I find myself reflecting on a troubling trend emerging within church communities. This issue revolves around the contrasting doctrinal narratives concerning God’s love and His wrath. Recently, a theological speaker at a prominent Christian university delivered a chapel message emphasizing the boundless love of God asserting that God embodies love, extends love, and interacts with His creation through profound love. However, just before concluding his address, a student boldly approached the stage, seized the microphone, and accused the speaker of dishonesty, chastising the audience with the assertion, “You are worms, you are sinners, you are evil in the sight of God.” 
 
What a spectacle! 

On a smaller scale, a bible study member thanks God for His love and grace and the joy of being His child, only to be interrupted by another member who claims, “God cannot truly love us as individual people. He loves us because of the blood of Jesus, but we need to always hold in our minds that we are sinners, and that God doesn’t really love ‘us.’” 

I would love to talk to Dad about this strange gulf widening in our Christian circles. One that people feel the freedom to interject, overrule, and correct with a new severity, and insert evil and sin as the preeminent aspect of the salvation story.  

Our conversation would be, “Hey Dad, what is moving in the hearts of people to feel the desire to point out the evil of others and in themselves, to make sure this is the preeminent discussion superseding talk about God as love? Hey Dad, what about the language that God is love, and about His abundance of love and compassion is evoking a combative spirit?”  Most importantly we would discuss strategy and outcome. “Why is this person behaving in this way and what is their ultimate desire?” 

I believe we will all stand in the judgment as God adjudicates the living and the dead. It’s an evocative and humbling image. Does my knowledge that I am evil and need atonement bring me to greater repentance, or does my faith that God deeply loves me and has provided a means of unification and salvation through Christ lead me to repentance? Is it a combination of both?   

I am curious and find myself wondering about the intensity and judgmental aggressiveness. Why is there a fixation on labeling others as evil sinners? How do I show gratitude for those who do not believe the same as I do?  

After having so many meaningful conversations with my dad, this inner wrestling that we would talk through comes with a sense of peace and grace. I feel Dad encouraging me in this new encounter of disunity and emboldening me to consider how to be a voice of healing. 

“Therefore, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”  

– Philippians 2:1-4

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