Caring Like Jesus

“Jesus loves me, this I know.” Well, how exactly do we “know” that Jesus loves us? If you are familiar with the Bible and the Christian faith, you will answer, “by what He did.” And you would be correct.

Christian love is about more than “feeling” in love. We are called to love people all the time for whom we have no particularly “loving” feelings. So Christian love may or may not involve the engagement of loving emotion.

Yet, we are also called to love…and care…for people as Jesus did. It must be true of us as well that our feelings must be laid aside in favor of our actions toward others. And if we sit and wait for our feelings to give us direction, we will never get around to the hard work of “doing” love.

One of the most difficult and yet most important ways our love flows out is in the sacrifice of “our time.” We must remind ourselves that, when we came to Christ, everything about us became His property. We willingly signed it over with all the “bad” stuff in our lives. He owns it all. “You are not your own, you have been bought with a price.”

Therefore one of the highest prices we will pay
for Christian discipleship and learning to care like Jesus is the willing sacrifice of time. It takes time to invest in others in discipleship, and it takes time to step into the pain of other people and it takes time to stop and pray with a hurting person. Jesus didn’t just give His life when He came, He gave His time.

And if we are going to learn to care like Jesus, the first sacrifice we will make is the right to claim time as “ours.” Give it to Him. He knows how to make better use of “our” time than we do!