Today, we begin the Just Love Conversations in Kansas City, not only helping people explore the content of the book, but also helping us all find a better language to share God’s love and life with the world. How I wish you were all here, but that might have made our conversation a bit unwieldy.
This is the first time I’ll meet Tobie and his wife in person. I’m excited about that. I can’t tell you what a high-wire act this is, writing a book together in the mere hope that the love and justice we write about will guide the way we treat each other. No, we don’t have a contract between us, and yes, I remember how horribly wrong that went last time I went down this road.
But so far, so good, and both of us feel that if we can’t truly personify the love and justice we’ve written about as God’s ultimate desire in human relationships, we deserve another disaster. If God’s kingdom is ever going to be revealed in our world, it’s because we will embody God’s love in how we treat the other. Time will tell the tale.
And that has implications that go far beyond this book and our relationship. This question gets to the heart of Just Love.
What if the answer to a world coming apart is not winning, controlling, or condemning—but becoming people in whom love knows how to make things right?
Setting the world right has been God’s desire from the fall, and what human ambition has continually thwarted. What I love most about restoring God’s love and justice to the word most of us translate a righteousness is seeing salvation not as securing our eternal destiny, but more importantly, rescuing us from a world gone mad.
It redefines our place as ambassadors of his love within it. God’s justice is not about civility, compromise, or pretending every political idea is equally healthy. It asks: What would love do to make my world whole? That includes truth, repentance, protection of the vulnerable, repair, forgiveness, boundaries, restitution, courage, and sometimes confrontation.
And it doesn’t begin in political movements, but in the people we encounter daily. Our focus shifts from…
- Who is right?
- Which side are you on?
- Who deserves blame?
To: How does love make this right?
The world does not need another argument about justice or teaching about love; it needs to see love-produced justice embodied in those who claim to be followers of Jesus.
We do not overcome injustice by becoming more unjust toward those we blame for it. Rather, we allow God’s love to make us the kind of people who can see clearly, speak truthfully, empower the vulnerable, repair what we have broken, and seek the restoration of others without needing vengeance.
- In a marriage.
- In a friendship.
- In a divided family.
- With someone who has harmed us.
- With someone we have harmed.
- In an institutional conflict.
- Across political differences.
- In racial or economic injustice.
- In our use of power.
- In a world at war.
That’s what God’s love working in our hearts wants to accomplish. Jesus’s work on the cross didn’t just declare us righteous; it opened the door for us to experience his love with such power that it writes his justice on our hearts by making us as aware of the other as we are of ourselves.
That’s the power of God making us just in his love, and rescuing us from the kingdom of darkness, to live in the light and life of his Son. That is the priority of his kingdom, the source of our greatest joy while living amid the chaos of a broken world.
We hope that Just Love encourages that kind of transformation in the world.
