Admonition or Affirmation? Do I have to choose?

These days the word love has kind of by default come to mean something like ‘affirmation’. To love someone or something necessarily means to approve every bit of them. To disagree with some aspect of their life or character means you must hate them, or be afraid of them. (Although, in another shift of language, 'phobia' at the end of something (e.g. 'homophobia') has now come to mean 'hate' rather than 'irrationally fear'.) If you love someone you are obligated to agree with everything they do and say.

This view of love has even crept into Christian thinking and proclamation of the gospel. There is a strong desire to be affirming and accepting and welcoming as the means of love—to affirm and therefore be affirmed. At the same time exists a reluctance to speak against or to say no out of concern it looks unloving, hard or cruel. All under the guise of being ‘loving’.

As always the gospel of Jesus Christ ought to inform us, especially on the topic of love. The greatest act of love ever is the cross of Christ. Yet the cross is at once the most devastating, earth shattering rebuke of humanity and at the same time the sweetest, most tender and breath taking affirmation.

The agony of Christ—his suffering, his affliction and his death—reveals the wrath of God at us. Here on full view is God’s holy, burning anger at mankind. The cross says we deserve to be crushed and killed. The cross is God’s declaration of ‘No’ to who we are and how we live. Our actions brought this on. That’s humbling—humiliating even.

But at the same time the cross reveals perfectly God’s love as he accepts vile sinners through the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. We are forgiven and washed clean, we are given new life and new relationship with God and we now have the certain hope of our own resurrection to eternal life. The cross is God’s astounding ‘Yes’ to us. That is awesome.

So in our proclamation of the message of Jesus, in our ministry to each other and to the world, we must never lose either one of admonition or affirmation. There is a time that love means saying 'no'. And a time when love means saying 'yes'. If we only affirm, we miss the point of being saved from sin. If we only admonish, we miss the point that we are saved from sin in Jesus.

To truly love will always mean to do both.