Is Love All we need?

Is love the final standard for right and wrong?

There are those who believe that any loving relationship between two consenting adults is enough to make it right in God's eyes. However, I believe that God's Word teaches that love between two men or two women is not enough to justify a homosexual relationship. Why do I believe this way? Well, first, the Bible actually teaches us that Love is not enough. Love can easily interfere with God's plan for an individual. In the Old Testament we can see that God actually asks a father to be willing to make a sacrifice of the son he loved deeply. Abraham and Isaac's dramatic testing on Mt. Moriah, found in Genesis chapter 22, illustrates an important point. Love, for anyone, no matter how legitimate the relationship, becomes sin when it surpasses our love for God.

Also, we can see that in the New Testament, Jesus warns His followers about this same issue. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 14:26&33, Jesus speaks very bluntly about loving relationships getting in the way for those who want to follow after Him and be His disciple. "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father, and mother and wife and children and brother and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."..."So, therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple."

Love is not enough to justify a relationship. A married man can fall deeply in love with a woman other than his wife; that will never justify adultery. Likewise, love between two men or women cannot justify a homosexual relationship. Sex is a glorious gift from God - meant to be offered back to Him either in heterosexual marriage, for procreation, union and mutual delight or in celibacy for undivided devotion to Christ. It is a given that all 1st century orthodox Jews would have held to this same standard. Why? Because they lived guided by God's Word, the Scriptures.

People who justify homosexuality because Jesus said nothing directly about homosexuality in the gospels are using a misleading and illogical argument because Scripture teaches us that Jesus kept all the Law and affirmed all the Law and the Prophets teachings (Matt. 5:17-19). Undoubtedly, this would have included the affirmation of committed, monogamous male-female marriage and an unwavering condemnation of homosexual behavior.

After all, Jesus is the one who quotes from the book of Genesis when He says in Matthew 19 that, "Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? so they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."

How have we gotten so far off course in our culture, and now in many churches?
Read Romans 1:24-32 for a complete explanation.

I will not be posting a blog next Monday as I am taking a break, I will return the following week to continue to look more closely at the Word of God and how it can clear up much of the confusion around us if we read it and apply it to our everyday lives.