Love

I greet you in Jesus' precious name! It is Sunday morning the 19th of February, 2023, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today. We start with John 15:13:

"Greater love has no one than this than to lay down one's life for his friends"

Then we go to 1 Corinthians 13:1:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal."

Without a doubt, the most powerful force in the universe is one thing - love! How do we spell love? J-E-S-U-S. That's right! Why? Because God is love. 1 John 4:8 says:

"He who does not love does not know God, for God is love."

Love is an action word, it is not just talking. We have to become a band of feet-washers because that's what Jesus was. We have to prefer others to ourselves - because that's what Jesus did.

A very dear friend sent me a story the other day and I want to read it goes like this:

After the earthquake had subsided and the rescuers reached the ruins of a young woman’s house, they saw her dead body through the cracks. But her pose seemed somehow strange, for she knelt on her knees like a person who was worshipping; her body was leaning forward, and her two hands were supporting an object.

With great difficulty, the leader of the rescue team put his hand through a narrow gap in the wall to reach the woman’s body. He hoped that this woman would be still alive. However, her cold, stiff body told him that she had passed away for sure. The collapsed house had crushed her back and her head.

The team left this house and moved on to search for life in the next collapsed building. But for some strange reason, the team leader was driven by a compelling force to go back to the ruined house of the dead woman. Again, he knelt down, wriggled his hand in through the narrow cracks to search the little space under the dead body. Suddenly, he screamed with excitement, “A child! There is a child!”

The whole team worked together; carefully they removed the piles of ruined objects and under the young mother’s dead body they rescued a three-month-old little boy wrapped all snug in a flowery blanket. It was obvious that the woman, desperate to save her son had made the ultimate sacrifice. When her house was falling, she used her own body to make a shelter to protect her son. The little boy was still sleeping peacefully when the team leader picked him up.

The medical doctor came quickly to examine the little boy for injuries and when he opened the blanket he saw a cell phone inside the blanket with a text message on the screen. It said, “If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.” As the cell phone was passed around from one hand to another all of the rescuers that read the message wept. “If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.” Such was the mother’s love for her child!

That is what love is all about my dear friend and Jesus did the same thing for us. Let's go out today and love someone.