RECEIVING AND GIVING REAL LOVE

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

God showed how much He loved us by sending His one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.

1 John 4:7-12

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

It's been several years now since I received a very powerful e-mail forwarded by a friend. It contained this amazing illustration:

Imagine you're married. You and your wife have dreamed about having a child together and finally you learn she is pregnant. The most beautiful baby boy is born nine months later and your dream has come true.

Then suddenly, you're watching TV and see a news flash. A deadly pandemic has broken out and is quickly spreading throughout the world. At first, hundreds are afflicted but that soon turns into thousands and within a week, millions are stricken. People begin dying in droves and the world’s centers for disease control feverishly try to find a solution to treat the disease with no success. People begin to be gripped with paralyzing fear as they start to lose hope that a solution can be found before it’s too late. You’re among the masses, afraid to leave your home for fear that your family will perish, including your precious, newborn baby boy.

As you're sitting in your living room, contemplating whether this might be the end, your phone rings. As you answer it, the person on the other end of the line shares with you an unbelievable story. The hospital where your son was born had discovered a way to make an antidote for the pandemic disease and save all mankind. It sounds like the best news ever until they tell you that the key to the cure is within your baby. The doctors say they don’t quite understand it yet but your son has a one of a kind blood chemistry that can be used to create the antidote. You're asked to bring him to the hospital.

And so you rush your son to the hospital, thinking that they will need just a small amount of blood to get the job done. But then the doctors break the horrifying news to you: the only way to make enough antidote to save the world is to take all of your son's blood. They hand you a form to sign, granting permission to essentially kill your only son in order to save mankind.

Your heart breaks and you are left weeping under the weight of the choice you are faced with.

If you choose to spare your son, the world dies, including you and your son.

If you choose to sacrifice your son, the world is saved.

Faced with these options, you make the extremely heartbreaking decision to sacrifice your son to save millions and millions of others, giving permission for them to start the process. As they take him from you, you grasp his little hand and look in his innocent eyes for the last time as you give up your son to save the world, a choice made out of utter selfless love, a love that would lead you to surrender anything, in this case your son, to save another.

I don’t know if this hit you hard like it did me but this gut-wrenching illustration paints the picture of what God, Our Heavenly Father, was faced with as He willingly decided to give up His One and Only Son, Jesus, as a sacrifice to save us from the disease of sin, a sacrifice we find summed up in our scripture passage for today. Let’s look again at those words from the fourth chapter of 1 John.

Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

God showed how much He loved us by sending His one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us. Vv.7-12

How much did God love us?

So much so that He sent “His one and only Son into the world” to pay the price for the sins committed by all mankind. Only a perfect sinless sacrifice could do this and so God sent Christ, the Lamb, “to take away our sins” (John 1:29).

The scriptures tell us that this real love, the fact that God loved us more than we could ever love Him and was willing to do whatever was needed to save us from death and the grave, something only accomplished by the shed blood of His Son who washes the sinner clean and justifies them before the judgment seat of the Heavenly Father.

Friends, we don’t have to guess about how to love one another because God has already shown us through His own selfless act of surrender in order to bring us salvation. May we love one another the same way, showing others that we are true children of the Lord Most High who are committed to live and love as His Son did, even if it means laying our lives down to save someone else.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.