Love with No Buts

Love with No Buts The gospel is so unbelievable, we keep trying to change it to make it more sensible. We see this often in the LGBT conversation. Both conservatives and progressives grasp that God loves gays and lesbians. Yet each is tempted to chip away at the fullness of God's love. On the one hand, it's "God loves gays and lesbians, if they are repentant." On the other hand, we hear "God loves gays and lesbians, and accepts them for who they are." As CT managing editor Katelyn Beaty notes, repentance isn't a prerequisite to God's love. Neither is repentance absent after God's love is experienced. God's love does not merely forgive and embrace the sinner; divine love continues to work in us to help us shed our sinful patterns to become, eventually, the spitting image of his son, Jesus. Books Issue! This week, the Internet was slim pickings, but that hasn't stopped me from reading. Some samplings from books that are stirring things deep within me:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov I'm reading this novel for the third time. I still love the golden insights peppered throughout the speeches of Father Zossima, like: Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude...

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age When I say this is "must reading," I mean it. I'm making my staff read this so we can better understanding a crucial dimension of our times: how social media is undermining our ability to talk with one another—and what we can do about it. A representative passage: These days, we may mistake time on the net for solitude. It isn't. In fact, solitude is challenged by our habit of turning on our screens rather than inward. ... People who grew up with social media will often say that they don't feel like themselves; indeed, they sometimes can't feel themselves, unless they are posting, messaging, or texting. Sometimes people say they need to share a thought or a feeling in order to think it, feel it. This is the sensibility of "I share, therefore I am." Or otherwise put, "I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text."

Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus I've prayed the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner") on and off for many years. The older I get, the more meaningful it has become. The reason the prayer has had centuries-long staying power (especially in the Eastern church) might have something to do with the one who commanded prayer in his name: The apostles partly knew already the power of the name of Jesus; they healed incurable diseases by it, they reduced devils to obedience, conquered, bound, and expelled them by it. This most mighty, wonderful name the Lord orders us to use in prayer. He promised that such prayer will be particularly effective. "Whatever you ask," he said to the holy apostles, "the Father in my name, I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name, I will do it" (John 14:13). "Truly, truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Till now you have asked nothing in my name; ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full" (John 16:23). What a wonderful gift! It is guaranteed of unending, infinite blessings! It came from the lips of the unlimited God, clothed in limited humanity and called by the human name of Savior. The name by its exterior form is limited, but it represents an unlimited object, God, from whom it borrows infinite, divine value and worth, the power and properties of God.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli Editor, Christianity Today