Sorry, not sorry
It’s easy to say that we love Jesus. It’s even easier to sing about it. But what does it look like to really love Jesus? What marks a life lived in obedient love?
Change.
Not the superficial change of flimsy willpower or stuttering resolve. But real, heart-transforming, love-fuelled, grace-given change that shapes a life from the ground up.
“Don’t copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
When we sing about our love for Jesus on a Sunday only to deny it by the way we live every other day of the week, we expose selfish, lazy, unrepentant hearts. This is not love.
Perhaps then, it isn’t really Jesus that we love. Perhaps what we really love is the excuse to do whatever we want, guilt-free. Perhaps we get so excited on a Sunday because of the cheap grace we receive just enough of to dull our itchy consciences after another week of rolling in the mud.
This is not grace.
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Before you say yes, again, to that same old sin, without thinking or flinching, remember what it cost the person that you profess to love. Remember what Jesus had to say yes to, for you to be free of it.
He said yes to His body being ruined in bloody agony. He said yes to His life being torn from His burning lungs. He said yes to rejection by His Father.
For you. For me.
When on the cross Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, He experienced for the first time total separation and isolation after an eternity of perfect harmony and union with God. He accepted the guilt, consequences and curse of our sin instead of us, so that we could be accepted, forgiven and embraced by God. He was cast out so that we could be brought in, and He said yes to all of it, because of love.
Real grace cost more than we will ever know.
How then, do we respond? Do we continue on into Monday, itchy conscience scratched, ready to jump back into the mud?
No.
“When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarrelling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”
These words are like a hot poker to the soul. They should scorch away, what John Piper calls, ‘The great evangelical error of our day’.
“The great error says faith in God is one thing and the fight for holiness is another thing. Faith gets you to heaven and holiness gets you rewards... This is the great evangelical error of our day. The battle for obedience is optional, they say, because only faith is necessary for salvation. Our response is that the battle for obedience is absolutely necessary for salvation because it IS the fight of faith. The battle is absolutely necessary for salvation because it is the battle against unbelief.”
If we believe, we fight, because we truly love. If we truly love, our obedient fight will shape the way we live. If we don’t, it won’t.
Read that again.
Saving faith isn’t just a mental act. True belief can’t be contained to your mind. True belief overflows into action. If you truly believe that Jesus is who He says He is, it will change you. Your faith in Him will shape a whole-life posture of loyalty, trust and obedience to Him.
The battle for daily obedience is motivated by love and supplied by grace, and it is this love-fuelled, grace-given faith that transforms our lives from the inside out.
So, what does it look like to really love Jesus? What marks a life lived in obedient love?
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives.”
Have you nailed the passions and desires of your sinful nature to the cross and crucified them there?
Have you allowed real grace and a genuine love for Jesus to saturate and shape your life so that it is in conflict with sin, structured apart from sin, positioned away from sin?
Does your life tell the story of your love for Him?
“What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.”
When we do sin, we shouldn’t be sorry just because we’re scared of being found out. We should be sorry because our actions have inflicted deep pain on the love of our lives.
We should have no desire to do the things He had to die for.
“Wisdom requires a genuine hatred of wrongdoing, not just a calculated avoidance of it out of self-interest. The dread of punishment only makes us self-absorbed - worried about being hurt. The true fear of the Lord serves Him out of joy and high appreciation for who He is. There is no wise living unless we have a relationship with Him, one in which we obey Him out of love for who He is. Do you refrain from sins mainly because you hate their consequences? Or do you refrain out of distaste for the sins themselves, as they grieve and offend God?”
As we begin to know God more intimately and share His heart more passionately, the idea of indulging in sin should become a source of gut-wrenching pain and disgust.
If we’re living in loving obedience to Jesus, sanctification slows our sprint towards sin. But until the day we die, it will always be an ever present threat—an ancient dragon, only ever playing dead. The things that you ignore as they creep into your mind become the things you begin to dwell on, which become the things you let yourself see, which become the things you actively seek out, which become the things you do.
Don’t flirt with sin.
Don’t underestimate it.
Don’t try and tame it.
Kill it, dead.
Stop at the first step. Don’t play with it. Don’t dwell in it. Don’t entertain it for one second. Not today. Through the power of the Holy Spirit banish it from your mind and out of your life.
When it hurts, when it’s hard, when it costs—show Him that you love Him. Let your life be your love letter to Him, not just your words.
Through love-fuelled, grace-given faith in Jesus you really can lead a God-centred life. This is the real miracle of grace—its power. It is so much more than a cheap tonic. God’s grace means you really can be free from sin. You really can say no to it because Jesus won the victory over it—there is now no longer any requirement for you to say yes to it.
Jesus suffered in the dark so you could live in the light. He experienced absolute futility outside of God, so that what you now do with Him can count for forever. You can now know that your every action is a way to honour and glorify Him.
Don’t just say that you love Him.
Go and live like it.