Life Marks  – “A Reason to Love”

As I noted in my last blog, Jesus placed an “impossible” demand on His followers when He told them that they needed to love Him above everything else in their lives. The Bible tells us that the greatest of all Christian virtues is love (I Cor. 13:13), so it’s not surprising that Jesus expects us to put “love” at the top of our list of virtues, including loving him at the top of our “love pyramid.”

Also in my last blog, we talked about the “impossibility” of loving Jesus above all other affections, noting that loving Him, and anyone else for that matter, could not be accomplished unless we received the “gift” of love. That gift is the natural consequence of being “born again” by the Spirit of God, something that we looked at in my last blog. For those who have received this gift, they now have reasons to love Him above all other affections. Although there are many reasons, it really boils down to just one reason with two components.

First and foremost, we have every reason to love Him because He loved us first (1 John 4:7). “Wait a minute,” we might say, “I’m easy to love, so it’s no big deal for Him to love me. I live a good life, and I haven’t murdered anyone, so I’m pretty easy to love. Yep, lil’ ole’ self-centered, self-confident, self-absorbed me. Why wouldn’t He love me?”

There is no question that God looks at us differently than we look at ourselves. We have set the bar far too low. God sets it high, in fact, as high as He is. Simply put, the Bible calls us “sinners.” When we think of sin, we usually think of breaking the Ten Commandments, or any other commandments that we might have imposed on ourselves. But if we are honest, we don’t even live up to our own standards that we have set for ourselves.

But it’s not just about breaking commandments or standards, it’s fundamentally about desiring to live our lives independently of God. We simply don’t want God to be involved in our lives, and we surely don’t want to be accountable to anyone but ourselves. It’s that desire for independence that is at the heart of sin, and it’s that independence that leads to the breaking of those commandments that we usually like to focus on. You might consider yourself to be a “good” person, and maybe you have done and continue to do a lot of good things, but if you persist in your desire for independence from God, then you, like everyone else, has a sin problem. We need a Savior, one who can forgive our sins and give us a new heart and life.

Secondly, the Bible says that “God demonstrated His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).  No, it wasn’t while we were lovable creatures, but “while we were sinners,” that Christ died for us. In theology, we call this the “vicarious atonement,” that is, someone died for us so that we might be redeemed from the penalty and power of sin. We cannot, under any circumstances, work it out ourselves. Christ died for us, and we simply need to receive this gift, that is, the gift of forgiveness of our sins and the new life He came to give us. The Apostle John wrote that God “….first loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The word “propitiation” is another big word, but it means to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Such an atoning sacrifice is the act in which God’s anger and judgment toward sin is satisfied.

As we consider the “why” question about loving Him above all other affections, one overarching reason stands out: He loved us first, and He demonstrated His love by dying for our sins. And, He continues to love us, and the sacrifice He made for our sins on the cross two thousand years ago continues to cleanse us from sin today. But in order to have it, we need to ask for it. If we don’t ask, we won’t receive. In fact, Jesus Himself said, “Ask and you will receive” (Mt. 7:7). So, if you have never asked him to forgive your sin and to give you new life, just ask. It’s not complicated!