Hating To Love, When Love Meets Reality:
Raising four children, working with a ton of students for 20 years and now having 11 grandchildren, there's a profound collision that happens in every parent's life—the moment when your children stop being extensions of your will and become individuals with their own choices. For me it was terrifying yet beautiful in a way. And for those of us who claim to follow Christ, it reveals something uncomfortable about the way we've been loving all along.

Conditional Love Crisis:
Imagine watching someone you love more than life itself make decisions that terrify you. Decisions that, according to everything you've been taught about faith and eternity, are leading them down a dangerous path. Your instinct is to protect, to correct, to redirect. You pray harder. You set boundaries. You enforce rules. All in the name of love. But what if that kind of love isn't really love at all?
This is the uncomfortable truth many of us must face: we've been loving people with a religious love—a love bound by conditions, restrictions, and requirements. We love people when they make choices we approve of. We love them when they're heading in the right direction. We love them when they fit within our understanding of what's acceptable.
But can we love them when they don't?
Here's a question that might shake you to your core: Can you love someone even if they choose a path that leads to death and destruction?
It sounds almost heretical to ask. Our immediate response is, "Yes” but if they choose wrong in our sight, we can kick-in to manipulation and restrict them or even cut them off to prove a point. We say to ourselves and others, “I love them too much to let them go there!" But consider this: God allowed His own Son to descend into hell. He turned His face away from Jesus on the cross because Christ had become sin itself. Yet it was love—perfect, divine love—that made that possible. The challenge isn't whether we care about people's eternal destinations. The challenge is whether we can love them regardless of their choices and final destinations.

Layers of Love:
Ancient Greeks understood something we often miss: there are different types of love, and not all of them reflect God's heart.
Storge is family love—the natural affection between parents and children, siblings and relatives. It's beautiful, but it's also limited. It wants what's best, but it can become controlling.
Phileo is friendship love—the bond between close companions. Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love," takes its name from this word. It's the love that makes us loyal, but it can also be conditional on reciprocation.
Eros is romantic or sensual love—the passion we feel for people or things that give us pleasure. It's the reason we say we "love" our favorite song or device. It's driven by what we receive.
But then there's Agape—God's love, complete and unconditional. This is the game-changer

It Costs Everything and Demands Nothing:
First Corinthians 13 isn't just a beautiful passage read at weddings. It's a mirror that reveals how far we fall short of genuine love. Read it again, but this time, substitute "God" for "love":
God is patient and kind. God is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. He does not demand His own way. He is not irritable and keeps no record of being wronged. He does not rejoice about injustice, but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. God never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful and endures through every circumstance. This is the standard. This is what it means to love like God loves. And here's the uncomfortable truth: this kind of love costs us everything and demands nothing from the person we're loving.

Christian or Disciple:
There's a difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. Christians often love based on theology, doctrine, and fear of hell. We love people in order to save them. We love them with an agenda. Disciples love people simply because they are people created by God. First John 4:7-10 makes this clear: "Dear friends, let us continue to love one another for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love." Notice the logic here: If you don't love, you don't know God. Not because you haven't studied enough scripture or attended enough services, but because God IS love. To know Him is to love like Him.

Will They See God:
Here's a truth that might make you uncomfortable: The only way most people will ever experience God's love is through their experience of you. Think about that for a moment. The person checking out your groceries, the difficult coworker, the family member making choices you can't support—they won't experience God's love through your words about God. They'll experience it through how you treat them. We want people to get saved so they can experience God's love. But the biblical model is the opposite: we love them with God's love, and through that experience, they encounter Him. Christians often have prerequisites when loving someone they invest time, energy and money into.

The Practice of Divine Love:
So what does this look like practically? It means loving people past their decisions—good or bad. It means your affection doesn't fluctuate based on their choices. It means you can look someone in the eye who is making destructive decisions and genuinely say, "I don't agree with what you're doing, but I love you completely." It means your words match your actions. You can't say "I love you" and then treat someone with contempt, criticism, or condescension. Love isn't just declared; it's demonstrated. It means loving the person, not their behavior. Not their potential. Not who they could become if they just got their act together. But who they are right now, in this moment, in their mess.

