What, no Love? That Can't be God's Voice!

On our home page at www.christianheartbeat.org you’ll find a feature story about hearing God’s voice. It asks the question, “What does God’s voice sound like?” This may be the most important question facing the church today. It appears that we have intuitive knowledge of God’s voice written on our hearts, and trying to substitute another has as much chance of succeeding as fooling a baby with a voice other than mommy’s.
We know instinctively, without a single visit to a Bible study, that God’s voice is loving, forgiving, calming and comforting, inclusive, and perhaps most clearly, expansive of the human experience. God intends us to live large -- to love passionately and enjoy creation. God made the world for joy and laughter, not for fear and sorrow. Although some of that is inevitable, God gives us the resilience to bounce back. And if we’re living in God’s image -- speaking with God’s voice -- we’ll be out there helping others to do just that.
When people hear voices from the church and from Christian leaders in the media that just don’t sound like God’s, they recoil from so-called “organized religion,” especially organized Christian religion. Church membership declines and spiritual seekers begin to look elsewhere.
That’s the dilemma facing our evangelical media leaders and the unfortunate result of their public position on homosexuality. While the public may agree that legal bonds between homosexuals shouldn’t be exactly the same as traditional marriage, they also know instinctively these Christians are not speaking with God’s voice on the subject. If when the church speaks loudest it’s not speaking with God’s voice, why would anyone seek God in the church? It’s a no-brainer.
That perception of Christians as unchristian emerged from a recent survey by the conservative Christian polling group Barna, and is reported in a new book by Barna Group President David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons called, of all things, unChristian. Kinnaman recently told the news outlet of Focus on the Family that on homosexuality at least, the public no longer believes evangelicals are speaking in God’s authentic voice: “… that really is the perception, that Christians have lost the ability to love and to deal with and to have meaningful friendships with these individuals,” he said.
If these prominent media Christians aren’t speaking authentically on an issue they have made their priority, why would they be trusted on anything else? Because they lack love, the full Christian message loses credibility. And we all suffer -- including God.