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.”
[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?
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 weare 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'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.
· “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.”
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 8:1-5God 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