Are your religious leaders teaching and preaching racism or bigotry? Misogyny? Persecution of people who are “different,” like homosexuals, transsexuals, and others in the LGBTQ+ community? If so, you should know that that’s not Christianity.

Are your religious leaders telling you that Christians should seek political power? Wealth? Laws that seek to turn this country into a Christian nation? That’s not Christianity, either.

To avoid any confusion, let me make one thing perfectly clear at the beginning. Each church has the right, and biblical authority, to exclude anyone from membership if the congregation agrees that they are behaving immorally. Matthew 18:15-17 and 1 Corinthians chapter five make that pretty clear.

However, that does not mean that we have the right, or the duty, to judge or punish unbelievers or “sinners.” That’s God’s job, not ours. While we should not permit open, obvious, and unrepented sin to infect the church,[1] Jesus warned us to judge ourselves, not others.[2] He never used his authority to come down on sinners, but he often used it to criticize the hypocrisy of the Jewish religious leaders who valued money and power rather than God.[3]

Christianity is about love. It’s not about hatred, money, judgment, or power. Jesus gave us one, and only one, new commandment: love one another.[4] While the greatest commandment is to love God, the second greatest commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourself.”[5] Some claim that this just means we should love other Christians—that it doesn’t apply to unbelievers. However, that is simply not true.

Jesus told us to love even our enemies.[6] Our duty to love others applies to everyone, not merely those who are like us, or those we agree with, or those we think are Christians. It even applies to sinners. The Pharisees refused to associate with people they considered to be sinners, but Jesus rejected this practice. He regularly taught, and socialized with, sinners, explaining that they needed him, just as those who are sick need a doctor.[7]

In simple terms, we are to love everyone. Paul recognized this in 1 Thessalonians 3:12, where he says: “may the Lord cause you to increase and overflow in love for one another, and for all people, just as we also do for you.” Note that he first mentions loving “one another,” presumably referring to other Christians, but then he adds “and for all people.” All means all.

As I have said in a previous blog entry, this kind of love is not a feeling, but an action. It is the kind of love Paul described in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant. It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered, it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This is the kind of love God demonstrates when he sends his sunshine and rain on all of us, and not merely on those we think are “deserving.”[8]

Loving people who are not easy to love should distinguish Christians from unbelievers:

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors, do they not do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Even the Gentiles, do they not do the same?[9]

We are to show love and kindness even to people who are different, to people we don’t like, and to people who don’t like us. That is the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan. In Jesus’s time, the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other. But this Samaritan went out of his way to help a Jew who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. The one who “proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ hands” was the Samaritan, not the Jewish priest or Levite, both of whom ignored the injured man.[10] The Samaritan—whom the Jews regarded with such contempt—was the  “one who showed compassion to him.”[11] And what did Jesus tell us to do?: “Go and do the same.”

Some Christians who want worldly power for the “church” probably think they are doing God’s will, but they are badly mistaken. Jesus could have had worldly power, but he refused it.[12] Christianity is about love, not power.

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[1]. 1 Corinthians chapter five

[2]. See Matthew 7:1-5, Luke 6:6:37, and Luke 41-42

[3]. See, for example, Matthew 23:13-33 and Luke 11:37-52.

[4]. See John 13:34-35, John 15:12, and John 15:17. See also, Romans 12:10, Romans 13:8, Ephesians 4:2, Galatians 5:13-14, 1 Thessalonians 3:12, 1 Thessalonians 4:9, 1 Peter 1:22, 1 Peter 4:8, 1 John 3:11, 1 John 3:23, and 1 John 4:7-12.

[5]. Matthew 22:35-39, Mark 12:28-31, and Luke 10:25-28; see also Leviticus 19:18

[6]. Matthew 5:44, Luke 6:27, and Luke 6:35.

[7]. See, for example, Matthew 9:10-13, Matthew 11:19, Mark 2:15-17, Luke 5:29-32, Luke 7:34, and Luke 15:1-2.

[8]. Matthew 5:44-45

[9]. Matthew 5:46-47

[10]. Luke 10:36

[11]. Luke 10:37

[12]. See Matthew 4:8-10 and Luke 4:5-8.