photo © 2009 Helga Weber | more info (via: Wylio)"A revolution without guns? It will never work."
– Ernesto Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries
This post was supposed to be about John Piper.
…and Justin Taylor and Mark Driscoll and Tim Challies and all the leaders of the Neo-Reformed movement with whom I’ve got about a thousand bones to pick.
Spurred by their recent condemnation of Rob Bell, I was going to rail against their narrow view of Orthodoxy, challenge their commitment to Christian unity, judge them for being so judgmental, and then throw a bunch of Bible verses around like Rambo in a last-ditch siege. It would have been ugly, and for about ten minutes, satisfying.
However it seems that in an embarrassing turn of events, the verses I planned to use against John Piper and Tim Challies have come back around to convict me, and now I can barely see my computer screen for this pesky plank jutting out of my eye. So a post that was supposed to be about their lack of love has instead become about mine.
It is I who should be warned that “whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
It is I who need reminding that “if I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast[but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
It is I who have forgotten that “love never fails.”
The truth is, I don’t know how God will judge my fellow human beings after death. I don’t know the exact nature of heaven and hell. I don’t know whether I’m an exclusivist or an inclusivist or a universalist or a conditionalist. I don’t know all the details of how love will prevail…but I believe that it will.
So I might as well start acting like it—with my friends, with my enemies, with Rob Bell, with John Piper, with Republicans, with Democrats, with pacifists, with soldiers, with gays and lesbians, with Westboro Baptist Church, with the poor, with the rich, with the Japanese who lost everything on Friday and, as hard as it is, with the red-faced evangelists who say they deserved it.
For how can I proclaim that “love wins” when it has yet to win in me?
This is a revolution without weapons. God help me to lay down my arms.
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Who are the hardest people for you to love?
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