Why your belief in absolutes doesn't make you judgmental

Today’s post comes from Sam Chan, a public evangelist with City Bible Forum in Sydney, Australia, where he regularly shares the gospel with high school students, city workers, doctors, and lawyers.

Why are Christians so unloving?

You can give me so many examples of unloving Christians, and I can give you more examples of unloving Christians.

Here’s one way of thinking about it: in the end, it's not about being good, it's not about being religious, it's not even about being right.

Who Jesus came to save

Jesus says, "I came to save the broken and those who can humble themselves enough." That means those who will follow Jesus will be broken people.

It's like going to a hospital and saying, "Why are there so many sick people in here?" Wherein then Jesus said, "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I didn't come to call the righteous to salvation, but I came to call the sinner to repentance."

So one reason we have so many examples of Christians who are so unloving is because unloving people are who Jesus has come to save.

That’s the irony.

The Bible doesn't distinguish between the right people and the wrong people. It distinguishes between the humble people and the self-righteous people.

The problem is not belief in absolutes

We have the idea that it's absolutes that's a problem.

It's belief in absolutes that makes us intolerant, bigoted, and narrow, and that's why Christians are so unloving.

As Timothy Keller once pointed out, everyone believes in absolutes. It's which absolutes we believe in that matter.

I once stood inside a church in Cape Town, South Africa, and I could still see the bullet holes in the walls. One day in the middle of a Sunday church service, gunmen had stormed in and sprayed a church full of bullets, killing many people.

The church immediately forgave the gunmen. What would make the church do that? It's the absolutes that they believed in that made them so loving and forgiving.

Absolutes don't have to make us hateful, narrow, or bigoted. Sometimes they can make us more loving, more forgiving.

It's which absolutes we believe in that matter.

During the Civil Rights Movement, when Martin Luther King preached against the intolerance around him, he didn't preach to them less Bible, he preached to them more Bible.

He didn't give them less Jesus, he gave them more Jesus.

See, we all believe in absolutes.

Absolutes don't make us unloving, it's which absolutes we believe in.

If we believe in the absolutes of Jesus, Jesus who loves us and frees us up to love others, that absolute will make us more loving, not less.

Learn more about some of the most common objections to your faith

Sam Chan’s Evangelism in a Skeptical World—available as a book and a course—equips you with the principles and skills needed to tell the unbelievable news about Jesus to friends in a skeptical world.

These lessons combine the theological and biblical insights of classic evangelistic training with the latest insights from missiology on contextualization, cultural hermeneutics, and storytelling.

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