The Cost vs. Reward:
This kind of love is expensive. It costs you time, emotional energy, mental space, and sometimes resources. It requires you to set aside your need to be right, your desire to manipulate and control outcomes, your fear of what might happen. But here's the crazy paradox: the more you love this way, the more capacity you have to love. God doesn't give you resources you won't steward well, but when you steward His love properly—pouring it out on others without expecting anything in return—He multiplies it. You'll find yourself with more time, more peace, more joy, and more impact than you ever had when you were trying to love people into compliance. The truth is, we often love strangers better than we love the people we know, because strangers haven't disappointed us yet. But God knows everything about us—every failure, every rebellion, every selfish choice—and He loves us completely. If His Spirit lives in us, we can do the same. This is what it means to “Hating to Love”—to resist our natural inclination toward conditional affection and choose instead the costly, uncomfortable, transformative love of God. It's the hardest choice a disciple can make. And it's the only choice that truly changes the world.
The Challenge:
Ask yourself these questions:
Who do I say I love? How do I actually love them? Can I love them past my relationship with them? Can I love them past their decisions? Can I love them past my influence in their lives?
How can I "God" them—show them who God is through how I treat them?

Understanding Our Foundation:
Have you ever stopped to consider how much of what you believe about the Bible comes from what you were told as a child? Perhaps you learned that it's "God's Word" or heard the classic Sunday school song, "The B-I-B-L-E, yes, that's the book for me." These foundational truths aren't wrong, but they're often incomplete—like explaining to a toddler where babies come from versus having that conversation with a teenager or medical student. The reality is that many believers operate with a children's church understanding of Scripture, and this creates a significant problem when engaging with people who are hurt, angry, or disillusioned with the church. When someone is wrestling with deep questions or painful experiences, responding with simplistic spiritual platitudes feels dismissive—like offering a tuna fish sandwich to someone who hates tuna, no matter how you dress it up.

People We're Called to Reach:
There's a specific group of people who desperately need authentic engagement: those who've left the church. Not the "unsaved" that many churches traditionally target, but the wounded, the offended, the ones who walked away from faith communities for legitimate reasons. These individuals don't need another Bible verse thrown at them—they need understanding, knowledge, and genuine connection. To effectively reach this group, we need to move beyond surface-level spirituality and develop a robust understanding of what we claim to believe. As Mark Twain astutely observed, "It's not the parts of the Bible that I cannot understand that bother me. It's the parts of the Bible that I do understand that bother me." Think about that. We don't struggle with the miraculous—virgin birth, creation, resurrection. We struggle with forgiveness, loving our enemies, and living out the practical commands of Scripture. The disconnect between knowledge and application is where many lose faith.

Real Bible Facts:
The Bible we carry today has a fascinating and often unknown history. Consider these facts that might challenge your assumptions: The Bible is actually a library or collection of letters and books, not just a single book. It contains 66 books written by 35-40 different authors over approximately 1,500 years. Even more surprising, we don't actually know who wrote some books—Hebrews, Judges, and Ruth all have uncertain authorship. Jesus never wrote a single word of Scripture. He is the Word, but He didn't write the Word. Neither Jesus, His disciples, nor Paul used "the Bible" as we know it to preach the gospel, because it didn't exist in compiled form during their lifetimes. Chapters and verses weren't original. Between 1227 and 1555 AD, scholars added these divisions to make navigation easier. The original texts were continuous, flowing documents without the reference points we depend on today. The Bible wasn't originally one language. The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew and Aramaic, while the New Testament was written primary in Greek. Every translation we read today is an interpretation of these ancient languages. Perhaps most shocking: The Bible is the only religious text that proclaims itself to be the Word of God. No other major religious writing makes this claim. Yet even non-Christian religions recognize the Bible as the foundation of Christian faith.

The Dark Ages:
For a thousand years—from about 400 AD to 1400 AD—the Bible was essentially inaccessible to common people. During this period known as the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church maintained such control that possessing a Bible in any language other than Latin was punishable by death. Only clergy could own Scriptures, creating a monopoly on spiritual knowledge and power. Why would the church restrict access to God's Word? Because knowledge is power. When people can read Scripture for themselves, they can't be manipulated or controlled as easily. During this dark millennium, a secret society called the Colbys operated underground, teaching the Latin Bible to small groups of disciples. This continued for 700 years until the Reformation began breaking open access to Scripture. John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible into English in the late 1300s. For this "heresy," he was hunted. His disciple, John Hus, distributed these “English Bibles” to common people and eventually was captured and burned at the stake. The fuel for his execution fire? Wycliffe's translated Bibles. As the flames consumed him, Hus prophesied: "In the next hundred years, God will raise up a man whose call to reform cannot be suppressed." Almost exactly 100 years later, Martin Luther emerged. This bold reformer wrote his 95 Theses documenting the Catholic Church's heresies and literally nailed them to the church door—essentially picking a fight that would change Christianity forever. Luther translated the Bible into German and used the newly invented printing press to mass-produce Scriptures, breaking the church's stranglehold on God's Word. William Tyndale printed the first English Bible in 1526. He was arrested, imprisoned for 500 days, and then burned at the stake. His final words were a prayer: "O Lord, open the eyes of the king of England." Three years later, King Henry VIII began supporting and printing Bibles—a direct answer to a dying man's prayer.

