Pain

 Last Wednesday started the season of Lent - a time of preparation and focus on the work of Christ on Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.  As I reflect on the work of Christ I have been reading the gospels and the records of the crucifixion and the events that lead up to it.  When I read these texts, I am reminded of the immense pain that Jesus went through to save us from our sin and sinfulness.  I want to simply remind us today of some of the pain.

Physical Pain - Jesus endured a whipping that was designed to nearly kill a man.  He was beaten.  He had a robe placed on open wounds and then taken off.  He had a crown of thorns slammed on his head.  He had nails pounded through his hands and feet.  And all of this was just the prelude to the real torture.

Emotional Pain - Jesus correctly predicted that his closest followers would abandon him.  He knew and experienced the betrayal and denial of Peter.  He was weeping over Jerusalem even upon the triumphal entry.  

Spiritual Pain - Jesus experienced total isolation from God His Father.  He was forsaken.  He was punished because of our sins.  He bore the literal weight of all of our sins on the cross.  

The pain of death - Jesus surrendered Himself to die.  He was God incarnate.  God eternal.  Death was not a part of what He should have had to endure, and yet he became one of us and was willing to die as one of us so that we could live.

What a Savior we serve who was willing to go through so much pain.

Love - A Valentine's Day Corrective

 As anyone who knows me well knows - I do not celebrate Valentine's Day!  (everyone can let out a collective sigh of sympathy for my wife.)  If you do celebrate the day, please know I bear you no ill will.  However, I think it is important to know that we need to define some terms.  After all, I have been watching a few commercials that tell me what love really is and how I should define it.  The sad truth is that more and more of those ads have included relationships that I would not define as true definitions of love, and I think that this is because we have allowed our culture for too long to define the terms.  I will illustrate this with one word - the word "Love" itself.  

What is Love?  How you answer this question actually has a lot of important implications.  After all, if we say God is love, how we define love matters a great deal for our understanding of God.  If we say we are to love one another, how we define love matters a great deal.  And if we talk about self-love, how we define love matters.  I do not wish to make you read a long dissertation of the definition of love.  I want to pick one element of what love is and simply point out some difference.  The element I choose today is the question of where love starts - does it start internally or externally?

The culture will quickly tell you that love is internal and primarily emotional because it is internal.  Love is a feeling because it originates deep inside of us.  We cannot understand it always because the" heart wants what the heart wants."  Every sappy Hallmark movie, every romantic comedy, every commercial begins with the premise that love starts with me.  The Bible however has a different idea.

Biblically, love is primarily external.  It is not primarily an emotion - it is an act of the will, a choice to be made to act in a particular way.  Love is therefore not a feeling, but as DC Talk said - Luv is a Verb.  (Props to you if you get the reference)  We can understand it because it has been revealed to us by a God who loved us first and it does not start with me and therefore is not only external but can easily be defined because the God who is love has defined it for us.  

I will not today dive any deeper than that.  Love is not something you feel, it is something you choose to do.  Anything less is a culturally driven mis-representation of what love really is.