"When is this movie gonna be over?”

This is what my seven year old son asked as we watched the fairy tale unfold before us. But it wasn’t a fairy tale. This was real life.

Even I had to remind myself over and over that we were not watching a movie. That is what it felt like, right? The royal wedding was an incredible site to witness and I admit even I teared up a little myself.

There was talk before the wedding about one of those involved stealing the show: Bishop Michael Curry. That concern came true. Dude stole the show!

(Watch it here.)

I was totally surprised. I did not expect to hear the gospel, the saving message of Jesus Christ, to be proclaimed in the wedding, especially not with the passion we all heard from Bishop Curry. It was as if he thought, “There might be some expectations of me here, but I’m just going to do what I do.”

And he did it.

He started out rather stoic, much like those in attendance, but about three minutes into the message, something shifted. When he started speaking about love, he became animated.

“Sacrificial redemptive love changes lives and it can change this world,” proclaimed Bishop Curry. I could not agree more! This is the message of Jesus, after all. He asked us to imagine a world where “love is the way.”

Love…love is the only way. Who in the world is going to argue with that? The problem is not in agreeing with love, but with the definition of love.

Love is not self-serving and self-centered. Love is sacrificial.

That’s it.

The tension then becomes how does humanity become a vehicle to see this vision of “a world where love is the way” become reality?

I looked at the faces in the crowd and couldn’t help but think that they were so caught up in the pomp and circumstance of the moment that they were missing the life changing message being proclaimed right in front of them. See, the message is true, but it was easy to dismiss and ignore en masse. The message that you don't miss is the one being invested in you through a personal relationship.

Love is the way. It is the way of Jesus.

It is the ways, or in other words, the behaviors of those who claim him that will actually lead to the work Bishop Curry described. I am not making a case for works-righteousness. Rather, you can speak of love every second of every day and not make a single difference in the world. It is only when love becomes a verb in the lives of those who profess the message of Jesus that the world takes note.

This is why discipleship is the way. When one person pours his or her life into another in teaching and demonstrating the ways of Jesus...showing and encouraging another person intentionally how to sacrifice, how to surrender, how to die to self for the sake of others.

Millions across the world heard the message of Jesus spoken through Bishop Curry. How many lives are different today because of it? I would venture to say not many. Sure, Christians tweeted and posted about how much they loved it, but can we say lives were changed?

All this to say that perhaps just speaking the message is insufficient. Showing another how to live the message out is where the change occurs.

This is the power of love to change the world.