We talk about love as if it should come naturally, but without understanding what it really is—how it’s given, how it’s received, and the reality that it always has a cost—we often end up mistaking lesser things for love. Emotions, desire, or attachment can easily masquerade as love, but Christian love is something far deeper and far more costly.
The clearest picture of love is the Cross.
The Cross was not simply a symbolic price—it was a punishment. One that we deserved. Yet Jesus chose to take it upon Himself, not out of obligation, but out of a love that did not flinch at the cost. That love was not free. It demanded everything. And He considered us worth the highest price a life could pay.
Jesus taught us to “give Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” but He also revealed a deeper truth: we belong to Him. Not because He forced Himself upon us, but because He bought us—through suffering beyond imagination, through a death that should have been ours. Love, for Jesus, was not sentimental. It was obedience, blood, rejection, breathlessness, and a willingness to endure.
This reveals something about love in our own lives.
Love will always require something of us. Sometimes its cost appears in small, quiet acts of faithfulness:
- letting go of resentment to forgive,
- getting up with a child when we are exhausted,
- choosing compassion over convenience,
- helping someone when it would be easier not to.
These sacrifices pale in comparison to the Cross, and on our own, we could never consistently offer them. We are too weak, too wounded, too self-centered. That is why Jesus not only redeemed us—He also gave us the Holy Spirit, the very love of God living within us, enabling what we could never do alone.
God continues to love us, moment by moment, so that we can learn to love as He loves.
Love is costly. But the One who paid the ultimate price walks each step with us, shaping us into people who love because He first loved us—and still does.
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