Undivided Allegiance

There is a sentence going around the American Church that sounds like the gospel and is actually its opposite. It goes like this: "I don't want to push my beliefs on anyone. I just want to love people."

I understand the heart behind it. I have said versions of it myself. Nobody wants to be the person who wins an argument and loses a soul. We have all met the Christian who is right about everything and gentle about nothing, and we swore we would never become him. So we corrected. We softened. We learned to lead with warmth and to keep the hard parts to ourselves.

And somewhere in that correction, a lot of us crossed a line we never meant to cross. We stopped telling the truth, and we called it love.

Hear me carefully, because this is the heart of everything I want to say to you this week. The opposite of a harsh, truth-clubbing Christian is not a soft, truth-free Christian. Both of them have failed the person in front of them. One failed him with a fist. The other failed him with a smile. The man who needed the truth walked away from both without it.

My book says it plainly: compassion without truth is not love. It is surrender. It feels like kindness in the moment, and it functions like abandonment over time. If your child were walking toward a cliff in the dark, the loving thing is not to tell him the path feels nice under his feet. The loving thing is to say "stop," even if your voice shakes, even if he resents you for it.

Truth is not the enemy of love. Truth is the spine of love. Take it out, and what is left cannot stand up. It can only lie down next to people and agree with them while they go where they are going.

This week, three stories landed on my desk that put this exact tension under the light. A university. A government office. An adoption agency. Watch what each one chose to name, and what each one chose to leave unsaid. Then ask yourself the only question that matters: which one actually loved the people involved?

The university that wants a confession, its own teachers can contradict.

This week, the Christian Reformed Church held its Synod 2026 on the campus of Calvin University in Grand Rapids, gathering from June 12 through 18. On the table was a mechanism with a quiet, bureaucratic name and an enormous spiritual weight. It is called the "indefinite exception." In plain speech, it has allowed faculty members to teach against the denomination's own confession, the one that holds same-sex sexual relationships to be sin, while keeping their jobs and their standing.

Sit with the shape of that for a second. A Christian university says, "This is what we believe is true." Then it hands selected teachers a permanent permission slip to stand in front of students and say the opposite. The confession stays framed on the wall. The teaching in the room moves the other way. Everyone gets to feel generous. The institution keeps its name, the dissenting professor keeps his post, and the student in the third row keeps the quiet impression that nobody at this place really believes the hard thing badly enough to live by it.

That is the issue Synod was forced to face, because Calvin's own Faculty Senate moved in April 2026 to bring hiring back in line with the denomination's standard. The fight underneath the fight is simple. Can a Christian institution hold a confession that its own teachers are free to contradict? Or is a belief you will not stand behind just a decoration?

This is compassion without truth wearing a cap and gown. It was almost certainly born from a kind impulse, a desire not to lose good people, not to seem cruel, not to draw a line that costs somebody something. But a line you refuse to defend is not a line. It is a suggestion. And students can smell a suggestion from across the lecture hall.

Source: Calvin University called to clarify their confessional exceptions, The Banner

"For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear."

2 Timothy 4:3

The secular government drew a clearer line than the Church would.

Here is one I did not expect to be writing about. The Department of Defense cut its list of officially recognized faith codes from 211 down to about 31. Roughly two-thirds of what remained was Christian. Categories like atheist, pagan, humanist, and New Age were dropped. After public backlash, the Pentagon revised the list again, and it landed near 30.

Set aside the policy fight for a moment, because that is not why this belongs in front of you. Look at the contrast. A secular institution, an arm of the federal government, looked at a sprawling, blurry, everything-counts list and decided it would name what it recognizes and what it does not. It drew a hard, clear, public line. It took heat for it. It held.

Now turn and look at the Church.

We are the people entrusted with the most important claim ever made on this planet, that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through Him. And in the same season, the Pentagon is willing to be specific about something as ordinary as a personnel code, much of the Church has gone soft and shy about naming the one thing we exist to name. We will affirm almost anything to avoid the discomfort of distinguishing anything. The world out-clarified us. Let that sting a little. It should.

Source: Defense Department narrows its list of recognized religions to about 30, Religion News Service

"Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

John 14:6

The agency that paid to tell the truth again.

And then there is Bethany. Bethany Christian Services is the largest Protestant adoption and foster agency in the country. In 2021, it opened its services to same-sex couples, and it framed that decision in the warmest possible language, as offering services "with the love and compassion of Jesus." Compassion was the headline. Truth was not in the room.

This month, Bethany's board reversed course. They adopted a belief statement affirming the Apostles' Creed, the authority of Scripture, the image of God in every single person, and marriage as "a covenant between one man and one woman." Beginning in 2027, they will license only foster families aligned with that statement.

I want you to notice what this costs. This is not a press release from a group with nothing to lose. An adoption agency reversing a public LGBTQ policy will take real reputational fire and real financial loss. Partners walk. Donors leave. Headlines turn hostile. They knew all of that and recovered the truth anyway.

This is the counter-example to the other two, and it is the whole point of this issue standing right in front of you. In 2021, they chose compassion and called it love. This year, they remembered that compassion without truth was the surrender, and that real love had to include both. Notice too what they kept. The image of God in every person stayed in the statement. The door did not slam. The truth came back, and the welcome did not leave with it. That is the shape we are after.

