Courage and the Christian life

A couple weeks ago, a news story broke where a waitress who identifies as a lesbian claimed a family refused to tip her because they don’t agree with her lifestyle. The other day, the story returned to the news with a twist—it turns out the server lied.

While there’s a great deal one could say about the whole story, one of the things that struck me about it—even though it turned out to be false—was how much more difficult a story like this makes it for us to be effective witnesses to the gospel in the public square. Because Christians are typically depicted as backwards, hate-filled and homophobic by the media, stories like this make us want to stay quiet. We don’t want to speak up about anything.

And yet, speaking up isn’t something we can avoid—love won’t allow it. And so we need courage. Owen Strachan explains in his excellent new book, Risky Gospel:

…here’s the thing we must remember if we are to have a bold public witness: calling sinners out of sin is not hateful. It’s loving.

This is true of the gospel itself, right? It’s loving for someone to have shared the good news of Christ’s sacrificial death and life-giving resurrection with us. It’s unloving for a Christian not to share this message of hope. In the same way, it’s unloving for us not to speak the truth, whether in public or in private, about homosexuality—or adultery, lying, fear of man, pride, or lust.

It’s not hateful to tell your neighbor that he or she is trapped in sin. It’s kind and compassionate, and especially when you do so in a gracious and kind way. You can do it poorly if you speak without awareness of your own sin, of course. But if you’re humble and empathetic, and you courageously speak the truth about sin, you are by definition being loving. (190)

When the world calls “evil” “good”—whether we’re talking about homosexuality, lust, greed, adultery, pornography—it’s not unloving for us to say we disagree. There is a way to do it which is unloving, but what’s more unloving is for us to say nothing.

If we are Christians, we don’t have the option of being silent, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. If we love our neighbors, we must speak.