God is Love.

Sometimes I feel like this becomes an excuse for Christians to keep things the way they are. When we face a difficult issue like homosexuality, we don’t dig deeper and think about what it would actually take to reconcile to two communities, but just proclaim God is love! We need to love everyone, of course, but we can’t just expect someone else to figure out what that actually means for certain groups of people.

We find flaws in ourselves and say hey, God is Love! He loves us anyway. Isn’t it great? Yes, it’s great, but it doesn’t mean we are perfect the way we are. We need to strive towards becoming a more whole and complete representation of God’s love. He created us in His image, but we are not God. Not everything that makes us unique is positive, and not everything that makes us different is necessarily from God. Sin is a very real and powerful force. Things like sarcasm, or sassiness, they are indeed things that make some of us unique, but they are not from God. If we believe that God is 100% good, we can’t believe that He would create something within us that has any ability to hurt others.

It’s very tempting to just go back to saying “but God loves us no matter what!” but we can’t use that truth as an excuse to stay the way we are. We need to allow it to penetrate deep into our very core, transform our ideas of who we are. We need to truly die to ourselves and ask: what would it look like to let that love be the foundation, not the decoration?

Often times we take the words “God loves us just the way we are” to mean that He loves us even with our flaws, our jealousy, pride, anger, issues. But this isn’t true. God loves us just the way we are. He loves us as we, children of God, are. The way that He originally created us to be. He loves us just as we are at our very core and essence. He hates the sin that surrounds our thoughts and guides our actions. He hates the pain we inflict on others. He hates the fear we hold on to. He just loves us the way we are. We are God’s children. We are perfect, because we haven’t been perverted or deformed by the sins of this world. Our actions may be full of hate, but we are not. We are not defined by what we do, and thus we can’t become the sin that we so often partake in.