The Christian faith has numerous several heroes of uncertainty replaced by faith. There are the stories of Augustine and Luther, overcoming lust and guilt, respectively. There are the more modern stories of the likes of Josh McDowell examining the biblical “evidence” for its truthfulness.

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So there are, apparently, lots of ways forward toward assurance, depending on your issues, your personality, and the like.

But there’s one that we don’t hear about so much. It’s the way that Colossians offers as the road to assurance. It’s the way of love:

My goal is that their hearts would be encouraged and united together in love so that they might have all the riches of assurance that come with understanding, so that they might have the knowledge of the secret plan of God, namely Christ. (Col 2:2, CEB)

While we so often put a premium on the knowledge we can gain, the understanding of complex matters for which we can muster an argument, as the means to assurance, we find a different route laid out by Paul here.

It is the hearts united in love that attain to assurance and understanding. Hearts united in love pave the road to full knowledge of Christ.

In John, Jesus tells his disciples, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples–if you love one another.”

Apparently, that love is not only a signpost for the outsiders, but for the insiders as well.

A community of heart-knit love is the way to full assurance.

But I now repent in sackcloth and ashes.

Basically, what this tells you about me is that I don’t like something until I own it. Then it becomes the greatest thing ever. At least, until I leave it behind again.

(Note to self: talk to therapist about God complex: things become good by my involvement with and blessing of them, as I see the world.)

So to what do I now find myself needing to commit as the new year approaches? A more integrated life. By this I mean that I can no longer sideline everything else other than working and taking care of the kids.

A few weeks ago I had a flare up of a sometimes-recurring lower back pain. Put simply, this is “sitting on my butt” disease. Sit too long in the car. Sit too long in front of the computer. Your back ends up doing too much of the work, your other muscles don’t support you as they should. The lower back spasms. And you end up wasting a day of your life at the doctor and shuffling around at about the speed of a three-toed sloth.

This was a wake-up call to me: the life that I am given to live on this earth is not just a life of work and family–as important as those things are; it’s not just about mind and community. It is also an embodied life. And more…

So I return to the great command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and am reminded that applying this in my little world means adding some things that I have allowed to fall to the side.

I cannot love God with my mind if I have so neglected my body that it will not allow me the solace to sit and read and write.

Of course, once I start thinking about the holistic calling to love God, other areas of neglect surface soon enough as well.

And so, back to my original confession: I have a few days of vacation here before the New Year. Days in which to not only fret about the syllabus that has yet to be written for next Wednesday’s class, but also to take inventory of a life that does not fully lean God-ward as I would have it.

With a new year, a new quarter, and a newly awakened awareness, I think of restructuring my days and my week so that the care I take of my life might show in action the fullness of integration that I confess to need in theory.

So bring on the new year’s resolutions. And maybe even the actions that make good on them.

At a party this weekend at my parents’ house, I had a chance to talk with a man who is a self-described “seeker.” He loves to study religions, all religions. He loves Eastern and Western. He has seen that people in any tradition (and with no religious tradition) can be “good.”

We all know how to love, right?

Well, yes and no.

Love is a malleable category. To take one less-than-serious example, we used to joke in my college fellowship group that we were doing something “in Christian love,” when we were being a jerk about something. The truth behind the joke was that all too often we used “Christian love” as a thin veneer for not loving our neighbor as ourself.

Back to reality: our definitions of love are given their substance by the stories in which they are embedded. Family histories create tremendously powerful understandings of what love looks like–for both good and ill.

And, as Christians, we confess a story about Jesus that gives specific shape to the command to love one another.

Advent, and its remembrance of “love,” provides a black-and-white picture of what will come in full color on Good Friday.

Love in the Christian story is laying down our own life so that another might live. It is setting aside our own glory so that it might accrue to another.

“Remember the Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul admonishes, “that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor so that you, through his poverty, might become rich.”

To love as a Christian depends on two things.

One, it depends on the confidence that if we lay down our life, God is able to give it back again. The call to Christian love only makes sense in a story that resolves in resurrection. Otherwise, it is mere martyrdom.

Two, it depends on an unshakable conviction that the economy of the kingdom of God is an economy of abundance. It is an economy that brings forth riches out of poverty.

Of course, this is just another way of saying we believe in the God who gives life from the dead. But it’s a life from the dead, a something from nothing, that impinges also on the present. See, it’s not merely that our riches make other people rich, or Jesus’ riches that make us rich. On the contrary, it is through Jesus’ poverty that we are made rich, partakers of God’s heavenly inheritance.

Christian love is Advent love because it is Good Friday love. It is love that moves the story of God to its successful climax.

It is the story of the self-giving God who becomes the self-giving Christ so that all those who are Christs might live and reign with him forever.

