The following message is based on John 13:31-35 and is adapted from Jonathan Leeman’s The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love. Preached Sunday Morning, February 7 by Pastor Paul Edwards at Calvary Baptist Church of Waterford, Michigan. The audio is here.

THE FOLLOWING ARE PASTOR EDWARDS’ PULPIT NOTES – NOT A TRANSCRIPT

God intends for the way we interact with one another as believers to help redefine love and beauty for fallen humanity. The basis of our interaction with one another is love.

 Love is an affection for another’s good, recognizing that the ultimate good is God. Love is from God as a gift as distinguished from the common way we view love: love as desire or attraction.

Love as desire or attraction says, “I love you because you are beautiful, good, rich, etc.” The Bible doesn’t deny this kind of love exists. It just doesn’t make it primary.

Love as gift (benevolence) is not prompted by the attractiveness of the one loved but rather by a quality of benevolence in the one who is showing love: “I love you because I want to do you good.” This is the primary focus of love in the Bible.

During the next two Sunday morning services we will examine both of these views of love, aiming for this conclusion: The highest expression of love is God’s love for himself and his own glory. Therefore, we ought to love God for God’s sake, our neighbors for God’s sake, and one another (in the church) for God’s sake. Jonathan Leeman:

 “I should not love you for your own sake; I should love you because you are created in God’s image, because you belong to Him, because he has commanded me to. Love centered on anything other than God is the opposite of love.”

“God does not love humanity because he sensed anything intrinsically valuable in us. God loves everyone because he beholds his own handiwork, image, and glory in everyone.”

 What influences our ideas about love that place them opposition to biblical ideas about love?

 1.                  The American Concept of Individualism

The creed of American individualism is: “I am principally obligated to myself and maximizing my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”

Every attachment is negotiable. We are all free agents, and every relationship is a contract that can be renegotiated or canceled.

This self-actualization and self-realization has fundamentally altered the way we think about love. A romanticized love has replaced rational compassion as the ideal in all of our relationships:

Rational love (agape) or compassion is motivated by the others’ ultimate good.

Romantic love (eros) is motivated by how the other ultimately makes me feel, based not on loving the other for the sake of God, but rather on loving the other for the sake of ourselves:

 “I might claim to love you, but it’s really the way that you make me feel that I love. You make me feel accepted, smart, inspired, romantic, tingly, encouraged, special, warm and fuzzy, turned on, attracted, attractive, , hot, all that I can be, hardworking, creative, full of life, intellectually edified, spiritually edified, like a hero, empowered, built up, great! As John Piper has said, we call it “love” when people “make much of us.”

 When self-actualization and self-realization become the basis for our love in the church, the focus of our ministry becomes therapy and not the gospel, because how you feel is more important than any truth about what you actually are.

2.                  Consumerism, or maximizing purchases for my benefit

The focus on the individual ultimately leads to a consumer mindset in every area of life, including love.

Love becomes an exchange: what does this person possess in terms of character traits, external beauty, resources, etc that will serve to fulfill me and my desires.

The object of our desires becomes the deciding factor rather than the faculty (rationalizing) of desire. In other words, when the object of our desire becomes the sole focus of our desires, we never stop to ask, “Are my desires right?”

 Superficiality is the normal result. We focus on externals rather than on deeper unseen qualities. Beauty more than character, income more than constancy, manners more than virtue.

 How does this focus on maximizing the purchase for my benefit affect my relationship with the church? I decide whether or not I fit into a church fellowship based on superficial externals rather than on quality internals. When superficial externals have my attention more than quality internals, I evaluate my experience rather than my heart.

We might leave a worship service and say things like, “I liked the music, except that one song. The preacher wasn’t very funny. Did you see any programs for teenagers? Am I comfortable with these people – are they like me?”

We must intentionally focus our desires away from our own self-interest and rather ask hard questions about the not so readily apparent internal qualities: is the mission of this church biblical? Is it gospel-centered? Is truth valued over pragmatism?

3.                  A culture opposed to any kind of commitment

If the focus of my love is me and my self-actualization, I will have an aversion to making any kind of long-term or even permanent commitments to another person or organization.

“People today are generally more reluctant to enter into binding commitments and associations that will limit the options available to them in the future.”

We worship the god of options. The consumeristic mindset, the multiplicity of options, and the worry of buyer’s remorse hinders the ability to make commitments in everything from jobs, to spouses, to restaurants, to houses, and to churches.

Commitments are not based on the ultimate value derived for the individual, rather than on moral obligation or a sense of duty or a call to serve or care for the other. Relationships become a function of what is purely advantageous to one’s own well-being. Whenever a relationship becomes inconvenient or demands too much, it is left behind.

When the idea of binding commitment is removed from the definition of love, churches become places where personal sacrifices are seldom made.

How do these characteristics of our contemporary ideas about love fit with Jesus commanding us to “love one another as I have loved you”? Obviously they don’t.

The Bible says, “God is love,” not “Love is God.” We have taken our romanticized view of love and defined God by it, rather than beginning with an understanding of God and defining love by Him.

So if I am going to love you the way Jesus loves you, I need a biblical understanding of God as love, freed from the influences of the romanticized view of love, a subject we will take up next week.

Randall Balmer is Professor of American Religious History at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written several books which explore the development of political activism by people of faith, specifically conservative evangelicals.

