Love Isn’t the Answer

I chose a provocative title to this blog because this word, love, is now being used to the reason to celebrate immoral evils.

If all we did was “love” people, the culture wars would be over, people would like Christians, we’d keep in step with progressing, evolving history, etc.

I say this because somehow this word has been degraded to mean nothing more and nothing less than a tolerant, no truth kind of enabling.

Requirements of Modern, No Rules Love

Love means never saying no to anyone else’s agenda or self-crafted identity.

Love means never calling anything or anyone wrong.

Love means making every kind of person and group feel “special” and never, ever doing or saying anything to make them ever feel bad.

Love means calling everything right, celebrating every choice, championing every self-identified group of “oppressed” people and vilifying and shaming every “oppressor” group.

In other words, this modern kind of “love” requires the outright justifying of sinful actions and words that break God’s heart and offend His holiness.

Paradise Lost and Hell Unleashed

A generation ago, the Beatles wrote as song “Love is All You Need”.

Reflecting the “make love, not war” generation, the word became a code word for a libertine, anything goes, no boundaries, no standards freedom from all rules and constraints.

Then a new kind of sexual paradise, a society without morals, roles, or rules, would emerge.

Life beyond “right and wrong” would be so much better.

Everyone would be blissful forever and ever.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

For millions of kids who were given no roles, no boundaries, and no effective moral guidance or even parental presence, the logical outcome of this philosophy in family life was a hell on earth for them.

I know. I was one of them.

And yet here we are again.

We are stuck with a fraudulent kind of love, a counterfeit, a mirage that satisfies no thirsts and which actually leaves people in the worst kind of bondage imaginable:  the bondage to self.

It’s a love that says to the person on the top of a cliff, “Go ahead and jump–be free!”

Meanwhile, those of us manning ambulances at the bottom of the cliff are calling up to the jumpers to stop and are being told we are to blame, are intolerant of their choices, and have no right to say what we say.

The True Love the Redeems

But there is a different kind of love, unique to God Himself and perfectly compatible with His truth, His laws, His will, and His most holy, unchanging character.

This kind of love does not celebrate evils, it overcomes and defeats them by transforming the evil-doer into a child of God.

This kind of love frees us from the tyranny of self, the bondage to our idols, and the misery of our sins.

This kind of love paid a terrible, terrible price on the Cross for all our sins–our specific, repeated, vast, and overwhelming violations of God’s truth, God’s standards, God’s holiness, and God’s laws.

This kind of love offers incredible compassion, enduring presence, tender kindness, and untold mercy.

Yet this kind of love, embodied in Jesus, also says “Go and sin no more!”

It acknowledges the reality of sin when if offers utter forgiveness to the morally guilty, total cleansing to the spiritually polluted, and heaven itself to the Hell-bound sinner.

This kind of love is the answer!

Until…

And until we repent of our false, counterfeit, modern perversion of love we call love, we will go down and down and down and down and down and down.

The euphoria at the top of our society’s sin cycle will soon end, the rainbows of immorality will soon fade, and we will enter an terminal stage of growing chaos, frenzied idolatry, and corrupted self-destruction.

The alternative is to admit we are collectively wrong and corporately turn from our wicked ways, and then look away from our selves to the One who truly loved us on the Cross.

If history is any guide, it will be a long, tragic wait before that ever happens….