Tough Love Part 2 #love 02
I talk a lot about God’s magnificent, breathtaking, far-reaching, unconditional love.
I tend to push people’s boundaries of thinking about his love, because when it comes to God’s love, I believe most of us are thinking too small. God likes you. God loves you. God loves loving you.
When I’m declaring God’s expansive love, I often hear the tough love mandate in response:
“God’s love isn’t just warm fuzzies. It includes tough love. Is it loving to allow someone to continue in sin without saying anything? Aren’t we supposed to correct people if they’re sinning?”
“Doesn't God’s love say we are mandated to act if a fellow follower of Jesus’ is living in willful and rebellious sin?”
These responses are so common, that I decided to write a blog post about it. I had so much to say that it turned in three posts.
In part 1, I took a look at the source of the “Tough Love Mandate”: Matthew 18:15-17. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend you go back and read it first. The understanding of what Jesus was proposing in Matthew 18 helps provide the foundation for understanding the many ways tough love is abused.
In this post, I’ll address the common misuses of tough love. In part 3, I’ll share why I have resistance to the common practice of tough love.
Is It Loving?
One of the most common arguments for tough love goes like this: “Is it loving to look the other way and say nothing when your fellow follower of Jesus is sinning?”
There is such a thing as healthy tough love.
Yes! It's loving well to speak to your fellow follower of Jesus if they’re destroying themselves.
If your good friend is coming home every night drunk after a bad break-up with a significant other, it isn't loving to look the other way and say nothing. This is a self-destructive path, and if you care about your friend, you’ll say something.
If you know your friend is cheating on their spouse, is it loving for you to say nothing and just look the other way? Unlikely. This one’s more challenging, and your response depends on the level of relational trust you have with your friend and their spouse. Infidelity leads to relational destruction every time, and so you may need to speak up.
If your child is reaching for the hot stove, is it loving to ignore this and allow them to burn their hand? Most healthy parents would say, “No, that’s not love, that’s neglect.”
This idea of tough love is real. Your godly sense of sacrificial love for your brother or sister in Christ compels you to speak a hard truth to someone you love for their sake.
...often something else is driving our desire to correct the accused.
On the surface, we express our desire to correct our fellow follower of Jesus as faithfulness to Christ, but, if we were able to see ourselves more clearly, and better understand the complexity of our internal motivations, we might see less pure reasons for wanting to bring correction to our fellow follower of Jesus. We want to get to get even. We want to be right. We need to be seen as faithful.
Looking For A Loophole
In part 1 of this blog, I told the story of a person challenging me when I taught about loving your enemies from Matthew 5:38-42. This person said, “What about tough love? When people are sinning, they need to be held accountable for their sin!”
This person was using the tough love mandate to openly argue for an exception to Jesus’ exhortation to love your enemies. They wanted to put limits on God’s love. They were using the Tough Love Mandate as a lever to pry open a space where they could continue to withhold love from some of their enemies. I have no idea what this person’s past pain and internal struggles were, but they manifested in a spirit of unforgiveness. This is clearly not what Jesus had in mind in Matthew 18. Furthermore, Jesus’ words are for his followers, not people who wouldn’t consider themselves followers of Jesus.
Our Love Affair With Certainty
In part 1 of this blog, I mentioned that I taught a message about John 13:35 where Jesus said the love we show our fellow followers of Jesus was the main way people know that we’re his disciples. I finished the message by challenging the congregation, “When did your position on abortion become the litmus test for whether or not you’re a follower of Jesus?”
Sometime later, a person challenged me: “Aren’t we supposed to correct our brothers and sisters in Christ when they’re believing something that’s a lie? Allowing them to continue endorsing murder (abortion) is not loving.”
This person was using the Tough Love Mandate as a way to establish a new “plumb line” for their fellow followers of Jesus. They were so certain of their rightness on this secondary matter, that they were willing to shame their brothers and sisters in Christ into agreement on their particular view of that subject.
