Christians fail, and they fail a lot. They can’t help it, really, they’re human. The problem is that when Christians fail, non-Christians believe that God fails with them.
God is not Christians and Christians are not God. It’s just like you’re not your parents and your parent’s aren’t you. You share similarities with your parents – you look like them, you might sound like them, you even act like them and use words that they use. You, however, are very much your own person and you have your own ways of being and of doing things. Christians are literally the children of God and while they show a lot of the family traits, they are just as liable to look very different from God at the same time.
The fact is that God really is who he, and the Christians, say he is. You can look to Christians for a general idea of who he is, but they will not be perfect like him.
What God is, according to the Bible and Christians, is love – perfect love, undying love, unconditional love. This can be confusing when we look at the Old Testament examples of God’s wrath in the past and the New Testament promises of God’s wrath in the future all because some people just refuse to believe in him and do as he says. But, love doesn’t mean that you just accept whatever anyone does, especially if it causes harm to them, to you, or to anyone. Love can spank. Love can reprimand. Love can be disappointed. Love can respond to wrong in all kinds of ways. What doesn’t change is Love itself. Again, like a parent and a child, children can hurt parents in lots of ways but that hurt doesn’t ever negate the love that a parent has for a child. And, a parent can, and should, bring correction into a child’s life for the wrongs they commit, and that also does not change the love in the parent’s heart; what’s more, that correction is part of the expression of love from the parent, part of the expression of the deep care the parent has for the child.
Look at the Christians and laugh if you must. Heck, I laugh at them myself sometimes, and I AM a Christian. Do not, however, make the mistake of confusing the sometimes horribly misguided ways of Christians with the ways of God. He is still just as perfect as any crackpot ever claimed he is, and his love is without failure, because he himself is love itself. That being said, you can see that it really is true that God loves you.
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