We’ve been created to love and to be loved. In fact, after our immediate physical needs, love is the greatest need of all. But in this world, that is so confused about love, what is it, and how do we get it?

Have you ever wondered what the greatest and most immediate human need is in life? Well you don’t have to think about it very long, the answer is oxygen. Without that we’re dead in just a few minutes. After that comes physical safety and water and food. Those are the four absolute essentials to our survival. Add shelter, a roof over our heads and there you have it, our basic physical needs are taken care of.

But once those needs are met, well at least to the point where there isn’t anything critical happening, would you like to hazard a guess at what comes next in our list of human needs? What is it that people will tell you they need most once they have air to breathe, their lives and safety aren’t threatened, once they have water to drink and food to eat and a roof over their heads?

The answer is simple, the thing we need most is love. The problem is that this thing we call love seems to be getting so confused these days. We all need it, desperately we need it and yet it can be so difficult in this world to get a handle on exactly what it is and what we need when we talk about love.

Well, what is love? Is it friendship; is that what we’re looking for? Or is it marriage, a life-long commitment, is that it? Well maybe, maybe life-long is a bit long, is it a shorter term relationship that fills this void? Or is it a one night stand, is it sex, is that what we’re talking about? You and I, we both know how much we need to be loved but exactly what is that need look like?

The reason I’m asking you this question is that I’ve met so many people who went looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes, and when our needs and expectations for love aren’t met, that is such a painful thing.

A man and a woman go through divorce, the pain that that involves is indescribable. Or girl meets boy and on the second date they sleep together, she thought it was love, he just wanted sex. See, it’s a side show, it’s like we’re looking at love through distorted mirrors. You look at yourself and you’re tall and skinny or short and fat, these funny reflections in these distorted mirrors, it’s kind of how the world presents love.

What is love? If you had to give me your definition of love, what would it be? The dictionary lists these definitions:

• A profoundly tender passionate affection for another person.
• A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection as for a parent or child or friend.
• Sexual passion or desire.
• A person towards who love is felt, a beloved person or sweetheart.

But you see, I don’t think the dictionary’s really getting there, it doesn’t do it for me. See, the definitions are based on feelings and physical things. Is that all that love is? Okay, on the good days, we have warm and fuzzy feelings and when the relationships going well and there’s no adversity and there’s plenty of food and money and shelter, maybe that “feeling based” love is okay on those days but it just doesn’t cut the mustard on the tough days.

What about when we hit a stormy patch in life or we’re in a relationship or a dangerous patch or a lonely patch? If love is just about feelings and emotions and physical things, what happens then when it doesn’t feel good? Where do we go to discover what love is?

You know that the word “love” appears 550 times throughout the Bible. It’s one of the most used words in the Bible and I want to share with you today something of that love; God’s love. Just from the Old Testament, that part written before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, before God’s chosen people, Israel, could see God in the person of Jesus Christ. One of the most common uses of the word“love” is of God’s unfailing love. Hmm, now we’re getting to much better understanding, I think, than that dictionary definition. Psalm 32, verse 10 says this:

Many are the woes of the wicked but the Lords unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts Him.

You get a sense that love isn’t just about feelings; it’s a love that doesn’t go up and down through circumstances. On good days we might feel love, on tough days we don’t feel the same warm fuzzy feeling. And those are the days when love is a decision, when love is a sacrifice even and God’s love is unfailing because He is unfailing.

I had a email recently from a man, he’d been through some really bad things in his life. He’d had an affair and after that ended he came to faith in Jesus Christ and he emailed me. He couldn’t get his mind around the fact that God could possibly love him and he said to me, he accused me, he said “Berni, you make it sound so easy.” That’s because it is. God’s unfailing love is not like the stuff of the world. The stuff the world dishes up under this label of love that’s supposed to be warm, fuzzy, romantic, sexual feelings. Listen again when the psalmist writes about God’s love:

Many are the woes of the wicked but the Lords unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in Him.

What an awesome thing to do, to put our trust in someone. I put my trust in my wife and her love for me is unfailing. You know, some days I’m not the most fantastic husband on this planet, some days I’m grumpy, you know some days I’m tired, some days I fall short of her expectations but her love doesn’t fail on those days and God’s love doesn’t fail either, it’s an unfailing love.

