I saw a post on social media that went something like this: “When you love people, you love all of them. There are no boundaries. If you have boundaries, you’re not living into the kingdom of God that is always expanding and always welcoming. Your boundaries are nothing but fear mongering.” At the heart of this comment is the modernist assumption that God’s love is unconditional. This is an assumption that has crept its way even into the minds of conservative Christians and it permeates the theology of liberalism. To say “when you love people, you love all of them,” I agree wholeheartedly that you cannot distinguish between race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, social status, wealth, or ability. Things, by and large, that are out of an individual’s control. As Christians we must love our brothers and sisters in the faith regardless of their physical or social differences. As Christians, we can never love sin nor those who refuse to repent of their sinful lifestyle.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when clergy commit the sin of eisegesis. To be perfectly honest, I, too, have fallen into that sin. Most of the time the Holy Spirit stops me before I can preach it, but sometimes my pride and sinfulness get in the way. For those times, it is upon me to repent and restate correctly where I erred.

For those who don’t know, eisegesis is reading an interpretation into a biblical text. Exegesis — the proper form of interpretation — reads out of the text what the passage says. Justin Taylor provides an excellent example in a 2015 article printed in Tabletalk Magazine. ​He says,