Relationship Not Ratification

Turan opened with a story about his neighborhood association. There is a small beach at the end of his street on Cape Cod Bay, and the board wants to put up a gate.

There are good reasons. Liability. Vandalism. Teenagers partying at night.

But the handful of outsiders who actually use the beach are mostly early-morning fishermen and walkers, and Turan and Mary like saying hello to them. A gate sends one message: this is a place for people, but not people like you. So he is caught. What is right seems to push people away.

We all know that tension. The choice between what is right and keeping a relationship. Doesn’t God want both?

That is the question 1 John 4 answers. When it comes to truth and love, John says, the choice is actually clear. The hard part is how we communicate it.

We started with testing the spirits. How do we know a spiritual claim is really from God? John cuts to one central question: does the person acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that he came in a real body, fully God and fully man?

If yes, the Spirit of God is in them. If no, it is not. There are two kinds of people, and John does not soften it.

That black-and-white talk makes us uncomfortable. It can feel like playing judge. Turan named the reason so many people reach for tolerance instead. Tolerance waters down absolute truth until it stops feeling harsh.

But John speaks in absolutes on purpose. There really is a difference between God’s truth and the world’s truth.

We must never ratify the world’s version. To ratify is to approve it, to officially agree. What is wrong is wrong, and we do not sign off on it.

But how we disagree matters enormously. Except where real harm was being done, Jesus never rejected people over disagreement. He made love prevail over rejection, even with people who did not yet know the truth.

Then John turns to love. God is love. That is not the same as saying love is God.

God continually gives himself away for the good of others. Selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love.

And just as with truth, we are never to ratify the world’s love, which is finally selfish, conditional, and limited. We are always called to love. Never called to love on the world’s terms.

John writes in circles, so he returns to assurance with a variation. The Spirit in us, the eyewitness testimony, changed lives: all of it is evidence. And so we know. We know how much God loves us. We can face the day of judgment without fear, because perfect love casts out fear.

Truth and love are not ours to water down. They are God’s, and they are clear. The question John leaves us with is not whether to hold them, but how to hold them so people are drawn in rather than pushed away.

Something to sit with this week:

Where are you tempted to ratify the world’s version of truth or love just to avoid seeming judgmental? What would it look like to hold to God’s truth and still choose relationship over rejection?