There are times in my life and I know there are times in your life too, when we are difficult to love and yet people stick with us. That’s the great thing about a real marriage, that’s the great thing about a deep friendship and above all, that’s the great thing about a relationship with God. God’s commitment to me, God’s commitment to you, if we put our trust in Him, is His unfailing love. Not a feeling, an unfailing love and when we are the subject of that unfailing love it is something that we can rejoice in. Psalm 36, verse 7:

How priceless is your unfailing love. Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.

Isn’t that fantastic? God’s unfailing love is absolutely priceless. To that man who sent me that email saying, “God couldn’t love me”, to anyone else who’s ever had that same thought, I want to say this, “God’s love never fails, ever, because the central characteristic of God’s love is that it’s unfailing no matter what we do, what we don’t do. No matter how much we fail Him, He will never fail us.”

Love, as a commitment, God’s commitment does not reject us. A commitment to draw us close. Every other person on this earth will fall short one day, God’s love never falls short. Every other person on this earth will fail one day, God’s love will never fail because God is love. In this world, that’s something that each one of us needs to know.

It’s not unusual to find ourselves in a place where on the one hand, we know that God loves us, but on the other hand, it seems like God’s love is missing in action. It can be a difficult and confusing time.

I was standing in an elevator in a hotel in Chicago recently and depending on where you live, you may have noticed that they now have LCD screens in elevators these days. They flash up the latest news and the weather forecast and they advertise everything under the sun. I guess they figure they have a captive audience so they might as well use the time to sell us something and this day, they flashed up the latest top ten songs in the charts and I know that this isn’t going to be any surprise to you but what do you think that the first three songs were about?

Yep, you guessed it – Love! In fact, a very particular kind of love. As I recall each of the top three songs had quite a raunchy title. “Touch My Body” by Mariah Carey; “Love in this Club” by Usher and Young Jeezy and “Four Minutes” by Madonna and Justin Timberlake. The lyrics of these songs bear out my point. And that appears to be the level to which we reduce love in our popular culture.

It’s such a superficial picture of love isn’t it? But you know something, in this world that’s what we’re fed all the time, it’s like the air that we breathe. That’s what we’re told that love is; one way traffic that heads towards my gratification. That’s because ‘love’ involves putting others ahead of ourselves, that’s what real love is. And that is just not the pattern of this world.

Before I became a Christian I never considered putting others ahead of me, the thought never crossed my mind. It doesn’t matter where you live, you don’t have to look very far to see that kind of thinking, whether you’re in down town Chicago or in the heart of an African refugee camp.

People are so often ‘in things’ because of what they can get out of the things. I know that sounds pretty bleak and cynical and yes there are some good people out there but this world is also full of hurting people, people who desperately need to be loved and yet never find anyone who’ll stick by them through thick and thin.

Over my life time I’ve been through that, through some dark and lonely places, some scary places and even in those places we are made to be loved. Our deepest need in our hearts is to be loved by someone. Accepted unconditionally, just the way we are. And I’m so conscious when I’m sharing this that there are people listening today who, well their heart aches and I have no doubt that what I’m saying brings tears to some peoples eyes. Maybe that’s where you are right now.

I want to tell you something of the love of God today: a love that never fails, a steadfast love that persists through thick and through thin. I going to share with something of a story of a man called Job. There’s a whole book about Job in the Old Testament, just before the Book of Psalms. He was a good and a Godly man. He never did anything wrong and yet God allowed the devil loose on this man.

He lost everything, all his possessions, his family, his health. He had these horrible sores that afflicted his skin. And none of it made any sense because he said to God, “Look, I haven’t done anything wrong”. Have a listen to how Job pleaded his case before God, it’s from Job chapter 6. Job said:

If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery placed on the scales! It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas; no wonder my words have been impetuous. The arrows of the Almighty are in me, my spirit drinks on their poison; Gods terrors are marshalled against me. Oh, that I might have my request that God would grant what I hope for, that God would be willing to crush me, to let loose His hand and cut me off.

You see how desperate Job is? That’s how it feels when we’re going through that sort of stuff. And the thought that crosses my mind as I read through the book of Job and I see the affliction that the devil brings on Job, with God’s permission, is how can a loving God allow this?

