The NIV 365-Day Devotional Reading PlanНамуна

Love Without Bias

The man wept as he told how his mother had treated each of her children in an equally rotten manner. One after another, she had driven her children away. They had moved to other places just to escape her tirades about their tragic worthlessness. Even now, when her children return to celebrate her birthday or some other holiday, the mother only adds to their guilt by caustically reminding each about how they have abandoned her.

I admire this man and the way that he, in Christian faith, has chosen to remain close to his mother. He cares for her because she is his mother and because there is no one else left that she has not sadistically forced away with lacerating venom.

Like that cruel mother, judgment and prejudice often influence how we view others. We see it in Peter. Years of social training had identified the “OK” people and the “not OK” people, similar to how religious instruction shaped his views about animals for sacrifices. For Peter, some people were acceptable, some tolerable, some to be avoided altogether.

In situations where prejudice pulls our noses into the air and causes us, like my friend’s mother, to become equal opportunity disdainers, that intolerance bites and hurts and destroys. But that can be counteracted with another form of prejudice: the discrimination of love, which chooses to care even when social convention says otherwise.

This is the lesson God taught Peter that day in Joppa when he showed Peter a large sheet containing all kinds of animals, reptiles and birds and ordered him to kill and eat them. When Peter objected, saying he had never eaten anything impure or unclean, God told him not to call anything impure that God had made clean. This vision was an object lesson to show Peter that the Good News of Christ’s sacrificial love is for all people, whether Jew or Gentile. This was a revelation to Peter, who had been taught to distance himself from non-Jews.

Although this passage is a wonderful story of equality, it also teaches us that sometimes there is a good side to discrimination. The beauty of family life is found precisely in its inequalities. In a family we learn that persons are to be loved uniquely, not equally. A wife does not love her husband because he is just one of the crowd that hangs around, but because he is uniquely her spouse. Nor does a father treat one child the same as another child. True love discriminates.

Parents who try to love all of their children in exactly the same way become frustrated to the point of incompetence. It is in the family that we learn to esteem each person greatly, not because each is a cloned pea in a pod, but because each is unique and different. It’s the same in marriage; we learn to love each other uniquely, rejoicing in our differences and learning how those differences can enrich and enlarge our relationship.

—Wayne Brouwer

Taken from NIV Couples’ Devotional Bible