Love the Sin; Love the Sinner?

“Liberal” Christianity has adopted a new approach to sin. It’s OK. In fact, if it’s necessary to get you into church, we celebrate your … well, we can’t any longer call it “sin.” Let’s call it “lifestyle.”

Professor Mike Adams has a thoughtful article on it at Townhall: St. Jude, Don't Make it Bad

Some excerpts:

St. Jude’s, the local gay church in Wilmington, NC, ... ran an advertisement that read “Whatever you believe, we embrace you.”

When I saw that “whatever you believe” ad, I was tempted to go to St. Jude’s one Sunday and tell them I thought the Holocaust was a good idea and that I liked cooking cats in a microwave oven. I just wanted to see whether they actually bought into moral relativism ...

Today, St. Jude’s seems to have softened its stance on wide-open “whatever you believe” moral relativism. Their website now actually lists several “core values,”
...
“St. Jude's is committed to expanding our Core Values into the community. We are: Christ-Centered - Holy Spirit Led, (We are) God's Love in Action, (We) Celebrate LGBTQ & Straight individuals and families.”

It’s a good thing the St. Jude gay church talks about certain “truths” or “core values” because that is what St. Jude himself talked about in verse three of his one-chapter epistle in the New Testament:

“Dearly loved friends, I had been planning to write you some thoughts about the salvation God has given us, but now I find I must write of something else instead, urging you to stoutly defend the truth which God gave, once for all, to his people to keep without change through the years.”

In other words, St. Jude was concerned that people were going to come along and start to change things that were clearly prohibited by the Bible. Maybe even celebrate them. ...

“And don’t forget the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighboring towns, all full of lust of every kind including lust of men for other men. Those cities were destroyed by fire and continue to be a warning to us that there is a hell in which sinners are punished.”

So this is interesting. By actually celebrating homosexuality – as opposed to say, ignoring it – the St. Jude congregation is actually driving congregants towards damnation. ...

But, of course, the real St. Jude doesn’t think we should reach out to gays with anything like hate speech. In verse twenty-three he urges that we approach them with both kindness and caution ...

Maybe it’s time for liberal Christians to get their own set of epistles. Maybe they should get their own set of Saints as well.