Now this crossed Jobs mind too just once or twice and he keeps on asking God, ‘Why are you doing this to me’? You know God never gives up on Job and the only answer that He gives Job is that, ‘Well I’m God and I will do as I please’. Can I ask you a question, where is Gods love in that? In Job chapter 30, verses 20 to 21 he says:

I cry to you and you don’t answer me. I stand and you just look at me. You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me.

All the time Job cries out to God and yet he never speaks against God, he never turns against God, he never turns away from God. And what I love is how frank and open Job is with God about how he feels, there’s a lesson in that. Job tells God exactly how he feels, the pain and the frustration. None of this makes sense, all this pain, all my loss and yet still Job can still say this:

I know that my redeemer lives and at the last He will stand upon the earth and after my skin has been destroyed then my flesh will see God.

How often have we been in a place where all hell seems to be breaking loose and the love of God seems like such a distant thing, such an impossible thing, such an utterly, well almost like it’s a figment of someone’s imagination. Sometimes, like Job, we think God is punishing us for something, He must be, but He isn’t.

We try to discover what God is doing and why, but we can’t. Sometimes we’ll never find out why we had to travel through those difficult times and yet, through all of that, God is love, His unfailing love never ceases. Listen how the story of Job ends:

After Job had prayed for his friends the Lord made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before. All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble that God had brought upon him and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring.

The Lord blessed the latter part of Jobs life more than the former part. He had 14,000 sheep, 6.000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, 1,000 donkeys and he also had 7 sons and 3 daughters. Nowhere in all the land were found women as beautiful as Jobs daughters and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers. After this, Job lived to 140 years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation and so he died old and full of years.

Gods love never, ever fails. It doesn’t matter what we see with our eyes and what we feel with our hearts and our bodies, Gods love never, ever fails:

I know that my redeemer lives.

I used to tell people that I didn’t have time for studying history. It’s all out of date anyway. But when it comes to experiencing God’s loving, it turns out that looking back into our own history has a big part to play.

This week on the program we’re taking a bit of a look at the whole subject of love. We all need love, it’s so important and yet it seems to be such a confused and distorted concept or commodity in today’s world. Have you ever wondered where love comes from? Love is actually very natural. We expect to find love in a family for instance. That doesn’t always happen and when it does it’s never perfect because you and I aren’t perfect. But the place where we learn about love and we learn to love is in our families.

And yet our desire to love and be loved is something that we’re hard wired with, it’s in our identity. Love is such a wonderful thing, I find it hard to swallow that it happened by accident as you and I evolved out of some primeval slime. I just do. I know there are people who believe that, I simply can’t.

Above and beyond the fact that the complexity and diversity and beauty of living things of this planet dissuades me from the ‘chance evolution thing’, is the existence of love that convinces me utterly and completely and beyond a shadow of a doubt that there must be a God, a God who created us in His image, the image of love.

And that’s exactly what God tells us in the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, beginning at verse 26. It says:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

The funny thing though, is that the first book, this Genesis book, God doesn’t directly tell us about His love, He just shows us. You see how He creates the world and how He deals with people in Genesis, you see His love in action not in words. Isn’t that powerful? Because so much of love is not the way we feel, it’s not so much what we say but it’s what we do.

Now the first five times that the word “love” appears in the Bible and it’s the five times it appears in the Book of Genesis, it’s about human love. And in fact the first time it appears, it’s about Abrahams deception on his wife. He ends up lying and she ends up in another man’s harem:

And when God made me wander from my father’s household I said to her, “This is how you can show your love to me, everywhere we go say of me, “He is my brother.

See the very first time the word love is used in the Bible God shows us how we, human beings, can distort love. It seems to be what we do with this amazing gift that God’s given us. The first time we read anything about God’s love is in the second book of the Bible, Exodus, when God has led His people out of the slavery in Egypt through the Red Sea. Pharaohs army is drowned as the sea closes over the top of them and then Moses is singing a song of praise on the other side of the Red Sea. Have a listen to what Moses sings, Exodus chapter 15, verse 9:

The enemy boasted, “I will pursue, I will overtake them, I will divide the spoils, I will gorge myself upon them. I will draw my sword and my hand will destroy them.” But you O God blew with your breath and the sea covered them, they sank like lead in the mighty waters. Who among the Gods are like you O Lord? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders? You stretched out your right hand and the earth swallowed them. In your unfailing love you will lead the people that you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them to your holy dwelling.

