Dare to love like Jesus

I went to visit my old church, where a good friend of mine dared us to love like Christ. It was a great message. Some how we are to encounter people with God's love.
I'm challenged by this. I feel like I fall very short on this one. To love like Jesus is to be truly human. But we have fallen short and humanity has fallen. Love isn't what it should be. This is true even of some who follow Jesus. Our relationship with God and each other appear broken at times. How can we truly be humans who bear God's image and who show God's love?
For the answer to this question I turn to the apostle Paul. It's clear that we have fallen short of God's glory. Just read Romans 1-3 and it's summed up in 3:23. Thank God for verse 24, which says, "and by God's grace they are freely declared to be 'in the right,' to be memebers of the covenant, through the redemption which is found in the Messiah, Jesus."
Though we have fallen, and we have dehumanized ourselves, God by His grace has brought us into His covenant family. What does this have to do with loving like Jesus? Everything! We can only begin to love and truly be human unless God has rescued us and brought us into His family, because in this and through this we learn what it means to love like Jesus. Or to put it another way, because of the redemption that Jesus has brought us , we can now truly love. This I fear is missed. Conversion to faith in Jesus has been minimized for other experiences subsequent to conversion.When we are converted Jesus brings us out of sin and gives us new life, which is suppose to begin to be realized now. "But if we died with the Messiah, we believe that we shall live with Him." (Read Romans 6 for more details) This will be fully realized when the dead in Christ (the Messiah) will rise to new life but this new life begins now, because Jesus has already risen from the dead. So many times Paul speaks of believers being "in the Messiah" or "with the Messiah," which means that what is true of the Messiah is true of His people. If He died and rose to new life so will we. This happens at conversion and we are to identify (or we are suppose to) with this through baptism. This new life in God's redeemed famliy should be a life of love. We no longer identify with our old way of living life. We firmly belong to and are identified with Jesus and His redeemed family. I hope you can grasp how truly big this is. God has enabled us to live a life of love when we died and rose again to new life. This has already happened. We are free to love!
Lord, how can we love like you? Help us by Your Spirit to do this. Help us to BE Your restored humanity. We have died to sin and are alive in the Messiah! We are fully alive and ready to live a life of love. Thank you for the work you have done in Your people. You enable us to love! You are amazing!
In my next blog I will further discuss what it means to love like Jesus and how God's love for us should lead us to love others.