Phil Ryken. Loving the Way Jesus Loves. Wheaton IL: Crossway, 2012. Print.

Do not read this book if you are content with your life. This will wreck your comfort zone.

There have been a handful of books that have brought me literally to my knees. One, Daring to Draw Near by John White, I pretty much read on my knees. Another that somewhat shocked me was Overcoming Racism by Rick Joyner. I am a Yankee; all my ancestors fought for the North. I lived in the ghetto for a while. I am post-Civil Rights Movement. Yet that book caused me to pray in a way I never had.

Similarly, Loving the Way Jesus Loves opens up Jesus to us the way few books outside of the Bible have. Reading one chapter in this book also brought me to my knees.

As the former manager of a Christian bookstore, I have seen and read numerous books on love. There is a certain sameness in many of them. They are either analytical word studies, or else they tell us what we ought to do. The first are dry; the second are preachy. While we understand that God wants us to love good deeds and avoid evil ones, most of us who have been Christians know what we ought to be doing, even if we do not (see Romans 7).

Loving the Way Jesus Loves is really different. It does not tell us what to do. It shows us. And it mostly shows us through the life of Jesus. The plan is very simple. Analyze I Corinthians 13, the “love chapter,” by showing how Jesus lived it out. That what was literally awesome about this book. Jesus. His love.

There are two things implicit in this approach. One, we can learn to love and appreciate Jesus more. Two, we can live by His example. I think it was chapter five in this book that brought me to my knees. “Love is patient,” says the verse. For years I have noted that patience is the difference between love and lust. But this was different. Ryken used the story of the raising of Lazarus to illustrate this. Jesus waited a couple of extra days after he heard Lazarus was sick. By the time he arrived at his house, Lazarus had been dead four days. Jesus took His own sweet time as they say, but what he accomplished was much more than a mere physical healing. If we get a vision that Jesus really does hold the keys to death and hell (Revelation 1:18), we really can relax. We know it is all in His hands.

So each chapter tells a similar episode in the life of Jesus. Interestingly, the chapters follow the verses of I Corinthians 13 in order, and the episodes follow the life of Jesus in order: His ministry, His arrest and trial, His suffering, His resurrection appearances, and His promise to return.

The author encourages us to try to put our names in the chapter in place of “love”: “I am patient. I am kind.” And so on. That is enough to trouble most of us if we are honest. But, you know, we can say, “Jesus is patient. Jesus is kind.” And so on all the way to the end of the chapter. That ultimately is our hope. Not I, but Jesus. As that old chorus says, “Jesus in me loves you.” Without Jesus, I am nothing: I am that clanging gong and clashing cymbal.

Ryken does include some interesting testimonies. One seemed unbelievable to me, but I found that it had been well documented. There was a famous photograph from the Vietnam War of a village being napalmed by American planes. A small group is fleeing the bombs including a little girl who is completely naked because the napalm had burned off all her clothes. She has her own story of how she learned to forgive.

Read this if you dare. If your heart still beats, it will affect you. My prayer is that in my own life the effect will become a permanent change. Amen.