Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Some people are not so much turned off by Christianity as intimidated by it. They know enough about the life of Jesus and the lives of those who sincerely love and follow him to know that the religion he founded involves great personal sacrifice. This is summed up in the idea that as Christ laid down his life for us we should be willing to lay down our own lives for others. For human beings who have an intrinsic and overriding tendency towards self-protection as well as self-aggrandizement, and that includes all of us, this idea does not come across as particularly attractive. We know, somewhere in our hearts, that to love others is a wonderful thing, but the suggestion that we do this to a degree that puts our own self-perceived wellbeing at risk seems impossible.
The hard fact of the matter is that it is impossible, at least in and of ourselves. When Christ asks his followers to do things like love their enemies, as he does on the Sermon on the Mount, he is asking human beings to do the naturally impossible. It does us no good to look at what Jesus asked us to do and then try to do it in our own strength. You might as well ask something to fall up instead of down.
The problem is that many who know just enough of the tenets of this belief system to know that radical self-sacrifice is innate to it have missed another equally important truth of the Christian proposition. The reason Christians can love in a way that goes beyond what is possible for others is because they have been on the receiving end of the inexhaustible love of God in Christ. It is this supernatural love which so changes and fills the human heart that those who are given it not only can, but truly want to lay down their lives for others. What is finite cannot conceive of emptying itself for the sake of another unless, and only unless, it has been filled with the infinite. We are profoundly finite apart from the vital connection with God that comes through faith in the Son of God, but once that connection is there we become partakers of a love so abundant and pure that the intense blessing inherent in receiving it actually makes us want to give it away.
What is humanly impossible ceases to be humanly impossible once the love of God is present and the love of God becomes present in everyone who truly receives Jesus Christ. It is in the sure and certain knowledge that we have tapped into this affection, and will never lose it, that we become able to love as we are commanded to in the pages of the New Testament. Self-sacrifice no longer seems like such a sacrifice when we know that whatever we give up for the sake of another is more than equaled by the unspeakable blessing of being in an eternal love relationship with the one who both created and redeemed us.
This is why we need not feel intimidated by what he requests of his children. His incredible love for us, in and of itself, makes what Jesus asks not only possible but deeply desirable as well. In relationship with the God of Christianity self-sacrifice actually becomes synonymous with joy.