Unloving Love

We finish up our look at the churches in Revelation today by looking at Thyatira. Ephesus had a problem because they knew truth, but didn't love. Pergamum struggled because they believed passioantely, but didn't discern. Now, we come to Thyatira.

Thyatria was praised for loving well, but was admonished for refusing to judge (Revelation 2).

And this is the other side of the grace vs. truth dilemma. (I've said that twice this week, but pleas understand that it's not really a "vs." At least, it shouldn't be.)

Thyatira loved well. They knew how to care for one another, how to encourage one another, how to fellowship. They were doing a great job of drawing their circle larger and letting everyone in. They were the hands and feet of God in their community - healing the sick, feeding the hungry, helping the poor. You'd better believe these people were Jesus with skin on.

But they weren't actually preaching Jesus. They weren't requiring commitment to principles. They weren't expecting repentance, even from those among them. They weren't willing to call out when someone was falling short - they'd just go right on loving that person. They weren't weeding out from amongst them those who were leading them astray. In fact, they didn't even seem to understand that they could be led astray. That there were bounds and guidelines to who Jesus is and what we can do in His name.

It's the same thing we're facing today. Isn't it? We have this world that preaches a Jesus with no expectations. He doesn't want you to ever change; you're perfect just the way you are. He doesn't expect anything more of you than you're able to give right now. You don't have to grow. You don't have to repent. You don't even have to try for our culture's version of Jesus. He's all love and peace and promise for everybody. No matter who you are. No matter what you've done. No matter what you keep on doing and what you refuse to quit.

Our culture's Jesus doesn't even see you as a sinner. Oh, sure, we still call ourselves sinners and talk about all the things we could do better, but that's us, not Him. Jesus would never call you a sinner. He would never call your actions sin. Because you know, you're doing them with the best of intentions and the purest of heart. It's different now, we say. Our culture is different. Things mean different things now, not what Jesus thought they meant. So He's cool with it. He's cool with us.

And it's the same thing we were saying yesterday - if you believe anything different than that, then you must be a bigot. If you expect more of someone than they're currently living, you must hate them. You must be prejudiced. You must be whatever-phobic. Because Jesus, man, He doesn't have all these hang-ups.

"He's just love."

But "just love" will get you in trouble. It wrecks things. It creates more problems than it solves, for those inside the faith and outside of it. It was the trouble in Thyatira.

It's our trouble today. 

Believe Anything

We continue looking at John's letters to the churches in Revelation, and today, we come to the church at Pergamum. This church seems to have a bit of the opposite problem as Ephesus, who we looked at yesterday.

Pergamum is praised for their great faith, but is admonished for being undiscerning in their teachings (Revelation 2).

In other words, Pergamum were the people you wanted if you needed some inspiration. They believed. They believed enthusiastically. They believed with their whole hearts. If you needed someone to reassure you of anything, these were the people. We might gently say they probably had the spiritual gift of encouragement - their great faith was assurance for your struggle, your questions, your doubts.

But what they believed in was a bit of a problem. See, being undiscerning in their teachings, the church at Pergamum would believe...well, just about anything. They weren't interested in just the truth; they were into whatever they thought might be in some way godly. They were cool with ideas that were just thrown out there to see what would stick. If it sounded good, Pergamum was in - whether it actually was good or not. They didn't bother to check out if what they were buying into was right or wrong, if it was good or bad, if it was truly from God or just something posing as Him, just someone using His name or His words or even maybe twisting them. They were just believers...firm, fast, passionate believers who had faith right, but had the substance wrong.

We are seeing the same thing happening today in our pluralistic, postmodern culture that says that truth is whatever you believe it to be and that you can't argue with what someone else decides is truth because it's all relative; nothing is absolute. Naturally, it hasn't taken long for this mindset to creep into the church and infect even the things we believe about Jesus.

Now, we've got all these persons who call themselves persons of "faith" who staunchly believe things about Jesus that He never revealed Himself to be. They believe things about the world that Jesus directly warned us about buying into. They take everything that everyone ever tells them and throw it into a hodgepodge heart and call whatever comes out of it "faith." You start talking with them and all seems well, but then they start spiraling into all of these things that even the smallest amount of rational thinking and reasonable discernment would have discarded long ago.

