Christ Love

God loves us just as we are. What a hard statement to write but one that is so true. Why is so hard to wrap our minds around this. Romans 5:8 says “God demonstrates his love for us in this, while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” The God that is Holy and perfect came to earth lived a sinless life for thirty three years, was arrested and beaten by people that he knit together in their mother’s womb, and allowed them to kill him for a sinner such as I. He knew every sin that you and I would do. He knew every bad sinful thought that would go through our mind. He knew how many times we would treat him like fire insurance, how many times we would coward instead of taking steps of faith, yet he still took that cross.
Why then since we have received such an awesome display of Grace do we have the ability still within us to look at others as lower than ourselves? We are to speak the truth in Love and call sin, sin but we should never look at people as less than us or not as important as us, but we do. How many times in our churches do people feel pushed away as outsiders because they don’t fit a certain standard we want them to fit? Jesus looked at the woman caught in adultery and didn’t say “dang girl you’re a big time slut, I can’t believe you did this.” No, he told the men standing around if you think your better start throwing rocks, and then he looked at her and said “go and sin no more.” If she was brought into many churches this Sunday I am afraid many people would try to keep her out or they would at least start telling her how bad she is and how messed up her life is. Jesus doesn’t do that. He in a way says go and fight sin like all those other folks have to do also.
You see we all know that when we accept Christ the appetite for sin doesn’t leave us. It is still there and still pulling at us. When we have Christ, we have a new coach and new teammate in the fight that says if we do it His way we will conquer. Sometimes people that are in sin don’t need to be told that they messed up, but they need to be told by another teammate that “hey, I conquered and you can too through Christ. This is where the whole loving our neighbor as ourselves thing comes in. When a ball player lets a ball roll between his legs and gives up a run to the other team he doesn’t need to hear “you screwed up,” he knows that already. He needs to hear “hey man if you keep your glove down that won’t happen, but even if it does your still on the team.”
Christians are called to love as Christ loves us. That means that even though people screw up, or we know they are about to screw up we still love them. That is how we want to be loved right? When our Christianity is so focused on me and my troubles and my conquering, and my family and my home and my money and my, my, my. Then it ceases to be Christianity. Then we are not representing the Christ that went to the Cross. Because in that Garden the night of his arrest Jesus, our Jesus left himself behind and focused on God which led his focus to sinners.
Only when we focus on God and his sacrifice on the Cross can we really see what it means for him to demonstrate His love for us and for us to pass that love toward others.