Max Lucado ~ gone squishy

Recently I read a post by Max Lucado on Fox News teaching moral tolerance: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/max-lucado-how-to-really-love-your-neighbor-who-is-nothing-like-you

Max says: You love your husband and she lives with her wife. …

How do we respond? Ignore them? Share a meal with them? Leave the room when they enter? Ask them to leave so we can stay? Discuss our differences? Dismiss our differences? Argue?

I wonder if the best answer might be found in this short admonition from the Bible: “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God” (Rom.15:7). This verb for “accept” means more than tolerate or coexist. It means to welcome into one’s fellowship and heart. The word implies the warmth and kindness of genuine love. …

Reserve judgment. Let every person you meet be a new person in your mind. None of this labeling or preconceived notions. Pigeonholes work for pigeons, not for people.

Is Max right to welcome homosexuals into his heart and fellowship with such warmth? The Bible verse that Max builds his doctrine of tolerance from is:

Romans 15:7 Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.

Those received by Christ are saved, believers, Followers of God. Look with me to see if God receives homosexual men, as Max seems to be encouraging us to:

1 Corinthians 6:9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals,

Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

That doesn’t sound like Max’s stated warmth and kindness of Genuine love, that doesn’t sound like God accepts men who make an abomination out of God’s image, by buggering it.

(FYI: God is not female, and we are never told that women are in God’s image, so likewise we are not told that two women lying together is an abomination, but that lesbianism is an “unnatural” act. Lesbians defile each other, but can’t tarnish the image of God by their unnatural usage. )

So are we to accept the abominable and their bodily acts of desecrating sacrilege? Or do we assume God’s clear judgement against them, should be mirrored in our own judgement? I contend we should not be trying to warmly accept God’s enemies, but to condemn their abominable acts and call for their repentance, as Jesus so often called for His adversaries to repent.

Be discriminating.

An online dictionary sample usage of the word “discriminating” says: “ A discriminating person can pick up on the small differences between things and use those differences to make better choices.”

You don’t have the underpinning of the “seven pillars of wisdom”(Proverbs 9:1) if you don’t have any discernment or discrimination. We should come to any situation with as much solid prejudicial understanding and wisdom as we can, but then be open minded enough to continually reevaluate the situation as we learn more about the actual facts. Instead of approaching people and situations as an empty headed fool, we should pre-judge things for our own protection based upon our learned prejudices, while remaining willing to rapidly adapt our thinking if our prejudices prove to be unmerited in the particular circumstance or involving particular individuals.

We all constantly prejudge people and situations based upon past experiences and acquired knowledge, for our own benefit and protection. Would you wander alone at night on foot and unarmed in a high crime area of urban decay? Probably not, because you are wise enough to prejudge the danger of doing so. How do you know it is a high crime area, or an area of urban decay? Because of your prejudice, that is how you have prejudged that. What more solid of a foundation for a prejudice could we have, than God’s own eternal judgement?

James 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

If some man is a homosexual, and God says that is an abomination, can we not accept God’s judgement in the matter? I think a refusal to accept their sin, and a clear call for their repentance is a far more caring and Christ like response than the permissive welcome into one’s fellowship and heart and warm acceptance that Max Lucado is advocating.