Passion v. Love

I took a class in seminary one summer that surveyed the gospels in a week. All four of them. It was intense. There were two professors that shared the class, one of which had come from the DTS extension in Daytona, Florida. This same summer, a group of guys visited the church Misha and I attended who were seminary students as well. I discovered that they had followed their favorite prof from Daytona to Dallas, just to take even more classes from him. So I thought it would be great to go visit them at their apartment, since that’s what good Baptists do. It’s called “visitation”.

This particular prof is a free grace guy, as evidenced by his followers’ desire to get the gospel right. I had rarely met anyone as passionate as these guys, even at seminary. They were a rare breed of students who had the right answers and had set out to make sure the world was corrected. Ok, so they aren’t so rare, but their passion was remarkable. Misha and I spent a couple of hours with them one evening, during which time we learned every statement our pastor had made that betrayed his legalism, and how we must be heretics because we attended that church.

Did I mention that they were passionate?

Misha and I left the apartment feeling like we had been horse-whipped. And we do not remember that encounter fondly. For me, it’s partly because I do not have that kind of passion about many things. I think I might be a little bit jealous. To be willing to follow a teacher 1,100 miles to learn from him, to be so convinced of something and be willing to defend it to the death, to seek intellectual battle like they did are still foreign practices for me. I just don’t get that excited about much.

The other reason I don’t remember our encounter with positive feelings is that I felt that the goal of these guys was to destroy me. I was a legalist, and they were going to take me down. Or that’s how it felt. The fact is that I was not a legalist, but I was working through some contradictory messages I was receiving from pastors and professors, and I was seeking the truth. What I did not want to do is go back to that apartment and spend another 2 hours hearing about all the ways I was wrong.

Passion v. Love.

What I’ve come to realize is that Passion, while necessary and desirable, makes for a lot of loud noise without love. Isn’t that what the first part of I Corinthians 13 is all about? I can speak with knowledge, power, and accuracy, but if I do not have love, I am nothing but a clanging cymbal from which people flee.

Over the last few years I have been growing in passion and confidence about a few things, especially the gospel. I’ve even been seeking out conversations that pit the intellectual reliability of free grace against all forms of legalism. But what I want to always be the hallmark of my presentation is passion tempered by love. I don’t ever want a conversation with me to feel like a horse-whipping. There just might be something to this “truth in love” thing.