The first day we owned it I pulled out the avocado green dishwasher with a couple buddies. And, yes, the old shut-offs were leaky so water was soon cascading into the basement. Within a couple of months, though, we had laid the kitchen tile, painted the cabinets, replaced the counter tops, changed the sink fixture, moved in the new appliances–and voila! The kitchen was beautiful (and all decked out to the Night Kitchen theme).

With saws and nails and hammers in hand, we loved on the dining room by tacking up wainscoting and chair rail, painting with a silver linen look, and changing out the light fixture.

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I love that first house, not because it was an awesome house, but because we poured our labor into it.

Last weekend, I finally made good on a vision for planting some flowery vines and other things in front of our house here in San Francisco. It wasn’t much, but it makes a huge difference in how I see the house. And I’m proud of the my house here for perhaps the first time. I love the way those changes enhance the way it looks.

It wasn’t love that made me labor, it was labor that made me love.

John Locke proposed that mixing your labor with the soil was how property rights developed. I don’t know about his theories of government or his history, but I know the feeling he’s talking about. When you mix your labor with something, you feel like it’s yours.

The same goes for our relationships.

Once upon a time, the main pre-marriage counseling that my circle was into was a set of bootlegged Tim Keller sermons. He was talking at one point about how we treat children differently from our spouses: “By the time that child is 18 years old, even if he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, you love him. Why? Because you’ve spent the past 18 years pouring yourself into him.” Conversely, in marriage, we hope to find our fulfillment by having our own needs met by the other rather than discovering love in pouring our life into our spouse.

And there’s the trick. Too often in our relationships we look for someone, or something in the case of organizations, that are worth loving, and then envision ourselves laboring there–at least for as long as the initial infatuation lasts.

But perhaps that is only a quick fix. Perhaps real love doesn’t work that way. Perhaps real love, be it of an individual or a community, is not about responding to love with labor, but cultivating love through our labors. Perhaps the dynamic that more truly satisfies, the place where more profound love, develops, is not in the discovery of the lovely, but in the cultivation of love through our giving ourselves to our beloved.

Can we ever love a church if we ask it to meet our needs? Or will we only love it if we give ourselves to it? Can we ever love a city if we only use its resources to meet our expectations? Or will we only love if we pour out our lives in making it better?

Mix a little labor. See what happens.

And from here, he invites us to consider what the life of the children of God is to be like–a life of love, and a life of praise (Church Dogmatics §18).

In wrestling with the topic of love, Barth gets off to a promising start (§18.2). He insists that we not allow our own vague notions of love to be our standard for the love that God demands of us. Instead, we come to the drama of salvation and learn from this what the love of God is. And then we know what this love is that we are called to emulate.

We know love, Barth insists, only in light of the “outwardness” of God’s love to us–the occurrence of love in revelation (which would mean, in Jesus Christ). This is exactly right.

Then things go downhill.

What we learn from this love toward us, Barth asserts, is “the inwardness of God,” that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and therefore God is love in himself before people ever come on the scene.

But when Barth turns to establish these points, the texts all point in the same direction: not toward love as some transhistorical, Trinitarian reality, but as the reality we know–and that IS–simply as the work of God in Jesus Christ to rescue humanity.

The great claim, “God is love,” is substantiated by saying that love is not our love for God, but God’s love in giving his son as a sacrifice for our sins; it is backed up by saying that love is God’s sending of the Son so that we can live through him.

God’s love is known in the giving of Jesus on the cross.

Barth’s eagerness to transpose this into Trinitarian eternal realities bodes ill for the remaining part of the chapter, also. The whole of this section wanders from Barth’s own stated premise: that God’s love for us first shows what our love in turn is to be.

Where this should have taken Barth was in realizing that God’s love in the giving of the Son is the Son’s love in giving of himself that we are called to execute in our love for one another. It should have led him to work out a paradigm of loving God that entails participating in the mission of God by giving ourselves so that others might live in this new human family that God is creating.

Instead, Barth gets mired in a debilitating theological program of saying that love to God is merely recognizing again and again that we seek God as those who know we will be found by grace. The notion that we are always sinners, always received only by grace, creates a vision of Christian love that is thin, at best: always attempting to relive the reality of being found afresh by God as a sinner saved by grace.

This is not the picture of love that the saving cross of Christ generates. We love not merely as recipients of grace, but as those who enact the saving story of Jesus in communities that bear Jesus’ name.

There is a certain genius to Barth’s system: with a definition of love that simply means coming to be received by God’s grace, he cuts off the possibility that we have to confess that someone outside of Christ is, in fact, loving God or loving neighbor better than we who confess Christ’s name.

To my mind, Barth’s solution is too easy.

I think it is important to say, instead, that to love God and love neighbor looks like living the self-sacrificial life of the cross, and that, therefore, Christians will always be confronted with those who are not “in Christ” who appear to be living the story better than ourselves. And, these should be the impetus for us to renew our repentance and renew our love rather than redefining love such that we can privately seek God’s face without allow any conviction to develop in the face of our failure to love.

