Easter 06: Self-Sacrificial Love

Redemption Church KC Sermon Podcast

1. One of the slides Tim put up during his sermon read, “part of what it means to be a Christian involves learning to contemplate the true nature of love.”

What do you think this really means pragmatically and in our day to day lives as Christians? How do we engage in this practice? If someone sought your advice about how to contemplate the true nature of love, what might you say?

2. Another slide said, “Love (after Christianity) is self-sacrifice… to elevate someone else, in importance, over myself.”

Tim also pointed to a cultural conception of love that is about “finding yourself.” In contrast, Jesus taught a love that was more about “losing yourself.”

How do all these ideas strike you? In what ways do you feel resistance to them? Do you have other ideas and priorities that conflict to some degree with these concepts?

How do you process the tensions that exist between Jesus’ example of self-sacrificial love and other things like meeting our own physical needs or perhaps a need for boundaries in our relationships? Where does that get difficult to navigate? Are there limits to what that self-sacrifice is meant to be? How do we negotiate how self-sacrificial love takes shape in the actual living of our lives?

3. In his sermon, Tim said, “[love] has a way of drawing out of us the things we don’t want to know [about ourselves.]”

What’s your experience of this idea? In what relationships and ways has love drawn things out of you that you might have preferred not to see or acknowledge?

In the long run, what have been some of the positive byproducts of this dynamic? What have some of the beneficial byproducts of this principle-in-action? What have been some of the painful or hurtful byproducts?

Considering your collective answers, is love worth it? What might you say to someone who’s doubting that it is?