eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Do you love Jesus more than your spouse? Your reputation? Your kids? Your health? Your job? Your money?
As Christians, we're called to love Jesus more than anyone or anything else. But do we really do this? Emphasizing that God's love for us is the source of our love for him, Phil Ryken challenges us to take Jesus's words seriously and think carefully about where our affections truly lie.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433534119 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 552 KB |
About the Author
Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.
Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Where Love Comes From
The goal of this book is to help people grow more in love with Jesus.
How important is it for us to pursue this goal? At the beginning of his classic devotional text, The True Christian's Love to the Unseen Christ, the Puritan Thomas Vincent wrote:
Love to Christ being so essential unto true Christianity, so earnestly looked for by our Lord and Master, so powerfully commanding in the soul and over the whole man, so greatly influential on duty, I have made choice to treat this subject of love to Christ, and my chief endeavor herein shall be to excite and provoke Christians unto the lively and vigorous exercise of this grace of love into the Lord Jesus Christ, of which incentive there is great and universal need.
To make the same point more simply, there is hardly anything we need more in the Christian life than more love for Jesus. But this is a daunting challenge. Part of the challenge is personal: Will we really love Jesus more as a result of reading this book? But behind this lies the even greater challenge of comprehending God's love for us, which is the true and ultimate source of all love for him. How can anyone do justice to the great love of God?
A.W. Tozer wrestled with this question in The Knowledge of the Holy, where he described the love of God "as an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea." Tozer observed that if we are going to understand God, "we must try to speak of his love," for God is love. Yet this is difficult for even "the loftiest eloquence," as he explained:
All Christians have tried [to explain God's love] but none has ever done it very well. I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a child can grasp a star. Still, by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. So as I stretch my heart toward the high shining love of God someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope.
As we consider God's love for us in Jesus, which is the source of our love for him, we are "reaching for the stars." But even if we are not able to "grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ" (Eph. 3:18–19 NIV), at least we can point toward it and say, "See, there it is: the love of God in Jesus Christ." And the more we see this love, the more our hearts will grow in affection for our Savior.
Loving Jesus Less
I have given this book the simplest title I could: Loving Jesus More. But this title presupposes yet another problem. If we say that we want to love Jesus more — or that we ought to love him more, whether we want to or not — then we are admitting that we do not love Jesus as much as we should. Logically, the only people who can love Jesus more are people who love him less. And unfortunately this is true for all of us. Our love is limited — not just for one another, but also for Jesus.
When we open the Scriptures, we discover that we are not alone in this limitation (which, in a way, is encouraging). The failure of God's people to love their God is one of the most pervasive themes in the story of salvation.
We see this all the way through the Old Testament. The story of the children of Israel is really a love story. God has a heart full of love for his people, which he proves over and over again by what he says and what he does. "I have loved you with an everlasting love," God declares. "Therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you" (Jer. 31:3).
The children of Israel were called to respond to this everlasting affection by loving God in return. Every day devout believers would confess their love for God in heart, soul, and strength (see Deut. 6:4–5). Yet they repeatedly failed to live up to their promises by turning their hearts against God.
One of the ways that God confronted this failure was by styling himself as a wounded lover. His passion smolders on the pages of the Old Testament. Understand that God's romance with his people was a spiritual marriage. So when their hearts grew cold, it was the ultimate betrayal. The imagery that the Old Testament uses to describe this marital breakdown is shocking. On occasion God compared Israel to a groom who cheated on his wife, or to a virgin who became a prostitute (e.g., Ezekiel 16). In the book of Jeremiah God actually files for divorce on the grounds of spiritual adultery (see Jer. 2:1–3:5). But he never gives up on his love covenant with his people. To exemplify his undying love, he tells his prophet Hosea to return to a wayward woman and take her to be his wife all over again.
We see something similar in the New Testament, where the followers of Christ often fall out of love. When Jesus warned his disciples that the hearts of many would grow cold (Matt. 24:12), he knew what he was talking about. The first generation of the church was also the first generation to love Jesus less. By the end of the New Testament, John was already warning the first Christians in Ephesus that they had forsaken their first love (Rev. 2:4).
Notice that in every case the people who struggle to stay in love with God are people who have experienced his blessings directly. The children of Israel had every reason to love God. He had delivered them from slavery, conquered their enemies, and established their kingdom. Yet even in a land of milk and honey, they fell out of love with God. Or consider the church in Ephesus, which was planted by the apostle Paul, led by Pastor Timothy, and later led by the apostle John — the evangelist of God's love. Despite this exceptional care, the Ephesians succumbed to spiritual entropy; their hearts grew cold.
All Out of Love
What has happened to your love for Jesus? Maybe you are falling more in love with him all the time. Jerry Trousdale has written about the way this is happening across the Muslim world in his book Miraculous Movements, which has a thrilling subtitle: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus. This is a marvelous way to describe the Christian life, as a romance with Jesus.
