Self-Sacrificing Love
Taking my youngest son shopping with me is quite the experience. At 4 years old, he has mastered the “I need this” and “I want that” requests, and yes, I use the term requests very loosely. But he soon realizes that he actually does not need any of those things, even if the process involves heightened emotions. It can be hard to filter what you need, from what you want, from what you already possess.
We learn early on that our nature is inherently selfish. As we go from one day to the next, “What do I want?” is often our greatest concern and can be the very thing that dictates what we find ourselves doing. If left unchecked and unguarded, much of our life can become wrapped up in our preferences, our opinions, our feelings, and our priorities that it really just is an all about me show.
How does a naturally selfish heart affect how we show love to one another? Unfortunately, much of what we call “love” is actually self-love, seeking what we can gain or benefit from someone or something else. We claim to love our spouses, our friends, and our faith communities, but how often are these discarded like hand-me-down clothes when we no longer get what we want from them? Just to be clear, I love a good hand-me-down shirt, by the way, we just shouldn’t treat one another as such.
Instead of relationships centered on commitment and sacrifice, our “love” often looks a lot more like consumerism, grabbing off the shelf what we need or want for the day and moving on to the next thing. That’s what sin does though. It distorts and fractures what God intended to be for our good.
Thankfully, there is hope. Our hope as Christians is that real Love changed – and is changing – the world. 1 John 3:16 says, “By this we know love, that he – Jesus – laid down his life for us.” 1 John 4:9-10 continues, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
While much of our culture operates off the principle “my advantage at your expense,” Jesus Christ did the exact opposite: he came into our world and laid down his life to say “your advantage at my expense.”
This self-sacrificing love of Jesus is special and unique because it does not depend on anything about us. He does not look at your past or your present to weigh out how much love you have earned or deserve because we do not deserve any of it in the first place. His love derives from His nature, it finds its existence in Him and is sustained by Him because He is love. Even though we are unlovely because of our sin, He loves us, He loves you, with a supernatural, sacrificial love.
This is how John can say, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). It is a declaration of fact: We love because Christ’s love changes our hearts and his selfless love flows through us to love others. Feel the love that Christ has for you today. Live in it. Walk in it. Rest in it. Then go and share that love with someone else.