Many followers of Jesus desire certainty in their faith. They want to know the rules so they can obey them and be faithful to God. The desire to please God is a good and healthy motive. The problem is that this way of approaching life with God is that you have to nail down all of the debatable matters to define what it means to be “Christian.” You end up with a theology that requires more than faith in Jesus to be one of his followers. Faith in Jesus AND your stance on abortion. Faith in Jesus AND your stance on same-sex relationships. Faith in Jesus AND the political party you support. From this perspective, the litmus test for a genuine life with God is based on debatable virtues that extend well beyond the creeds of the faith.
But it’s a house of cards theology.
The deep and abiding life with God is a life of tension and wrestling, where there’s mystery, and a decent amount of healthy ambiguity. Many of the people who challenge the idea of God’s gracious love are unfamiliar with this way of being. It’s so foreign to some of them, that they treat it as blasphemy and do everything they can to preserve their complicated, problematic certainty.
The fruit of certainty is clear: when something threatens the elaborate structures of certainty, the practitioners react defensively and often aggressively. The certainty structure must be defended, because what would we have if we lost our certainty? This is how otherwise loving followers of Jesus can devolve into hate-filled combatants who cause great relational harm in “the name of Jesus.” This is what I believe Steven Weinberg meant when he said,
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
Our desire for certainty creates rigid structures that compromise the Law of Love (John 13:35). This is fear. So often, the advocacy for a sintervention is driven by the fearful need to protect the manmade religious structures that bring order to our lives. It’s a natural human reaction, and we have grace for it. But it’s a fearful, unthoughtful response to being threatened.
Here's the good news: the moment our house of cards theology is blown down is the moment we’re actually ready to start going deeper with God.
I’m confident that Jesus wasn’t advocating for using Matthew 18 as a bludgeon to make other followers of Jesus believe the way you believe.
The Relational Investment
I opened this blog series with a story about my friend at the pub who wanted to stage a sintervention. For them, it was much more personal. They felt hurt, disappointed, and frustrated with the choices our fellow congregant had made, and they felt a desire to fix it. There’s a good motive mixed in here - the desire to help and bring relational healing. The problem is that my friend lacked sufficient relationship with the person in our old congregation to be able to speak to them about it. This was super frustrating for them, and I felt for them.
Having a conversation where you point out someone’s sin requires a tremendous amount of relational trust. You have to have a strong loving history with that person. I think of Stephen Covey’s “relational bank account.” Even the healthiest and most loving tough love conversation is a tremendous relational withdrawal. You must have invested heavily into the relationship over a long time to even hope to be able to have this conversation in a life-giving way.
Think about what it would take for you to be OK with being the object of a sintervention.
What would it would take for you to be able to have someone say to you, “I believe your relationship with your significant other is unhealthy and here’s why”?
How much trust would you have to have with someone for them to say to you, “I think you’re drinking too much”?
What level of relationship is required for you to be able to receive, “I feel like you have a problem with gossip, and it’s hurting you, me, and the rest of our friends”?
I find we’re often ready to show someone else tough love, and then we’re offended when they reject our counsel. However, the moment someone shares their tough love with us, we’re outraged by their presumption. “Who do they think they are to speak to me that way!”
This is where the untempered reading of Matthew 18 hurts people. At face value, Jesus is telling us to point out the sins of the Christians around us. Laboring under this unthoughtful interpretation of this passage, I’ve seen so many followers of Jesus who have genuine concern for one of their brothers or sisters in Christ, but lack sufficient relationship to act on it. But because they have a “plain text” perspective on the Bible, they plow ahead and stage a sintervention anyway, acting under the auspices of the Tough Love Mandate. This often results in tremendous relational wreckage and can unnecessarily taint people’s perspectives of Jesus and his Church.
Behind The Scenes: Fear
Behind this action is fear. The stated motive is that they must stage the sintervention or they’re not being faithful followers of Jesus. Looking deeper, we might be able to see other motives driving the behavior:
- Love - the fear that God will only love them if they perform,
- Avoidance of Pain - the fear that God will punish them if they don’t act,
- Avoidance of Shame - the fear that their peers will shame them or think poorly of them for their inaction.
