Faith makes all things possible . . . love makes all things easy.1
—D. L. MOODY
We recently had the chance to take our four daughters to a few of the national parks in the West. The kids were so excited, so we decided to buy the lengthy Ken Burns documentary detailing the history of the national parks—a long story full of drama, politics, and its fair share of wild characters.
The first park to be established was Yosemite, which was originally given to the state of California to manage. Therefore, the second park—Yellowstone—was the first true national park. Yellowstone is in what at that time was still the Wyoming Territory (not yet a state), so it had to be managed by the federal government.
The creation of the National Park System began during the Theodore Roosevelt era. Roosevelt was an intellectual, an imposing political strategist, and because of his many early experiences out west, a lover of America’s natural wonders. He visited the West often and, at times, left his travel companions to go off into the wild alone or with the likes of naturalist John Muir.
In 1906, Congress passed a bill giving the president authority to designate national monuments, although declaring a national park remained a congressional right. This bill was intended to streamline the process by which the president could protect important places—archaeological ruins or other points of national interest. Roosevelt was not a timid man and pushed the boundaries of this new authority by naming dozens of national monuments. He even named the Grand Canyon, which covered more than 1.2 million acres and whose designation as a national park had faced stiff opposition from Congress, a national monument.2
The story goes that Teddy Roosevelt once asked, “Is there any law that prevents me declaring Pelican Island a National Bird Sanctuary?” He paused only briefly and then said, “Very well, then,” reached for his pen, and said, “I do declare it.”3
When conviction and authority intersect, it’s easy to act.
BACK TO BASICS
Roosevelt’s confidence and passion about natural resources might illuminate the type of confidence and passion we should have as Christians, living in a valuable creation with valuable people.
In one sense, this chapter is something you’ve probably heard since the day you became a Christian, or maybe even before that:
• God is love.
• Forgiveness matters.
• Be humble.
• Love your enemies.
• Do good.
• Pray.
It sounds familiar but I think there’s a subtle deception that we live with: learning about God is always going to be new and exciting, a constant exploration of uncharted territory. We are always on the hunt for the next profound revelation.
Sometimes modern Christianity encourages us to derive Christian principles, action steps, and application maxims from every lesson and every sermon. The danger is that where Jesus really only offered one command—to love—we populate the heavens with shoulds and oughts.
Similarly, in our Christian walk we face many ups and downs that are full of emotion. God gives us emotions—and like anything, they can either help or hurt. The downside of emotion is when it makes following God’s will more difficult. But if I can rest on a few simple principles and stay focused there, then I can stand on something—even if I don’t feel it or understand why I’m doing it in a given situation.
The solution to learning how to live for Christ isn’t more insight or more feeling, but more commitment. It isn’t about knowing more, but obeying more. In the midst of doubt, messiness, and confusion, rather than trying to uncover deep mysteries, we can always return to what we know already—like a football team that goes “back to the basics.”
It can actually be simple.
Christianity isn’t exciting because it’s new or novel or because there’s some new secret we’re going to uncover. It is exciting because it leads us continually back into the heart of what it means to be human and made in the image of God.
NEVER WRONG
Have you ever felt that sometimes religion is less like a way of life, and more like a system of behavior modification? That something is broken in the way we present Christianity? That there are too many rules for anyone to follow perfectly?
For those who truly care about love and justice, one of the most disappointing experiences in religion is when it becomes a man-made system of conformity and standardization that we use to judge each other.
Conform yourself to the right behaviors, at least externally, and you can pass as being religious, spiritual, or good. Many times the focus is on the things we shouldn’t do. Such a legalistic focus can easily lend itself to judgment, guilt, and a straitlaced, duty-bound faith. Meanwhile, all the attention is focused on measuring ourselves by who has been less bad, rather than actively seeking to reflect the grace and love of Christ. In the life of faith it can be counterproductive to guard our moral status and make perfect righteousness our goal.
Certainly this isn’t the life to which God has called us.
What would happen if we flipped the system around? What if religion was primarily focused on doing the things that are never wrong, rather than avoiding the things that are always wrong? In fact, isn’t pursuing religious perfection the very thing that sometimes keeps us from pursuing justice?
