True Love.

What is love?

I cant love people. Not on my own. Not without realizing what love is. This year, I have seen a raw picture of love.

It started far too many years ago for me to imagine. It got real real in Gethsemane when Jesus was preparing to be crucified. He went to the garden to get away and pray to His Father for comfort. But He was met with silence. This began His drinking of the cup of wrath on my behalf.

Jesus prayed to His Father, pleading “Abba Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” Seeking a kindness from His Father, but only staggering to the ground as He stares into the detestable vessel that He will drink for us. This cup contains the full intensity and fierceness of God’s holy wrath poured out against all sin…that is intended for all of humanity. Ouch. Looking into this cup was as if all of the power of Mt. St Helens was contained in a coffee cup. Scary.

But what Jesus dreaded was the abandonment by His Father. See, we deserve death for our sin. Eternal separation from God. That is what Jesus faced on my behalf.

It was as if the often quoted verse, John 3:16, actually said “For God so loved the world…that He is silent to His Son’s agonizing appeal.”

This stress and utter abandonment is not something that I can grasp.

The Jesus said that He will drink my cup of wrath. He will drink it all. When He could say, “its your sin, its your cup, you drink it!” He says, I’ll drink it all.

This is love.

But there is more. Jesus rose again, defeating death. His life anew says that God has accepted His sacrifice. He gives us His righteousness. He gives me a new cup to drink. The cup of salvation. He gives it to me to drink consistently, endlessly, eternally, because it is always overflowing.

What?!

This love allows me to love. I have nothing to offer apart from this. I was dead in my sins until the Jesus who did this made me alive. He calls me to a life of repentance that I may be sanctified to be more like Him.

This is the gospel. That we depend on Christ for everything.

When we see how sinful we are, we see how great the cross is. This makes us love people and despise sin, sin that put Christ on the cross at all. All sin is the same. I want to hate it all the same. Mine, yours, theirs, ours, I just hate the brokenness of the world.

But through grace, I love you. I love people. And I just want to share hope with you. No matter your opinions, this is mine that I believe is based on truth. This is the plumline for my life that filters through all my beliefs and opinions on everything, relationships, politics, evangelism, parenting, working, all of it is filtered through this lens.

I will try not to offend any more than the gospel does because it opposes all sin.

But this is what I believe.