🤔🥰💒 Jesus's love for us

Posted : 8 Sep, 2021 03:18 PM

Christians have always put great emphasis on Jesus‘ love for us, and rightly so! The love of Christ is a central theme of the gospel and a driving force behind all of redemptive history. From their youngest years, children in many Christian families sing songs like “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tell me so.” And it does tell us just that. Yet, it is also important for us to let the Bible define the nature of this love. What does it mean that Jesus loves us? This is worth exploring further.



Love as self-sacrifice

Perhaps the clearest definition of Jesus’ love is located in Jesus’ own words to His disciples, where He said:



“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends,” (John 15:13).



This is the kind of love with which Christ loves His people. Not a feeling, a passion, or a sentiment, but rather an action. A true willingness to die for another which is realized in an act of total self-sacrifice for the other’s benefit. The book of Revelation praises Jesus for this very thing in words like:



“and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood,” (Revelation 1:5).



Our faith is a trust in this self-giving love of Christ, as Paul writes:



“I have been crucified with Christ; and 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 up for me,” (Galatians 2:20).



And our ultimate hope is secure in the unchanging faithfulness of Jesus’ love:



“Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Romans 8:33-35).



The love that brought Jesus to the cross on our behalf is also held up as an example for us to imitate toward one another:



“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma,” (Ephesians 5:1-2).



Even the imperfect love I have toward my wife ought to be modeled after and point toward Jesus’ love for His church as expressed in His atoning death on the cross:



“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her,” (Ephesians 5:25).



Yes, our lives ought to come under the control of this perfect, self-giving, redeeming love of Jesus Christ displayed in His torturous death on the cross for our sins:



“For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf,” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).



Jesus’ love, the greatest and most perfect of all loves, is His giving up His own life to rescue us from sin, death, and hell. This is how we, too, ought to love.



“We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and w ought to lay down our lives for the brethren,” (1 John 3:16).

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