What Does It Mean To Live as a Christian?
Why Living in Love with God Changes Everything
Day 2
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Why Living in Love with God Changes Everything
Do you remember how it felt with your first real crush? That jolting buzz of being near them. The growing desire to learn more about them. The reorienting of your day to just be in their orbit. We know what it’s like to be in love.
What if our faith was no different? What if our commitment to being like Christ, to our faith, looked like a desire to know Him more? A shift in our schedules to put Him first? A commitment to being near Him?
Today, we unpack that very idea, looking to our love of Jesus as yet another marker of what it means to be a Christian. Let’s get started.
Why Living in Love with God Changes Everything
Summary
“To be Christian is not akin to praying a prayer. To get a ticket to heaven. To sign up and join a church. To be Christian is to entrust my life to God. To entrust my life to Christ. And when I look at Christ, what I learned about Christ is that Christ was constantly in a loving relationship with his father.”
You may be four days into following Jesus, or forty years into your faith journey, and that statement should still cause you stop and take stock of where your affections lay. What does it mean to live as a Christian? Well look at what Jesus himself modeled for us.
Jesus lived His earthly life in love with God, the Father.
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Luke 10:25-28
Look at how we are to love the Lord.
…with all our heart.
…with all our soul.
…with all our strength.
…with all our mind
Let’s unpack what it means to be in a relationship where we are in love with God. Have you, as the writer of Proverbs 7, said “stored up God’s commands within you?” Have you, as we discussed yesterday, surrendered your own inclinations for the will of your Heavenly Father? Do you turn to Him in times of celebration and challenge?
Loving God as His son or daughter can be a tension point; after all, each of us has had unique experiences with our dads throughout our lifetimes. Some have been amazing, while others have been absent. No matter what, it is important to remember that God is not the reflection of your earthly dad; He is the perfection of your early dad. In God, you have a perfect father, one you can trust and look to, just the way that Jesus did throughout His lifetime.
There is a humility that comes with loving God in this way, one that Jesus exemplified with the way that He lived, and even the way that He died:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:6-11
If we want to live a Christian life, which we identified as being constantly conforming so that we live more and more like Jesus, then we have to take on His attitude of adoration towards God the Father. To learn to trust Him, seeking His will for our lives and walking in obedience where He leads, that is our privilege as sons and daughters of the most high King. Will there be a cost? Yes. Jesus clearly teaches this in a passage we’ll visit down the road, but can we be confident that laying down what we desire for the sake of what God desires will be the right choice? Yes. Recall what Paul wrote to the Romans, and take heart.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28
What's next?
Which part of Luke 10:27—heart, soul, strength, or mind—is easiest for you to love God with? Which is most challenging?
How did Jesus demonstrate humility in His life and death?
What does Romans 8:28 teach us about trusting God’s will?
What is one desire you may need to lay down to follow God’s leading?
