Extravagant Love

In the last week before Jesus was crucified, He shared with His disciples, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” These prophetic words became His reality in the next few days as He offered up His own body as a sacrificial sin offering and demonstration of His love. Ephesians 5 continues to reverberate in my thoughts- His love was not cautious but extravagant.

God doesn’t just love; He is love. God, who formed me in my mother’s womb, has being watching me all my days, chose me as His own, directs my days, intervenes constantly and in His spare time keeps the planets spinning and the stars shinning; is love. With His whole being, He loves. He loves you and He loves me. He loves me in my unfinished state and He love me through all my imperfections, weaknesses, brokenness, disillusionments, hypocrisy and failings. He loves me completely as His own son and in the same measure as His own Son. This reality isn't my delusion but rather a confession of the truth of John 17.

To see and really understand the Father’s love toward us, we need to look at Jesus. Jesus, the express image of the Father, Himself said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” Jesus’ primary witness of God was as Father, but His revelation wasn’t just God as Father but a Father who loves His children. Jesus declared to us the nature of Father God and continues to declare it. In the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus shared about a waiting and embracing Father, conveying Father God’s kindness and extravagant generosity. The Father’s generosity that moves me isn’t His willingness to surrender the son’s premature inheritance but rather the Father’s generosity in welcoming and restoring His lost son into relationship.

I believe generosity is a mark that we’ve been transformed by love. One of the ways God love us is through generosity. In Jesus' discourse with Nicodemus about eternity and new life, Jesus affirms it is God’s love that motivated God generosity to give His only Son. Father God is truly generous with His affection and His constant invitation into relationship. It’s my conviction that Father God is the merchant who sells all that He has to buy the precious pearl, demonstrating His extravagant generosity.

Jesus embodied Father God’s generosity and demonstrated the heart of God in the most remarkable way. He demonstrated it with His death on the cross but He demonstrated it throughout His life too! Jesus was love incarnate, love made flesh, love who lived among us. He befriended and ministered to the outcast, poor, sick, disabled, demonized and the sinner. Jesus loved people. So simple and yet the biggest cultural quake that has ever hit humanity. The tsunami of His love is still relentlessly surging toward us.