Not That Kind of Love

 What Is Love? | Day 8

 

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” John 8:11 (NIV)

 

Good morning, friends. A skilled forger can copy nearly everything about an original. The color is right. The texture is right. Even the signature looks convincing at a glance. What a forger can never copy is the one thing that makes the original valuable, the truth of where it came from and what it cost to produce. Held up to the light, the forgery gives itself away.

 

This series has spent its days holding love up to that kind of light. From Day 1 we have seen that agape is the love that wills our true good and moves toward it, and our truest good is not our comfort today but our salvation forever. On Day 7 we watched chesed keep that same commitment through every reason to quit, refusing to leave the beloved in the wreckage of their own unfaithfulness. Both loves are about to appear in a single sentence, spoken to one woman who expected only judgment. And once we see how Jesus loves her, we will recognize the counterfeit that our own culture has been calling love.

 

When Affirmation Wears Love’s Name

The scene in John chapter eight is worth picturing fully. A woman caught in adultery is dragged before Jesus by accusers holding stones, men who wanted condemnation with no grace attached at all. Jesus refuses to give them that. He does not pick up a stone, and he adds no word of his own condemnation to what she has endured. That refusal is pure grace, agape moving toward someone who has done nothing to earn it. But Jesus does not stop there. “‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.’” (John 8:11, NIV). He speaks the truth about her sin in the very same breath that he forgives it, because he wills her eternal good, and her eternal good requires that she leave that sin behind. The forgiveness is the Gospel. The call to leave her sin is the Law. And here is what matters most: both come from the same love. Jesus does not forgive her and then warn her out of some separate duty. The warning is the love. He tells her the truth precisely because he wants her saved.

 

That is what our culture has quietly gotten backwards. It has come to believe that love and truth are enemies, that to truly love someone we must affirm whatever they have chosen, and that speaking a hard truth is therefore the opposite of love. But Scripture never sets love and truth against each other. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” (Proverbs 27:6, NIV). The friend who wounds us with truth and the enemy who flatters us with kisses are not one loving and one truthful. One of them loves us, and one does not. Love is the very thing that compels the truth.

 

When Silence Pretends to Care

So what is the counterfeit actually protecting when it stays silent about sin? Not our worth. Our worth was never in question. We are made in the image of God, and nothing we do and nothing anyone says about us changes that. What it protects is comfort, ours and its own, purchased at the price of the truth we most need to hear. Picture a parent who believes God’s Word about how their child was made, watching that child embrace what the culture teaches instead. Real love does not leave the harder truth unspoken to keep the peace. Real love says the difficult thing, gently and through tears if need be, because a parent who wills their child’s eternal good cannot stay quiet about what threatens it. The culture calls that silence kindness, but the culture is not loving the child at all. It is trading the child’s salvation for the child’s momentary approval, offering the satisfaction of today while ignoring the sin the child will go on living in. That is not love wearing a softer face. It is the absence of love, dressed in love’s clothing.

 

This is why gentleness matters so much, and why it is never the same as silence. “Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10, NIV). The pressure the counterfeit puts on us is always the pressure to be liked, to be approved, to avoid the cost of speaking. Real love pays that cost. It speaks the truth, and it speaks it the way this whole series has been anchored, that “opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.” (2 Timothy 2:25-26, NIV). Gentleness is the manner. Truth is the message. Love is the reason underneath both. They were never three things to balance against each other. They were always one act.

 

And none of this makes obedience a burden we carry to buy back a love we might otherwise lose. “This is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:3, NIV). We are not saved by leaving our sin behind. We leave our sin behind because we have been saved, and because the God who saved us wants more for us than the life our sin was building. The grace comes first and does all the saving. The changed life follows, not as payment, but as the natural shape of a heart the Holy Spirit has made new. “For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.” (Titus 2:11-12, NIV). Grace does the teaching. Grace does the transforming. It simply refuses to leave us where it found us, because leaving us there would not be love.

 

Jesus Christ is the only one who has ever held forgiveness and truth together in perfect love, without letting either collapse into the other. He set the stones down and told the woman the truth in the same breath, and he did it while already carrying, toward a cross still ahead of him, the price that would make both halves true for her and for us. He forgave fully, and he loved her far too much to leave her where she was. The love our culture manufactures may pass inspection at a glance. Held up to the light of what Jesus Christ said and did, it has never once held together the way his does.

 

Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank you for a love that has always told me the truth, because your love has always wanted my salvation more than my comfort. Forgive me for the times I have called silence kindness, or withheld from someone the truth they needed because I was afraid of the cost of speaking it.

 

Lord Jesus, thank you for forgiving me fully and for loving me too much to leave me in my sin. Give me a love that truly wills the eternal good of the people around me, and the gentleness to speak that good in a way they can hear. I pray this in your name. Amen.

 

If something in today’s message stung a little, that sting is not the opposite of love. It is very often love doing exactly what it was made to do. The God who tells us the truth is the same God who will never let us go. Tomorrow this series turns to why a love like that can quiet our fears instead of adding to them.

 

To God be the glory

 

Pray, praise, and give thanks, for God is good and His mercy endures forever.

 

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