This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 
- 1 John 3:16
 
Jesus is more to us than a great example: he’s our Savior and Redeemer and Liberator. But let’s not let our commitment to elevate him in worship keep us from responding in appropriate ways to his invitation to join him in his way of life.
 
Jesus doesn’t just inspire us to live lives of loving sacrifice and service, he empowers us to do so. Apart from him, we wouldn’t really know what love is. We’d have our guesses and our hunches and might stumble into the truth from time to time, but we’d miss and miss and miss.
 
We, left to our own devices, might think that love looks like making people happy and giving them things. In some ways, this is the driving force behind the charitable impulse, which is often blind to the real needs of the recipient. John Perkins writes about our broken tendency “to insist that the charitable feelings of the giver are more important than the real needs of the poor.”
 
We need help to move toward real love. Our love-compass is broken. It spins and spins in circles because the magnetic power of our own neediness overwhelms everything in our orbit. We need Jesus to settle us so that we can love. And he does.
 
The call to loving service and sacrifice emerges, time and time again in Scripture, after and in response to the loving service and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Because he has given us his infinite everything, we can lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.
 
Take a moment today to thank Jesus for his loving service and sacrifice on your behalf. Don’t move so quickly past his extraordinary love. Contemplate it, meditate on it, enjoy it before you move out to work and serve and do good today. You’ll be healthier if you pause in this way.