Acts 11:19-30
I saw a post this week where a fellow said that he was looking forward to seeing more blood-bought, red-hot, fired-up, soul-redeeming, devil-stomping, Spirit-filled, sin-hating, Bible-believing churches appearing. Churches brought about not by our might or poser, but by His Spirit.
This sounds great on the surface, but the more I thought about it, something wasn’t setting well with me. It took a few days but I finally figured it out. He never mentioned love.
Y’all, I spent some time in my youth in a church that gave the appearance of having all of the attributes the guy said he was looking forward to seeing. None of those attributes helped me when I was drifting. In fact, they drove me away from trying to develop a personal relationship with Jesus because they made me feel that God could only love me if I did all of the “right” things and never sinned. They didn’t teach me about the love that God had for me, they taught me a list of rules and made me believe that if I didn’t follow those rules that I was unlovable by God.
For many years, I wasn’t able to believe that God loved me warts and all so I had no inclination to work on removing the warts.
This is why I preach far more on love than I do about sin. Until we really get it through our thick skulls and scar-tissue wrapped hearts that God LOVES us period, the rest of it doesn’t matter.