How do you define love?
“Always giving the other person everything they want”?
Sounds good to me! Start sending me gifts!
As a parent who loves your children, do you always give them everything they want?
Of course not.
When the tantrum breaks out on the floor at Walmart, do you say – “Well, I didn’t know you wanted that toy/candy/live animal so badly. I love you, and you want it, so yes, I’ll buy it for you.”?
I highly doubt it!
We can easily see how that is not love.
Love is always doing what is best for the other person, and that might mean telling them “no” to something they want.
If a pastor, minister, or church leader loves the people in his church, will he always give them everything they want?
No. Sometimes, the loving thing requires that he share with them the truth – and that can hurt.
God condemns the priests long ago telling them:
“Those who are sickly you have not strengthened, the diseased you have not healed, the broken you have not bound up, the scattered you have not brought back, nor have you sought for the lost.”
Many ministers in America today have “left the weak and crippled to limp hopelessly on in their sin, unaware that they aren’t walking normally.” By not wanting to offend anyone, we are not being loving neighbors, because it isn’t loving to only give someone what they want. “We must also give them what they need—the truth.”
…We have all these happy, friendly churches with happy-looking people happily doing work for God, and yet, beneath the surface, nothing is making sense. Husbands aren’t sacrificing for holiness and right living, wives are giving up, and behind every whitewashed wall are dead-men’s bones.
…somewhere along the way, we decided to stop defining holiness too clearly because we didn’t want to seem too different from other people, scared of what people might think and scared that we might hurt our relationships at home. Now we have our wish—we don’t look much different at all, and we’re too often limping along in the same fog as the lost.
Why are we scared to share? Many people wonder: “what if I seem irrelevant to them?” “Why not consider a far more frightening question – What if we are irrelevant? In our rush to seem relevant, what if we lose our saltiness as Christians and lose our purifying effect on our culture? That is true irrelevance.”
(Arterburn & Stoeker – Every Man’s Challenge)
So let’s all stop worrying about being irrelevant. Let’s stop worrying about whether everyone likes us. Let’s worry about how to tell people the truth in love (though with gentleness & reverence). Sometimes that might sting a bit, but it is the only right thing to do if we love someone else.
