Tough Love Part 3 #love 03

We serve a good and beautiful God who loves us.  

He’s the father who comes running when his spoiled, unfaithful brat of a son returns home.  He’s the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to search for the one lost sheep.  He’s the rabbi who chooses to eat with tax collectors and sinners, and who honors the prostitute who anoints him with oil.  His love crosses all boundaries and pierces every heart.  

Our life with God is the daily surrender to this astounding love.  We risk vulnerability before the Creator of the Universe, to open our hearts as best we can to God's pure and holy influence.  We show God how we really feel, and God shows us ourselves.  In this process, this good and beautiful God changes us slowly over time into someone more like Jesus.  It’s a gracious and humbling dance with our glorious God.  

When I share this, I inevitably get pushback:

“God’s love is also punitive and correcting. 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?”

“Does God’s love say we are mandated to act if a fellow follower of Jesus’ is living in willful and rebellious sin?”

I’ve answered this question in the first two posts in this series.  In part 1, I explored the source of the “Tough Love Mandate”: Matthew 18:15-17.  In part 2, I shared the most common misuses of tough love I’ve encountered.  In this final post, I want to share why I’m not a fan of tough love.  

Honoring Our Complexity

To the best of my ability, I try to extend the grace that Jesus has shown me to the people I encounter - especially when I first meet them.  I try to meet them where they are without judging them.  I do this out of a desire to demonstrate God’s incredible love for them in some small way.  Perhaps my meager attempts at unconditional love will point someone to the provider of true unconditional love: Jesus.  

We all struggle with sin.  For those who are making an effort to follow Jesus, at any given moment, the following four things are true about you.  

There are areas of your life where:

• …you are surrendering to God.
• …you are struggling to surrender to God. 
• …you are in some degree of rebellion against God, and 
• …there are blindspots - the things you don’t know you’re struggling with.   

This is the reality for anyone who’s trying to follow Jesus. All four of these things are simultaneously true about us on any given day.  This should bring us some measure of humble hesitation when we feel like someone else needs to be corrected.  

Grace, Grace, Grace

For the areas where we know we’re struggling, most of us subtly (or not so subtly) signal our distress to those around us. We wear our pain openly in ways that someone who knows what to look for can see it.  Because of this, many pastors can spot your top five struggles with within five minutes of meeting you.  The challenge isn’t spotting the areas where you’re struggling to surrender; the challenge is knowing which one, if any, God wants to address in the moment.  In God’s gracious way, our Lord usually addresses our issues one at a time, because God knows that it would be overwhelming for us to try and tackle all of our issues all at once.  If your pastor or friend in Christ knows this, they’ll listen for the Holy Spirit’s promptings and try to join God in what God's doing in your life.  

This means I try to have incredible grace when I encounter someone.  You might tell me about your alcohol problem, but I’ll only engage you on that topic if I sense the Holy Spirit’s invitation.  You might tell me about how your spouse doesn’t know you’re looking at pornography.  Again, I’m only going to engage that issue with you if I sense the Holy Spirit’s invitation.  If I sense that God is being silent on the things that I can see, then I’ll stay silent as well.  

I do this because my desire is to join God in what God's doing.  You belong to God, and God knows what you need in the moment far better than I do.  If I truly trust God's love for you, then I can say nothing if that’s what the Lord's asking me to do.  I’m trusting that God's going to help you work through your struggles in the proper time, when you’re ready.  Chasing every little tell intended to disclose a private sin is like playing whack-a-mole at the carnival.  Weighing in on every little sin is being a hammer, when God might be inviting us to be a magnifying glass, a mirror, or a pair of tweezers.  Or to be silent.

This means I may hear about your secret (or not-so-secret) sin, and just love you well, showing you the grace that Christ has shown me, while choosing to acknowledge, but not address, your sin.  I’m willing to see the sin and let it continue without any commentary from me. I see this as a human manifestation of what God does for me all the time. 

How do you engage with the sins and issues you see in your fellow followers of Jesus?  

What do you feel when you hear me suggest that God might have you stay silent about someone else’s sin?

Too Good To Be True

My final issue with the tough love mandate is the most personally disconcerting. For many followers of Jesus, 

Tough love is a correction to the heresy of God’s love. 

In Brennan Manning’s testimony to God’s love, The Ragamuffin Gospel, he says this about the story of the Prodigal Son (mentioned earlier in this post):

Here is the revelation bright as the evening star: Jesus comes for sinners, for those as outcast as tax collectors and for those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams. He comes for corporate executives, street people, superstars, farmers, hookers, addicts, IRS agents, AIDS victims, and even used car salesmen. . . . This passage (the Prodigal Son, Luke 15) should be read, reread, and memorized. Every Christian generation tried to dim the blinding brightness of its meaning because the gospel seems too good to be true.*

I declare the prodigal inclusivity of God’s extraordinary love, and I get immediate pushback: “But what about tough love?” In this context I hear the heartbreaking idea behind the question: “The Gospel seems too good to be true.”  

