Search your Bible concordance for all of Jesus’ public admonitions to love that are recorded in the Gospels. You’ll find only three directives: Love God, love your neighbor, and love your enemies. That’s it.

The college student’s challenge was formed as a question: “Doesn’t Jesus teach we should love and accept one another?” The query sounded innocent at first glance, and the answer seemed obvious, at least to most people. If you’re asked this question, though, beware of naively affirming it, for two reasons.

First, there’s likely a different issue lurking behind that question, as it was in this student’s case. If Jesus taught love and acceptance, then why don’t Christians—who allegedly follow Jesus—love, accept, and affirm those who are LGBTQ? If you quickly give the nod to the first question, you’ll be skewered by the second one.

The challenge falters in part because genuine love does not require approval and acceptance of every behavior of the one loved—a point obvious to thoughtful adults and foundational to wise parenting. Indeed, in the most famous biblical passage on love—one frequently quoted even by non-Christians at weddings—Paul himself declared that love “does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6).

Note that for the apostle, homosexual practice was unrighteous. It was “contrary to sound teaching” (1 Tim. 1:10) and was, along with other vices and sinful sexual activities, a practice that disqualified partakers from entrance into the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9–10). Plus, transgenderism runs afoul of God’s “very good” creation order: humans created by God as sexually binary, male and female, thus capable of fulfilling God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:27–28). This point was explicitly affirmed by Jesus himself (Matt. 19:4–5).

Consequently, no biblical understanding of love—and, therefore, no characterization of Jesus’ view of love—could endorse, affirm, or approve of either homosexual behavior or transgenderism.

There’s a second problem many miss, though. Contrary to popular opinion—and surprising even to me when I checked—Jesus actually said precious little in his public preaching about love in general, and he said absolutely nothing affirming the kind of “love and acceptance” being promoted in Jesus’ name through the student’s line of questioning.

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