Joey Crandall
“And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.”
— Ephesians 5:2
It is a foreign thing — indeed, counter to our very nature — to walk through life with others as your primary concern.
To walk in love.
Listen to the echo chamber of social and mainstream media today, and one is led to believe that love is whatever you make it to be. Whatever best serves your wants and desires and needs in life. That one can’t fully or truly love anyone else if they cannot first properly love themself.
The life of Jesus Christ, though, presents a much different picture.
Jesus said, in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”
As I have loved you.
In five words, Jesus established Himself as the point of reference upon which the depth and breadth of true love — real love — is based.
Those five words are the baseline for true love.
You are loved from on high by a servant King. A divine Savior. The Son of God.
Loved with a love absent of self, filled with compassion, couched in humility and founded in sacrifice.
And it is that love which defines true love: Patient. Kind. Never envious or prideful or self-seeking. Bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things.
A love like that — counter as it is to our own nature — a love like that never fails.
And a love like that is only found in Jesus.
After emphatically stating both that love is of God and that God is love, John the apostle wrote, “In this, the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” (1 John 4:7-9).
So God’s love is revealed in this: that seeing us helpless in our sin, He sent His Son to be the propitiation — to be the atonement — for our sins.
Literally, God sent His only Son into the world to bridge the unbridgeable gap that our sin — that our pursuit of self — tore away between ourselves and God.
Jesus Christ gave Himself for us: an offering and a sacrifice to mend the wounds that our pursuits of self dug.
That is love.
Love, as God established it, is a complete and absolute denial of self. More specifically, it is the setting aside of self for the betterment of another.
A love like that is contrary to our human nature. But it flows naturally from the heart of Jesus Christ.
You will only ever find a love like that in Him. You will only ever be able to give a love like that from Him and through Him.
Jesus loves you with that love right now.
Unconditional. Unmerited. Undeniably yours if you would just look to Him.
Joey Crandall is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Carson Valley.
