Subtitle: But reject the rest of Jesus' teachings.

Excerpt: A reader dismissed Jesus’ teachings beyond “love one another,” prompting the author to emphasize salvation through God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice, not just love.

Author: Jeff Hilles

One of the advantages of social media and its anonymous nature is that often people clearly tell you what they are thinking, in our case, about Christianity. The better we understand where the lost are coming from, the better we can be at offering thoughtful counterpoints. I recently received the following edited comment from a reader …

Reader on Medium

There are so many people spewing all this nonsense these days: that Jesus has to be this, that, or the other thing, but not this or that thing. The attempt to limit Jesus of Nazareth’s life and teachings to certain details, even if that includes his divinity, is nothing more than us thinking we actually know what the heck is going on. It’s Jesus’ message that is important: love one another unconditionally. The rest of it, including Jesus himself — are details.

My Response

Respectfully, if your wife sent you a long letter while you were fighting a war in a foreign land … would you just read the last line that says, “I love you,” or would you pour over the whole letter, taking careful note of all that she was offering you?

To say that all the red letters of the Bible can be boiled down to “love one another,” much less the rest of the thousands of words from the Creator of the universe, is significantly more naive. Believe me, He has a lot more to say that, among other things, speaks to the plan of salvation that involves God’s grace rather than our works. Loving one another is the result of salvation, not the formula for it.

Conclusion

So many reject the full scope of what God commands yet accept Jesus’ statements regarding our desire to love one another … that come from the same source document, the Bible.

This approach to Christianity or life in general represents rejection of a vertical relationship with the Trinitarian God while desiring a horizontal dedication toward our fellow man. The convenience of this approach is the ability to claim superiority over others who are “less loving” than we perceive we are, while protecting ourselves from the commands of God that conflict with our personal freedoms.

God rejects this approach to earthly life by clarifying that a relationship with Him is dependent on an acceptance of what God’s Son did on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. Again, being a good person is the result of salvation, not a method to obtain salvation.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. - Ephesians 2:8-9