Last weekend, I visited the Uptown Art Festival with some friends. We spent the day trekking through heavy construction, ogling pieces of art way out of our price range, and stopping to talk to some really interesting people along the way. We met musicians playing at a park, gave money to the homeless on the side of a highway, discussed women's rights with a complete stranger, signed a petition to abolish the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners of Chinese concentration camps, and had a prolonged discussion with an elderly woman whose life story and gumption could put a smile on anyone's face. We got to love and be loved by so many people.
It was a great day.
Halfway down the street of art booths, a small group of individuals caught my attention with their chanting and their large, colorful signs. I saw the name Jesus plastered on many of the signs, although the text was too small to read at a glance. Their chants were lost among the chatter of the festival, amounting to as little as white noise. The one sign that caught my eye, really the one sign I could make out, read in bold and in all-caps:
"JESUS HATES SIN."
The other signs, after I strained to decipher their messages, revealed themselves to display messages of Jesus's divinity and a call to believe in Him or spend eternity in Hell.
This didn't sit well with me.
I don't know if their message resulted in any conversations with the fair attendees. I don't know if any hearts were turned to Christ as a result of this group's "protest." I don't want to cast judgement on their intentions or their hearts. That is not my place.
But I do know that if I had one message to plaster on a sign for all to see, one thing I wanted people to know about my God, it wouldn't include the word "HATE."
According to the Christian Bible Reference Site, the word 'HATE' appears in the NIV translation of the Bible 80 times. The 4th most common word found in the NIV, ranking behind "God," "Lord," and "Heart," appearing over 550 times, is LOVE.
I know of zero testimonies that claim their lives were transformed by Jesus's hate of their sin.
Every testimony I've ever heard gives all credit to the all-powerful, all-encompassing, all-knowing, all-consuming love.
And if I were in a position to share my faith with someone who may not have any other exposure to Jesus in their lives, that's what I would want to tell them about.
Too often, I feel that God's love for us is put on the back burner in our churches, in our spiritual conversations, in our day-to-day lives.
I once heard a woman share a story about a conversation she had. The man she was speaking with had been attending church for a few years. As he shared his heart-wrenching story with her, she prayed to God for the words to say in response. The message she felt God conveying to her was to tell this man that He loves him. She persisted in prayer, seeking a more eloquent, deeper word from the Lord for a man who's supposedly heard of God's love for him a multitude of times. But God persisted.
"Tell him I love him."
When the man finished, she took a deep breath and said, "I've been praying to God while you were talking, and the message I feel He wants to say to you today is that you are His son, and He loves you." The man immediately burst into tears. After a few moments, the woman asked him, "Has no one ever told you that God loves you?" He shook his head through his tears. Years of church, and yet this man had never heard that the God of the universe loves him.
I don't mean to convey with any of this that God's love is a simple fact that ought to be common knowledge to us. The truth is the exact opposite. God's love is the very foundation of the Christian faith, the core of my own relationship with God, and the most mind-blowingly radical idea in all of history!
Guys. God loves you! Let yourself be blown away by that for a minute.
We live in a world that desperately needs God's love. And the sad thing is, so few people are aware of that life-altering truth. Christians have the power to share that truth with others. Believe it or not, the world is watching us. We have the power to impact the way someone views God through our own words, actions, and what we choose to share with them.
I know what I want people to know about Jesus. How about you?