His most recent foray into this effort is The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond (2010: Baylor University Press) in which he asserts that what has come to be known as the “Religious Right” did not have its beginnings as a response to the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion on demand in 1973 (Roe v. Wade). Rather Dr. Balmer forwards a radically different motivation for the formation of conservative evangelical political engagement in the mid to late 1970s: the Green v Connally decision by the District Court of the District of Columbia on June 30, 1971 which threatened the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policy denying admission to students of color.

Balmer’s conclusion that the Roe v. Wade decision was not a precipitating factor in the formation of conservative evangelical political engagement serves as a classic example of historic revisionism. Of the response of evangelicals in 1973 to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion on demand Balmer writes:

While a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly questioned the ruling, the overwhelming response on the part of evangelicals was silence, even approval.

Indeed, Balmer’s thesis is that the abortion issue was only “cobbled into the agenda of the Religious Right” as a political maneuver by Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of evangelical political activism, who knew (according to Balmer’s characterization) that the sterile subject of tax exemption would not rally evangelicals to political action, engendering the kind of emotional response that “protecting those poor, defenseless babies” would create. Randall seems to be asserting that the abortion issue was only a front for the real cause of standing against the IRS for threatening the tax exempt status of evangelical schools. Money. not morals, was the precipitating cause of the Religious Right.

To support his revisionism, Balmer quotes Dr. Edward Dobson who was “formerly Falwell’s assistant at Moral Majority,”:

“The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

Balmer offers no footnote to cite the source of the above quote, only stating that the comment was made in 1999, and offering no details about the context. So I picked up the phone and called Dr. Dobson, who is now living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

When I asked Dr. Dobson if he recalled making such a statement he replied that while he has no doubt that he may have made such a statement, the way in which Dr. Balmer was using it seemed to be out of context. Dr. Dobson told me, “I have always argued that while abortion was not the major issue in the formation of the Moral Majority, it was certainly one of the issues.”

When I asked Dr. Dobson if he agreed with Randall’s assertion that the Religious Right was formed more as a response to Bob Jones University losing its tax exempt status rather than as a reaction to the Roe v. Wade decision, Dr. Dobson told me that such an assertion was “absolutely false. The subject of Bob Jones University never came up in any conversations as a reason for forming the Moral Majority. In fact, Bob Jones, Jr. once called Jerry Falwell ‘the most dangerous man in America,’ so the notion that these men would be concerned with defending Bob Jones University lacks merit.”

What kind of history is this? On what basis does Balmer reach the conclusion that money and racism were the motivating factors that precipitated conservative political activism and not the moral issues of abortion, marriage, and homosexuality?

Dr. Balmer is firmly in the camp of those who see the purpose of the gospel to be primarily about reforming the ills of society through social action. He’s part of the new “Religious Left,” a category of evangelicals he denied exists during a recent radio interview with me. While his bias is implicit in his conclusions, it’s also explicitly stated. Not until you get to the end of Balmer’s 84 page revisionism does he show his hand:

“For too many years I offered an exasperated defense, arguing that the Bible I read enjoins me to act with justice and points me toward the left of the political spectrum.”

The Making of Evangelicalism is a distortion of facts in support of biased characterizations of conservative evangelicals. In addition to the absurd notion that a defense of the sanctity of life was not the precipitating cause of the formation of the Religious Right, Balmer asserts that conservative Christians opposed women’s rights, supported torture, care more about abortion than divorce, support the destruction of the environment, and favor the affluent more than poor, without once offering a shred of objective balance from those he accuses. This sounds more like Keith Olbermann than a respected historian.

What kind of historian produces a history that presents facts in evidence supporting only half the history?  Balmer has not written a history of the making of evangelicalism. The reality is Balmer is “making up” evangelicalism by reading into history a conclusion influenced by his own progressive bias against conservative evangelical political engagement. History as he would like it to be, not as it was.

Conversations with Today’s Influencers and Critical Thinkers

4:00 pm – A True American Hero
My guest at the beginning of today’s program is Admiral Jeremiah Denton. Admiral Denton is also the former Senator from Alabama (1981 – 1987). He spent nearly eight years as a POW in Vietnam and is best known as the naval aviator who used his eyes to blink the word “TORTURE” in Morse code during a televised interrogation.

Admiral Denton is a Christian and the author of the book, When Hell Was in Session, made into a motion picture starring Hal Holbrooke.

4:20 pm – Shaping How We Lead by Who We Are
How does our internal relationship with God affect or influence our external relationships with others, especially in the realm of leadership? Robert Fryling is publisher of InterVarsity Press. He brings his years of leadership experience to bear on the issue how we think about our leadership goals and values.

5:05 pm – Christianity and the Culture of Sports
With the Superbowl coming up on Sunday, what better time to examine critically the relationship between sports and faith. Shirl James Hoffman has written an excellent critical analysis of how faith – especially evangelicalism – has acquiesed to a sports culture: Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports.

5:25 pm – The Controversy over Scripture References on Rifle Sights
In the last month it was revealed that a Wixom, MI manufacturer of rifle sights for the US military has customarily inscribed Bible references as part of the serial number on each sight. This has raised concerns about a “Christian Crusade” against Muslims since most of those sights are being used by our military in predominantly Muslim countries. Tom Munsosn from Trijicon – the manufacturer of the sights – gives us his perspective.