In the latter half of the paragraph about Paul’s own ministry, the formation of Christ in the Gentiles is the goal. Paul extends Christ’s death by going to the Gentiles, and the goal is that Christ Himself is formed in them. This is the hope of glory.

The story Paul tells is one in which there is a sure and certain line to be drawn between the cross of Christ and the eternal hope that lies ahead. “Hope” is Christological, and begun by participation “in him.” Paul’s own work intends to “present each person mature in Christ” (1:28).

The transformation that lies ahead is begun now. It begins with the cross, is reenacted in the community’s cruciform life together, plays out in acts of faithful obedience and love, and resolves with hope being realized in glory.

The trick, it seems, is to hold onto all these things simultaneously: to be of sure hope, possessing Christ, while not embracing a triumphalism that neglects the cross; to be confident that we are a reconciled people, while still recognizing our need for transformation; to see the cross of Christ saving us, but not to leave it behind as we seek out how to best love and serve the world in which we find ourselves. There is no hope without the cross, but there is no maturity or love without it, either.

Too infrequently do we realize that this means that the characters in the stories with whom we bear the greatest similarity are the Jewish people whose understanding of God’s work is getting reconfigured. Thus, the story of Jesus’ sermon in Luke 4 tells us as much as them that God’s blessing cannot be confined to us as the insiders; Jesus’ healing the centurion tells us as much as them that God’s blessings and Jesus’ authority reach beyond the people of God even to those who could rightly be labelled “enemy”; and the parable of the Good Samaritan warns us that faithful keeping of the Law of God can keep us from seeing the neighbor whom we are called to love.

In all of this, there is something to be learned for Christians who hold to a traditionalist view of marriage as something God has ordained to be between a man and a woman. Once we have said this much, we still have not yet said what it means for our posture toward those who disagree, whom we would see as not practicing what falls within the sphere of God’s instruction for humanity.

Perhaps I can now put it more strongly: these stories together demonstrate that what God wants of us is not to restrict God’s blessings to the people of God, but to participate in showering these blessings indiscriminately among the people of the earth.

And, this blessing does not mean simply calling them to join the people of God, a “spiritual” concern above and before anything else, but means a true extending to them of all the blessings that come from the authority of Jesus, the mercy we have in our power to extend, the food with which we can feed the hungry, the medicine with which we can feed the sick–all the blessings that God bestows upon the world.

Today I want to add one more NT passage to the mix, to show that all this is not merely hermeneutical trickery on my part. Jesus tells us directly: it is not our business to restrict the blessings of God to those whom we love. This is not the character of God whose children we are.

“I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you because of your faith so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous… Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete” (Matthew 5:44-48, CEB).

The blessings of God indiscriminately shower down upon the earth. And if we are truly God’s children, we are to be agents of such showering in our own world as well. The gay marriage issue is difficult because it is easy to point to the Bible and say that homosexual lifestyles are wrong. But it is even more difficult because God demands that we not restrict the fullness of life and blessing of God to those who do what is right, to those whom we love, to those whom we can address as brother and sister.

Love is not about demanding that people act like we do or believe like we do before receiving the blessings of God that we can help bring about in the real world. Love is about bestowing the blessings of God so that the people around us will see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven–this is exactly what it means to be, as the church, the light of the world. It’s not about keeping God’s Law so people will see how pious we are, it means loving our neighbor, truly, as ourselves, so that they will know themselves loved by our God and Father.

Being part of the in crowd is not, can never be, prerequisite for someone being the recipient of our love, of the blessings of God.

As Christians, we are a people of the book. The scriptures witness to the redemptive work of God that comes to its fulfillment in Christ. This collection of documents is normative for Christians. It tells the stories that found our communities, it reflects on the implications of those stories for our life together. It gives rules to live by.

One of my operating theories these days is that for a people of the book our identity, our ethics, and our hermeneutics are inseparable. How we read the Bible is indicative of how we conceive of what it means to be Christian, what we think we are supposed to do will flow from these two.

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But these “close calls” are all the more wrong for their proximity to the truth.

We are not saved by grace [full stop].

We are saved by the grace of God made known and given to us in Christ.

We are not called to obey [full stop].

We are called to walk in the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ; we are called to obey the words of the good teacher who also laid down his life for his friends.

It is Christ who makes us Christian. It is the participation in the cosmic reality that the crucified Christ is the resurrected Lord over all things. This will give us our own standard and definition of love.

What does it mean to love my neighbor as myself? Somehow, the self-giving of God for the sake of sinners who turned on the grace-giver in murderous rage will have to become our story. Not necessarily the murderous rage part–but that we step forward and love as Christ loved, that we bless the world as God blesses.

