Posted on by Abe Austin

A Loving Relationship with Christ- Conclusion

Summary)

In this study I have considered those that excuse sinful behavior with their testimony that Jesus loves us all, which is used to imply that he will accept even those who live in a manner that is condemned by the scriptures. I have strongly disagreed with this statement, though I have also emphasized that the claims of Jesus’s universal and radical love for us is true. Those assertions I have no dispute with at all.

But as I have pointed out, being loved by Jesus is not one-and-the-same as being saved. Jesus’s own words make clear that not everyone who calls on his name and invokes his love will be able to join him in the kingdom of heaven. Some of those that he loves will not be found acceptable in the day of judgment. This is a sober statement, and not popular, but the scriptures are abundantly clear on the matter.

I made clear in this study that what actually does save us is a real and living relationship with Christ. And while half of that relationship is defined by him knowing and loving us, which is a gift that is given to us freely, the other half requires us to know and love him back, which requires deliberate action on our part. Specifically, the scriptures say that they require us to follow the commandments.

Only those who are willing to stop living in sin as a way of life, and who earnestly seek to obey Christ, and sincerely repent when they fall short, are going to genuinely develop a loving and knowing relationship with him. And only those that genuinely develop a loving and knowing relationship with him will be saved.

In my last post, I also made the point that living in a state of sin generally comes from a dearth of feeling the love of Christ, not an abundance. People habitually sin as a coping mechanism, and usually what we are coping for is how unworthy and fundamentally unlovable we feel. Even if we believe Christ loves us in our head, deeply feeling the reality of that in our hearts is necessary for us to stop coping and sinning as a way of life.

Words of Hope)

Thus, the call to surrender our sin and become holy is not a call of forced perfectionism. It is not a call to white-knuckle our way through life. It is a call to break down the walls we’ve built inside, let the love of Christ flow in, genuinely feel it in our hearts, and then love him back by following his way.

The call to repentance is not one of shame and burden, it is one of love, freedom, and hope. Does it involve surrender? Does it involve change? Does it involve following rules? Yes, but it isn’t really about the surrender, it’s about not needing to harm oneself anymore. Not really about the change, but about being restored. Not really about the rules, but about reciprocating our Savior’s love. It is a glad message, even the most joyful one the world has ever known.

Posted on by Abe Austin

A Loving Relationship with Christ- Missing Love

Discovering Jesus’s Love)

I have already discussed how Christians that defend sinful habits by an appeal to the love of Jesus Christ are incorrectly conflating being loved with being saved. But actually, I think there is an even more fundamental confusion than that. When they say, “well Jesus loves me anyway,” I suspect that most of them don’t actually believe that.

My reason for this is personal experience. For much of my life I was a slave to a sinful addiction, and through it all I would have adamantly insisted that Jesus loved me. But it was not an excess of Jesus’s love that gave me license to do evil, it was a dearth of it. For while I truly believed in Jesus’s love in my head, I did not feel it whatsoever in my heart.

Indeed, it was as I managed to break down my walls and actually start feeling his love that my behavior became more holy also. I could never feel the beautiful reality of his love and continue living in sin. That’s not say that I’m perfect, to say that I don’t still do wrong things from time to time, but I can say that I don’t live in sin like how I used to. What was once a way of life are now only slips were, and it was his love was what made that change possible.

A Recurring Pattern)

And I’ve been to enough 12-step meetings to know that this isn’t only true for me. One of the most common refrains I’ve heard in these stories is a severing of the connection to the love of Christ, and the resultant increase in sin. I’ve heard many of these men say something like, “I knew that Jesus loved everybody in the world…just maybe not me.”

For many people, sin is used as a drug to try and dull the sense of being fundamentally unlovable. They do what they do from a starvation of love, not an excess of it. Those that are truly secure in Christ’s love are freed from the spiritual pain that leads to wrongdoing. Those that are truly secure in Christ’s love, and know that he died for their sins, feel less compulsion to hurt him, not more.

I understand why people who are not ready to let go of their sins would look for a divine excuse to not change their ways. I think invoking the love of Christ is not only inaccurate, though, I think it is tragic, because admitting that they don’t feel any love is one and the same as hard as admitting that they’re not doing okay. They have my sympathy, not by disdain, but sometimes the kindest thing is to speak the hard truths that sting…and then heal.

Posted on by Abe Austin

A Loving Relationship with Christ- Love Without Obedience

Love via Obedience)

In yesterday’s post we gave both an acknowledgement and a question. Yes, Jesus does love you, but how do you love him back? Can someone say that they genuinely care for their Savior while shamelessly performing the very sins that make him suffer to death? Surely, genuine love for the Lord must look different.

The scriptures detail exactly what genuine love would look like. Jesus, himself, said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” (John 14:15).

We also learned yesterday the importance of knowing Jesus. There, too, the scriptures tell us how to do so.

“And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments,” (1 John 2:3).

“Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him,” (1 John 3:6).

The message of the scriptures is clear. If we want to do our part to gain salvation, we must love and know the savior, and the means and the fruit by which we come to love and know the savior is by keeping his commandments.

The Proper Framing)

There is an important distinction that we must make here, though. We are not saying, “keep the commandments to make it into heaven,” or “do enough good works that you deserve to be saved.” Those sorts of messages make people overwhelmed and uncomfortable, and well they should, because they stray from the true theology.

When we focus primarily on the works, we stop being motivated by love, which is supposed to be the core of our behavior. It is entirely possible to do good works without love, and those offerings are not acceptable to the Lord, as Cain famously learned.

