When loving Jesus becomes more important than living like him

The best Christian is the one that loves Jesus the most, right? It’s why we’re so obsessed with loving Jesus and making sure that everyone else loves him, too. And yes, loving Jesus is important, but I’m realizing that it doesn’t make any difference whether we love him or not unless that love means that we want to be like him.

When we want to know whether a person is a Christian or not, we say, “Does he/she love Jesus?” as if this were the sole factor of our faith. Every girl knows the conversation that begins with “So there’s this guy...” and every Christian girl knows that this is always followed by “Does he love Jesus?”

But this past year, I’ve met people who love Jesus and do not do as he did, and I’ve met people who do not claim to love Jesus but live as he did. And let me tell you how much easier it is to love the latter than the former.

I get it though. In the church we’re taught at an early age that the bottom-line is loving Jesus (actually, that the bottom-line is believing in him, but that’s a different issue). I get so frustrated with this because for me, the bottom line is being Christ-like, which doesn’t always have anything to do with loving him (although it certainly helps).

Think about it this way, you don’t have to love your mother to be like her. For many, that likeness occurs naturally. In the same way, we can be committed to loving others (“the least of these” in Jesus’ words), without necessarily loving Jesus, who has modeled that love for us (certainly, though many would argue that Ghandi did not love Jesus in the evangelical Christian sense, few could claim he wasn’t Christ-like). That said, I do think that a love of Christ can lead to a more complete love and commitment to his ways, his service to the poor and powerless.

What doesn’t make sense to me, then, is why so many people that profess their love for Jesus seem so uncommitted to—and even unaware of—the ways in which he served others. Maybe this is because it’s so easy to say we love Jesus and so hard to actually do what he did. We are quick to proclaim our love and slow to show it.

This is why Jesus has to ask Peter three times, “Do you love me?” John 21:15-18 says this: “‘When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ he said, ‘you know that I love you.’ Jesus said, ‘Feed my lambs.’ Again Jesus said, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ He answered, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’ Jesus said, ‘Take care of my sheep.’ The third time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ He said, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep.’”

Here, Peter tells Jesus that he knows that he loves him. But how should Jesus know unless there were proof by his actions? If we were unable to express our love in words, how then would anyone know that we loved Jesus or others?

Ultimately, Jesus never asks us to love him. He asks, of course, that we love God and love others (our neighbors, our enemies, etc.), but most of his commands are that we follow him—that we take his way—serving the poor, the fatherless, those trampled on by the rest of society. I think if Jesus were a bottom-line type of guy (which he is not, thank goodness, because of grace), he would want us to be like him more than he would want us to love him.