As you dig down into the layers, it might be as simple and base a desire as:
- Revenge - getting even for a perceived betrayal,
- Confirmation - the powerful desire to have what we already believe affirmed,
- Pride - the need to prove to someone that we’re right,
- Affirmation - the need to receive approval from others.
The Deadly Combination
The most common misuse of tough love I’ve encountered is a combination of two missteps:
1. The perceived sin being addressed is either debatable, or it isn’t a significant transgression, and
2. The accuser lacks sufficient relationship with the accused to be able to address it.
This combination of misapplication is incredibly common and incredibly destructive. I’ve found that this is often what people are doing when they try and apply Matthew 18:15-17.
We feel so right about our view of a particular issue (abortion, same-sex relationships, immigration, End-Times theology, once-saved always saved, etc.), that we’re willing to blow up a relationship to prove that we’re right. “Winning them over,” becomes “winning the argument.”
Unsolicited opinions are annoying.
Many choose to ignore the complexity of these types of non-credal matters in favor of a false certainty. But, if the matters truly were simple, then we’d have agreement. The fact that we don’t have agreement means there’s a legitimate complexity that should be explored. The complex interaction of disagreement should give us pause and bring humility as we engage others on these debatable matters.
Is the matter you feel so strongly about really something you need to bring to your brother or sister in Christ who sees it differently than you do?
I remember, back in the early 1990s, imploring my friends not to go to the Faith No More concert that was coming to town. They were an evil band and Christians shouldn’t listen to secular music. This was a non-credal debatable matter, but worse, I didn’t have the relational equity with my friends to address this matter in such a direct way. I was a wrecking ball, here to tear down their false idols and set them on the right path. I almost lost a couple of friends that night. It was their more mature expression of grace that saved the relationship.
Assuming the matter truly needs to be addressed with your fellow follower of Jesus, do you have enough relationship with them to speak to the matter in love? Will you be a friend drawing close in love, or a stranger spouting unsolicited criticism?
I've seen cases where Matthew 18 is applied well, with wisdom and rooted in the Law of Love. What Jesus lays out in Matthew 18 is incredibly helpful for establishing a common process for dealing with a serious grievance that can’t be resolved privately.
But here’s the thing:
Tough love is the last option.
I see far too many followers of Jesus who reach for tough love FIRST. They’re so set on fixing the world, that tough love becomes a hammer, and every perceived imperfection is a nail. Tough love can become synonymous with God’s love. Instead, I encourage you to think of tough love as the nuclear option. It’s an option, but you reach for it when every other option has already been tried.
Think of tough love as the nuclear option.
Jesus asks you to bring some friends along, because you need to be thoughtful and get wise counsel before taking action. It takes more than one person to launch those missiles, and so it's good to have some other folks who have the "keys" and can help you discern with godly wisdom.
What's your experience of tough love?
If you’ve employed Matthew 18:15-17 before, what did you do?
Looking back, is there anything you would do differently?
If you’ve never employed tough love yourself, think of a time when you saw someone else apply tough love. What was the fruit of that application of tough love?
What were the stated and perceived motives behind this tough love?
Talk to God about all of these things.
Motives are slippery things.
Why we do what we do can be challenging to discern, and we typically can’t discern our own motives in isolation. We need other followers of Jesus to help us understand ourselves. This is just part of what it means to be human.
This calls for tremendous humility when we find ourselves desiring to employ tough love or to pursue correction through the application of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 18:15-17. We should examine our motives to the best of our ability to try and spot the various motive imposters (vengeance, affirmation, pride, etc.) who are posing as “faithfulness to Christ.” We want to avoid wrecking ball religion dressed up as holiness. When we do this, I believe we ARE being faithful to Christ, and I think we’ll find that “tough love” becomes the last option to reach for in our toolkit - if we reach for it at all.
Read on in the 3rd post of this series to see why I rarely practice tough love.
Comments
Post a Comment