To Love Like Jesus

John 13:31-35 "When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (ESV)

In this passage, we are amidst the final hours of Jesus's life here on Earth. He knows that His time has come, and He is trying to prepare His disciples to carry on in His name once He is gone. In 5 more chapters, Jesus will be betrayed by Judas, and His purpose on Earth will be fulfilled, but between chapters 13-18, Jesus gives a series of teachings to His disciples, as well as His final commandment to them before He dies. He repeats this command here in 13 again in chapter 15. What is that command?

If you were to ask the average Christian today what Jesus's final command to his disciples before He died was, they would tell you that He said we need to love each other. But that's wrong. Jesus doesn't command us to love each other but to love each other as He loved us. To love like Jesus. But here again, we run into another problem. How did Jesus love us? The common answer that we come across when asking this question is that Jesus loved us enough to die for us. While this is true, that Jesus died for us, that isn't how Christ loved us. That doesn't actually answer the question. You see, military members die for us all the time, so do police officers, firefighters, and everyday people who come into extreme circumstances. People die heroically sacrificing themselves for others, but does that mean that they loved us like Jesus? Not necessarily.

This isn't to discount the sacrifice made by brave men and women for our benefit, nor is it to discount the sacrifice Jesus paid for us, but to explain exactly what Jesus meant when He commanded His followers to love like Him we need to look a little deeper. Jesus loved us so much, He humbled Himself, made Himself low enough to meet us at our point of need. That is the kind of love we need now.

There is a heroin epidemic that has taken hold of our nation. This has struck home for many, taking loved one's lives. While all of this has come about, many in the Church, I would honestly say the Church as a whole, has sat by, watching. We see it on the news, maybe see it in our towns, and we shake our heads. We speak in platitudes, say things like "That's such a shame." We ask why would they throw their lives away like that, but we don't really reach out, we don't try to connect. But that's how much Jesus loved us. In His life, Jesus went where the religious elite wouldn't go, approaching people that were considered untouchable. He engaged the social outcasts and even though He existed as the Prince and Glory of Heaven, He humbled Himself, becoming a poor carpenter from a poor region. He made Himself an outcast, breaking societal norms, purposely alienating Himself from the great teachers of the Church of that day. You see, Christ loved us so much He cared about those who no one cared about. Christ was not blinded by a person's sin, He saw the soul that was crying out in pain.

Mark 5:1-13 "They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea." (ESV)

Never is Christ's concern for the soul of mankind more evident then in the story of the Gaderene, and it is one of the best of examples of both how and why we are to love the way Christ loved. This passage is familiar to most of us. People love the story and how it shows that Christ was powerful enough that He could defeat a Legion of demons. A Roman legion consisted of 6,000 soldiers, and this might well mean the man was possessed of just as many demons, which shows just how powerful our Saviour was. But there is so much more to this story.

So often we make excuses for why we do not engage people, especially addicts. I am just as guilty of this as anyone. My wife and I live in Akron, and both of us are regularly approached by homeless people, and both of us will regularly decline to give them money. I cannot speak for my wife, but I know that I have never taken that moment to share the gospel with them. Logically, I know that I will probably get laughed at, cussed at. Like most of us, I try to avoid these people, knowing that they are regularly addicts, sometimes they are scary-looking, drooling, having pocks and marks on their skin. These people are hurting.

The excuses are endless, but there is still no reason. You see in Mark 5, Jesus has every reason to not engage with the Gadarene. The passage says that the man lived among the tombs. According to Jewish custom, to touch anything dead was to make you unclean, and you would have to perfom a ritual cleansing to made pure again. The text also says that the man regularly cut himself, so we can assume he had fresh wounds, that he was bleeding. Again, according to Jewish custom, you are not to touch blood, so again, Jesus was made 'unclean' simply by touching the man. He was risking His reputation. The location was also another reason why Jesus could reasonably avoid the man. This story takes place in Gadara. Gadara was in a region that had once been a part of the Kingdom of Israel, during the reign of David and Solomon. But after Alexander the Great swept through the known world, the city had adopted Hellenism. In fact, the town was famous for having a temple to every god. Gadara was the center of Helenism in the region, and though they had a high population of Jews, they had just as many Greeks, stacking pagan temples next to Jewish synagogues. In other words, for a Jewish rabbi, it was a bad neighborhood.

Which brings us to the final reason Jesus may have had. He was literally across the way from a massive herd of pigs. The gospel numbers them at about 2,000. I think everyone knows that Judaism and pork don't mix, so for Jesus to stand there and have a conversation with a man was something that most would not do. Really, it was something no one would have done. But this is how Jesus loved. You see, when Jesus saw this blood-covered man living among the corpses, he saw a beautiful tormented soul crying out for help.