As Jesus admonished the religious leaders, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23).
Christ has given us permission to flip things upside down. Like Roosevelt, we have authority. We have the mandate. Is there any law that prevents us from doing things that are never wrong?
Instead of managing behavior, maybe we should be simply living rightly. The surest way to become just and righteous is to live justly and righteously.
As I’ve reflected on this idea, I keep returning to several themes of behaviors in this positive vein. Here are five things in Scripture that I believe are never wrong:
HUMILITY
First Peter 5:5 says, “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” Ephesians 4:2 says, “Be completely humble and gentle.” And we’re familiar with Jesus’ words in Matthew 20:16, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” These verses convey that there is never a time when authentic humility is frowned on by God or a bad strategy for life. It is always a good thing, and never wrong, to be humble. Saint Augustine put it this way: “Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not yet exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.”4
REPENTANCE
First John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful”; Isaiah 30:15 says, “In repentance and rest is your salvation”; and in Matthew 18:22, Jesus told Peter to forgive his brother “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” In Scripture, confessing sins and repenting—saying you’re sorry—is always virtuous and a healthy part of maintaining and restoring relationship with God and others. Do you want to move your life forward today? Think of somebody you can forgive, and forgive that person. Think of something for which you need to apologize, and do so. When it comes to creating a just world, one of the best things we can do is to say, “I’m sorry.” It’s also often the hardest response, but repentance is never wrong.
FAITH
Hebrews 11:6 says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” We also sense Jesus’ discouragement with His followers throughout the book of Matthew when He says, “O you of little faith” (for example, 6:30; 14:31 ESV). God desires to nurture in us and draw out of us a greater faith, a stronger reliance upon Him, and a readier trust in His promises that we would end each day with greater faith than when we began that day. Faith is always good and never wrong.
PRAYER
Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to “pray continually.” And the 150 psalms, or songs of prayer, in the middle of Scripture make it very clear to us that it’s always appropriate to pray. There’s never a time when turning our eyes and tuning our ears to God falls outside the bounds of what we should be doing in that moment. Prayer is never wrong.
But probably more important than all these others is the idea that love is never wrong. In Galatians 5:22–23, love is listed as the first of many attributes that make up the fruits of the Spirit. These verses close by saying, “Against such things there is no law.” This means that there is never a time when love or these other virtues are legislated against. Therefore, there is never a time when love is wrong.
Jesus commands us to love, and, in his famous passage on love in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul wrote, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud” (v. 4). In verse 8, he declared, “Love never fails.” Love is both a sanction and an imperative. It is a sanction in that it is always good, and it is an imperative in that we should always do it.
There is no law, no legislation, no case against love. It is never wrong. We can, of course, do foolish and even very harmful things from a motivation of love (as the classic dictum observes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”), but that is a separate issue for another time.5 Biblical and sacrificial love is not only fully sanctioned, but mandated.
Jesus’ strongest commands are more focused on what to do rather than what not to do. And this loving others is a command woven throughout all of Scripture.
We find this command in Leviticus 19:18: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6:5 and this verse and then expostulated on them: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments’ ” (Matthew 22:37–40).
Writing to the church at Galatia, Paul added, “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ ” (Galations 5:13–14).
One of the best ways to follow Jesus and develop authentic spirituality is to start each day with a mental framework of love. With this mind-set, we ask, “Who am I going to bless? Who could I encourage?” And, motivated by love, “What offense can I overlook?”
Choosing love will slowly begin to weed sin out of our behavior patterns. Jesus saw the avoidance of sin as a by-product of choosing love. We are commanded to love, and every failure to love is a sin. The one who loves is the one who is not sinning.
One of the early church leaders, Augustine, in his commentary on the book of 1 John, summed up the principle by simply stating, “Love and do as you please.”6 If our hearts are oriented toward the love of God and others, then all that follows will sort itself out.
Mother Teresa said it this way: “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
If love comes with a sanction and an imperative, then there is never a time when it is wrong and never a time when it can be ignored. It’s something we can be sure of and something we can always return to.
Love is.
Love does.
Love holds.
Love believes.
Love suffers.
Love gives.
And love is never wrong.
