Extravagant Love

Some believers today are more interested in knowing how little they can give to God than how much they can give to Him. They want to know what is the least they can do and still technically be a Christian. How much can they get away with and still go to Heaven?

The question they ought to be asking is this: “Because I am a Christian, because I have this incredible salvation, how can I show God how much I love Him? What can I do for His kingdom?”

Yet some Christians want to give the bare minimum to God. They will read the Bible—if they find time in their busy schedules, after they’ve visited all the websites they want to visit and watched all their TV shows and checked their social media.

They’ll pray a little prayer before a meal or sing a worship song in church, but maybe not out loud. They’ll put something in the offering—if they have some spare change in their pocket. And they are critical of someone else who does something good. They don’t like it when other people, in their eyes, go overboard. That makes them uncomfortable.

That is the Judas mentality. When Mary anointed Jesus with very costly, fragrant oil at Simon’s house in Bethany, Judas Iscariot was very critical of her. He accused Mary of waste.

Ironically, the very name Judas means “waste.” Talk about wasted opportunities and a wasted life. Jesus Himself handpicked Judas Iscariot to be His disciple. Yet Judas threw it all away and had the audacity to accuse a woman with a good heart of wasting the gift that she gave to Jesus.

The Bible tells us, “But Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would soon betray him, said, ‘That perfume was worth a year’s wages. It should have been sold and the money given to the poor.’ Not that he cared for the poor—he was a thief, and since he was in charge of the disciples’ money, he often stole some for himself” (John 12:4–6 NLT).

This reminds us that hypercritical people actually can be worse than the people they criticize. Those who are quick to jump down the throat of someone else often are guilty of something far worse themselves.

That is what Jesus was talking about when He said, “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3–4 NLT).

All too often, those who complain the most do the least. And those who do the most complain the least. Maybe that is why the first-century Christians changed their world. As modeled by Mary, they had a sense of abandon about them. They took risks.

When was the last time you took a risk for the kingdom of God?

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