Love Side Up by Ernest Randolph

How Is Believing In Jesus the Secret to Living a Good Life?

The good life is not discovered through increasing our wealth and influence; instead, it is found through our belief in a Supernatural truth and our living out Spirit-led love. Learning to embrace this message will help us see that true value can be achieved through sacrifice and real status can be found in promoting the least among us as the greatest.

Human instinct mistakenly labels these principles as upside-down, but the reality is the opposite. When we are filled with the love of the cross, our lives become abundant because they are turned Love-Side-Up.

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Excerpt from Love Side Up © Copyright 2025 Ernest Randolph

Understanding the cross is key to understanding our life in Christ, our complete freedom from sin, the end of the law for those who believe, and the new way of love without condemnation. In addition, Christ on the cross models for us the ability to embrace our troubles for the sake of love. J.C. Ryle, a great theologian of late 1800’s centered his ministry around the cross in much the same way I am advocating for.

The cross is the grand peculiarity of the Christian religion. Other religions have laws and moral precepts, forms and ceremonies, rewards and punishments. But other religions cannot tell us of a dying Savior. They cannot show us the cross. This is the crown and glory of the gospel. This is that special comfort that belongs to it alone. Miserable indeed is that religious teaching which calls itself Christian but contains nothing of the cross. A man who teaches in this way might as well profess to explain the solar system but tell his hearers nothing about the sun. The cross is the strength of a minister. I for one would not be without it for all the world. I would feel like a soldier without arms, an artist without his pencil, a pilot without his compass, or a laborer without his tools. Let others, if they desire, preach the law and morality; let others hold forth the terrors of hell and the joys of heaven; let others drench their congregations with teachings about the sacraments and the church, but give me the cross of Christ. This is the only lever that has ever turned the world upside down and made men forsake their sins. And, if the preaching of the cross will not do this, nothing will.

The cross is the opposite of what humanity would expect from a savior. Our savior should be a knight in shining armor riding in on a white horse to conquer our enemies. Our savior should be strong and fix all our problems. Our savior should answer all our questions and give us solutions to the things that trouble us. Our savior should build a kingdom in the mold we see fit. The cross did not make sense-to the Jews, it was “a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23, NASB1995)-why would a savior have to die?

We can hardly imagine the immense love Jesus demonstrated as He submitted Himself to the whipping and the brutal death on the cross. At each blow, His love endured as He restrained His power to obliterate the perpetrator. The ancient Jewish prophet Isaiah wrote: “By His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5, NKJV). His gruesome torture and death were for an important reason. He took on the violence we deserve for our sins. In His love, Jesus paid the penalty and endured the destruction our sin caused so we could be healed, freed from our enslavement to destruction, and invited to enter a relationship with Him.

When Jesus came to restore eternal life and repair humanity’s relationship with Him, no conditions were put on our behavior before He would exercise His love for us. Jesus told Nicodemus, long before He was crucified, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16, NKJV). All anyone must do to receive restoration of God’s love is to believe in and accept Jesus as Lord. His love does not come with any stipulations to fulfill or hoops to jump through prior to Him loving us. Jesus died for us “while we were still sinners” (Rom. 5:8, NET).

In His great love, God forgave the sins of the whole world through Jesus on the cross. The apostle John also wrote: “He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (1 John 2:2, HCSB). Jesus was so completely driven by His love for us that He took upon Himself all the sins of each and every human. John the Baptist exclaimed upon seeing Jesus: “Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29, HCSB). The cross was an act of sacrificial love that restored the possibility of a relationship with God for every human (Rom. 5:18).

Paul goes to great ends to communicate how immense and permanent the love of God is for us when we choose to follow Him:

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He did not even spare His own Son but offered Him up for us all; how will He not also with Him grant us everything? …Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or anguish or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? …No, in all these things we are more than victorious through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that not even death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come, hostile powers, height or depth, or any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord!

Romans 8:31–32, 35, 37–39 (HCSB)

Our trust in the loving, brutal act of the cross as the means of forgiveness for our sins is the seemingly foolish act of faith we must commit to change our hearts from the inside out. Jesus’ humble sacrifice freed us from a life of sin and death. When He died for our sins, He made it possible for the Spirit to live inside us, guiding us in His love. We can be forever transformed and deeply moved by knowing of and believing in this strange act of sacrifice. On the cross, Jesus showed a new way of love that was intensely superior to any achievement that the world would have deemed worthy of a savior. He demonstrated that His love was even more important than His own life. If a person can comprehend such an amazing act of love, how could they not respond positively to this love, a love with the ability to turn our lives love-side-up?