Though these are warm words, to me they served as a sobering reminder that trying to write what is on my heart concerning Jesus as Love is going to be like swimming against the current with weights on every limb. I am well aware this message may seem in direct contradiction to decades of evangelical sentiment and I don't take such a thing lightly.

Still, I must ask, are we missing the point with sermons and songs and self-help books that seem to make Christianity all about us? Was it primarily His affection for us that brought about Jesus's birth in Bethlehem or His death on Calvary? I wrote earlier in the introduction of my quest to discover a different Jesus, of my desire to extricate myself from the center of a lifetime of 'Christian' thought and theology. Nowhere have I found this more difficult to do than in regards to God's love.

It began a few years ago when in a message on Christ's death, John Piper asked: Do you love the Cross because it makes much of you, or because it enables you to make much of Jesus? I was taken aback and slightly offended, but mostly frustrated because the question didn't seem to make sense. How could the Cross not be about me? All my life I had heard and believed that Jesus loved me, suffered for me, bore the shame for me, and shed His blood for me. I cherished the Cross, had written a book about it, and came to it often to be bathed in the Love of God – what could possibly be wrong with that?

In the ensuing years God stripped me bare, first with tender assurances that He does love me with an everlasting love, and that this Love poured out on Calvary will always be an ointment to heal my fallen soul. And yet slowly, painfully I began to grasp the folly of turning His great love into some kind of measure of my value, instead of holding it forth as a banner extolling His. Jesus Christ is Lord, He is worthy, and He alone must be the center, the exalted One. I have grieved from the depths of my being this form of subtle idolatry, this worship of self that plagued my heart. I believe these roots lie hidden in the very fiber of a humanist world-view and pagan culture that inevitably translates into in a man-centered Christianity.

Jesus made His purpose for living and dying abundantly clear in a prayer just hours before His arrest. "Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify Thee... (John 17:1)." God's supreme passion has always been His own glory -- that His attributes, acts, character and ways -- might be made known throughout the earth, and then worshipped. When we were lost and had nothing to offer and no way to find Him, Christ suffered and bled and died in our place that we might relate to Him intimately, so that we might offer lives of worship commensurate with His worth. This is the Love of God manifested for sinful souls.

There is indescribable delight in recognizing that this Love is not really about us, but about the God of the Universe who condescends to come into our finite existence and manifest the beauty of His being. God's Love is exorbitant because He is eternal, merciful because He is mighty, powerful because He is preeminent, magnificent because He is majestic, and extravagant because He is extraordinary. Love means God will go to extreme lengths, even dying on a Cross, to display His glory in and through and to us for His own exaltation and our highest joy.

This is the Love that both transfixes and transforms, for it knows no bounds. Indeed, an experience of this Love renders issues of self-esteem and personal worth irrelevant -- they are just no longer the point. He is worthy, and as our hearts truly come to know the length and height and breadth and depth of Love, we will delight to make much of Him, as we are filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18).

Do you live with the sense that you are being filled with all the fullness of God? Consider John Piper's question: Do you love the Cross because it makes much of you, or because it enables you to make much of Christ? How would you answer this? Why?

The love of God for sinners radiates from His passion to exalt Himself for our joy. Because agape is best seen through Jesus's death on Calvary, we can have the assurance that God's love will go to any lengths to glorify Himself. This is our hope. How might this kind of love encourage you with struggles of faith you are presently experiencing? How might it motivate you to press on in obedience to the upward call of God in Christ Jesus?