I’ve been reading David Putnam’s Detox… for the Overly Religious. For Putnam, detoxing from toxic religion is simplified into living like Jesus lived, loving like Jesus loved, and leaving behind what Jesus left.

I love this segment I read this morning on loving like Jesus:

One of the most challenging aspects of loving the way Jesus loved is that it demands action. Like the Pharisees, I often find it easier to talk, preach, teach, and write about love than to live it. I can talk the talk, no problem, but that’s not enough. The good news is that Jesus’ kind of love is life giving. It rids me of all kinds of religion, the mindless activity that sucks the very life out of me. Jesus’ love takes me to new depths of surrender and new heights of experience, backing me into corners where only faith can lead me out…

Loving like Jesus is a challenge because it always involves death – death to your pride, death to your bitterness, death to your overly religious ways. It always comes with a struggle, and it always involves surrender. Loving like Jesus is impossible of our own accord. Our only hope is to allow Jesus to love through us.

This kind of Crazy Love, as Francis Chan called it, means I will have to follow Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane and take up my own cross. This is territory the overly religious dare not to venture. But it’s the only place to truly follow Jesus – in the garden of surrender and self-abandonment. Jesus, love through me in ways I find it impossible to love.