Loving Like God

Somewhere Jay Ferris mentions the movie, “The Passion of Christ” by Mel Gibson, saying that as noble an attempt as it was to accurately portray the horrors of crucifixion, that it was unfortunately stamped with a love that was for friends. What did he mean?  In this last “Audio Clip” (saving the best for last!), Jay shares what he said was his greatest, most life-changing revelation concerning the love of Christ on which all other revelations were based – especially concerning ‘unshakeable’ relationships.  As simple as it may seem, very few act like they have received this specific revelation of Christ.  O Lord, open our eyes!

Click here to listen to the audio:

Written Version:

“….. Something came to me in a patent office in Dusseldorf Germany in 1987 when I was in a place of deep groaning because of some relational difficulties client wise, and family wise.  It was at a time when my understanding was that, laying His life down for His friends was part of the gospel of Christ.  Now from a personal point of view, one of the things that I was struggling with was that I found that my expectations were my greatest enemy and I found when they weren’t lived up to, I became part of the problem.  It was an expectational kind of confrontation that my wife and I were going to be walking into in about ten days.

So I was sitting there in this patent office, linguistically ignorant, so I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on there because it was all in German.  Then the sky opened up and the Lord touched me this way.  I had a burst of scripture from 1 John, “Prefect love casts out fear” cycling just below my level of consciousness.  When I became aware of it, my awareness took the form of, “Oh that’s interesting, love casts out fear.”  I was rebuked immediately in my inner man, and the Lord said, “No, love creates fear. Perfect love casts out fear.”  And then the sky opened up again and I reached for paper and was writing as fast as I could.

The long and short of it was, He showed me that Romans 5 is an elaboration of what Jesus said.  What Jesus said, He said before he died.  But John told us later on, “This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” That’s the demonstration of the New Commandment basis on love. And so in Romans, Paul says, “Scarcely for a good man or for a righteous man would anyone die, but for a good man or in effect for a friend, someone might possibly dare to die.”  In a patent parlance that’s the “state of the art.”  That was the best that had been known, and that’s what Jesus had stated before He went to the cross – the state of the art.  Greater love than that?  No one ever saw anything greater than that before. But then he goes on to say, “But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” and if that’s not already enough, a little bit farther down he says, “If while we were God’s enemies we were reconciled to Him by the death of His Son, how much more shall we be saved by His life?”

I was then overwhelmed that He died for me on my worst day! He died for me while I was His enemy!  I had never seen that before because I was working with the other kind of love.  And every time I needed saving this side of conversion, the first kind of love wasn’t doing me any good because I didn’t feel like His friend!  And so I said, “Lord, how is that possible?”  He said, “Well, the day I said I love you I nailed my expectations to the tree. And if you’re going to love like I love, you’re going to have to nail your expectations to the tree.” I think that goes to all of these things that we carry with us: gender-wise, and racially, and economically, by which we decide whether to love somebody or not.  He’s nailed it all to the tree.