Do friends let friends sin?

There is a cultural sentiment that if you love someone then you will not confront that person’s sinful choices.  To do so is profoundly unloving, the thinking goes.  Yet if we love one another, we will still abhor sin and cling to everything good (Rom. 12:9).  And that is true of our relationships as well.

Commenting on this same theme, John Piper has written,

…we live in a time when emotional offense, or woundedness, often becomes a criterion for deciding if love has been shown. If a person can claim to have been hurt by what you say, it is assumed by many that you did not act in love. In other words, love is not defined by the quality of the act and its motives, but by the subjective response of others. In this way of relating, the wounded one has absolute authority. If he says you hurt him, then you cannot have acted lovingly. You are guilty. Jesus will not allow this way of relating to go unchallenged.

Love is not defined by the response of the loved. A person can be genuinely loved and feel hurt or offended or angered or retaliatory or numb without in any way diminishing the beauty and value of the act of love that hurt him. We know this most clearly from the death of Jesus, the greatest act of love ever performed, because the responses to it covered the range from affection (John 19:27) to fury (Matt. 27:41-42). That people were broken, wounded, angered, enraged, and cynical in response to Jesus’ death did not alter the fact that what he did was a great act of love.

This truth is shown by the way Jesus lived his life. He loved in a way that was often not felt as love. No one I have ever known in person or in history was as blunt as Jesus in the way he dealt with people. Evidently his love was so authentic it needed few cushions. It is owing to my living with the Jesus of the Gospels for fifty years that makes me so aware of how emotionally fragile and brittle we are today. If Jesus were to speak to us the way he typically spoke in his own day, we would be continually offended and hurt. This is true of the way he spoke to his disciples and the way he spoke to his adversaries. People were offended in his day as well. “Do you know,” his disciples asked him, “that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” (Matt. 15:12). His response to that information was brief and pointed: “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides” (Matt. 15:13-14). In other words, “They are plants that do not produce the fruit of faith because God has not planted them. They don’t see my behavior as love because they are blind, not because I am unloving.” These and dozens of other things he said to both friend and foe in ways that would rock us back on our emotional heels and make many of us retreat in self-pity.

The point of this is that the genuineness of an act of love is not determined by the subjective feelings of the one being loved.

Just because someone says we aren’t loving when we don’t ignore their sin and we encourage and exhort them to righteousness does not mean we aren’t loving.  (Of course one does need to examine his motives and manner in such an interaction to determine if the way the exhortation is done is gracious and loving.)  In fact, one of the great demonstrations of love is that we care enough for others that we address their sin and encourage them to repent.