¹³ “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

Well-quoted, but rarely lived out (or should I say rarely “died out”), this verse. It is the stuff of noble characters in fiction novels. But this should be normative Christianity. The call to Christian self-sacrificial love is well known and reaches its zenith in this assertion, the ultimate expression of love in action. This is the core of everything Jesus came to do and teach. This is the undoing of Eden’s fall, when Adam and Eve acted in their own best interest, or so it seemed.

Self-sacrifice presents to us the opposite diametric of all sin, as epitomized in the self-exalting, self-centered one, Satan, “But you said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High’” (Isaiah 14:13-14). The universal human struggle now resides in all of us, as we strive to give up the need to say, ‘I’.

Jesus came not just to teach this truth, but to lead the way—to show it is not only possible, but that it needs to be the way of life for those who follow Him. This is not an easy ‘believism’ preached to the masses. This is deep truth for those who are committed to Jesus as Messiah, the Christ. Let him who has ears to hear, hear, as Jesus would often say.

In a few short hours, this struggle would be maximized by the polar opposite strands of the redemption story’s plot line. The major thread is, of course, Jesus dying on the cross as a substitutionary atonement for all mankind. The secondary thread was the disciples’ sinking into that self-protection mode, escape at all cost, that demonstrated to them the depth of their self-centeredness. They were unable to even pray with Him without falling asleep. Peter would deny Him, not once but three times. We may recognize ourselves in the story and thus find their actions understandable. But make no mistake, in Jesus’ most troubling time, they were consumed by their own self-preservation. They were unable to part with their most valuable possession, life itself.

We find this teaching hard to accept. We speak of self-preservation being a fundamental of human behavior, an inborn instinct that we share with all creatures. But that is not how God created humanity to be, we were to be different than all the rest of creation. We were created in His image, and He is a self-giving God. Jesus came to restore us to that image.

Lord, loving as You love is impossible, I struggle with selfishness. I need Your supernatural, miraculous help to do the impossible, to love sacrificially.