Love That Demands More

The God of Scripture does not affirm sin. He does something far more profound, He delivers us from it.

There is a version of God circulating in the American cultural mainstream right now that is, if I am being precise about it, not the God of the Bible. He is a God of pure affirmation, a cosmic mirror who reflects back to us whatever we have already decided about ourselves and the world we envision. He blesses our appetites and validates our identities and asks nothing in return. He is endlessly agreeable. He is, in the most theologically disastrous sense, nice.

I understand the appeal. We are a wounded people living in an age of profound disconnection. We want to be loved, and we have come to confuse love with the absence of expectation. When we hear that God accepts us as we are, something in us exhales. And it is not entirely wrong, God does accept us. The scandal of the incarnation is precisely that He entered our wreckage without flinching.

But acceptance is the beginning of the story, not the end. And the God of the Holy Bible is not interested in leaving us exactly where He found us. He does not condemn us where we are. He refuses to let us stay there. That is not indifference. That is love of the highest order.

The confusion we are living through has a shape. Liberal theology, which in its various progressive expressions now dominates significant portions of mainline Protestantism and has seeped into historically orthodox Black churches, has made a fatal transposition. It has taken the genuine truth of God's love and quietly inverted its logic. God's love, in this schema, means that He affirms whatever we affirm about ourselves. His grace becomes a divine rubber stamp. His acceptance becomes approval. What gets lost in that inversion is the entire redemptive drama of Scripture: that God, precisely because He loves us, refuses to accept sin as our final condition.

"God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say Christ died for us to confirm us in our sin. He says Christ died for us while we were in our sin, and the direction of that sacrifice is always toward us, never away from God's standard of holiness. The cross is not God lowering the bar. The cross is God absorbing the cost so that we might be lifted over it.

Lakewood Church, Houston, Texas

THE THERAPEUTIC CAPTIVITY OF THE CHURCH

The sociologist Christian Smith coined the phrase 'Moralistic Therapeutic Deism'¹ to describe the functional faith of most American young people: a belief in a God who exists to make us feel good about ourselves, solve our problems when asked, and leave us otherwise alone. That was 2005. In the two decades since, the therapeutic framework has not merely shaped American religion from the margins, it has occupied the center.

We have churches that perform affirmation the way other institutions perform entertainment. The preacher has become, in many contexts, less a herald of the gospel of Jesus Christ than a life coach with a Bible verse for texture. The sermon no longer wounds before it heals. It simply assures. And the congregation, drawn in by the warmth of the welcome and the promise of unconditional love, never hears the uncomfortable corollary: that the God who welcomes them is also the God of incomparable holiness who, in His love, intends to make them new.

This is not merely a theological problem. It is a pastoral catastrophe. People do not simply need to be told they are loved. They need to be told the truth about their condition so that they can receive the cure. A physician who refuses to name the disease because the patient finds the diagnosis distressing is not kind. He is negligent.

“Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18)

This is the invitation God has always extended. Not an invitation to pretend the sin is not there, but a promise to transform it; to deliver you from it. The diagnostic is honest. The remedy is real. That is the shape of divine love, it sees us clearly and refuses to abandon us to what it sees. The God of Scripture does not tell us our sin is fine. He tells us our sin is forgiven, and that the forgiven life looks profoundly different from the life that came before.

WHAT DELIVERANCE ACTUALLY MEANS

The word the New Testament uses most often for salvation is not 'affirmation.' It is rescue. It is deliverance. It is a word that assumes a prior bondage. You do not deliver someone who is already free. You do not rescue someone who is already safe. The entire logic of the gospel, what the old preachers called the kerygma, the core proclamation of the faith, assumes that something is deeply wrong with us, that we cannot fix it ourselves, and that God in Christ has done what we could not do.

"So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed." (John 8:36)

This is the verse that the therapeutic church most consistently misreads. It reads 'free' and thinks Jesus is validating individual autonomy, the freedom to define oneself, to live without constraint, to pursue whatever the self most deeply wants. But the context of John 8 is bracing. Jesus has just told a group of religious leaders that everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The freedom He offers is not the freedom to sin without guilt. It is freedom from sin itself, from its grip, its power, its ultimate claim on our lives.

This is the true gospel rather than the one so many are presenting. And it is a more beautiful one.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)

Notice the two verbs John employs. God forgives, that is the judicial declaration, the canceling of the debt. But He also cleanses, that is the transformative act, the moral renovation of the interior life. The gospel is never only a verdict. It is always also a process. Justification and sanctification are distinct but inseparable. A theology that stops at forgiveness and refuses to speak of cleansing has not given people the whole gospel. It has given them half of one.

The God who delivers does not deliver us into a shapeless expanse of self-determination. He delivers us into His own image. That is the destination of sanctification, not self-actualization, but Christ-likeness. The New Testament is relentless on this point. We are being transformed. We are being renewed. We are being conformed to the image of the Son. That transformation is not punitive. It is the most intimate form of divine love, a God who cares enough about us to participate in the remaking of our character.