Moses looks back and there were some difficult times there getting out of Egypt and he has the faith to look forward. You know the next forty years, Moses led Israel through the wilderness in the desert and it’s this evidence of God’s love in the past that gives us faith in God’s unfailing love for the future.

I wonder how many times, in that wilderness during those forty years – Moses was going through difficult times with the Israelites who grumbled and complained and turned against God – I wonder how many times he thought back to that wonderful passage through the Red Sea where God parted the Red Sea and saved His people from the Egyptian army? I wonder how many times he looked back to remind himself of Gods unfailing love? I wonder how many times it’s been like that in my life.

The Exodus is often a long time in the wilderness. When we’re in that place it’s so easy to forget about the unfailing love of God because we focus of what’s before our eyes, we lose sight of God’s love and often, it’s not until I pause and I look back and I see what God’s done, I see God’s love speaking through the things that He’s done in my life – the miracles, the blessings – do I realise how much He loves me.

See that’s the evidence of His love, I could look at what God has done. Love is a verb, it’s a doing word. Yes, the Bible tells us about God’s love but for it all to make sense we need to experience His love for ourselves, in our lives, then it becomes real.

The problem is, so often we experience it, God shows us His love and somehow we don’t see it for what it is, His love in action or we see it and then we forget about it. God’s love is steadfast and unfailing; it’s something to sing songs about. That’s why we can praise God, even when we look around and we can’t see anything with our eyes worth praising Him for.

Paul and Silas, many years later, in the New Testament, they cause a riot. They end up being locked up because they were doing God’s work. They were doing good things and yet look at what happened to them, Acts chapter 16, verse 22:

The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and flogged and after they’d been severely flogged they were thrown into prison and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. Upon receiving such orders he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God and the other prisoners were listening to them.

What were they singing about? They were singing about the steadfast love of the Lord because it never ceases, never. Doesn’t matter what jail we’re in, God’s love never ceases. It isn’t this distorted image of love that the world projects. The world’s love is a “me, me, me” love. That sort of love inevitably fails. But God’s love is a selfless love, a sacrificial love.

In fact I can’t imagine true love without sacrifice and pain because loving someone means putting them before us and inevitably, at some point, that hurts. Jesus knew that. We’re going to look at that later in the week on the program. I just want to finish off with this one passage from Isaiah chapter 54, verse 10:

Though the mountains will be shaken and the hills will be removed yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed.” Says the Lord who has compassion on you.

It’s one thing for two parents to tell a child, “I love you” but if they don’t love one another, it’s meaningless. There’s no security in the home for the child. And it turns out, it’s exactly the same with God.

They say that God is a God of love; in fact that God is love. Love is one of the most common words in the Bible, it appears over 500 times. But then, well what did God do before He made us? If God is a God of love and He was on His own before He created us, didn’t He get lonely? I mean, you or I would, an eternal vast nothingness. And at some point in all of that He creates humanity, people, you and me in His image. People whom He can love, people with a capacity to love Him in return.

But if we have a capacity, in fact the inbuilt desire to love and to be loved, then surely it had to come from Him and if He, God, has the same capacity, then it would have been tough for Him before He made us. Now that’s reasonable human logic, love by definition involves more than one person. There needs to be at least two or more in order for there to be love, I mean for love to exist in a practical real way. Does that make sense to you?

And that is what the Trinity is all about! My eyes used to glaze over on this one but the more I understand the nature of God, the more awesome He is in my sight. You’ve probably heard Christians talking about the Holy Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, one God. Three persons in one each one God, together – God.

Now I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand that in this life, it’s something that God is going to explain to us in full when we’re with Him in heaven. But when you think about it, unless it was so, God couldn’t have been “love” before He created us because He had no-one to love and since God never changes, He’s the same yesterday, today and forever, He had to be “love” before He created us.

Now there’s nothing specific in the Bible about the Trinity. It’s something that we can see and deduce but there’s no single clear statement. It becomes obvious though when you read the whole thing. It’s interesting, Moses wrote the first book in the Bible, the Book of Genesis and the book starts out, “In the beginning God …” And the Hebrew word for God is Elohim, which is God’s, plural and then again in Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, Moses writes:

Let us make man in our image.

