The Relationship Between Love, Lifestyle, and Faith
I wish you to rightly observe this conjunction, that these are inseparably knit together, love to God and love to other people – delight to do His will – to love Him and live to Him. Do not deceive yourselves with vain words. If you do not find the doctrine of grace laying this restraint on your heart, you are yet in your sins. This is the reasoning of a believing soul: “Shall I, who am dead to sin, live any longer therein? Shall I not delight in those commandments, when Christ has delivered me from the curse of the law?” Although that person falls and comes short, yet the pressure of their heart is in that direction.
At the same time, pay attention to the order. You must first believe on the Son, and then love Him, and live to Him. You must first flee to His righteousness, and then the righteousness of the law shall be wrought in you.
Therefore do not weary yourselves to no purpose. Do not wrong your own souls by seeking to reverse this order, which was established for your joy and salvation. Know that you must first meet with satisfaction in all the commands of Christ, before your obedience to any of them can be accepted. Then, having met with that, know that the sincere endeavour of your soul, and the affectionate impulse of your heart towards your duty, is accepted.
And if you find yourself afterwards surcharged with guilt and inconsistent walking, yet you know that the way is to begin at this again, to believe in the Son. This is the round you must walk, as long as you are in the body. When you are defiled, run into the fountain, and when you are washed, strive to keep your garments clean, but if defiled again, get your hearts washed from wickedness.
How Far-Reaching Love Is
Now love is a very comprehensive command. It is the fulfilling of the whole law (Romans 8:10, Matthew 22:37–38. It is indeed the true principle and pure fountain of our obedience unto God and men. All fruits of the Spirit are moral virtues that grow out of the believer. Whether pleasing to God, or refreshing to other people, they are all virtually in the root of love. That is why the apostle names one for all, i.e., brotherly love, as the bond of perfection (Colossians 3:14).
Love is a bundle of many divine graces, a company or society of many Christian virtues combined together. They are named bowels of mercies, long suffering, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, forbearance, and forgiveness, all which are tied to the believer’s girdle by charity. So where love is, every good comes. After love comes a troop of so many sweet endowments and ornaments, and where love is lacking (as truly it is the epidemic disease of the time), many sins abound, for when iniquity abounds, “the love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12).
Oh! that is our temperament, or rather our distempered nature — our love is cold, and our passions are hot! When charity goes away, out come the wild and savage beasts of darkness, i.e., bitter envying and strife, rigid censuring and judging, unmercifulness and implacableness of spirit towards others’ failings and offences. Self-love keeps the throne, and all the rest are her attendants. For where self-love and pride is, there is contention, strife, envy, and every evil work, and all manner of confusion. They lead one another as in a chain of darkness (Proverbs 13:10; James 3:16).
Do not think that love is a mere compliment, an idle feeling. It more real than that, more vital. It has bowels of mercy, which move when others are moved, and which bring their neighbour’s misery into the inmost seat of the heart, and make your spirit a companion in their misery. It is also exercised in forbearing and forgiving.
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Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Friday, April 19, 2024
The two Hays argue that God, who is ever “changing his mind” to “broaden,” “widen,” and “expand” his “grace” and “mercy” in order to “include more and more people,” “has already gone on ahead of our debates and expanded his grace” to embrace “full inclusion of LGBTQ people in Christian communities.”

Sadly, Richard Hays (professor emeritus of Duke Divinity School) has backslidden into heresy, reneging on his decades-old published rejection of homosexual practice as immoral. He used to be the main go-to person on the issue until his work was eclipsed by my own more extensive work in 2001 and following.
In late September Yale University Press will be publishing a book entitled, *The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story* (272 pgs.), written by Hays and by his son Christopher, who is an OT scholar and chair at supposedly evangelical Fuller Seminary.
This will likely lead to an acceleration of evangelical capitulation on the scripture’s (and Jesus’) male-female foundation for sexual ethics. It will also likely signal Fuller Seminary’s capitulation on sexual ethics.
The two Hays argue that God, who is ever “changing his mind” to “broaden,” “widen,” and “expand” his “grace” and “mercy” in order to “include more and more people,” “has already gone on ahead of our debates and expanded his grace” to embrace “full inclusion of LGBTQ people in Christian communities.”
They contend that the arguments about the so-called “handful of specific passages” dealing with homosexual practice and transgenderism (it is really the entire matrix of biblical texts dealing with human sexuality) “have reached an impasse” and are “missing the forest for the trees.”
This is a nonsense claim. There is no exegetical (or hermeneutical) impasse. The texts that speak directly to the issue of homosexual practice and transgenderism, understood in their ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman contexts and taking into consideration the flaws of “new knowledge” arguments, decisively demonstrate a strong biblical witness against these behaviors from ancient Israel through early Christianity.
Nor is discussion of these texts “missing the forest for the trees.” They are part of a larger matrix where every narrative, law, proverb, exhortation, and poetry having anything to do with sexual ethics, from Genesis to Revelation, including the teaching of Jesus, always presuppose a male-female foundation and thus exclude the implosion of that foundation that would come about by embrace of homosexual practice or transgenderism.
The position being espoused by the two Hays is akin to claiming that arguments against adult-consensual incest or polyamory that are based on biblical texts directly indicting these practices “miss the forest for the trees.”
Hays had previously defended the orthodox scriptural position in a journal article in 1986 (“Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell’s Exegesis of Romans 1,” Journal of Religious Ethics 14 (1):184-215) and a book chapter in 1996 (ch. 16, pp. 379-406, in: The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics [HarperSanFrancisco]).
Even then his work had problems. He dismissed the relevance of the Sodom text (and the related Levite at Gibeah), failing to grasp the ancient Near Eastern context and think analogically. In fact, Sodom and the Levite at Gibeah are both stories that present homosexual practice as an egregious offense within stories about multiple offenses (similar to a story about a man raping his father as not indicting only coercive forms of incest).
He also wrongheadedly critiqued Boswell for allegedly thinking that Paul operated with a view of sexual orientation when (Hays claimed) such is a modern idea unknown to Paul. In fact, Hays was agreeing with Boswell that Paul allegedly understood homosexual behavior to be the result of insatiable lust seeking novel forms of self-gratification. Not realizing it, Hays was undermining his own attempt to support Paul’s view by giving the Left a “new knowledge” argument for dismissing Paul’s witness. Hays failed to understand that rudimentary but real notions of “sexual orientation” already existed in the ancient world, including by some Greco-Roman moralists and physicians who still rejected the behavior arising from said orientation.
I look forward to critiquing their book in depth when it is released in late September. But this isn’t the first time I have been to the dance. I have been researching this issue for thirty years, and have encountered similar arguments before. This manner of reasoning is rubbish. Some additional considerations:

