How We Lost Our Way and Then Lost Our Message

While ever no-one was in danger of being offended, no-one was in danger of being helped

Sloppy reductive thinking has threatened to turn the church into the kind of wet lettuce leaf that even Aldi would refuse to stock.

But worse, large sections of Christendom pride themselves on resembling a wet lettuce leaf, as if they were called to the vegetable section for such a time as this.

The rot began when we decoupled virtues from the Person whom the virtues describe.

You see, the most important thing to understand about the virtues is that the virtues are only virtues because they describe the nature of God Himself.

God is patient. That’s His nature. And so that is why patience is a virtue.

God is gentle. So gentleness is a virtue.

God is love. Love is therefore a virtue. It is also why love can only truly be understood by observing the nature of God Himself.

What is love like? Well, what is God like? Answer the second question and you’ll answer the first.

But if you talk of love, without taking your bearings from the One ‘love’ describes, you soon find yourself talking about something approximating but other than love.

Stay with me.

While the Bible says that God is love, many people have unwittingly made love into God and, in doing so, have redefined - which is to say corrupted – love completely.

As a result, much of what now passes for ‘love’ is nothing but rank sentimentality.

How many times have you heard someone say: “I believe we just need to love everybody.”

Well, yes. Sure. But does that actually mean?

More often than not, loving everybody comes to mean accepting everybody which, usually means – though it is never said - abandoning truth in order to approve the latest cultural fad embraced by our neighbour, no matter how insane or self-destructive it is.

In this way, ‘Love everybody’ quickly comes to mean ‘Anything Goes’.

And this is how the Army of God, the Pillar of Truth and the Light of the World, transformed itself into a beige blog of blah.

Or, if you prefer, into a wet lettuce leaf with barely enough substance to fill out the garden salad that accompanies your overpriced chicken parmigiana at the local pub …