Does Just Love Silently Endure Abuse?
You’re never too young to pick up Just Love.
A mother from Australia sent me that picture. It made me laugh. No, she isn’t really reading it, but the picture made me wish I had been that old spiritually when I was introduced to a Gospel that had love and justness at its center instead of sin and shame, albeit without the pink pajamas. How much different my life would have been if I’d focused on the transformation that comes from the lived experience of the Father’s love.
Yesterday, Tobie and I conducted our fourth class on How Does Love Make this Right. The topic was How Does Love Respond to Injustice? Does loving an offender mean allowing them to keep being the victim of their abuse? Does forgiveness negate the difficult consequences of someone else’s destructive behavior?
These are important questions as we learn to live inside of his love, and remind us that Just Love is not a set of principles to apply to any specific situation. It’s a way of entering into the flow of God’s life through relationship, so that he can guide us through the complicated questions that arise in our lives.
Of course, love making things right begins by redeeming us through whatever damage we may have suffered. We have to experience that before we can see how his love might lead us on the outside. So, don’t just run out seeking justice from others until God heals the damage done to our hearts and makes up for what others have done. That needs to be very practical and can take some time.
There are obvious exceptions here. When someone’s actions are violent, illegal, and harmful to yourself or others, get away immediately. Contact law enforcement to expose the problem and protect those who are in danger. I’m writing here about more interpersonal hurts.
Once we see how God is at work in us, we will begin to sense how his love can work outside of us to make things right. That’s what I love about Just Love; it isn’t just about being kind and nice to everyone, but to become part of God’s restorative justice to whatever degree the offending party will allow. It is not resubjecting ourselves to others’ abuse in the name of love, unless God asks it of us as he did Jesus in the week of his passion. But that is extremely rare, and we do it at his leading, not others telling us to, and only for a higher purpose.
An eye to redemption, however, frames our love inside the desires of a just God. Love and justice come together in him, and, honestly, principles won’t guide us here. As I wrote at the outset, what we need is the leading of the Spirit. This is an invitation into a journey of love, shaping us on the inside—untwisting justice in our own hearts, so that we can be part of his justice unfolding in the world.
It doesn’t just ask what would love lead me to do, but more importantly, how is his Spirit leading me in that love? He may ask you to stay in a relationship that’s painful for a larger redemption, or he might lead you away to safety so you are no longer the victim of someone else’s selfishness or anger.
But whatever he asks of you, you will have the strength and courage to follow him, however he may lead.
Also, we got a wonderful review a couple of weeks ago at Mike Morell.org. Here are some excerpts I especially appreciated:
Tobie realized something seismic had just been confirmed: the very word English-speaking Christianity has used for five centuries to translate the heart of the Gospel is unintelligible — even repellent — to the people the Gospel was meant to reach…
It makes a case that is at once scholarly and devastating in its simplicity: the Greek word dikaiosynē, translated as “righteousness” in every major English Bible, is rendered as justice in every other language — German, Afrikaans, Spanish, French, Dutch. Every single one. The English deviation traces directly to the Norman Conquest of 1066, which severed English legal vocabulary from its Germanic roots, creating a religious word — “righteousness” — that conveyed personal moral status instead of right relationship, inner purity instead of just action, individual salvation instead of communal transformation…
That’s the register of this book: personal, pastoral, luminous with grace, and quietly revolutionary..
Tozer sensed it. N.T. Wright and Nicholas Wolterstorff have written about it in academic papers few will ever read. Just Love brings it home — not to theologians with PhDs, but to the “plain man and woman, the insignificant, the widow and the orphan, the poor and oppressed” for whom the justness of God was always intended…
What changes when you read justice instead of righteousness? Everything. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” “Seek first the justice of God.” “The Golden Rule” becomes the Golden Life — not a rule to follow, but a love to inhabit, overflowing into the world.
For the last two years, I’ve enjoyed exploring the connection between living loved and God’s passion for justice in human affairs. I find two or three situations a day that invite me to think differently about what’s going on than I have in the past.
What about you? Would you care to share what you are learning and how it is shaping the way you live? You can do so in the comments here or send me an email.