Christ’s Compelling Love

2 Cor 5:11-17

 

1. What is your motivation of life to work hard, study hard, and live hard? What is your motivation of patience and perseverance even in difficulties and sufferings? What is your motivation of sacrifice and benevolence for others? Is it social success and recognition, political ambition to rule others, comfortable and even luxurious living, pleasure and enjoyment, achievement and adventure, or something else? For the structure of human motivation is very complicated, I mean the deepest and most compelling motif of your life.

2. In the last sermon, I informed you that 70 million Christians have martyred to witness and spread the Gospel, starting from all the apostles of Jesus and now 420 thousands missionaries are now spreading the Gospel in all the nations of the world in spite of serious hardships and dangers. What do you think about their motivation? Apostle Paul gives a clear and definite answer here in v. 14: “For Christ's love compels us.” It was the only and sufficient reason to devote full life and even die for. It is “because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.”(14b) Jesus loved us and died for us. When we are convinced it, the love of Jesus compels us to devote our whole life for Him.

3. We humans are created to love God and other people around us. But when we are fallen and corrupted, we are confused, disoriented, and distracted to love wrong object, not others but oneself, not personal being but material or abstract things. Salvation is a mental and spiritual correction and reorientation of our love back to God and our neighbors. So, Paul said that “he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”(15) Our reorientation is the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ whose love compels us to change our object of love.

4. We humans seem to demand endlessly like a bottomless pit. But, in fact, we are so easily and sufficiently satisfied and moved with a small kindness and love. When a woman loves a man, she devotes everything for him in the whole life. It is the compelling power of genuine love. It is same with a mother who sacrificially loves her children. God loves you very much! Jesus Christ loves you so much to suffer and die for you. When you believe His love, you are totally changed: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”(17) Our world and life view is totally changed: “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.”(16) Christ’s compelling love will be your motivation of life. Even after we are changed, we are distracted to our old object of love. Then, remember and meditate on the love of Jesus Christ for you. Whatever we do, let His love compel us to do it!