According to Trousdale, it is happening all over the Muslim world: people who grew up reading the Koran are falling in love with Jesus. He tells the story of a man he calls "Zamil" — a successful businessman, prominent citizen, and leader in his local mosque. One night Zamil had a dream in which Jesus appeared to him and claimed to be the Light of the World. Zamil was blinded by the light, and when he awoke, he was unable to see. Soon he came into contact with local Christians, heard the gospel, and gave his heart to Jesus. Naturally, he prayed that God would restore his sight. But God did not answer that prayer, or protect him from the jealousy of family members who disowned and dispossessed him. Yet the Holy Spirit gave Zamil such a passionate love for Jesus that he could not keep the gospel to himself. Zamil went to nearby villages and started preaching the good news of Jesus and his love. When Trousdale met him two years later, the blind evangelist was already planting his eighth church!
When we are truly in love with Jesus, we will overcome any obstacle to advance his kingdom. Yet it is all too easy for our affections to move in the opposite direction. Thomas Vincent gave his readers a simple way to test the extent of their love for Jesus. "When you leave Christ quite out of your discourse," he wrote, "it shows that you have not an abundance of love to him because, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth will speak of their riches. Such as have much love to pleasures will be often speaking of that subject; such as love their friends much will be often speaking and commending them when they are in company. And when you speak but little of Christ, it is a sign that you love Him but little."
As we look back, we may well realize that there was a time when we were more in love with Jesus than we are today. Maybe that time was when we first came to Christ in repentance and faith. We were so happy to receive the free gift of eternal life that Jesus was the sole object of our affection. Or maybe we felt more that way later on. God helped us, healed us, rescued us, or provided for us, and we could only respond with loving gratitude. Our hearts were moved in worship or humbled by the amazing gifts we had received, and it was natural to say, "I love you, Jesus, for loving me the way you do."
Perhaps that moment has long since passed. Now life is filled with so many affections — all the other things we say that we "love": the latest video game, our beverage of choice, a favorite hobby, the hometown team. We still love Jesus to some extent, but he's like the old backpack that we're comfortable with but no longer excited about. Or maybe he is like the crush we had back in high school, and now it's hard to remember how we could have been so infatuated. If we are totally honest, we have to admit that we love our Savior less.
Love's Channel
If we are not content with loving Jesus less, but actually want to love him more, then we must learn how and where to get that love. What is the channel for receiving the love that will enable us to grow in our love for Jesus?
At first the answer may seem obvious. And it is obvious. We know that "God is love" (1 John 4:8). Love is one of his defining attributes. We also know that "we love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). So, of course, God is the source of all our love, including our love for God himself.
We can be more specific, however. In Romans 5, as Paul begins to apply the saving doctrine of justification by faith, he says something significant about the origin and the channel of God's affection:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Rom. 5:1–5)
Here Paul simply is spelling out the implications of our justification. By faith in Christ we stand righteous before God and have confidence to face the coming judgment. Part of the proof for this justifying grace is our present experience of the love of God. The apostle then proceeds to explain that the love of God is the love of Calvary — the love Christ showed to us when we were still sinners by dying for us on the cross (Rom. 5:8).
But notice the channel of that love. The love we have within us — the love that is poured into our hearts — comes through the third person of the Trinity: "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom. 5:5; cf. Rom. 15:30). Whatever love we have was put there by the Spirit of God. God has placed his love into our hearts specifically through the delivery of the Holy Spirit.
When Paul tells us that the Spirit gives us the Father's love, he is not drawing a sharp distinction between the love of these two divine persons. The love of the Father and the love of the Spirit are one and the same love, for there is no division of affection within the Godhead. Yet this verse does highlight the distinctive role of the Holy Spirit in communicating the love of God.
People sometimes wonder exactly what the Holy Spirit does. We know who the Father is because most of us have fathers of our own, or know other fathers. We know the Son because we read his story in the Gospels. But who is the Holy Spirit? What does the Spirit do? This is part of the answer: the Holy Spirit puts God's love into our hearts. The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards said that the Spirit's office is "to communicate divine love to the Creature." When the Spirit does this, Edwards went on to say, "God's love doth but communicate of itself." In other words, in giving us the Holy Spirit, God gives us his own love.
Consider how amazing this is, and how necessary. God does not expect us to love him with our own puny love, which is so feeble and fickle. Instead, he invites us to love him back with the love that he gives. God has a generous heart. He gives us so much of his love that we have enough left over to use for loving him. As Timothy Dudley-Smith has written in one of his gospel hymns:
Safe in the shadow of the Lord,
Possessed by love divine,
I trust in him, I trust in him.
And meet his love with mine.
William Temple, who served as the Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, illustrated the inward work of the Holy Spirit by drawing an analogy to William Shakespeare. "It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear," Temple said, "and telling me to write a play like that. Shakespeare could do it — I can't. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that. Jesus could do it — I can't. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like his. And if the Spirit could come into me, then I could live a life like His."