LOVE AS SACRAMENT
In my first book, Pursuing Justice, I included a chapter called “Love as Sacrament.” In it I tried to show the curious, unfortunate, and rather significant shift in our culture’s understanding of the word love. Love, culturally speaking, is usually meant to denote the intensity of our wants, wishes, or desires. If we long for something, that must mean we love it. If we really want something, we say we really love it. If we have an intense desire for it, we must love, love, LOVE it!
When we define love in terms of desire or wants, what we’re in effect doing is replacing love’s deep meaning with the definition of lust—intense want or desire. It is shocking that we’ve inadvertently turned love into a synonym for lust.
This is radically different from the way Jesus measured love. In John 15, He said that love has no greater expression than laying one’s life down for a brother or sister (v. 13). Sacrifice, with its ultimate expression in giving up one’s life for another, is at the heart of love. Whereas for our culture the metric is desire, for Jesus the metric of love is sacrifice and service.
The word sacrifice shares the same root as the word sacrament, which has for us a very spiritual and religious connotation. And the commonality of these two words can be seen in a well-known event in Jesus’ ministry. As He sat with His disciples the night before He gave His life as a sacrifice, Jesus took and passed the bread and wine—in what Christians called the sacrament of communion, or the Lord’s Supper—and said, “This is My blood. This is My body, broken for you.” What Jesus was literally saying to His disciples that night as He held out the wine and the bread was, “Here is the full measure of My love.”
As we participate in the sacraments of communion, marriage, or baptism, we are entering into, remembering, and hopefully calling to mind the definition of love. It’s a great irony that individuals can often partake of the sacraments of Jesus, thinking only of the religious benefits for themselves, while missing completely the fact that they are entering into love-saturated symbolism.
As we begin to wrap our minds fully around Jesus’ understanding of and the scriptural mandates for love, we won’t be able to participate in the sacraments or in any religious rituals without coming away marked and shaped by the love of God in Christ and compelled to reflect the same love for humanity.
SIMPLY LOVE
In Romans 13:8, Paul stated, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.”
Grace wins over legalism.
Sadly, however, there is a long history of trading the positive call of love into a set of religious rules, a set of sins to avoid, or a form of behavior management that keeps us looking externally pure and righteous. Such a negative focus is a lot like playing defense with no thought to offense.
Jesus, by contrast, spent a lot of time talking about what we should be doing—the kinds of things that are always right and never wrong.
It’s a lot like learning to ride a bike. Forward momentum is a much more powerful balancing force than sitting on a bike, trying to keep it from tipping. The wise father will direct his child’s focus toward building forward momentum, knowing that balance, and avoiding falling to the left or the right, is largely resolved through the bike’s momentum. Likewise, Christ’s mandates and the call to follow Him all speak to a momentum in the life of the believer that handles much of errant behavior through positive focus and pursuit.
We have the authority and the mandate to run forward—to write new national monuments into existence.
If you want to walk forward with confidence, if you want to put down sure steps, find the things that are never wrong, always right, and do those things—even in times of doubt and uncertainty.
I have tried to raise my daughters not to be afraid of making mistakes. Rather, my hope for them is that they would be excited about experimenting and trying and testing. We try to let them paint, bake, sing, create, and serve without worrying whether they have it exactly right or perfect.
I want my daughters to be confident. To know that they can do some good.
Jesus says childlike faith is our best template, which means faith isn’t beyond us. We can do this. We can get excited about being wholeheartedly, confidently engaged in the aspects of faith that are never wrong.
Faith doesn’t require a stratospheric IQ, encyclopedic knowledge, a PhD, good looks, exceptional talent, or any other worldly measure of value or credibility. Faith requires obedience.
Who has been the most encouraging person in your faith walk? The person who gave you a huge list of dos and don’ts probably didn’t have the greatest influence on you. It was probably the person who most made you feel you could succeed.
God has told us, as a dad tells his kids, “Go out in the world.” Jesus said in Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world.” There’s an exciting assumption buried in what Jesus was saying: What God has called us to do is something He’s made possible for us to do. We can do it. We have the mandate and the authority.
You have gifts, talents, and the ability to love. Be empowered. Be encouraged. The God who calls us to love has given us the capacity to love.
For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.
—PSALM 100:5