Persecution to Pocket:
Think about this journey: people died horrific deaths just to translate and distribute the Bible. They were hunted, imprisoned, and executed for doing what we do thoughtlessly every day—access Scripture. Today, we have the Bible on our phones. We have dozens of translations at our fingertips. We can search any topic, cross-reference any verse, and access thousands of years of biblical scholarship with a few taps.
Yet how engaged are we? We don't need more access to the Bible—we need more engagement with it. We can quote movie lines and song lyrics because we're engaged with that content. But when it comes to Scripture, many believers remain surface-level, equipped only with childhood understanding.

Beyond Children's Church:
When someone is hurt and questions their faith, they don't need platitudes. They need depth. They need someone who has wrestled with Scripture, who understands its complexity and history, who can engage intellectually while remaining spiritually grounded. You can be deeply spiritual and highly knowledgeable. These aren't opposing qualities—they're complementary. Just as you wouldn't dismiss medical knowledge while praying for healing (you pray AND wait for test results), you shouldn't separate spiritual truth from intellectual understanding. The Bible has survived millennia of opposition, persecution, and suppression. As John 1:1 declares, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." God's Word prevails regardless of human attempts to control or destroy it.

What's Ahead Foundationally:
Understanding the Bible's history, composition, and journey to our hands creates appreciation and removes fear from difficult conversations. When someone challenges Scripture's reliability or questions its contradictions (which are actually differences in perspective, not contradictions), you can respond with confidence rather than defensiveness. The Bible contains no actual contradictions—only differences in viewpoint, translation, or cultural context. When challenged, simply ask: "Can you show me the specific contradiction? Chapter and verse?" Most cannot, because they're repeating what they've heard rather than what they've investigated. This foundation matters because the people we're called to reach—the hurt, the angry, the disillusioned—often know more about biblical criticism than believers know about biblical truth. They've done their research, often looking for reasons to justify their departure from faith. We cannot win them back with simplistic answers to complex questions. We need depth, understanding, and the willingness to engage both spiritually and intellectually. The Bible is life. Hold onto it with everything you have. But remember: when ministering to someone who's wounded, they don't want your life jacket just because you're holding it. They need to see the life it produces in you, demonstrated through understanding, compassion, and authentic engagement.
The foundation is set. Now it's time to build on it.

When "My Bad" Isn't Enough:
We live in a culture of nonchalant. apologies. "My bad." "Oops, sorry." or "I made a mistake." These phrases roll off our tongues with practiced ease, smoothing over our missteps like a quick coat of paint over a crack in the wall. But what if the very language we use to address our wrongdoings is keeping us from genuine repentance and heart transformation?

The Mistaker: 
Picture this: My wife and I planned a backyard “camp out night” for our younger grandchildren. Everything is going well throughout the evening with hotdogs, smores and activities. After getting all the kids into tents and sleeping bags for the night. I found myself on my laptop doing digital work late that evening while the kids slept. Fast forward and unexcepted storm rolls in. It turns into a rainy night, and in the chaos of gathering sleepy grandchildren from backyard tents, a laptop gets left on an outdoor table. At 4 AM, the realization hits—that laptop spent hours in the downpour. Water literally pours out when I picked it up. "My bad," we say. "I made a mistake." And it's true. That genuinely was a mistake—unintentional, unplanned, an accidental in the midst of caring for the grandchildren.
But here's where things get complicated: Have we become so comfortable with the language of mistakes that we apply it to everything. We use the same phrase for accidentally leaving a laptop in the rain that we use for deliberately hurting someone, for calculated deception, for intentional selfishness. A mistake happens when your GPS says left but you turn right. A mistake is writing the wrong date on a document. A mistake is unintentional, unexpected, without malice or forethought.
But when we plan things in our minds, rehearse it mentally and emotionally, and then execute it for our own benefit—regardless of who it hurts—that's not a mistake. That's something else entirely.

The Word We Don't Want to Use
Sin, the one we word we associate with smoking, drinking and cussing There it is. The word that makes modern Christianity squirm. It feels heavy, judgmental, outdated, socially unacceptable. Nobody wants to be called a sinner. We'd much rather be “mistakers”. After all, mistakes are friendly. Mistakes are forgivable without much cost. Mistakes don't require deep soul-searching or genuine accountability. When a child breaks something, we tell them to say sorry, give a hug, and move on. We've trained ourselves to treat all wrongdoing in life this way. But sin is different. Sin is intentional. Sin is planned. Sin is 100% thought out before we ever act on it. When someone has an affair that lasts six months, that's not a mistake. When we deliberately misuse someone's trust for our own benefit, that's not a mistake. When we lie, manipulate, or scheme—even in small ways—we're not making mistakes. We're sinning and its all planned and perfectly orchestrated.

