Love, Acceptance and Endorsement

I knew a woman who was very much loved by her parents. That means her parents wanted the very best for her. She was in there hearts and minds most all of the time. She didn’t need to do anything or become anything in order to have that love. She was loved because she was their daughter.

This woman was also born with a debilitating syndrome. In impacted her cognitive ability. It distorted her appearance. It rendered her non-verbal. No doubt, her parents very devastated by her condition at birth; but, since they were powerless to change it, it was something that they accepted about her. Were it changeable, they would have changed it in a second. But since it was not, they accepted her as she was.

This didn’t mean that they endorsed her condition as something everyone or anyone else should have. They knew that this condition was a part of what the Bible calls “the curse”. It was damage to the system that creates us and a deviation from God’s plan for us before sin changed the world.

With something like this syndrome it was easy to see where the line existed between acceptance and endorsement. It would have been wrong for the parents to be so grieved by her disability that they chose to not love her. Thankfully, that was not the situation in this case. With some of the “disorders” that happen under sin and the curse it is harder to find that line.

All of us are born with a sinful nature. We are all disabled in this sense. God loves us nonetheless. He loves us but he doesn’t wish to leave us in this state. You could say that He accepts that we have a problem. In this case, God can do something about it, and He did. He did not wave His hand and declare that our condition was cool. Very much the opposite. God has never endorsed sin, even in the smallest doses. Jesus created a way for our condition to be forgiven, provided access to the Holy Spirit so that our condition could be managed, and ultimately provided as way for our sinful condition to be abandoned at our death and permanently fixed with a Heavenly and later resurrected Earthly body.

While we wait for this to be fulfilled, how should we think about ourselves. First, we should love ourselves. God does. Our condition can manifest itself in some pretty ugly ways. The doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be loved. We can also accept what we are. We are not declaring ourselves normal or flawless. We are accepting that we are flawed, deeply flawed. The temptation is to endorse our condition. I am born this way! Yes, we are. Therefore this is what I am. No, it is not. It is what you are for now. It is the cross we bear in the interim.

Few people seek to endorse such things as selfish, lustful, uncontrollably angry, addicted, petty, or many of the other sins. Some might, but most get that these are flaws not sources of identity. The LGBTQ+ movement wants to take a flaw and make it an identity. I understand that this is the product of centuries of rejection and mistreatment. That mistreatment an unacceptable flaw in itself. The danger of making a sexual orientation an identity is that it places it outside the umbrella of sin and declares it to be normal. That may feel comforting, but Jesus died for sin. He redeems sinners.

I know I am loved by God, and I understand what I am, but I do not accept it as okay. My sin is not okay with God or me. I know that Jesus has atoned for me. I know I can manage my sinfulness and make it small and less impactful. I also know it is a part of me that I will shed. Sin is only a conditional part of my identity. It is what I am dealing with at the time.

God loves people who are gay, or have sexual dysphoria or have other sexually related sins. They have come to be this way in a myriad of ways, many involuntarily. Because God loves them, I love them. I want the very best for them. They don’t scare me. I am not repulsed by them. The more I understand them, the more I am simply concerned for them. I get that they equate love with endorsement. Because I love them I can’t endorse their condition. I do accept that this is what they are wrestling with. It can’t be easy. Much is the product of trauma. Some is the product of development in the womb. All have an element of genetics in the form of sinful nature. Some is the result of being unloved and rejected by other people. That is not cool. It is a trap for those who are in this group to call normal what God has identified as sin. It is better to say that I am a sinner, and I need Jesus.