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| Mike Hosey, Elder |
If love
means being committed to the well being of another person, then the Bible
employs that meaning in a very radical and counter-intuitive way.
Consider,
for instance, how most of us view who should be the object of our love. Most of
us intuitively understand that such commitment should be applied to those for
whom we have affection. It just makes sense to us to apply commitment to our
spouse, or to our brother, or to our first-tier friends and family.
But the
Bible simply does not stop at those people for whom we feel affection. In the face of what seems like common sense,
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, and to
do good to those who hate us (Matthew 5:42-48). Combine that teaching with His
command (Mark 16:15) for us to go out into all the world, and one gets the idea
pretty quickly that we should be looking to love in all the wrong places. Jesus instructs us quite plainly in that
Matthew passage that if we love only those who love us, then we are no better
than the rest of the pagan world.
If Jesus is
our example, then we must acknowledge that we are to love people like he
does. That means that we are to love
those who don’t deserve it, who are unlovable, who are often wrong, dirty,
smelly, grumpy and broken. We are to love like Jesus did – self sacrificially. Commitment (or love), after all, isn’t proven
when things are pleasant and easy. It is
proven when things are hard, and distasteful.
And who
knows how our love -- our commitment –
will soften them, and perhaps bring them to a place where they see Jesus.
The
strongest Christians I know are those who realize how committed Jesus was to
them even when they were living in ways that He found totally repugnant and
distasteful. Perhaps we can have a
similar effect on a smaller scale when we look to love people in all the “wrong”
places.
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