Sin’s Anatomy
Consider what sin actually looks like when we break it down: Selfishness, Independence, Narcissism. We sin because we're being selfish—putting our desires above others' wellbeing. We sin because we want independence from God and from the people who care about us. We sin because we're being narcissistic—making everything about us. All those "sins" we typically think of—drinking, smoking, lying, stealing, adultery—they're not the root problem. They're symptoms. They're byproducts of selfishness, independence, and narcissism. When we only address the symptoms without dealing with the disease, we're like a doctor prescribing pain medication for an infection instead of antibiotics. We numb the pain, but we don't heal the problem.

Religious Trap
Jesus had strong words for the religious leaders of His day. In Matthew 23, He called out the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees with devastating accuracy: "You are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. "He continued: "You are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity." “Ouch”. The problem wasn't that they were following rules. The problem was that they were meticulously managing their external behavior while their hearts remained "filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness"—or as we might say, filled with selfishness, independence, and narcissism. We can fall into the same trap today. We show up to church, we serve and give our tithes, we say the right things. But inside, we're plotting. We're scheming. We're thinking about how to benefit ourselves, how to get what we want, how to position ourselves advantageously—even if it costs others. And when we get caught? "My bad. I made a mistake."

Righteousness
Romans 3:23-24 tells us: "For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard. Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins." Here's the beautiful truth: While we were still selfish, still independent, still narcissistic, Jesus died for us. He didn't die because we occasionally made honest mistakes. He died because we're sinners who need redemption. But here's what many miss: We can't experience the fullness of that redemption if we won't own our sin. God can't forgive what we won't acknowledge. James 5:16 instructs us: "Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results." Notice the connection? Confession leads to healing. Confession leads to powerful, effective prayer. But we skip right over the confession part because it's uncomfortable. We want to be "the righteousness of Christ Jesus" without the humbling work of acknowledging our selfishness. We want our prayers to "availeth much" without confessing to one another. We want the power without the vulnerability.

True Confession
Real confession doesn't sound like: "Hey, I made a mistake yesterday."
Real confession sounds like: "I lied to you on purpose because I was thinking about myself, not you."
Real confession sounds like: "I was late because I wasn't considering how that would affect you. I was being selfish."
Real confession sounds like: "I took that because I wanted it, and I didn't care that it wasn't mine."
That's uncomfortable. That's vulnerable. That makes us look bad. But that's also what leads to genuine transformation. The Apostle Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, said in 1 Timothy 1:15: "This is a trustworthy saying, and everyone should accept it: 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners'—of whom I am the worst." Paul—who lived sacrificially, who suffered for the Gospel, who loved others deeply—called himself the worst of sinners. Why? Because he understood what was happening in his heart and mind, even when his actions looked righteous. He knew his internal battles with selfishness, independence, and narcissism. He knew what all he had done before being converted and experienced salvation.

The Difference It Makes
Without conviction, there's no true repentance. Without repentance, there's no genuine conversion. When we own our sin—truly own it—we experience God's faithfulness to forgive. We grow in our relationship with Him. We become more patient with others because we recognize our own desperate need for grace and mercy. When we merely acknowledge mistakes, we stay stuck. We repeat the same patterns. We hurt the same people in the same ways. We wonder why our spiritual lives feel stagnant. The reality is this: Jesus didn't go to the cross for mistakers. He went to the cross for sinners. And until we're willing to identify ourselves as such—until we're willing to own our selfishness, our independence, our narcissism—we can't fully embrace the redemption He offers.
Practice 
So practically what does this look like? It means when we hurt someone, we don't just say, "Sorry, my bad." “I made a mistake.” We acknowledge: "I did that on purpose. I was thinking about myself, not you. I was wrong. Will you forgive me?" It means confessing not just to God in private, but to one another—being vulnerable about our struggles, our temptations, our failures. It means recognizing that when we know what we ought to do and don't do it—as James 4:17 tells us—that's sin, not a mistake. It means embracing the discomfort of true accountability because that's where real growth happens. The question isn't whether we've messed up. We all have. Romans 3:23 makes that clear. The question is whether we'll own it honestly or hide behind the comfortable language of mistakes. Because on the other side of that honest acknowledgment is something beautiful: genuine forgiveness, authentic transformation, and a deeper relationship with the God who loves us enough to die for sinners—not “mistakers”.