S168P3 – Fragrant offerings: the sacrifice of love
Eph 4:29-5:2
Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
In my opinion, the most insightful detail the Bible gives us regarding Christ’s sacrifice for our redemption is that He gave his life for us while we were still enemies of his. [Rom. 5:10] This is a critical detail because God is not the one who was against us. We determined to be against God. This idea of us being at enmity with him is one-sided. We are the ones who were unfaithful and created this spiritual divide between creation and creator. When we expressed to the Lord that we did not want to follow him, He still wanted to love us and change us. His response to our rejection was to give us another opportunity to accept him, and He did this knowing that many would still reject him.
I am sure that I am not the only one who has thought that the command to love our enemies is emotional in nature. While that is a component of our love, we see that the love of God is active. When we rejected the Lord, He did not simply continue to feel love for us. It was not a matter of him thinking of us and feeling for us but doing nothing about it. God’s love manifested by his making a way to reconcile us to him, and that is the kind of love He asks of us. This sacrificial love means that we put ourselves on the line for those who will reject it, but we do it anyway because it pleases our Father. It is an image of the same sacrificial love that moved the Son to give himself to make friends of these enemies.
We might think that sacrificial love is what moves us to love even though we might be rejected and hated. I would argue that it moves us to love knowing that we will be rejected and hated. After all, it was no mystery how anyone would respond to Jesus. God has always known what the result would be, and He has always known that many would still reject him. To imitate Christ means that we love as He loves even when we are certain not to be loved in return, either by the world or our own fellow saints. That kind of sacrifice is a most pleasing fragrance to God. Father, help us to love like You, loving one as much as another regardless of whether we are loved in return.