Broken-Down House
And we really do believe that this love is the most powerful force for change in the universe. What is the hope of this love? We don’t feel burdened by this call to love, because we know that the God, who is love, is transforming us by his love, so that we will increasingly be people who love. Here is the biblical model: God’s love rescues us from self-love so that we will be able to love others. Let me unpack this for you. God knows that, because we are sinners, our first inclination is not to love others, but to love ourselves. Sin turns us in on ourselves. Sin causes us to be selfish, self-absorbed, and self- focused. Sin causes us to be obsessed with what we want, what we feel, and what we think we need. Sin causes us to want to exist at the center of our own universe, having our feelings addressed, our wants satisfied, and our needs met. Sin makes us demanding and expectant, rather than serving and giving. So God has to rescue us from us. He has to free us from our bondage to ourselves so that we can live for him and for others. And as he does this, God is not taking our humanity from us. He is giving it back to us. You see, we were designed to love him and to love others. In progressively freeing us from sin, he is increasingly enabling us to live as we were created to live. And this is itself the happiest and most satisfying way to live. God has arranged all this so that we need not be overwhelmed or weighed down with the call to love, for the God who is love now lives inside of us empowering us to love others as he has loved us. But there is more. We don’t have to wonder what in the world this love is meant to look like. We don’t have to fear that we won’t know how to function as his tools of love. Why? Because there is a moment in history that is the final definition of the love to which God has called us. That moment is the cross of Jesus Christ. We have been called to cruciform love. What does this mean? This means that the love we give to others must shape itself, mold itself, to resemble in some essential way what took place at the cross of
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