Love is Not Acceptance

“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." Matthew 7:12

So often in today’s world, we are commanded to love each other. Yard signs educate us on what love looks like – “In this house we…Stand for truth. Stand for acceptance. Stand for equality. Stand for love. Kindness is everything.” But the problem is that these yard signs aren’t actually about love, they are about acceptance.

The love of today’s world means acceptance. It means approving of alternate lifestyles. It means acceptance of boys who believe they are girls and girls who believe they are boys. Accepting the normalcy of killing babies before they are born. Embracing living together before marriage. It means accepting my every flaw because, after all, it’s who I am. 

The word love has been hijacked. Repurposed into something much less meaningful, love has been changed into accepting everything as it is, without any thought given to what it should be. Which begs the question: what does love look like?

Christians should be very familiar with what love actually looks like…it all started in the Garden. God created Adam and Eve to live with Him in paradise. Their disobedience brought sin, death, and separation from God and the world. This separation was repaired through Christ’s death and resurrection. He was and is our atoning salvation; He is our restoration and redemption.

Love, as God intended, is best seen through the gospel: God the Father sent God the Son from Heaven to serve as the perfect sacrifice for our sin, restoring humanity’s relationship with Himself (John 3:16, 1 John 4:7-21). Christ completely embodied love in His time on earth. His words, actions, and ultimate death on the cross exemplified the great lengths to which He would go to re-establish a right relationship with His creation (Ephesians 3:17-19). 

During His life on earth, Christ showed us that love looks like calling out sin in a way that provides restoration and healing (Ephesians 4:15). The woman caught in adultery should have been stoned, yet Christ quietly convicted her accusers while also addressing her sin (John 8:1-11). Through his actions, or rather His inactions, He reminded the crowd that no one is without sin, and He encouraged the woman to “go and sin no more.” He met the woman where she was at, while still calling out her sin in love.  

This story is key to understanding love and how our world has so grievously misunderstood it. Christ does not condemn the woman, but He also doesn’t condone her behavior either. He calls out the wrongdoing, encouraging her to go and do better. Love looks like recognizing sin for what it is and calling it out so it can be addressed, learned from, and conquered through the power of Christ in us. Love is not celebrating sin because “it’s just how I am.”

We are all sinful human beings in need of a Savior. It is not loving to allow ourselves and others to continue on a sinful path of destruction. In fact, this acceptance is quite the opposite of love. Some Christians have bought into the lie that love means embracing people for who they are, without the need to change. This statement falls short as it misses the key fact that each of us are inherently sinful beings in need of a Savior – we all have sin that continues to separate us from God (Romans 3:23). 

Today’s culture of “love is acceptance” omits the need for change. It omits the need for a Savior. It omits acknowledging sin when we see it. This false “love” means approving behavior without reservation, even if that behavior is sinful. This is not love. This is the path to destruction. 

Love is calling out sin for what it is – behavior that separates us from God. Love is a God who sent His only Son to die on a cross to restore His relationship with a broken humanity. Love is Jesus Christ – beaten, mocked, scourged – on a cross, dying for our sins so that our relationship with Him could be restored.

Our world has missed the radical beauty of the love of the cross because we have reduced love to acceptance. He loved us so much that He willingly went to the cross to die on behalf of us so that we do not have to be held by the bondage of sin. Christ showed us in His life how to love perfectly – loving the woman despite her sin by showing her a better way – His way, which requires us to change our behavior…to seek obedience to a holy God over social acceptance or the easy way out.

Love is embodied in an all-powerful God hanging on a cross for the sins of the world with a crown of thorns on his head. Love looks like caring too much about humanity to let us continue on in our sin. We have the chance for a beautiful restoration of relationship through Jesus Christ, but that does not mean being content to live in our sin (Romans 6). Don’t shortchange God’s incomprehensible, unending, unconditional love. Do not buy into the lie that love is acceptance. Love is so much more.