This is what the Spirit does to enable us to live with Christlike love: he comes right inside us, and once he is there, he fills us with the love of God. Jesus told his disciples that he wanted them to have his Father's love within them (John 17:26; cf. 1 John 4:16). The way he fulfills his promise and accomplishes this purpose is by sending us the Holy Spirit. Part of the Spirit's ongoing work is to produce the fruit of love in the life of every believer (see Gal. 5:22). Whenever we look into our hearts and find even a small measure of true love for Jesus, this must be the work of God the Holy Spirit.
Getting the Spirit
This assumes, of course, that we have the Spirit to begin with. We will never love Jesus at all without the third person of the Trinity. If he is the channel of God's love, then in order to love Jesus more we need to have the Holy Spirit. So as we examine our hearts, we need to ask whether we have truly received the Holy Spirit. Do I have the Spirit in my life? Have I experienced his regenerating power? Am I born again?
The unmistakable sign of the Spirit's presence is faith in Jesus Christ. This is what the Holy Spirit comes into our lives principally to do: give us faith and love for Jesus Christ.
Listen to the way that one former imam testified to the Spirit's power. It started with a conversation he had one morning with his grandfather, who was also an imam. The two men were discussing the death of Mohammad. According to the Qur'an, when Mohammad was dying, his daughter Fatima said, "Father, you are dying, but where are you going from here and what will happen to us?" All Mohammad could say in response was, "Ask me anything from my wealth, but I cannot save you from Allah's punishment." Then he said, "By Allah, though I am the apostle of Allah, yet I do not know what Allah will do to me." The prophet himself was uncertain of receiving mercy.
The former imam remembered this conversation later, when he was reading the New Testament. A Christian missionary had challenged him to read the Gospel of John. He was happy to do this so that he could discover the Bible's mistakes and then argue with the missionary. But as he was reading, the man encountered the words of Jesus in John 14: "I am going to the Father. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know."
Immediately the man ran to his grandfather and asked him again what Mohammad had said when he was dying. After his grandfather recited the Qur'an, the man said, "Grandfather, look at Jesus. He said he was going to his Father and he would prepare a place for his followers, and after that he will come back. But Mohammad doesn't know where he is going, so which one would you follow?" From that moment on, the imam started to follow Jesus. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he fell in love with the Savior who actually knows where he is going, and has promised to take us there with him.
Understand that once you have the Holy Spirit in your life, he may not call very much attention to himself. The Spirit has such a strong desire to show us the Son that he is almost shy. Maybe this is true of each person of the Trinity, because they are always directing attention to one another. The Father wants to glorify his beloved Son (e.g., Matt. 3:16–17). The Son seeks to honor his Father (e.g., John 17:1). And when the Son promised to send us the Spirit, he boasted that the Spirit would enable us to do even greater works than he did (John 14:12–17)! The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are never narcissistic, but always give one another the glory. There is mutual admiration within the Godhead.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Loving Jesus More"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Philip Graham Ryken.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
1 Where Love Comes From,
2 This I Know,
3 With All We Have,
4 What Makes Love Extravagant,
5 What Love Does,
6 Love's Greatest Test,
7 When I Don't Love Jesus,
8 Sight Unseen,
9 Loving Jesus Perfectly,
Study Guide,
Notes,
General Index,
Scripture Index,
What People are Saying About This
“If you can believe the holy, righteous Creator and sustainer of all really cares about you and wants a relationship, then you can believe he wants you to love, as well. Phil Ryken has written a dangerous book. Drink in these thoughts, pore over these pages, but please do not keep this to yourself.”—Chris Fabry, Host, Chris Fabry Live!; author, Every Waking Moment
“I wish I could say that I read Loving Jesus More with joy, but I didn’t. I read it with grief. It exposed once again how weak and fickle my love for Jesus really is. Sadly, beneath my theological knowledge and biblical literacy is a heart that is still prone to wander. But Ryken didn’t leave me with a better understanding of what it means to love Jesus and the pain of acknowledging that I love him less. No, this book drips with the love of Jesus for me—love that is constant even when it is not reciprocated. This book balances the shocking honesty of the gospel with its glorious hope. I’m thankful for the surgery done on me through this book, and I think you will be too.”—Paul David Tripp, author, New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional
“Phil Ryken has taught us about loving Jesus more by going deep to the truth of the Bible, by helping our hearts to be stirred up by Jesus’s love for us, and by being direct and practical about loving the Lord and his church.”—Joseph "Skip" Ryan, Minister, Park Cities Presbyterian Church; Moderator, General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America
“At the heart of Christianity is a simple passion: love for Jesus. Everything flows from this passion. And yet for most, love for Jesus is elusive. In Loving Jesus More Phil Ryken gives you a path to follow that will fan that passion into a flame.”—Paul E. Miller, author, A Praying Life; J-Curve; and A Praying Churchd