Becoming Like Jesus: Spiritual DisciplinesSample

How Jesus Loves

Discipleship is the process of becoming like Jesus so we can love God and love others the same way Jesus does.

Since this whole process is about becoming like Jesus so we can live and love like He does, it’s pretty important to answer this question: How does Jesus love?

Love can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Usually, we say we love something when we have positive feelings or experiences associated with it. But, for Jesus, love is so much more than what we think or how we feel. It’s about what we do and how we live.

Today, we’ll look at how Jesus described His love for God and others and let that shape our understanding of loving like Jesus.

First, let’s pray.

Pray …

Heavenly Father, thank You for sending Jesus to save me. I’m different because of Him. Help me to never forget Your love and Your grace. Show me how to live for You. I want to make Jesus’ habits my habits so I can grow as a disciple. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Read …

… “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40 NIV

Consider …

All of God’s commands can be summed up in this: loving God with all we are and loving our neighbor as ourselves. A fully devoted follower of Christ is someone who does this. They love God with all they are and love others the way Jesus loves them.

What does it mean to love God with everything we are: heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Loving God with all our heart means desiring God—seeking Him first and above everything else.

Loving God with all our soul means trusting God—even more than we trust ourselves.

Loving God with all our mind means knowing God—getting to know Him better and more intimately every day.

Loving God with all our strength means serving God—faithfully offering our time, talent, treasure, and our very bodies to God as a living sacrifice.

And loving others the way Jesus loves us? Well, He spelled that out too. Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Then, He went and did it. He didn’t just “talk the talk.” He walked the walk with a rugged cross on His beaten back all the way to Calvary.

Because, for Jesus, love is so much more than what you say or how you feel. It’s what you do and how you live. And through His life and actions, Jesus perfectly loved God and completely loved people. He wants to help us do the same, to become people who love and live like He does. How does that happen? By the power of the Holy Spirit, who works in us and transforms us from the inside out. And we do our part by practicing spiritual disciplines, the habits of Jesus that help us become like Jesus.

For the rest of this Plan, we’ll discover how spiritual disciplines reorder our desires so we can love God with all our heart, reveal who or what we are trusting in most so we can love God with all our soul, renew our ways of thinking so we can love God with all our mind, and retrain us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice so we can love God with all our strength.

We’ll wrap up by talking about how our love for God is best evidenced and expressed in our love for others.

Listen …

As you go from this place today, spend a few moments talking to Jesus and reflecting on these questions:

• What about the way Jesus talks about love is different from how you or people around you have thought about love before?
• Is there an area (heart, soul, mind, strength) in which you want to learn to love God more?
• How are you at loving others? If you had to rate yourself, just today, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being loving just like Jesus), what would you give yourself and why?
• What’s one thing you can do tomorrow to move closer to a 10?