And it's because we're told that if you're discerning, you're offensive. If you find a problem with something someone believes, then you're a bigot. You must hate that person. If you didn't hate them, you wouldn't disagree with them. So what we have is a whole world of persons afraid to be labeled as bigots, afraid to be called prejudiced, who are trying to take literally everything the world throws at them and make some kind of meaningful understanding out of the nonsense, trying to make harmony out of things that are incompatible. And calling themselves persons of faith because at the core of it all, they really do believe in "God." And if that's the foundation of their belief, then they must be Christians...whatever all this other stuff does or doesn't mean.

What they're finding is that it doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. Not all teachings are created equal; not all truths are truly true. Yet, what happens is that we have these persons of "faith" who identify as Christians because of a core belief in God, but these beliefs they try to hold on the edges break them and then what they decide is that it's Christianity that's false. It's the Christian faith that doesn't work. After all, they were "believers" and it was unsustainable.

The problem isn't belief in God. The problem isn't faith rightly placed. The problem is being undiscerning about what you are willing to believe. It was the problem at Pergamum.

It's our problem today. 

Truth and Love

In Revelation, John writes letters to the seven churches. These letters generally praise something the church is getting right and admonish them in something they are doing less-well. As our journey-through-the-Bible finally reaches Revelation, we're going to take the next few days to look at three of these letters because the message of these three continues to be exceptionally relevant in today's culture.

First up is the church at Ephesus, who are praised for knowing how to judge rightly but admonished for forgetting to love (Revelation 2).

It's the old grace vs. truth debate, right?

Ephesus knew what was right and wrong. They knew what was from God and what wasn't. They knew who was trying and who wasn't. They knew what God expected of them, both what to do and what not to do. They were experts on truth and even, you might say, discernment (which is a branch, to some degree, of wisdom). Presented with any situation, Ephesus could figure out what was up.

But they were less adept at...applying wisdom. They could see truth plain and simple, but what they couldn't seem to see was humanity. For them, everything was black and white and nothing was flesh-colored.

That's what love is. Love is flesh-colored in a truth that is black and white. Love remembers that we are not factoids or pieces of information or commands of the law or propositions; we are human beings created in the divine image of God, each of us carrying something sacred about Him into the world. We are broken, fallen, sin-stained in a world that keeps wandering away, even though there's something essential about His goodness that we can never wander too far from.

Love sees that we're falling short, but remembers that we're doing the best we can. Truth only sees half of that. It was the problem with the Pharisees - they could look at a man and tell him all the ways that he was "wrong" but they couldn't seem to look at a man and tell him any of the ways that he was human. They could tell him all the ways he was missing the mark, but they probably didn't know if his name was Mark or James or Hymenaeus.

Love reminds us who we are and inspires us to become who we can be, which in the best of things is who God intended us to be. Truth never does that. Truth always seems to call us out for who we're not, always reminds us of what we're not. Truth seems to condemn us more often than not, at least the way we've weaponized it in our postmodern culture.

Don't get me wrong. Truth is important. It's essential. We have to know right from wrong. We have to know real from false. We have to understand what God is getting at, and Truth is an essential nature of God. It's vital to who we are as a people of faith.

But we can get so caught up in truth that we forget love. We can let our vision get so black and white that we no longer see what's human. That's what was happening at Ephesus, and it's why John writes to them. It's great, he says, that you can discern the truth. But what you need also is love.

So do we. 

Called, Loved, Kept

Jude is often overlooked as a treasure of biblical beauty, but something that he says ought to catch us and make us take a second...and third...and fourth read. It's something we ought to think about, to pray about, to ponder, letting it sink into our hearts and shape our relationship with the Lord. What Jude says is this:

You are called, loved by God, and kept for Jesus.

It's one of those phrases in the Bible where the words are deliberately chosen and structured to convey something important about our life of faith. There are many such passages, and they always illuminate something we aren't often thinking about. Or aren't thinking about often enough.

Let's look at what Jude is saying.

You are called. There is a God who knows your name and uses it. He knows your gifts and values them. He knows your heart and treasures it. There is a God who wants you to be part of what He's doing in this world, and He's gone to great lengths to extend the invitation. When He created you, He put a burden on your life that would develop His story in the world, put a passion in your heart that would fuel His fire. This God knows everything about you and chooses you, chose you from the very beginning, and continues to whisper in your ear. Yes, you are called. But you are not just some tool in God's cosmic plan, not just some cog in a wheel....

