They Call It Affirming. God Calls It Abandoning.

A church can love you all the way to hell.

It happens like this. A man walks in carrying something Scripture calls sin, and the church, wanting to be kind, wanting to be welcoming, wanting above all not to be one of those churches, tells him God made him this way and blesses it. They call it affirming. They put it on the sign. Everyone feels warm, no one has to have the hard conversation, and the man walks back out the door exactly as lost as he walked in, except now with a church's blessing on it. That is not love. It is one of the cruelest things a church can do, and it is spreading.

Whole denominations have crossed the line. They will tell you the old churches handed people religious trauma, and that the affirming church is the healing. Hear the sleight of hand. The wound gets renamed so the cure can be called the disease. A church that calls sin sin becomes the abuser. A church that blesses it becomes the refuge. And a generation gets taught that the most loving voice in the room is the one that never asks them to change.

But you cannot vote on what God has already said. Hear it, and do not flinch, because the mercy is buried inside the hard part. "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). Now watch what Paul does next, because if you stop at the list you have heard the diagnosis and missed the whole reason he wrote it. "Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Such were some of you. Read that as slowly as you can. Paul is not writing to a room of the innocent throwing rocks at outsiders. He is writing to former swindlers and former drunkards and former adulterers, and yes, men who once lived what that list names, and he says: were. Past tense. You were that, and then you were washed. The gospel never leaves anyone as it found them, and it never leaves anyone out. It is the hardest word and the most hopeful word in the same breath, and the affirming church has traded the whole thing for half. It kept come as you are and cut but you were washed. Come as you are is the door. It was never the destination.

And notice Paul sets the man who once practiced homosexuality on the same line as the greedy and the gossip and the drunk. That matters two ways. It means this sin is not a special, unforgivable category. The church has often treated it as uniquely disqualifying, and Paul does not. And it means it is not a special, exempt category either. The culture now says this one alone can never be called sin, and Paul does not agree. It sits in the list, alongside the sins you have committed. Every one of us was on that list somewhere. Every one of us needed the same washing.

So here is the line the loving church has to hold, and it will cost them the sign and the applause. We will not hate you, and we will not lie to you. Both. The church that hates is not Christ. And the church that lies, that tells you God blesses what He named sin, is not Christ either, however warm the room feels. It is telling a drowning man the water is fine.

If this is your fight, whatever your particular one is, do not go hunting for the church that will bless it. Go find the one that will love you enough to tell you the truth and then walk with you through the cost of it. That church is harder to find and harder to sit in. It is also the only one holding the thing that actually saves. Such were some of you. But you were washed. That door is still open. It was never opened by pretending you did not need to walk through it.