True Love

While sitting in Good Friday service tonight and listening to The Last Seven Words of Jesus Christ, I felt something different than previous services of this occasion. Instead of joining the rest of the three congregations in the sorrowful remembrance for the death of our Savior for our sins, I was really somewhere else this time. I was in a state of awe.

Flash back to the last Sunday of March. AOW was invited to perform a sketch on the notion of false love to introduce the sermon in front of the entire English congregation for the first time. After the sketch (which, by the way, went really well after much hard work in writing, acting, and praying), Pastor Rich delivered on his message of the difference between true love and false love. In a nutshell, false love is self-seeking whereas true love is self-giving and furthermore, self-sacrificing. He drew an illustration of an aged man whose wife has just past away. After burying her, the man turned to his two sons and took them in his arms. He said:

"Boys, it was a good 54 years and it ended just the way I wanted it to end: your mother went first. You see when two people love other as much as your mother and I loved each other, each wants the other to go first. I did not want her to have to go through the pain of having to put me in the grave. If anybody was going to suffer, I wanted it to be me. It ended just the way I wanted it to end: your mother went first."

It was one of the best examples of true love I have ever heard. And Jesus Christ did even more than that - he wanted to suffer the pain and go to the grave first so we wouldn't go through it. So we may live and be free.

When I looked upon the cross that night, I couldn't bring myself to mourn my Lord. I could only look on, with wonder for this amazing grace - the ultimate act of true love by the Son of Man.


"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." ~ John 15:13