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Christian Love

In: Religion Topics

Submitted By elgrantoro
Words 1423
Pages 6
Christian Love—One Step Beyond (Podcast)
John H. Hampsch, C.M.F.

Just before the Korean War some Communist rebels in a Korean town murdered a young Christian who was a YMCA secretary—an instance of Proverbs 29:10: "Bloodthirsty men seek to kill the upright." At the trial, the father of the slain boy, a minister, asked the judge to spare the life of the young cutthroat leader, and to be permitted to adopt him as his son, to replace the son that was murdered. As a result of this extra measure of forgiving love, the young Communist and all of his living relatives were converted to Christianity.

What is the source of such heroic love? The answer is found in the very command to love with the extra measure, in the words "I say to you..." (Matt. 5:44). The secret of love and its glacier-melting warmth can be found only in the person of Jesus. He didn't say, "Without my ideals, you can do nothing," or "Without my precepts, you can do nothing." He said, “Without me you can do nothing." You can't live the Sermon on the Mount unless the Savior of the mount lives in you. "And this is how we know that he lives in us," says John. "We know it by the Spirit he gave us" (1 John 3: 24).

Virtue, like a well-cut diamond, is multifaceted. Heroic virtue is any of those facets supercharged with love. "Over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity" (Col. 3:14). That's why it is in the treatment of the virtue of charity or love that Jesus spotlights the "principle of the extra measure." It required heroic love to go beyond obeying the legal demands of the occupying Roman soldiers who could require a Jew to carry their military gear, but Jesus told them, "If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles" (Matt. 5: 40-41). Heroic love was to be the normative response to being offended by another: "To the one who would take

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