Radical Love

There is a chapter in Bill Hybel's book Who Are You When No One's Looking titled Radical Love. This chapter focuses on Jesus' teachings from the Sermon on the Mount to make a case for the kind of radical love that is expected from followers of Christ. Hybel's says: 

"According to Jesus, the demands of radical love often exceed those of any written law. Love never seeks to get away with doing the bare minimum. It goes beyond law keeping and offers outrageous service...

As Jesus clearly taught, the  highest priority in the life of every believer should be to love God with all our hearts, souls, and mind (Matthew 22:37-40). Our second highest priority should be to love people, all of whom matter to God, in a radical second mile way....

[The Sermon on the Mount] plainly points out the secret power of the second mile. When we exceed the barest minimums of service, when we go beyond the call of duty, it has an effect on people that they do not soon forget...

Nothing leaves a deeper mark on the lives of spiritually hardened men and women than seeing radical love in action. If you know the love of Jesus Christ in a personal way, you may sometimes lie awake at night thinking of ways to make a mark on people's lives so that they too will come to enjoy what you have found.  Should you wear a little lapel pin? Put a little bumper sticker on your car? Display a large Bible in your office?  Tell people that you don't go to movies or buy sexually explicit rock albums? Jesus says that if you  really want to make a deep, lasting mark on someone, demonstrate radical love. There's so much compelling power in that kind of love that it makes callous people's heads spin...

Jesus showed radical love all his life. At the end he took slaps without saying anything. He absorbed beatings without cursing anyone. When nails were pounded into his hands and feet, he did not turn to the people doing the pounding and say 'You're going to rot in hell for this!' No, he said, 'Father, these men matter to you. Don't charge this crime to their account. Forgive them."

In Matthew 27:54 we read of a Roman officer who was brought to faith by Jesus' radical exhibition of love as he was tortured towards his death (not to mention, the earthquake). The centurion who witnessed Christ's crucifixion was clearly changed by the contrast in Christ actions to the countless others he had witnessed put to death using this heinous method. Chances are  the Roman officer knew nothing about Christ prior to this, and chances are even greater that he knew even less about theology, but ultimately the love Jesus literally bled out led him to confess"Surely this was the Son of God."

Showing the kind of radical love Jesus taught of (and lived out) can only be accomplished through  knowing and appreciating the grace that God has shown towards us. When we know what God has done for us, we are naturally filled with a desire to share that with others. Sometimes (almost always) that demonstration goes against what comes naturally to us. That is the whole concept of being "born again", we take our old selves and allow God to transform them into new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17), almost unrecognizable from before. This transformation is not physical, but spiritual, and the results should be as drastic as is if God had used his hands to perform a plastic surgery on us. Sharing our faith involves far more than just speaking words, though we ate to proclaim the Good News boldly. Sharing our faith involves obediently following Jesus, and doing that involves knowing the examples that He set for us and doing likewise.

Faith without works is dead (James 2). This does not mean that we are somehow earning our salvation, as that is an impossible feat that only Christ could accomplish on our behalf. What that means is that if we read in the Bible that Christ told us to turn the other cheek and don't do it, we don't truly believe it. It means that when Jesus told us to go the second mile when we're only obligated to go one mile and we chose not obey, we don't believe it enough to commit to the difficult stuff. Following Jesus was never meant to e easy, and someday He will surprise a great deal of people who thought that they were following Him but never had the genuine faith to obey Him with the difficult stuff, shake you up and rock your world like a  hurricane stuff. The real stuff. The stuff that shows the world that the God you follow is a God who evokes change and demands  radical love.

Your brain will fight you on the concept of radical love. It doesn't make sense and it is rarely easy, but that is the point. That is one of the traits that is supposed to distinguish followers of Jesus (John 13:35).

Are we up for it?Are we really ready to be radically in love with Jesus?  That's what a follower of Jesus is not only meant to be, but commanded to be, because someday the ones who aren't really sold out and in love with Jesus will be exposed before God and separated (Matthew 13:24-30, Revelation 3:16).  God doesn't call us to a life of ease, He calls us to a life of obedience. He promises us abundance (John 10:10) but not the kind that our earthly minds expect. When we accept the journey of following Jesus, when we take up our cross daily and give up our desires for God's (Matthew 16:24), everything changes and the only thing that matters from then on is God's radical love and how it transformed us.