This is why we need to learn to love like Jesus. The Gadarene didn't start out like this. He probably didn't want his life to be this way. The Bible doesn't tell us what the circumstances were that brought him to this point, but it does tell us a few things beyond just his description.

First, it tells us that He was so used to pain and torment, that that is what he expected. In verse 7, he begs Jesus not to torment him. So often, that is what drives people into addiction and sinful lives. They are hurt, by a parent or loved one, rejected by friends or peers, and they have this big gaping hole in their lives and they just keep taking things and trying to fill that hole, to erase that pain. Jesus sees the pain, sees the source of the man's torment, and Jesus meets Him there at the point of his need.

The passage also tells us that the man is so consumed by his sin, so run down, that he identifies himself by it. In verse 9, Jesus asks him what his name is, and the man replies, "Legion for we are many." Now I realize that this is the reply of the demons, but it is also the only name we are given for the man. Have you ever heard anyone refer to themselves as their sin? Have you ever known anyone so hurt, so beaten down that they just talk about themselves that way? "I'm just a drunk," "a whore," "a piece of trash?"

Again, when Jesus saw the man, that isn't what he saw. Jesus saw the man that He had created and planned at the foundation of the world. He saw the beautiful soul that He had painted and loved before the Gadarene had ever been born. Psalm 139 tells us, "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." This is what our Lord saw when he look at that man.

And this is what God sees now, when He sees people throwing their lives away to drugs, to sex, entertainment, alcohol. Meanwhile, we as a Church have become so numb, so content, so unconcerned that we do nothing. We are literally in the midst of a war, a spiritual war, and just like the army of Saul, we stand there scared to engage. Christ is the only hope that people have, but we keep Him to ourselves. How selfish is it, that, Christ came to set the captive free, but we keep Him from breaking chains?

To be the Church that God wants us to be, we have to engage. Christ says that if we are to be His disciples, we have to take up our cross and follow Him. Christ didn't just hang on a cross that day, He walked through the entire city. Everyone saw Him. Today, we carry our cross to church, then put it in the trunk of our car after service.

When Christ casts the demons out of the man, they enter the herd of pigs, which run wild and kill themselves. In doing that, Jesus cleaned the town out of pork, which in the long run was probably good for the Jewish population. Although Jesus was chased out and couldn't minister there anymore, He left the former demon-possessed man behind as a witness. When you reach out to one person, you never know the impact you may have, not just on them, but the whole world.

Take Edward Kimball, for an example. Most people have never heard of him, but Kimball was a Sunday school teacher who not only prayed for the hyper boys in his class but also sought to win each one to the Lord personally. He decided he would be intentional with every single last one of them.

One young man, in particular, didn’t seem to understand what the gospel was about so Kimball went to the shoe store where he was stocking shelves and confronted him in the stock room with the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That young man was Dwight L. Moody. In the stockroom on that Saturday, he believed the gospel and received Jesus Christ as his Savior. In his lifetime, Moody touched two continents for God, with thousands professing Christ through his ministry.

But the story doesn’t end there. Actually that’s where it begins. Under Moody, another man’s heart was touched for God, Wilbur Chapman. Chapman became the evangelist who preached to thousands. One day, a professional ball player had a day off and attended one of Chapman’s meetings, and thus, Billy Sunday was converted. Sunday quit baseball and became part of Chapman’s team. Then, Chapman accepted the pastorate of a large church and Billy Sunday began his own evangelistic crusades. Another young man was converted whose name was Mordecai Ham. He was a scholarly, dignified gentleman who wasn’t above renting a hearse and parading it through the streets advertising his meetings.

When Ham came to Charlotte, North Carolina, a sandy-haired, lanky young man, then in high school, vowed that he wouldn’t go hear him preach, but Billy Frank, as he was called by his family, did eventually go. Ham announced that he knew for a fact that a house of ill repute was located across the street from the local high school and that male students were skipping lunch to visit the house across the street. When students decided to go to interrupt the meetings of Mordecai Ham, Billy Frank decided to go see what would happen. That night Billy Frank went and was intrigued by what he heard. Returning another night, he responded to the invitation and was converted. Billy Frank eventually became known as Billy Graham, the evangelist who preached to more people than any other person who ever lived.

Every one of these men impacted the world in a major way, but each was only one link in a chain. Any one of them could have decided to just be a pew-filler. Luckily they didn't. And neither should we. We are each called to reach out, each commanded to love like Christ. Each one of us could change the life of another. Every person we meet, every person that stumbles across our path, is a soul that God values. Hopefully, we will learn to see like Jesus, learn to love like Christ.