And that means loving those who are outside, beyond, and against the kingdom of God as ourselves. Loving neighbor is never antithetical to the love of God, because the God whom we are called to emulate is the God who causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike–all the nations are blessed. Because the God whom we are called to emulate is the one who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all–while we were all still sinners and hostile in mind to this same God.

Ours is a world where we can claim that people are inherently good–and actually believe ourselves.

But Miroslav Volf does not sugar coat the world and he perpetually summons us back to reality. Having experienced a measure of persecution during his years in Serbia and Croatia, he demands of Christians that we recognize a moral duty to call evil evil–even while summoning us to the sacred duty of loving all our neighbors (even the evil ones).

His book Against the Tide is a series of short reflections on what it means to love in the world that we actually inhabit.

The book is a collection of articles that range widely while pushing us to have our imaginations transformed afresh by the Christian story of a God who loves us and calls us to be agents of God’s love in the world.

Volf is bold. He wrestles with the story of the flood. He demands that we learn from it that God will not rest content with a world full of evil. And, he draws on the flood imagery from 1 Peter and suggests that we can read the washing of the flood as a symbol not of God washing away the evil doers, but washing us up so as to stand pure before our God.

He also insists that we call evil when talking about the actions of people. The alternatives are to deny the evil that destroys the world or to demonize perpetrators. Demonizing the evil doer makes the person an object to be exorcised, expelled, destroyed. Calling a person evil maintains their humanity: yes, he is evil, an evil neighbor I am called to love so that I might overcome evil with good.

For short daily devotional reading, you could do no better than Against the Tide.

Disclaimer: I don’t need to provide a disclaimer because I actually paid $10 for my copy of the book. So the Fed won’t come after me for this one. But on the other hand, Volf and I are Facebook friends, which, of course, makes him my BFF. I was even in the same room with him once at a reception!

On the one hand, there was the passage of 10A in the PCUSA, a change to the ordination standards that was crafted in order to allow persons in same-gender relationships to pursue ordination. Of course, they still have to be found ordainable on other grounds as well.

From the other side of the world, and pushing in much the opposite direction, it seemed as though the Ugandan Parliament was set to resume debate on its anti-homosexuality bill.

Click here to download the PDF file.

No doubt, the framers of the legislation in Uganda would see the juxtaposition as an affirmation of their contention that forces in favor of homosexuality are largely external, and forces of “activists” that would undermine “the people of Uganda.”

I find myself in a strange place in responding to these two events.

Although I am opposed to homosexual practice on religious grounds, it is precisely because I oppose it on religious grounds that I think the PCUSA is right to wrestle with the issue and take a stand one way or the other and that the people of Uganda are wrong to criminalize homosexual behavior.

One thing that traditionalists too often forget is that in the place where Paul seems to come down hardest on sexual immorality he confines his sphere of judgment to the church (1 Cor 5). It is the place of the Christian community to establish and enforce a godly morality among its own.

“But what have I to do with judging outsiders? Those who are outside God judges.”

This does not mean, of course, that we have no responsibilities for outsiders. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves; we are called to do to our neighbors as we would have done unto us.

And that is why in cases where religious or cultural convictions are leading to the punishment of behavior I disagree with on religious grounds, I feel convicted to oppose that law on precisely religious grounds.

What would I want done unto me? Would I want Muslim law and cultural requirements for dress, marriage, and schooling imposed on me and my family? If I would not want this done unto me as the “other,” then I am forbidden, by the gospel itself, of imposing Christian law on another.

The intent of the law in Uganda is, among other things, “to prohibit and penalize homosexual behavior and related practices” (3.b).

Several months ago, I petitioned all my good-natured readers for a reprieve from the word “homophobia.” Reading through the Uganda legislation, I know of no better word for what it embodies.

The legislation is striving to protect people from any number of important things. It protects victims who are forced to have sex by people who are in authority over them, who are minors, who have disabilities, who are drugged in order to become a sex object.

But protecting people from those who are using sex as power is not the same as protecting the country from homosexuality. The Bill embodies baseless stereotypes and rank fear that a gay person will force someone to have gay sex against his or her will (and perhaps transmit HIV thereby).

Sexual crimes are heinous. And this bill confuses the idea of sexual assault with homosexuality. While strong legislation against sexual assault should be applauded, at the bottom of the list of the sexual assaults (such as the ones mentioned above), the bill includes “repeat offenders.”

To be repeatedly convicted of same-sex intimacy is tantamount to raping a child or invalid according to this legislation.

And this is why I oppose such bans on homosexuality. It confuses sex between consenting adults whom one thinks ought not to consent with sex between someone who is wielding coercive power and a true victim. The former may be immoral or a bad idea, but this is categorically different from sexual assault.

Word on the street is that Uganda has taken the bill off the agenda. I’m glad of that. For one more day I can feel like my gay Ugandan neighbor has been loved like my straight American self.