always forward looking. God's love is not a mere endorsement of the
status quo. Even when the status quo is pleasing to God, there is always a next
level, always another step to take.
That’s
the hard part, usually, isn’t it, that to know that God loves us is not simply
to get warm, fuzzy feelings of divine acceptance, but also to acknowledge that
God's love is both a revealing love and a commanding love?
It is a revealing
love because at a basic level we are unlovely creatures. We are sinners top to
bottom. We rebel against God, we ignore God’s law. “If we say that we have no
sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Sin is not simply what
others do; it is not merely social structures of wrong such as racism. Sin is
personal. You are each one a sinner and so am I. And this is unacceptable to
God. God's love reveals our nature: we are, as John Calvin put it, depraved in
all our faculties. There are none of us who does good, no not one. Every one of
us falls short of the glory of God. We are plunging headlong for hell-bound and
there is nothing we can do about it.
This is the “just as you” (and I) are. If that is what we think that God loves
about us then we will be worse off than ever. It would be as if a doctor said
to a cancer-ridden, diabetic, obese patient with heart disease, “You are fine just
the way you are.”
But God
knows all this infinitely better than we do, so he commands, “Go and sin no
more.” This is a command of love because sin is a fatal condition. There is life
eternal waiting and only the love of God can get us to it. Hence God summons us
not because of what we have done but
what God can do, not for who we are but who we can be, not because we deserve condemnation
(even though we do) but because Christ did not come into the world to condemn
the world, but that the world may be saved
through him.
There is
therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of
the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and
death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By
sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned
sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be
fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the
Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things
of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the
things of the Spirit. Romans 8:1-5
God loves
us just as we are …becoming.
“Just as
I am, poor, wretched, blind; sight, riches, healing of the mind, yea, all I
need in thee to find, O Lamb of God, I come, I come.”
[1] http://zackhunt.net/2012/07/11/jesus-doesnt-love-you-just-the-way-you-are/
[2] http://www.gty.org/resources/questions/QA193/Does-God-Love-Whom-He-Does-Not-Save
