“If You Don’t Affirm Me, You Don’t Love Me”

“Jesus would’ve baked the cake.”

“Christians hate LGBTQ people.”

“You’re on the wrong side of history”

“Why can’t you let them be ‘their true selves’?”

“That’s just your truth, not mine.”

And, perhaps most painful, especially when it comes from a friend or family member: “If you love me, you’d accept me for who I am.”

All of the slogans that leave Christians silent or shamed today are, at root, different ways of saying the same thing – that truth and love are incompatible. For people to tell the truth, especially when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender, is to be unloving and intolerant. And, to love someone is to affirm their choices.

There’s a uniquely “Christian” version of these slogans, too. Taking a moral stand, we are told, especially on questions so culturally controversial, is to distract from the Gospel. Instead, apparently, the Church needs to be more welcoming and to avoid anything that makes people feel excluded from the Church. After all, we are told, isn’t the Gospel really about inclusivity?

Today, of all the days of Holy Week, directly confronts this mentality. Maundy Thursday is set aside on the Church calendar to remember the Last Supper. The word “maundy” comes from the Latin word for “mandate,” or “command.” At this first celebration of Communion, Jesus gave His disciples “a new command,” that they should love and serve each other. To demonstrate what He meant, He picked up a basin of water and a towel and washed their feet.

To fully understand His words and actions, recall that at this “Last Supper” and first Communion, Jesus and His disciples were obeying God’s original command, given to all Jews, to remember the Passover. God’s people were to never forget how they were rescued from slavery in Egypt. For Jesus to issue a “new” command was an audacious thing to do, especially given how significantly God’s original command stood in Israel’s history and identity as a people.

Jesus, however, went even further than merely adding instructions to an old celebration. Now, rather than remembering how the angel of death “passed over” those homes with lamb’s blood on their doorposts, they were to remember His broken body and His shed blood. Ultimately, the new command was to remember a new rescue, and how, through Christ’s death, death is not merely avoided but finally defeated.

Though the volume has increased in recent years, the American Church has been divided over whether it should be primarily about proclaiming truth or about serving others since at least the mid-20^th century. The Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ “new” command remind us that this is a false dichotomy. It’s an unnecessary choice to make. These two things need never be separated and should never be separated. On the same night Jesus when commanded us to remember how His broken body and shed blood rescues us from sin (that’s the truth), He commanded us to demonstrate our new life by serving others (that’s love).

We need not choose between truth and love. In fact, we must not choose. They always go together, because they are both grounded in the same Source, or specifically, the same Person.

“How to Speak Truth and Love Both Inside and Outside the Church” is a new short course that begins next Tuesday. The course will examine how, in practical terms, we can communicate truth to four groups of people: unbelievers who need to know Jesus, Christians who don’t know what (or how) to think, Gen Z who don’t know how (or whom) to trust, and progressive Christians who have abandoned truth. Instructors for the course are Greg Stier from Dare2Share, Michael Craven from the Colson Center, apologist and author Sean McDowell, and Jonathan Morrow from the Impact 360 Institute.

Come to BreakPoint.org to register. The course runs four consecutive Tuesday nights, beginning next week, April 6. All sessions are recorded and made available to all registered guests, which is really helpful if you have to miss any of the live sessions.

Jesus embodied truth and love, not only in the event we commemorate this day, but every event we remember this Holy Week. He is truth. He is love.

And, He has risen. Indeed.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash