Love

 As is the case with most words that matter, we’ve redefined love to mean something it was never meant to. By we, I mean this present generation who is dead set on ignoring the Bible, doing whatever it wants, but still expecting to be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven posthaste and without delay. Who are you to say I can’t get in just the way I am? Nobody, but the One who said it is somebody, and He’s the somebody that gets to make the determination. I’m just the messenger. Shoot me if you must, but it won’t change the message.

We can play all the games we want with dialect and translations from Hebrew and Greek; we can insist that something isn’t fair because it does not allow for a duplicitous, uncommitted life, but all our endless machinations are just that. In the end, in order to receive what God promised, you must do as God commands.

Love does not mean tolerance of sin. Love does not mean tolerance of evil. Love does not mean that you see someone running toward a wood chipper and you say nothing for fear of offending them. The wood chipper will hurt worse than the words you cry out in warning ever will, and if the individual in question is not so consumed in their depravity that they will ignore the warning, they may even thank you at some point. Even if they don’t, you’ve shown love in that you did your best to warn them of the danger.

James 2:8-9, “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well; but if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as a transgressor.”

What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? It’s a hard nut to crack because nowadays, self-loathing is the standard rather than the exception, and everywhere you turn, you are told you should hate yourself. The only things we’re encouraged to embrace about ourselves are the things that are going to kill us quicker, but when it comes to looking in the mirror and loving what God created as it is, that ship sailed some two decades ago.

If you declare that God got it wrong and He put you in the wrong skin, you’re brave and beautiful even though your face could pass for a Halloween costume, but if you dare say that you are happy and comfortable in the traditional role of husband, wife, and family, you’re just an oppressor and an ally of the patriarchy. The dumber people get, the more you start hoping for a mushroom cloud, but it may just be me.

Culture has become so twisted that the number of those who want to feel a physical manifestation of their emotional pain is multiplying exponentially, and they end up either hurting themselves, hurting others, or turning to anything that could numb them and make them feel nothing at all.

When all of this is taking place around us, yet the church is silent in declaring that Jesus is the remedy for all that ails this broken generation, we are falling short and not doing our duty. If you don’t tell someone that Jesus can take the hurt away, if you don’t tell someone that Jesus can put them back together and make them whole, you are not loving your neighbor as yourself. You are keeping the gift to yourself and not shouting it from the rooftops.

That’s the disturbing thing as far as I’m concerned. Most preachers today are still preaching a 90’s gospel to a 2020s generation. They’re still beating the prosperity horse, long dead and maggot-riddled, not realizing that most in this generation just want the pain to go away. They just want the hurt to stop, and money isn’t going to do it. That’s the problem with tweaking the gospel to fit a specific time rather than presenting it as timeless. If only they’d preach Christ and Him crucified. If only they’d preach forgiveness of sins and being reconciled to the Father rather than things you can get just as readily if you applied yourself, perhaps the average age of churchgoers wouldn’t be 87.

I’ve run into some of these kids and had interactions with them, and they’re not daydreaming about McMansions or driving Bentleys. They just want to wake up without hating the fact that they did. They just want to go through a day without thinking about hurting themselves, yet here we still are, trying to call money down from heaven and insisting that God wants you to have mega bucks.

The world around us has become what it is because we stopped preaching a risen Christ. It will continue to spiral and descend into ever-growing darkness as long as we continue omitting the name of Jesus from our vocabulary. The world is hoping it stays this way. The devil is hoping we never return to the preaching of the gospel because between uppers, downers, mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety medication, anti-depressants, and therapy sessions where the therapist subtly suggests that maybe the problem is your sexuality and you should explore more, his minions are doing gangbusters business and hell has enlarged herself and opened her mouth without measure.

Love is active. If you love your neighbor as yourself, you will take steps to ensure that they know of the hope that resides in you, that they know there is peace and joy to be had, and that they can lay their burden down at the foot of the cross and be made whole. The greatest demonstration of love is not buying someone a meal, or a car, or a house; it’s telling them about Jesus. Do you love your neighbor as yourself? The answer might be harder to come by than first thought.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.