Source: Bethany Christian Services no longer allows LGBTQ parents to foster, adopt, Christianity Today

"Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ."

Ephesians 4:15

"Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?"

Galatians 4:16

Read that line slowly, because it was written with a lump in the throat. Paul is not scolding strangers. He is writing to the churches of Galatia, people he loved, people who once would have torn out their own eyes for him, as he says a few verses earlier. These were his people. And now there is distance between them, and Paul can feel it, and he stops the letter to ask the question out loud. Have I become your enemy? Did I do something to you? Did I change?

He did not change. That is the whole sting of the verse. Paul was the same man saying the same true things he had always said. What changed was their appetite for it. A smoother, easier gospel had come through town, one that asked less and flattered more, and next to that, the truth started to feel like an attack. The same words that once sounded like rescue now sounded like rejection. He had not turned into their enemy. The truth had simply stopped being welcome, and the man who carried it got reclassified along with it.

If you have ever loved someone enough to tell them the truth and watched their face change, you know exactly what verse 16 feels like from the inside. You did not get harsher. They got more sensitive to the very thing they used to thank you for. And here is the trap, the one I want to pull you out of this week. When that happens, every instinct in you screams that the way back to the relationship is to take the truth back. Soften it. Walk it down. Become safe again by becoming silent.

Paul did the opposite. He kept the truth on the table and kept loving them across it. He did not choose between the two, because he knew they were never actually two things. That is what holds these three stories together. Calvin is being asked whether it will keep the truth that its own people stopped wanting. The Pentagon, of all institutions, was willing to be the unwelcome one and name its line out loud. Bethany already lived Galatians 4:16, told the truth, and absorbed the cost of suddenly looking like the enemy to people it longs to serve.

Underneath all three is one question pointed straight at you. When the people you love stop wanting the truth, do you love them enough to keep telling it? Or do you love their approval more than you love them?

Hear me. This is not permission to go be cruel and call it courage. Paul wept over these people. The heart of God in this whole thing is a Father standing at the end of the road, watching for a son who walked off divided, ready to run the second he sees him on the horizon. God is not looking for reasons to condemn anyone. He is calling people home. But you cannot call a man home while agreeing he was right to leave. Telling the truth is not the opposite of compassion. On the worst night of someone's life, it is often the deepest compassion there is.

So here is what lands on you this week, in your actual life, with the actual person God put in front of you.

There is someone in your world right now who is drifting. You can see it. And you have a choice, you have probably been quietly making for months without naming it. You can keep the peace, or you can keep faith with them. Most days, those feel like the same thing. They are not.

Keeping the peace means you manage your face, agree enough to stay comfortable, and tell yourself your silence is kindness. Keeping faith means you love them enough to risk the conversation that could cost you the warmth between you, because their soul is worth more to you than their approval of you.

Decide which God is asking of you. Not in the abstract. With a name attached. The institutions in this week's news are facing the exact decision you are facing at your kitchen table, only yours has a face you love.

Go to the one person you have been managing instead of loving.

Not a crowd. Not a comment section. One person.

Before you open your mouth, get your own heart right. If there is any part of you that wants to be proven correct, repent of it now, because that part will poison everything you say. You are not going to win. You are going to love. Lead with how much they matter to you, because they have to know the truth is coming from inside the love, not instead of it. Then say the true thing plainly, without ten qualifiers built to protect you from their reaction. Say it the way you would want it said to you on your worst day.

Then leave the door open and keep it open. Truth told in love is not a verdict you deliver and walk away from. It is an invitation you keep extending, the way the Father kept watching that road. You are not the judge. You are the one who refused to lie to someone you love. That is the whole assignment. Go.

Here is the hard part nobody says out loud: the people who most need this message are the least likely to know they need it.

That is who I wrote the book for. Not for you, the reader who already feels the weight of all this and lies awake over it. For the other one. The one in your life who would read this whole issue and not feel a thing, because he is sure he is fine. He is not in rebellion. He has not stormed off. He is just slowly, comfortably divided, serving two masters and convinced he is at peace with both, and he cannot see it from the inside. The prodigal almost never knows he is the prodigal. That is the cruelty of the condition.

You Can't Serve Two Masters: Undivided Allegiance To Christ In An Age of Cultural Compromise was written to put words to the thing he cannot name yet. It does not bludgeon him. It walks him, chapter by chapter, to the mirror most of us spend our lives angling away from, and it does it the way I have been describing all week: the truth in full, with the door wide open, and the Father already running.

You can preach this whole issue at the people you love. Or you can put something in their hands that says it better and more patiently than you ever could in one tense conversation, something they can wrestle with alone, at night, where pride does not have to perform.

So this is my ask. Think of the one person who came to mind while you read this. Buy the book and give it to them. Not as a weapon. As an open hand. As the kindest, truest thing you could do for someone walking toward a cliff in the dark.

Get it for someone who needs to hear it.

Available in Kindle ($9.99) and Paperback ($16.99) on Amazon.