You are loved by God. This same God who knows everything about you, the hairs on your head, and calls you by name doesn't just want to use you; He loves you. He cherishes everything about you. See, what love does is takes this relationship and makes it two-way. His love makes it so that you can come to Him. He wants you to. He wants you to talk with Him, to tell Him what you're thinking about, to share your problems and your triumphs. To work through things with Him. He wants you to come and sit in His lap, learning not just to obey Him but to trust Him and to love Him back because you understand, through His love, His heart. The fact that you are loved by God is not just about Him knowing you; it's about you getting to know Him. And then....

You are kept for Jesus. Jesus is God-in-flesh. He is the human-Son who walked among us and still does and will again. Jesus is God-with-us, and the fact that you are kept for Him means that He wants to be with you, too. That's one of the things we often forget about Jesus. We think He came 2,000 years ago and walked with those persons, got to be with Galilee, hung out in Jerusalem. Sometimes, we think how cool it would have been if we'd gotten to live in that time and place, if we'd actually gotten to be with Jesus. But the thing about Jesus is...He is, not He was. And He wants to be with us. In fact, you and I are being saved for this very reason - so that we get the chance to walk with Him, too. We are being kept for Him.

These kinds of passages in the Bible are vitally important. It's easy to read right past them. We live in a culture of repetition (I'm even guilty of it myself), where we are trained that lists that sound like these are written for effect, to really pound something into us. But in the Bible, these things are developing revelations. They build on one another. They come together to create a bigger picture, not simply a single one. Jude gives us a beautiful gift in these words.

We just have to slow down and take the time to really read them. 

Sufficient

You've probably heard of the Phariees. These were the Jewish elite that Jesus often took aim at for making things harder for the faithful than they needed to be. The thing about the Pharisees was that they added human tradition on top of God's revelation, and they took it upon themselves to interpret everything God had ever said and determine what it "meant," which often included adding a lot of stuff that God didn't say.

You know, for clarity.

But did you know there's also such a thing as a Christian Pharisee? In fact, there are many of them among us. These are persons who have added interpretation and human tradition to the teachings of Jesus and declared them authoritative, holding the faithful to an impossible standard and making this life of faith much harder than it needs to be.

John warned about them all the way back in the first century, all the way back when Jesus had been gone only a few years, a couple of decades. This kind of thing started, then, right away.

What John says is this - anyone who goes beyond Christ's teachings is a deceiver. Christ's teaching is full and sufficient for all things (2 John).

In other words, what Jesus said is enough. You don't need anything else.

You don't need all of these interpretations. You don't need all of these traditions. It's what the disciples, now apostles, got so wrapped up in in Acts, right? Everyone wanted to know how much of the Jewish law and tradition they still had to keep as they sought to follow this new way. Do they have to be circumcised? Do they have to keep kosher? What's the deal here?

And the disciples, now apostles, keep coming back to this - we're not going to heap a bunch of human requirements onto the new believers. We're just not going to do it. We're going to keep to the basics - the presence of the Spirit, which Jesus promised was coming and would be His sign to believers - and that's enough. What Jesus said is enough.

We spend a lot of our time talking about what Jesus would want us to do, trying to figure out what this or that means. But Jesus told us what He wants us to do. Love God, love each other. Yet, we have invested the last 2,000 years (and counting) to figuring out, like Pharisees, what "love" is. Not because we want to do it better, but because we want to control what kind of definitions the faithful (and the world, I guess) get to use for it. Not because we want to understand who Jesus was, but because we want to defend what Jesus said. It's messed up.

What Jesus said, goes. It's enough. The hard part isn't figuring it out; it's doing it. We weren't supposed to spend our lives perfecting our doctrine, but improving our love. We were never meant to take the words of Jesus and divide and dissect them until every letter became its own book; we are meant to go out and live the abundant life He talked about, however messy that is. Jesus...can't be quantified. He can't be qualified. He has to just be embraced.

And that's enough.

Anything beyond that is deception. You brood of snakes! You hypocrites!

Just go love God, love one another.