Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
—1 John 4:7-12
At the beginning of every school year, Judah’s high school students go on a fun and faith-driven retreat, generally to Twin Lakes Camp in Hillsboro, Indiana. At the retreat, students attend several chapel services featuring speakers who set up a spiritual theme for the year. The theme for the 2023-2024 school year, introduced by Judah’s executive director of institutional advancement Blake Porter, is “Relentless Love, Radical Discomfort.”
Throughout his message, based on 1 John 4, Mr. Porter emphasized that God’s love is not the worldly type of love so often spoken about these days. It is a sacrificial love. In Mr. Porter’s words, “We’re talking about agape love, and it’s the strongest kind of Christian love. It’s a love that comes from God the Father and who He is. It’s a love that is unconcerned with self. It’s a love that is not created from emotion or feeling, but from the will. It is a choice that God makes to love.” God showed this sacrificial love for us by giving up His only Son to die for our sins. He made a choice to love us even though we did not love Him.
Our Father continues to make that choice today. Mr. Porter said, “We serve a God, we serve a Father, who has an incredible love for you. Hear me say this. If you get one thing from tonight, get this: God loves you so incredibly much. I want you to stop and think about that. Before you go to sleep tonight, dwell on this: ‘How much does God love me?’ It’s so unreal, so incredible, so unexplainable, we can’t even fathom it — the breadth of how much God loves you. He knows you intimately. He knows everything about you. He knows your deepest darkest secrets, the sins that you don’t share with anybody, who you love and who you hate. But He pursues you with love. You better believe it. It’s not even just how He sent His only Son to die for our sins. It’s how we can have abundant life in Jesus right now.”
What’s really remarkable about God’s relentless redeeming love is how much He offers it when we so little deserve it. But that’s the nature of agape love — it’s offered whether deserved or not. Mr. Porter said, “Let’s think about that. God chose to love us, even though we didn’t choose Him. We don’t deserve it. We don’t qualify. We have nothing to offer God. We sat here in the filth of our sin, in our brokenness. We told God ‘no.’ We said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do me. I’m gonna reject you and do life the way I want it. I’m gonna live for me.’ But God came to us and said, ‘I love you. I love you. I love you. And I’m going to send my Son to die on the cross for you.’ I think it’s hard for some of us to believe that God loves us, because it’s easier to believe a lie from the devil than it is to have faith in a God of love. The devil creeps in and says, ‘Hey, you’re not enough’ or ‘Hey, your sins are too much.’ But those are lies. God says He loves you. God chooses to love you.”
Mr. Porter wanted every student to leave the high school retreat knowing for a fact that God is always willing to share His relentless love, His wonderful provisions, and His divine wisdom with us. But he also wanted us to know something else: that if we are followers of Jesus, we are called to share that same agape love with those around us, by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. He said, “We have been the recipients of God’s love, and because we have received it, we are called to share it with others. The Father sent Jesus to die on the cross, to cover the cost of our sins. Now we have to love others. Because we’ve received this love from God that we don’t deserve, our job is to offer that same agape love, rather than our emotions. Offering this kind of love can create some radical discomfort. God is calling us to love our enemies, to say to even the people we dislike or who dislike us, ‘I want to love you, I want to care about you. I know that you have an eternity. I know that you need Jesus and I need Jesus, so let’s journey together. Even though we don’t get along, I’m gonna pursue you with love because God gave it to me and it’s inside of me, because the Father’s love is flowing forth from who I am.’” It’s relentless love, radical discomfort.
Mr. Porter summarized his message by providing students with six points to focus on, six points to hopefully walk out this school year alongside Jesus:
“We are to love God because He first loved us. We love God not because we love so much, but because He did.”
“God sent Jesus as a sacrifice to show us His love.”
“God’s love is made complete in us when we give it to other people. If we are rooted in the Father, we have to show love.”
“God gives us the power of the Holy Spirit to love. You don’t have to do it alone, wondering ‘How am I going to love?’”
“If you can’t love others, you can’t love God. We have to learn to love others. We have to come to God and learn what love is supposed to be.”
“Loving others is the fruit of our faith. They will know we’re His disciples by our love. How is anyone going to know you’re a Christian if you’re not showing agape love?”
To truly show agape love, followers of Jesus must be servants to others, regardless of how uncomfortable it is. God specifically calls us to be servants, and not to simply take advantage of others serving us. At Judah’s 2023 high school retreat, Mr. Porter made clear that if we are followers of Jesus, we must live our lives so others can see Jesus in us. Just as Mr. Porter said, “Jesus modeled a relentless love that was radically uncomfortable for many people and for the culture He was living in. As followers of Jesus, if we want to love like He loves us, we’re going to have to be prepared for radical discomfort in our lives and go out of our way to meet people where they are with His love.”
—Ava Carder, class of ’24
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