How is it that the Good News has become “too good” for so many people?

There’s something about being religious that makes us lose sight of why we’re religious.  When we first encountered Jesus, many of us were overwhelmed with a sense of wonder at how accepting, affirming, and loving Jesus is.  We know all the bad things we’ve done, are doing, and plan to do.  And yet, God's breathtaking grace is extended to us when Jesus invites us to, “Come, follow me.”  

What a gift of grace!  It's extended to us while we're still caught in the degrading machinations of our sin, our deplorable egocentric worldview, the self-destructive habits we celebrate that grind away at our humanity, and the tar pits of self-pity and blame-shifting that stunt our spiritual and emotional growth.  And here is Jesus Christ, standing before us in our dismal state, extending his hand for us to take so he can pull us out.  When we lift our eyes to him, his face lights up, and he says, “Come follow me.  You are mine, and I love you!”

It seems that as we become religious, we lose sight of the humbling reality of this initial encounter. The shine wears off. The memory becomes dull.  We forget.  In time, we trade communion with God for knowledge about God.  We trade the present risenness of Christ for a house of cards theology.  We trade Holy Spirit empowerment for a religious instruction manual.  We forget that God is making us righteous, and we begin to believe that we have somehow earned righteousness. We become proud.  We forget the incredible grace we were shown at the beginning, and so we forget how to show it to others.  

Because the Gospel seems too good to be true.  

Because it does.  Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous convicted serial killer, claimed to have given his life to Jesus while in prison in the years before he died.  Will Jeffrey Dahmer be in heaven with you?  What if Adolf Hitler, the 20th century embodiment of evil, gave his life to Jesus in those final moments in the bunker?  Terrorists, thieves, murderers, liars, traitors, war profiteers, sociopathic business owners, narcissists, feckless playboys (playgirls?), and yes, the person who hurt you - Jesus loves them all and he desires that they might be in the “mansion” next to you in heaven.  

The Gospel seems too good to be true, because way down deep inside us, where we don’t let anyone else in, we still believe there are people who don’t deserve Jesus.  We prefer the scales of justice to the seemingly irrational and reckless application of divine grace.    

We see God pouring out his love and grace on these sinners, and we're offended.  We question God’s sanity.  He’s abdicating his responsibility as judge!  So we step in to fill the gap, and we call it as we see it.  

The biggest problem with the tough love mandate that I’ve encountered, is that it is used as a way to correct God’s mis-application of grace.  His profligate grace is labeled a heresy that must be corrected before it goes too far. 

And yet, we hear echoing down through time, 

“Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own mercy and grace? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

How might we view tough love if we could get back in touch with the grace we were originally shown?  

My Story

I remember my salvation. 

I was living the life of an agnostic, thumbing my nose at God, and declaring religion a “crutch” for people too weak to handle the "real world."  I embraced the seed of nihilism and I reaped its bitter harvest.  I came to a point where I couldn’t think of a reason to continue my meaningless existence. When I finally collapsed under the weight of my own poisonous philosophy, I looked up and saw Jesus standing there.  He smiled a sad little smile, and reached his hand down for me to take it.

He pulled me up to standing, steadied me, and then pulled me in for a big hug. I realized he’d been there with me every step of the way.  I might’ve been able to see him, just out of the corner of my eye, in every situation in those ten long years in open rebellion against him. He’d heard every hurtful word I'd said about him.  He'd seen me harm myself and those around me in a foolish, self-centered desire to find meaning. In that moment, as he held me, I could FEEL the sorrow he felt over my choices.  It was the sorrow a father has for a son who is lost to drug addiction.  It was the sorrow of the mother who sees her daughter on an adult website.  It was the sorrow of the parent who loves so powerfully, but just can’t get through their child’s muddled worldview.  

I hanged my head in shame.

“None of that,” he said as he lifted my chin.  “That’s all past now.  Come.  Follow me.”

And I did.  

I have no righteousness to claim before the Lord.  I’m unable to make a compelling case for why I should be saved.  I’m rendered speechless when I consider why God would even acknowledge me, let alone love me.  I am the prodigal son, who’s squandered his Father’s inheritance.  

And yet, God says, “You are mine. My beloved.  Come.  Follow me.”

What would our lives be like if we were able to perpetually exist in the moment of our salvation?  

If we could hold in our hearts the second when we began to comprehend the unfathomable grace of Christ?  

How would we treat others if we could always live present to the emotions we felt when we first realized the lavish invitation Jesus was extended to us?  

How would we view the sin and shortcomings of others differently if we could always touch the moment we chose to follow him?  

If we were able to live life in this way, how might we understand tough love?  

Talk to God about all of these things. 

* Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah Books, 1990), pp. 19-20