Jesus didn’t “widen God’s mercy” on sexual ethics by approving of egregious sin and canceling the need for repentance. He intensified God’s demand for sexual purity and reached out to the biggest violators of that demand to call people to repentance.
Most importantly, Jesus viewed a male-female prerequisite for sexual ethics as the foundation for all sexual ethics, including the limitation of two persons to a sexual bond (monogamy). In this his witness was consistent with the witness of his Hebrew Scriptures and carried forward by the faithful apostolic witness to Christ.
The widening of the sphere of God’s mercy to include Gentiles is a poor analogical basis for widening it to include homosexual practice and transgenderism, which (unlike being a Gentiles) are direct moral offenses. Nor do analogies to slavery, women, and divorce justify an embrace of homosexual practice and transgenderism, as I have repeatedly shown (and as Hays once knew).
Sooner should the church embrace adult-consensual polyamory and adult-consensual incest, both of which are prohibited on the basis of a male-female foundation for sexual ethics grounded in creation. Homosexual practice is worse because it is an attack on the very foundation of sexual ethics at creation.

God hasn’t changed his mind. Hays and son have. They are now swimming in the sea of heresy, rejecting the clear and overwhelming witness of Scripture (including Jesus) for its antithesis in today’s misguided world, and in the process encouraging the embrace of behavior that leads to exclusion from the Kingdom of God.
That can’t be loving by any stretch of the imagination.
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When God creates us to reflect his image to the world, the first way that happens is through dominion. Dominion is a strange word for us, so what exactly does God mean? Dominion isn’t a word we use very often. Dominion means benevolent rule, stewardship, or care. It means work. We have been created for dominion—for work. Our creativity, our management, our organization, our labor– all of this reflects God to the world. We’ve all had a taste of this. We’ve all done work that was meaningful, that we took a sense of pride in.

I do my job just to get by.
-Three in ten American workers

My job is just a stepping stone for something better.
-Two in ten American workers[i]

Half of America agrees: work is a curse. This Monday we celebrate Labor Day. For many, the best part of Labor Day is that they don’t have to labor. And isn’t that what the Bible teaches? After Adam and Eve rebel, God levies this curse on Adam:

[C]ursed is the ground because of you;in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;and you shall eat the plants of the field.By the sweat of your faceyou shall eat bread,till you return to the ground…[ii]

Work is a curse. Historian Roger Hill agrees:
 “From a historical perspective, the cultural norm placing a positive moral value on doing a good job because work has intrinsic value for its own sake was a relatively recent development… Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading… the Hebrew belief system viewed work as a ‘curse devised by God explicitly to punish the disobedience and ingratitude of Adam and Eve’… Numerous scriptures from the Old Testament in fact supported work, not from the stance that there was any joy in it, but from the premise that it was necessary to prevent poverty and destitution.”[iii]
There you have it. Work is a curse. And haven’t you felt the curse of work? Haven’t you felt the thorns, thistles, and sweat?
I’ve held a number of jobs: umpire, swim coach, fast food restaurant cook, I’ve worked at a deli, worked at a call center, been a Detention Officer, worked landscaping, worked in fundraising, and, of course, as a pastor. And every one of those jobs had thistles and sweat. They were all hard in their own way. No one has a job without thistles and sweat.
There’s a scientific theory that I think sums up this “thistles and sweat” reality of work well: entropy. Entropy is the phenomenon that things break down from order to disorder. Why did our air conditioner break only two and a half years of installation? Entropy. Why does the sliding glass door stick? Entropy. Have you ever put earbuds in your pocket?
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