Again, there’s a plural sense of God. Now Moses had no way of knowing about Jesus, the Son. Jesus hadn’t been revealed and wouldn’t be for quite a long time and yet, even at the beginning, he was able to write about God in Trinitarian terms, using the plural. Now, the Hebrews didn’t believe in multiple gods like other nations around them, in fact in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4:

Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

So he doesn’t talk about a plural God, he talks about God as being one. Now one of the things that many of the other nations around Israel believed in at the time, and you still find it in some religions today, is that the different gods would have battles and arguments and in fact there were politics and war between the gods. Now when you think about that for a minute, if you believe in a bunch of gods where there were winners and losers, how exactly does that help you because you have to back a winner? What if I back a loser?

It’s a bit like a child who lives in a family where the parents are always fighting, it robs the child of it’s security because we have a deep need for love. And when we’re in a family environment of love, that provides us with real security where we can grow. So, here’s the question: what’s the evidence that there is love, this “oneness” between Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Because there must be great love between those three in order for the Bible to say that “God is love”.

It’s interesting, the New Testament, that part that begins with the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, into this world, the very first use of the word love tells us exactly that. It’s at Jesus’ baptism. The Holy Spirit descends on Him like a dove and in Matthew chapter 3, verse 17 it says:

And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son whom I love, with Him I am well pleased.” (Or other translations say) “This is my beloved Son.

There are three words for love in the New Testament. One is Eros which is the love between a man and a woman; it’s the Greek word from which we get erotic, that term. This other one is phileo which is a friendship kind of love and the last one is agape which is an unconditional love. And the word used here derives from the last of those three. It’s the bond of unconditional love between father and son. Jesus says it again, you can read it in John chapter 3, verses 35 and 36:

The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in His hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life but whoever rejects the Son will not see life for God’s wrath remains on him.

The Father loves the Son unconditionally. Now, why is this stuff important? Why are we talking about this today? My hunch is that it’s easy to lose sight of the nature of God and love is a place of complete security. Let me ask you, if a mother and a father each individually love their child and yet they fight like cat and dog between themselves, what does that tell the child about love? It’s going to breed insecurity, it’s going to breed fear.

And yet if the love between mother and father, wife and husband is strong, that brings such safety into the home for the child doesn’t it? John the apostle writes in his first letter, 1 John chapter 4, verse 18:

There is no fear in love but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears isn’t made perfect in love.

There’s lots of things and people and situations in this world that go to scream at us, ‘no-one loves us’ and there have been times when love has disappointed us, there have been times when we’ve felt completely alone. At those times, the thing that we need to know is that God is love and it’s not just a love that He gives to you and me and His children but it’s a love that exists for all eternity between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is such a security in that, there is such a safety in that. We can go to God and know that His love is perfect.

See, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have never had an argument, they’ve never had a tiff or a disagreement because their love, the love of the three persons of the Godhead; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for one another is unconditional.

Jesus talks a lot about this sort of ‘oneness’, the unity of the trinity and His final prayer before He’s crucified, have a listen to what He prays. John, chapter 17 in verse 20:

My prayer is not for them alone, I pray also for those who believe in Me through their message. That all of them may be one Father, just as You are in Me and I am in You.

Oneness in perfect love and that is exactly the relationship that Jesus is inviting you and me to be part of. Doesn’t matter what the world throws at us, there is no fear in love, God’s perfect love drives out all fear.

We don’t much like talking about the idea of sacrifice together in the same sentence as love, because we want love to be a nice, wonderful, romantic feeling that goes on for ever. But life isn’t like that.

I know that we would all like to believe that love is something wonderful, a romantic feeling that goes on forever but you and I know that it’s not always like that. Life isn’t like that. The music industry with its seductive lyrics and video clips would have us believe in that version of love. So many songs about love, so few that tell the truth. So, little by little, we start expecting this “love” thing to be something that it just isn’t.

If I want to love you, I have to put you and your needs before me and my needs. If you want to love me, you have to put me and my needs before you and your needs: even on the difficult days; even on those days when we don’t feel like it; even when the other person is behaving so badly they’re completely unlovable, or so it seems; even when we want to throw in the towel and walk away.

