What does it mean to love Jesus? Dr. Michael Allen reminds Christians of what it means to love and embrace Christ as Lord.
Listening to Christ’s Word
What does it mean to embrace Jesus, or more pointedly, what does it mean to love him? Not surprisingly, when Jesus addresses that question himself, he’ll say things like, “If you love me you’ll keep my commandments” (John 14:15). He doesn’t mean, of course, that to love him you have to earn your way to him. He doesn’t mean that to love him you have to measure up to some insurmountable standard of perfection. No. He means that to love him you have to actually follow him, to follow him you have to actually listen to him, and to listen to him you have to commit to the painstakingly humble task of submitting yourself, your aspirations, dreams, and desires to his own way. To love Jesus actually means to listen carefully to his Word.You will find that quite often, even as a growing and mature Christian, that he has to put to death some latent longing of your own and bring to life some new vision of what flourishing and mission would look like in your life. So we find that to love Jesus actually means to listen carefully to his Word.
Loving Christ’s Bride
We also see that Jesus describes the way in which we love him by loving the brothers and the sisters. The kind of love that we’re to display for him finds its roots, he prays, in John 17, in the way in which we’re one with our fellow Christians. It’s not that the church is perfect. It’s not that they have all the gifts and all the talent to be found in the world, but it’s that Christ has put his name there and only there. So to love Christ you’ve got to love that ragtag bunch of men and women who are named as the church of Jesus Christ.
To love Christ you’ve got to love that ragtag bunch of men and women who are named as the church of Jesus Christ.We live in a day and age where we oftentimes want to love Jesus but not do what he says, believing that somehow we can reform him and correct him to sort of bring him into the contemporary. We live in a day and an age where we find it so convenient and tempting to love him and to shirk his people, particularly the institutions that seem so outdated. But that’s not to listen to Jesus, and that’s not to trust his Word. That’s not to attend to the way in which he seeks to provide for us. That’s to turn him into something that we control.
Trusting Christ as Lord
One of the remarkable ways the Bible recalibrates the idea of loving Jesus is by saying that it’s always a call to love him by faith and to entrust yourself to him. It’s a call to put to death your own sense of control, your own dreams and aspirations, your own sense that your reason and your conscience is fit to discern what’s right, and instead to always submit that to his Word and to have it formed amidst his people because that’s where he promises to be with and for us.
