Sometimes, the Bible is difficult to understand because the language used in our translation, while correct, isn’t how we talk normally. Today, I will suggest a change of one word that, I believe, will help our understanding of what John is saying in our text. I want to exchange the word “for” for the word “because” in verses three and four.
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“If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” sounds like a big contradiction with “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”
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One can only walk in love if one walks in the light. Somehow, our culture has determined that truth and love are like oil and water; they don’t mix. Truth is seen as harsh and condemning, whereas love is soft and cuddly, and nonjudgmental. In this passage, John shows the fallacy of such reasoning.
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Ask any Christian what holiness means, and you may get a range of answers. If you ask a conservative Presbyterian (like a PCA or Orthodox Presbyterian), you will get one answer. Ask a liberal or progressive Presbyterian, like Presbyterian USA, and you will get a quite different Presbyterian answer. Ask an Assembly of God (AoG) member, and you will probably get a quite different answer. Ask a Nazarene and you will probably get an answer much like the AoG Christian (because their roots come from the same holiness movement). If you ask a few Southern Baptists and you will get the full range of answers since the Southern Baptists aren’t quite as homogenous as the other denominations. So, that leaves us with a question with no singular answer.
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Have there been “gay Christians” in the history of the church? Or is this strictly a 21st-century thing? History shows us that homosexuality is not new (go all the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah and Leviticus 18 as evidence), and homosexual people have been coming to faith for a long time. So, I would say the issue of “gay Christianity” is not a new phenomenon. The question is, how does the Scripture deal with “gay Christianity”
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We know that to get the kind of results Jesus got, we must do the work the same way Jesus did. For anyone who has carefully studied how Jesus made disciples, it is evident that the vast bulk of the church is not following Jesus as a disciple-maker.
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