Adult Content

At least once a week I have a conversation that goes like this, “I love Jesus. I consider myself to be a Christian. I know that the Bible says that it is wrong, but I believe that God understands why I ___(fill in the blank  with personal pet sin)___.” Now, if you are one of those people who work those phrases into conversations with other Christians and don’t want to get your feelings hurt, you might just want to back away slowly. However, if you are ready for some raw, ugly truth and you think you are adult enough to handle it, keep reading.

Let’s begin with the first statement, “I love Jesus.” No, no you don’t. You love the idea of Jesus and a Jesus who does not conform to Biblical standards. You love the Jesus you made in your image, the passive, cowardly Jesus who has no backbone, who is devoid of holiness and isn’t all that into justice.
A Jesus without these attributes is easier to love. He has no feelings to hurt, no holiness to offend and no sense of justice to violate. You can prop him in the corner of the room and take comfort in knowing that nothing you do wounds his heart or injures your relationship. A Jesus like this never makes you feel guilty for what you have done or who you have been. In short, he is just another accessory to help you feel good about yourself, and nothing more.

And this attitude leads to a lot of confusion, hurt feelings on your part, and frustration with this faith we call Christianity, because the first thing you do when you get in a jam is start praying to the image of Jesus you created. You will cry to him, beg him, and demand of him that he fix whatever issues you are facing in your life, and when he does nothing you resent the fact that he failed you.

But, really, what else did you expect? You denied him the power and the right to be life changing force in your world the minute you stripped him of his true identity. You rejected his holiness, you told him he had no right to be hurt by your actions, and you flat out refused to allow any room for him to be a just God when you said that all he was allowed to be was love, acceptance, and tolerance for you decisions.

You see, God has a funny way of giving you exactly what you asked for. The problem was you weren’t smart enough to know what it is you requested. You asked for a god who was too small to move against you and your sinful desires and a god that powerless is too weak to move against the other evils of this world. Congratulations on winning such a useless prize. I hope you enjoyed it.

The second statement: “I consider myself to be a Christian.” Good for you, I consider myself to be an octopus, and yet nothing about me conforms to the definition of this beast. Are you still sure you are a Christian or is that just lie you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?

Third statement: “I know the Bible says it is wrong, but I believe that God understands.” Okay, I will give you this one, God does understand. He understands that you are lazy, selfish, and undisciplined enough to think that giving up whatever you are hanging onto would cost you more than the agony he endured on the cross. He understands that you have placed your desires above his and in doing so declared that you are smarter, wiser, and more enlightened than he is. He gets it he really does, because you are not the first being to say this to him. Just check out Ezekiel 28 and see how that worked out for the first one to say such things to him.

But that kind of Jesus sounds so judgmental, and the guilt! Surely a God who loves me doesn’t want to me to feel guilty all the time. God wants me to feel good about myself because he loves me, and he accepts me as I am. Such are the counter arguments, I am told.

What people don’t realize they are telling me when they make those statements is that they have never been in love and maybe they have never experienced love. Love, real love, never leaves you as it finds you, and it does not condone or support you hurting yourself. Real love is bold enough to call you out on your self-destructive behavior, and it will risk hurting your feelings, even losing you for a season, if that is what takes to make you realize what you are doing to yourself – and God’s love is real! It is bold and full of courage, and love like that inspires us to a courage to face ourselves as we could not do on our own.

When our love for God does not inspire us to place absolute trust in him, when we think that our excuses for sin are greater than his command, and when we act as if God should be content to allow us to continue as we are and never seek something greater for ourselves than we can create without him, then we are not acting in love, we are not acting in faith, but rather we are lying to ourselves and to the world. Love changes us. If there is no change, then we have not known love no matter how much we may protest, and if you have not known love than you have not known God.