That sort of love, unfailing love, steadfast love, God’s love involves something we’d rather not talk about when it comes to love. It involves sacrifice. And the reason that we’d rather not talk about it is that we prefer to believe that love is some wonderful romantic feeling that goes on forever, isn’t that true?

If we lived in a perfect world surrounded by perfect people there’d be no need for sacrifice in love. If I was perfect you would find me easy to love, if you were perfect I would find you easy to love. But the moment that sin creeps in – I’m sorry to use that word but you know, neither you or I are perfect – the moment that sin creeps in, love involves sacrifice, it has to.

Think about it. There are two choices. When we love an imperfect person who fails us from time to time, who disappoints us, who falls short of our expectations, we have two options. You love them anyway or you don’t love them anyway. The first one involves sacrifice, the second one doesn’t. The second one ultimately rejects that person and walks away.

But if its steadfast love, if it’s unconditional love that we’re going to show to the other person, then there is going to be a price to pay, and that price is bound to hurt. Jesus talked about exactly that. Have a listen. I’m reading this from the record in John’s gospel, chapter 15 beginning at verse 9. He says:

As my Father has loved me so I have loved you. Now remain in my love, if you obey my commandments you’ll remain in my love just as I have obeyed my Dads commandments and I remain in His love. I’ve told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no-one than this that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

I don’t call you servants because a servant does not know a masters business is, instead I call you friends for everything that I’ve learned from my Dad I’ve made known to you. You didn’t choose me, I chose you and I appointed you to go and bear fruit – fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. This is my command: Love one another.

Yesterday on the program we looked at the fact that God is a God of three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and for all eternity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit have loved one another perfectly and the Father commands Jesus and Jesus commands us to love one another as the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – love one another. And then He goes on to qualify that and says, “No greater love has anyone than this, that he lays down his life for his friends.”

You and I know that they weren’t just words. Jesus laid down His life for His friends. He was brutally beaten, He was crucified, He was nailed to a cross. Just imagine thorns forced into your skull, big thick Roman nails driven through your wrists and through the flesh and the bone and through your heels, I can’t imagine the pain and then the weight tearing at these wounds when the cross was lifted up and dropped into the hole in the ground and just hanging there. Those nails through your flesh supporting your full body weight until you suffocated to death, a long, slow, agonising death.

Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.

Do you see what Jesus is saying here? The greatest love of all demands the greatest sacrifice of all and on the cross Jesus cried out:

“Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani” – “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?

It’s the cry of God, it rings down through the ages and it’s so easy to rush by these words:

Greater love has no one than to lay down their life for their friends.

Missing the sheer magnitude of what Gods saying here, the enormity of His sacrifice for us and then, then Jesus goes on to say this to you and me:

This is my command: That you love one another as I have loved you.

Pointing to the very same love that He was talking about, a love to die for, a love that would pay the price of it’s own life. So often people trifle with God’s Word, what He has to say. They just dismiss it, they skim over the surface but this is deep and profound and real and you and I both know that this is the Word of God and He’s calling us to live a life of love and the thing we don’t want to hear is that that involves sacrifice but it’s that sacrificial love that bears eternal fruit.

A life that involves dying to ourselves, our worldly desires, our pleasures, our comforts and following Jesus every day and you know something, it hurts some days to do that. There are some days we would rather walk away, there are some days when it’s too hard, there are some days where it doesn’t make sense because all we see is the pain.

This is my command: Love one another. Love one another as I have loved you for by this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love, one for another.

In Christ, God loves you and me so much that the price of God’s love is the suffering and the death of His Son and my prayer is that we will never lose sight of the enormity of His sacrifice on that cross. It’s so easy to do, it’s such a familiar story, we rush by it because we know how it ends. The world says, “Its all about me, God is there to serve me, everything is about my gratification, my pleasure”, and so when it’s not like that we wonder sometimes whether we’ve failed God. When it hurts we think, “Something’s wrong, it shouldn’t be like this.”

This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you.

That speaks of a love that’s prepared to die and it’s not the way the world wants it to be because that’s a “me, me, me” template and it was never ever God’s idea.

Greater love has no one like this that He lay down His life for His friends.