We should always frame our obedience to the commandments as a natural extension of our love of him. We should say, “he loved me first, and he died for me, and me following his word is just the way that I love him back.” Any time we feel that our works are being driven by a different motivation, such as fear, we need to recenter ourselves on love.

Posted on by Abe Austin

A Loving Relationship with Christ- Reciprocated Love

The Need to Know)

In the last post we made clear that all of us are loved by Jesus, all of us are offered salvation in his name, but not all of us who call upon that name will actually be saved. What, then, still remains? What must be paired with the love of Jesus for us to be redeemed?

Well, continuing with the scripture from yesterday, what explanation did Jesus give to those that would be rejected from his kingdom. He said, “And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:23).

Contrast that with Jesus’s description of eternal life was: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3).

Both of these passages use the very “know.” Clearly, “knowing” has something to do with those that are saved and those that are not. But let’s look at two more verses to expand this further.

“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment,” (Matthew 22:37-38).

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love,” (1 John 4:8).

Here, the verb “know” is joined by “love.” Thus, we need to know Christ, and be known by him, and also part of that knowing is loving the Almighty, which is the greatest commandment that we are called to do.

Divine Relationship)

So yes, being loved by Jesus is an essential part of our salvation but so is loving him back. We need to be known by him, but also, we need to know him. In a word, we need “relationship.” This is the part that we were missing in yesterday’s post, this is why salvation is a two-way street. Being loved without reciprocation is not a relationship, and it isn’t enough for a man to be redeemed by.

We started this study by considering those who openly defy the commandments of God, but justify it by saying, “Jesus loves me just the way I am,” suggesting that their salvation was made sure by the fact that Jesus cared for them. They are correct that Jesus loves them, but that was only ever half the requirement for salvation.

To these people the correct response is, “Yes, Jesus does love you, but how do you love him back?”

Posted on by Abe Austin

A Loving Relationship with Christ- Unconditional Love

Awe-inspiring Love)

I mentioned in my last post that those who excuse sinful behavior by saying Jesus loves us, and always will, do have some truth to their claims, but also some falsehood. Let us first consider what is true.

It is, in fact, true, that Jesus loves us virtually unconditionally. There is the special case of the Sons of Perdition and denying the Holy Ghost, but I believe the vast majority of us do not even qualify for these categories. Pretty much all of us have never done anything that puts outside the reach of Jesus. Though we may have been unquestionably selfish, may have hurt other people and ourselves, may have given ourselves to all manner of lusts, yet the love of Jesus remains firm, and he offers grace to us all.

This is an incredible promise. Indeed, it is so incredible, that I think it is hard to really take it seriously. Such unconditional, patient, persistent love is so strange and unfamiliar when compared to our usual earthly relationships. I know that for myself, I truly had no real grasp on this sort of love for most of my life. I had to see echoes of it in some very special people to really comprehend it at all.

This truth of the gospel cannot be understated, and insofar as a disciple of Jesus truly has a conviction of this, they are in the right. But now let us consider where one can take this truth and go astray.

Half of a Bridge)

Yes, Jesus’s love for us is unconditional, and he offers salvation to us all, but that doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to end up on the right hand of God. Jesus’s love and mercy is an essential component of salvation, but it is not the only essential component. It is only half of the bridge between us and God, useless without the other half.

Jesus, himself, made this very clear with his own words: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven,” (Matthew 7:21).

Those who say “Lord, Lord,” but are denied the kingdom of heaven will surely be people who were loved by Jesus, who had their sins paid for by Jesus, who had the offer of salvation extended to them by Jesus…but none of that is the same as actually being saved.

In the following posts, we will explore more of what is required of us to connect our half of the bridge to Christ’s, but I hope it is already clear that while Christ’s love for us is unconditional, our place by his side is not. Jesus has freely given all of us a path, but we still have to walk it!

Posted on by Abe Austin

A Loving Relationship with Christ- False Comforts

Twisting the Love of Christ)

There are a number of false doctrines relating to our relationship with God that are taught in the world today. There are those that say God does not exist and there is no absolute moral truth, so we may do whatever society will allow. There are those that say God does exist, and we must obsess over every shortcoming, trying to attain perfection on our own. But it is not as though unbelief is always paired with moral depravity, and belief with moral legalism. There are also those that mix the two in strange ways.

One example that I have seen repeatedly are so-called Christians who live in or support direct violations of God’s commands, and when challenged on that incongruity say something along the lines of, “Jesus loves us, no matter what we do.” Because they know Jesus loves everyone, they are sure that he accepts everyone, and to suggest otherwise is a hateful suggestion that he really doesn’t love anybody.

In short, they conflate love with acceptance and twist the gospel message. It is a difficult issue to disentangle, because they actually do have a correct understanding of the nature of Christ, but a terrible misunderstanding of what that actually means in regard to our salvation.

Roadmap)

In the course of this study, I am going to try and correct this confusion. I am going to start by acknowledging the points that the morally liberal Christian gets right but then show where they go astray. I will use scriptures to establish what the correct conception of our relationship with Christ is, and the signs by which we can gauge how aligned we are with those truths.

My purpose in doing this is not to be cruel to those who invoke the love of Christ incorrectly. To be frank, I do believe that they need to be awoken to the pain and guilt of wrong actions, but not because I desire ill for them, but because for all of us this is the first step to true healing and joy. I seek to dispel the palliative lies, only so that we can live in the healing truth.