Review: Love Matters More: How Fighting to Be Right Keeps Us from Loving Like Jesus by Jared Byas
In Love Matter More, Jared Byas argues that Christians need to do a better job when connecting with people we disagree with. He writes specifically about how Christians tend to “speak the truth in love” when telling others how to live their lives because it ultimately causes the receiver of the “truth” to feel dehumanized and unloved. As the title of his book says we should care more about showing “love” rather than focus on being right all the time. Byas states that we should show “true love” instead of “speaking truth in love”, the former places the emphasis on love while the latter places it on truth.
“Speaking truth in love” is a common phrase we tend to hear but may not seem as clear to us in practice. Byas provides a number of good examples of how we tend to do this. Some include: Christians telling an unmarried couple who are living together that they’re “living in sin”; Christian parents kicking their LGBTQ kids out of their house because of their sexuality; and Christians telling women they can not be pastors or hold some other form of authority because of their gender.
One of the most powerful sections of the book is on how we tend to make the Bible into an idol. Byas discusses how some Christians tend to treat the Bible as absolute truth when the focus should be on what Jesus taught us about the scriptures. He ultimately comes down to the conclusion that the best Christians are not those that know the most Bible but they are those who love the most. This made me think of a number of people I know who actually live out Christian values even though they don’t know the Bible cover to cover.
Love Matters More should wake alot of Christians up. Byas’ life experiences and wisdom that he chronicles in this book, as a former pastor and now scholar, should benefit those who have been victims of this toxic behavior of “speaking truth in love” and especially those who have been the promoters of this ideology onto others.
Thanks to Zondervan, Jared Byas, and Anna LeBaron for a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review. This book will be released on September 8, 2020.
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