REAL LOVE IS A PERSONAL EXCHANGE
1 John 3:16-18 This is how we know what love is: Jesus
Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay
down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees
his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in
truth.
In
the real world of relationships it is impossible to love people with a problem
or a need without in some sense sharing or even changing places with them. All
real life-changing love involves some form of this kind of exchange.
It
requires very little of you to love a person who is pulled together and happy.
Think, however, of emotionally wounded people. There is no way to listen and
love people like that and stay completely emotionally intact yourself. It may
be that they may feel stronger and more affirmed as you talk, but that won’t
happen without you being quite emotionally drained yourself. It’s them or you.
To bring them up emotionally you must be willing to be drained emotionally.
All life-changing love toward people with serious needs
is a substitutional sacrifice. If you become personally involved with them, in
some way, their weaknesses flow toward you as your strengths flow toward them.
In The Cross of Christ, John Stott writes that substitution is at
the heart of the Christian message: “The essence of sin is we human beings
substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God
substituting himself for us. We…put ourselves where only God deserves to be;
God…puts himself where we deserve to be.”
If
that is true, how can God be a God of love if he does not become personally
involved in suffering the same violence, oppression, grief, weakness, and pain
that we experience? The answer to that question is twofold. First, God can’t.
Second, only one major world religion even claims that God does.
The Reason For
God by Tim Keller,
pg.193-5