THE PARTICULAR CRISIS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH

I serve a historically African American congregation in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I want to speak carefully about what I observe in the broader landscape of the Black church. The African American Christian tradition is one of the most theologically resilient in the world. It was forged in the crucible of chattel slavery, where enslaved believers read the Bible with an existential urgency that most comfortable Christians never develop. They found in the God of the Exodus a God who was not indifferent to suffering, who did not simply affirm the structures of oppression but who was actively working against them. They found in the cross not a symbol of defeat but a promise of vindication.

That orthodox heritage produced preachers of extraordinary theological depth, clergy who held together justice and holiness, deliverance and discipleship, prophetic witness and doctrinal fidelity. It is a heritage worth recovering, because it is precisely what our current moment demands.

Bishop Yvette Flunder

But the Black church is not a monolith. This was recently highlighted at the Yale Divinity School's Center for Public Theology & Public Policy 2026 forum, where Bishop Yvette Flunder, noted liberal, lgbt, and womanist advocate, subjectively cited certain scriptures she found problematic, suggested they should be torn out, and that a “third testament” was needed. This kind of rhetoric exists in certain quarters of the Black church, particularly those most enmeshed with European born liberal theology and progressive cultural currents. This drift mirrors what has happened in the declining ranks of mainline white Protestantism. As a result, the prophetic tradition is being retained while the doctrinal anchor is slipped. Justice language flourishes while the language of sin, repentance, and transformation is quietly retired. God who liberates the oppressed becomes a God who simply affirms the oppressed, which is a very different thing. Oppressed people need more than affirmation. They need the same thing every human being needs: redemption.

The prophetic tradition of the Black church was never merely about telling people what they wanted to hear. It was about telling them the truth, about God, about the world, and about themselves.

ORTHODOXY AS LOVE

I want to make a case that is deeply unfashionable in our current cultural moment: that theological orthodoxy, the stubborn insistence on historic Christian teaching about sin, grace, repentance, and new life, is itself an act of love. It is not loveless rigorism. It is not the imposition of an arbitrary code. It is the church's commitment to tell the truth about the human condition and to point, faithfully and consistently, toward the only cure.

When the Scriptures say that God does not affirm sin, they are not describing a punitive deity who takes pleasure in human failure. They are describing a God of such fierce love that He refuses to make peace with anything that destroys His image-bearers. Sin destroys. It fractures relationships, distorts identity, corrupts the capacity for love, and, left unchecked, produces death. A God who simply affirmed sin would be a God who watched us destroy ourselves and smiled and nodded.

That is not the God of the Bible. That is an idol dressed up in therapeutic language.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Paul does not say that in Christ, old things are rebranded. He does not say old things are accepted. He says they passed away. The grammar is aorist, a completed action with ongoing implications. Something ended. Something new began. The Christian life is not a renovation project in which God improves the existing structure while leaving the foundation intact. It is a resurrection, a dying and a rising, the old self put to death and the new self raised in its place.

"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age." (Titus 2:11–12)

Grace, Paul insists, instructs. It does not merely comfort. It does not merely affirm. It trains us in a direction, away from ungodliness and toward the character of God. Grace is not the suspension of God's standards. Grace is the supernatural provision to actually meet them, through the indwelling Spirit, through the community of the church, through the means of Word and sacrament. This is the full-orbed gospel, and it is considerably more demanding and considerably more glorious than anything the therapeutic church is currently offering.

WHAT WE ARE WAITING FOR

There is a generation in the American church right now that is hungry for something real. They have grown up in an era of total affirmation and found it hollow. They have been told, by every institution available, that the primary task of life is to discover and express the authentic self, and they have discovered that the authentic self, unformed and undisciplined, is not particularly impressive. They are looking for something that will tell them the truth about who they are and who they could become.

The church that meets this generation with another round of affirmation will lose them. The church that is willing to preach the full gospel, grace that is free, but also grace that transforms; love that accepts, but also love that demands; a God who welcomed us in our sin but refuses to leave us in it, that church will find that the message still has power.

“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.” (Ezekiel 36:26–27)

The prophet Ezekiel, writing six centuries before Christ, understood something that our therapeutic culture has forgotten: the problem is not primarily circumstantial. It is cardiac. The human heart, hardened by sin, curved inward on itself, resistant to the things of God, requires not adjustment but replacement. And the staggering announcement of this passage is that God does not merely demand the new heart. He supplies it. The transformation is His initiative, His gift, His power. We do not conjure it by resolve or self-improvement. We receive it by surrender.

Because the deepest human longing is not to be affirmed. It is to be changed. It is to be made new. It is to look in the mirror one day and see, however faintly, the image not of the self we were born as but of the one we were redeemed to become.

That is the gospel. And it begins not with God affirming our sin, but with God, through the blood and resurrection of Jesus Christ, delivering us from it.

1. The phrase was coined in the book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.