BIBLE STUDY: Unconditional love—should Christians just accept each other the way they
by Brett Burrowes

At some time we have all said or heard someone say: “I just want to be accepted the way I am!” Isn’t this what Christian love is all about—accepting one another as God accepted us? After all, doesn’t God accept us the way we are? Isn’t God’s love unconditional? Shouldn’t we always be gentle and nice to each other, understanding that everyone makes mistakes now and again? So what if a Christian is disobedient for a time? God accepts them; who are we to judge? The old hymn appears to put it well: “Just as I am.” But I believe this view of God’s love and acceptance is a misconception, and ultimately, a deception. In addition, it is also a misconception of what Christian love for one another is all about.

We all want to be loved and accepted— it is a basic human desire. How many of us have spent years trying to gain the acceptance and approval of parents, even many years after they have passed away. The desire to prove ourselves worthy of our parents’ affection drives us to any lengths, and the knowledge that our parents don’t, won’t or can’t accept us feels intolerably painful. But we do not only seek acceptance from our parents—we also seek it from our peers. When we were teenagers we can all remember how the approval of our peers was paramount—we didn’t want to stand out in anyway that might cause us to experience rejection. Perhaps we had a terrible case of acne or even just one pimple and we didn’t want to leave the house for fear that someone might see us and either laugh at us or be repulsed by something so disgusting. Of course most of us are not teenagers any more, and having gained a little more perspective on life, don’t see a pimple as the end of the world as we know it. But we still want to be accepted by others, and to a large extent, this desire drives much of what we do and say. We do not want to be an object of shame and ridicule and will do almost anything to avoid being in this position.

But the facts are this: apart from Christ we have lived shameful lives worthy of God’s condemnation: in other words, we are sinners. The word “sinners” does not just mean that we made a few mistakes along the way. No, we have willfully gone our own way, even though we knew that God commanded differently: “There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one. Their throats are opened graves; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of vipers is under their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Rom 3:10-18). So although we may want God to love and accept us, our sin has made it impossible for Him to accept us the way we are. Unbelievers, and many Christians as well, live in the delusion that they can be accepted just the way they are, without any changes: the problem is other people “who won’t accept me the way I am” Or else we live out of this hidden shame, knowing deep inside that we are wrong on the inside but living out this shame in the form of depression and all manner of addictions and sinful habits. Pop-psychology, recognizing that shame is at the root of this self-destructive behavior, teaches that we have no reason to be ashamed of ourselves and that all shame is toxic. But perhaps, just perhaps, this shame inside us is not just because of how our parents and peers treated us, but because of who we are, because of what we have done. Maybe the solution to our shame is not by rejecting it as untrue, but by admitting to ourselves that we truly deserve to be rejected by God (Rom 1:18-32).

Perhaps now we can see how shallow a solution it is to demand to be accepted just as we are—because we’re not acceptable. The solution must run deeper than a dismissal of our feelings of shame as irrational. Fortunately (to say the very least) God chooses to accept us not as we are, but in spite of who we are, for “God proves His love for us in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8; see 1 John 4:10). God does not accept our sinfulness, and the hymn “Just as I am” refers to the only way we can come to God. We can come as sinners without a plea because we can come no other way and because God Himself has provided the solution in the cross. So God did not just accept us “the way we were.” In spite of ourselves He loved us and did something about our plight, something extremely costly to Him, a cost we can not even begin to measure: He sent His own Son to die in our place, to bear the curse of condemnation for us (Gal 3:10, 13). It is impossible to know how deep and how great the cost that the Son paid for us; Paul describes it as a love that surpasses knowledge! (Eph 3:19). On the cross, Jesus experienced His Father’s rejec-tion: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34). He endured such rejection and forsakenness so that God would never leave or forsake us (Heb 13:5). And all this is true for us simply because God did not “accept us just the way we were.” Had God just accepted us in our sin, there would be no hope for us, no release from the shame and that the spirit of sin that indwells us: we would forever be in a living hell. Only if God hated us would He “accept” us just as we are. Such acceptance is Satanic and rooted in a desire to be left as we are: sinful self-centered people who have no regard for the good of anyone except our feeling good in the moment. How grateful I am that God did not accept me in my sinful desire to be accepted “just the way I am.”

But still, in our pride, we continue to demand to be accepted “as we are.” I suggest that the real reason people don’t want to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ is that initially it is very bad news to us and our prideful view of ourselves: we really are the objects of shame, wrath and condemnation that we fear we might be: “we were by nature children of wrath” (Eph 2:3).We really are that bad. Only when we admit how deeply deserving of shame we really are, can we truly receive God’s solution in the cross. Receiving the message of the cross is death to us, to all the false and self-deceptive images we have of ourselves, but it is only in embracing that shame as real and deserved that we can come to the cross at all. So God’s acceptance of us at the cross demands a price; it demands our very selves, the view we have of ourselves. That is why Paul says: “I have been crucified with Christ.” (Gal 2:20).

So since God does not accept us “just the way we are,” then Christians shouldn’t accept each other that way either. At the same time Jesus Himself commanded us to love one another (John 15:12). But he adds: “as I have loved you.” Jesus’ love was demonstrated in that He went to the cross for us and endured the most horrible punishment a human being could bear: rejection by His Father in addition to physical torment and death. But He went to the cross because He did not accept our sin as the final word: Being utterly committed to our good and our salvation, He gave up His life to obtain forgiveness for our sins and to rid us of the Satanic spirit of sin. In the same way Christians should be committed to one another to cast out Satan when he gets a foothold in a fellow believer’s life (Eph. 4:27). This means that we do not accept or tolerate sin in our brothers and sisters in Christ, because such a Satanic infection will destroy them and others if it is allowed to continue. When sexual immorality was contaminating the Corinthian church, Paul told them that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Cor 5:6), meaning that if they allowed this man to continue in his sin then everyone would be affected by the Satanic takeover of this man.

In our society, “tolerance” is often praised as a great ideal. But God’s love is truly intolerant of anything that is not a manifestation of his character. God is committed absolutely to us, but is not tolerant of sin. He unconditionally accepts us, since we have no way of independently fulfilling the conditions laid down in His law, but He does not accept our sin. So Christians should not be tolerant of or accept sin in their midst, nor “accept people as they are.” Christian love means that we are so committed to one another that we will not allow any sin to contaminate our fellowship. And if someone willfully continues in deliberate sin despite the attempts of others to get them to repent, then Scripture ultimately calls us to hand the person over to Satan (1Cor 5:5), since Scripture commands us not to associate with people who call themselves Christians but act in certain ways (1 Cor 5:11). But even in handing such a person over to Satan we are still unconditionally committed to their good: the hope is that in experiencing the full consequences of their sins, God will lead them to repentance and restored fellowship with them. So outwardly rejecting the person is a form of unconditional love. A temporary rejection of a person may be the only way of driving home the absolute unacceptability of the sin. At the same time God’s love is always willing to receive a repentant sinner, as the parable of the prodigal son attests (Luke 15:11-32). Although God’s love is unconditional, our experience of that love is conditional upon our repentance. God’s unconditional love, both on the cross and in us, is not unconditional acceptance of someone in their sin, but an unconditional commitment to save them from that sin.

Brett has an M.A. in New Testament and a Th. M. in Biblical Theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is currently working on his doctorate at the University of Durham in England. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is a Zerubbabel Contact and Teacher-Sharer.