Believe me, I know what it is like to have a stiff neck. I’ve been to the walk-in chiropractor twice this last week because I couldn’t even swivel my head to back out the driveway. Nothing disturbs me quite like lying contorted, vulnerable on a table while a strong man uses his full bodyweight to crack my bones into submission.
Lately it feels I’ve encountered enough theology to be suspicious of people who claim to have a good handle on it.
I’m no Bible scholar myself, but I do wake up with a hunger to eat God’s word until I am satisfied. I do yearn for spiritual food, the meaty kind that doesn’t just begin and end with a milky, watered-down sort of love-everybody vibe.
Why should I stop and be content with loving everyone? Is it really enough? Actually, how is it possible to love everyone? Even the people who hate me? How can I drum up love for people who slander me and spit in my face?
I’m not sure I can do it, so I want to better know God, “the Lord, who stretches out the heavens, who lays the foundation of the earth, and who forms the human spirit within a person” (Zechariah 12:1). He knows everything; he’s got to know about love.
In my most recent church experience, I encountered folks who, as Dallas Willard postured in his book, The Divine Conspiracy, “take external conformity and profession of perfectly correct doctrine” as “primary goals” for Christlikeness.
In other words, they play by the rules, the ones they believe are best (according to Scripture), thinking it makes them Jesus experts. Then they do God a favor by forcing it on other people.
But Jesus condemned this very type of behavior, and He had some strong words for those people (not exactly the same vibe as “love everyone”):
“Woe to you…you hypocrites!
You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice the child of hell as yourselves!”
Matthew 23:15
Yikes. The last thing I want to make is converts, in that case.
Dallas Willard writes that this zealous approach (Follow these rules! This church is right, that church is wrong!) produces no obedience out of love, but will rather, “either crush the human mind and soul and separate people from Jesus, or produce hide-bound legalists and theological experts with ‘lips close to God and hearts far from Him’ (Isa. 29:13).”
To be closer to Jesus, to know what love looks like, we sometimes have to run in the opposite direction of church. There sure are a lot of examples of this in the Bible.
I’ve been going through the book of Acts with my kids. Last week, we did a little craft (my approach to Sunday school is straight out of Ezekiel; lots of modeling clay and dioramas), where I read the chapter that ends with Stephen being stoned for his words in front of the Sanhedrin.
For a good few minutes in the story, Stephen has the positive attention of the Sanhedrin, who love going over their Jewish history and their powerful God. But Stephen really annoys them when he declares God, specifically the Holy Spirit, as a Someone who cannot be tamed, nor comprehended by human beings.
“You stiff-necked people!” Stephens says, “Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors. You always resist the Holy Spirit!”
They hated this, you see, because they thought they were pretty enlightened. Their forward-looking, zero-range-of-motion head position tolerated none of this speaking up business. Stephen was standing up to the institutional church of that day, and it was outrageous. So they did the usual, and stoned him to death.
It made one of Stephen’s last statements ring irony in the ears of those who bore witness, “Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute?” (Acts 7:52)
(We made little clay Stephens and stuck pieces of gravel to his body.)
So, back to love, I guess, and how to reckon our churchified lives as believers with true, holy, God-breathed love that conquers not only hate but the so-called revelations of the more “enlightened”.
Love doesn’t spring from the Law, but is born of the Spirit. Love is supernatural, so we cannot fake it, or it will eventually surface out in our hypocrisy, as it did with the Jewish leaders and Stephen. He didn’t fall in line with their theology, and he was punished for it.
Love: We can’t even pretend to know what it truly is, or what it is capable of, because it will only grow as a Spirit fruit on a Spirit tree, and that without any outsider influence or conversion. It seeks forgiveness and unity, and no peace springs up without it. No law-making, law-bending, or superior knowledge can establish the real thing.
Love is a divine spiritual weapon that has the power to demolish strongholds (2 Cor. 10:4). It has the ability to correct the worse spiritual misalignment, the strength to soften the stiffest of necks.
Love is God. God is Love.
The world is full of counterfeits, and sometimes the church is, too.
Don’t be a stiffneck. Run to Jesus.
Run.
