But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
– Romans 5:8
My father, adopted near birth, an only child, lost his mother before he was ten and his father before he was eighteen. It would be easy to imagine a world where the man that grew out of that experience had serious misgivings about the inherent risks of loving people. But if my dad has taught me anything by example (and he has) it is this simple life-changing thing, love goes first. It is unafraid to say it first, and unafraid show it first.
Love goes first.
You see, fear’s lot in life is to go second. Or last. Or not at all. Any position that doesn’t require it to risk. It cannot conceive of a world where the risk involved in going first is outweighed by the potential benefit. The what-ifs of rejection, rebuff and embarrassment make the imagined limb we are stepping out onto impossibly long and implausibly thin.
A world where it is a requirement for us to go second in order to have our comfort at acceptable levels is not only sad beyond words, it is a work of evil to have us stuck in a stalemate for the heart and souls of the world. At best it makes us reactionary, at worst, stagnant and cold.
For the risk of loving first may be real or imagined but the cost of not loving first is always real and ALWAYS higher by a quantum magnitude. In fact when soberly weighed against one another it is like comparing apples and engine oil. We might wish them to be similar in order to count one against the other but they are not. Not even remotely. My potential vulnerability weighed against a person experiencing the love of God perhaps for the very first time, perhaps when their life depends on it.
It’s easy to consider the love of a God in an abstract way but I can tell you church firsthand as a recipient of people who have loved first that there is nothing even remotely abstract about the receipt of it. I am sure on reflection that in the moment I may not have communicated what it meant to me or responded well. Indeed in the moment I’m not at all certain I knew what it meant to me. But I can tell you now, at a distance from some of those moments, without a hint of exaggeration, that it changed my life forever.
I want us to be that life changing, church. Let’s be unafraid to go first. To love first. The world needs it from us. We need it from each other. We need to be the bigger people, to do as Christ did and go first no matter the cost! Let’s pray for the awareness of the moment that requires it and the courage to be the difference in that moment.
Loving and believing with you
Stephen