Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Sacrifice of Love

Nobody that understands the cross doubts God love. That was the topic of the last post. But the topic today is the forgotten part of 1st John 3:16 – “. . . And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Ah, most of us know and love John 3:16, but most of us would rather forget 1st John 3:16. But if we do that, we miss out on life’s greatest blessing - the blessing of showing love to others. It’s wonderful to experience God’s love, but it’s even more wonderful to participate with Christ as He shares love; to be the instrument by which Christ’s love.

This really does turn the natural laws on their head. The first law of physical life is self preservation, but the first law of spiritual life is self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is required even to the point of giving up our dearest possession – our very lives.

To illustrate, I’d like you to turn to a hymn in our hymnbook that expresses this kind of self-sacrifice – When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” It goes like this:
“When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.”

And the final stanza reads:
“Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
Amen! How true!

That kind of sacrifice will be our attitude when we truly understand the cross. It will break our hearts. Nothing we could ever do for God would be enough, could ever be enough. To respond to God’s love by loving others could be our only response. 1st John 4:19 says: “We love Him because He first loved us.”

To what extent do we love? 1st John 3:16 tells us, “By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” This is simple cause and effect. Because Christ loved us that much, we naturally would want to reciprocate. And since we show love to Christ by loving those He loves, we love each other. And, we love to the point of laying down our own lives for one another.

That is the essence of being a follower of Jesus Christ - total, unreserved surrender to Christ. Luke 9:23 says: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” The call, the invitation, is to come, to follow Christ. That invitation is open to all. But the condition (the “if”) is this: “let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.”

At the foot of the cross, there is no room for self-will. We come to God as utterly broken people. We have nothing to offer Him – we are empty handed. We stand naked and alone and totally condemned for our sins before the only one who can save us, who can heal our lost spirits, who can mend our brokenness. And what does He ask for? That we deny ourselves.

Deny, in Greek, means to utterly forsake. Luke 9:24 continues: “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.” “Well, Pastor, Jesus isn’t talking about actual death here, is He?” Oh, yes! He said, “Take up your cross” didn’t He? And He didn’t mean, wear a lapel pin, or put a bumper sticker on your car. I don’t think they had them back in Jesus day.

Back then, they didn’t look at the cross as a pretty piece of jewelry, but an ugly instrument of death. The cross symbolized extremes of both excruciating pain, heartless cruelty, and, above all, death!

And Jesus knew He was going to the cross. Repeatedly, He had told His disciples, like just a few verses back in Luke 9:22, that He was going to the cross. He said: “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day.”

The cross was common in that day. Just a few years earlier, a man name Judas had led a bunch of zealots in revolt against Rome. In response, the Roman General Varus took immediate action, and he ordered over 2,000 crucifixions to teach the upstart Jews a lesson. Crosses lined the roads of Galilee from one end to the other, each bearing a writhing man in excruciating pain, each man dying a long and merciless death. Each of the apostles, with the possible exception of John himself, was also martyred.

Certainly, the apostles knew what Jesus talked about. It was obvious – the cross meant death. Jesus asks us to abandon ourselves to Him with no reservations, with no consideration of the cost - not even of life itself.

But, in giving up, we gain. When we give our lives over to Jesus, we receive His life in return. He lives in and through us. Galatians 2:20 assures us: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

Christ gave His life for you. It is only reasonable that you, in return, give your life to Him.
And by doing so, you gain Christ’s life, lived out inside you, through you. What more could you want?

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