A World Made Right Through Love That Shapes How We Treat Others

The post opens with Wayne Jacobsen describing the start of the Just Love Conversations in Kansas City, a gathering meant to help people explore a book and find better language for sharing God’s love with the world. He also reflects on writing the book alongside Tobie and his wife, a collaboration built on the hope that the love and justice they describe will shape how they treat one another. He admits it is something of a high-wire act, since there is no contract between them, and says that if they cannot live out the love and justice they have written about, they would deserve to fail.

Jacobsen argues that God’s kingdom becomes visible in the world when believers embody God’s love in how they treat others. He suggests that this matters well beyond the book and the authors’ relationship, and that it gets to the heart of what he calls Just Love. Central to his question is whether the answer to a world coming apart is winning, controlling, or condemning, or whether it is becoming people in whom love knows how to make things right.

He presents God’s justice as an effort to set the world right, something God has desired since the fall and that human ambition has repeatedly undermined. In his view, justice is not about civility, compromise, or treating every political idea as equally healthy. Instead, it asks what love would do to make the world whole, and he lists truth, repentance, protection of the vulnerable, repair, forgiveness, boundaries, restitution, courage, and sometimes confrontation. He places this work first in the people believers meet every day rather than in political movements.

The post concludes that the world needs to see love-produced justice lived out by those who follow Jesus, not more arguments about it. Jacobsen describes Jesus’s work on the cross as opening the way for people to experience God’s love so deeply that it shapes them into people who see others as clearly as themselves, and he calls this the power of God rescuing people from darkness into his Son’s light.

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