4 ways we can love like Jesus
Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.
This paragraph is a summary of Ephesians 5:1-2 from ‘The Message’ Bible. I love what it says about love, about our directive, and the image it creates about Jesus’ love for us. We throw around the word ‘love’ a lot, but most of us do not use it correctly. We might say with the same enthusiasm that we love pizza, animals, people and a TV show!
So, based on this passage from Ephesians, what does it really mean to love extravagantly? I submit to you that we can define extravagant love in the following 4 ways:
Unconditional
Love is not an “If-Then” proposition. “If you do this for me, or if you love me, or if you act a certain way, then I will love you” are not Biblical statements. In fact, the opposite is true. We are to love – Period. In Matthew 22 we read:
Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
That’s it. There are no conditions added. There are no qualifiers to love. Loving without condition is a natural response to following Jesus. Respond to the love of God by loving Him back, and the love He has for you will overflow to others. This is not optional, and there is no other way. The good news is that He makes it easy for us! God showed us the example to follow. Instead of withholding His love from us when we were lost in sin, He loved us unconditionally (and still does) even when we don’t deserve it. As a result, we are called to do the same.
Never Ending
As an overflow of unconditional love, we don’t stop loving when we are tired, or when people don’t respond to our love like we think they should. If it’s really love, then it never ends.
Lamentations 3:22-23 tells us that: The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.
Lord, help me to be someone who can wake up each day and recognize your great love and mercy. Help me to do the same.
When it’s not easy
This is where it gets tough. We can try to love unconditionally, and we can try to do this every day, but what happens when we meet resistance? Especially when we meet a lot of resistance from those who don’t love us, and certainly don’t love God? We have to pray that God’s heart would overflow into our heart and soften our hard edges until we reflect His love to those around us. That’s really the way we get through these hard situations. We don’t have to come up with our own capacity to love because He will give it to us. He is happy to give it to us! We receive His love and respond to Him, then we become a vessel that expresses His love to the world.
Luke 6 has some real truth about love that we cannot ignore –
“But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you… Do to others as you would like them to do to you. “If you love only those who love you, why should you get credit for that? Even sinners love those who love them!… “Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked.
Sacrificial
Real love gives when it’s not easy
Real love gives beyond what the world would say is reasonable
1 John 4:10 says: “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” And John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son… God loved, so he gave. We are loved by God, so we give His love to others in return. Even when it means giving and loving beyond our comfort zone.
We also read in Romans 5:8 that “…God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He didn’t sacrifice based on our character, our history, or our goodness. He sacrificed out of His love for us, even though we never deserved it, so we could be saved and be with Him for eternity.
With Jesus as our role model, we can’t love any other way. If our ‘love’ is withheld or expressed in another way, then it’s not love. 1 John also tells us that God is love. Not just that God has love or God expresses love, but that GOD IS LOVE.
Maybe you don’t feel it, or maybe you have no idea how to start loving this way. That’s okay. My advice is to pray and ask God to reveal the tremendous, unfathomable, amazing depth of His love for you! God is love, so when you truly invite Him in, then His character, His very being (love) will saturate your soul and build up to the point of overflowing! That’s extravagant.
God Bless!
