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While doing some sermon prep for a chapel message, I came across some great illustrations of love. This is one of them I would like to share with you:
She was lying on the ground. In her arms she held a tiny baby girl. As I put a cooked sweet potato into her outstretched hand, I wondered if she would live until morning. Her strength was almost gone, but her tired eyes acknowledged my gift. The sweet potato could help so little — but it was all I had.
Taking a bite she chewed it carefully. Then, placing her mouth over her baby’s mouth, she forced the soft warm food into the tiny throat. Although the mother was starving, she used the entire potato to keep her baby alive. Exhausted from her effort, she dropped her head on the ground and closed her eyes. In a few minutes the baby was asleep. I later learned that during the night the mother’s heart stopped, but her little girl lived.
Love is a costly thing. God in His love for us (and for a lost world) “spared not His own Son” to tell the world of His love. Love is costly, but we must tell the world at any cost. Such love is costly. It costs parents and sons and daughters. It costs the missionary life itself. In his love for Christ the missionary often must give up all to make the Savior known. If you will let your love for Christ, cost you something, the great advance will be made together.
Remember, love is a costly thing. Do you love enough?
Dick Hills, Love is a Costly Thing.
I always find it amazing what love can do– especially a mother’s love. It can stop a moving vehicle, it can put itself in the place of another. And yet it is a love for someone that the mom has a relationship with. How much greater the love God had for us to send His Son while we were enemies with Him to die for us!
That was a powerful message. I kind of didn’t want to know the outcome because I had vague feeling the mother was not going to survive the night.
Any good and loving parent would sacrifice their lives for the sake of their children.
And what our Father in heaven did, well, it speaks volumes.
About stinkin time people remembered that this gift freely given costs something!
We are to count the cost because it costs our very lives. I look forward to opportunities to pay this cost. Praise God that we can feel this cost and can know something of how it must have cost CHRIST, and the Father!
Mrs. Meg Logan
Really enjoyed this post. It was a good reminder of how far we have yet to go. Jesus paid the price in the name of Love; not much can compare to that.
1Co 13:1-13
(1) If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
(2) And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
(3) If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
(4) Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
(5) or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
(6) it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
(7) Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
(8) Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
(9) For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
(10) but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
(11) When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
(12) For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
(13) So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Beautiful story…reminds me of a book I’m reading right now called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J. Sider…he’s a liberal Christian, I don’t agree with everything (such as his views on world population) but he makes so many great points about how important taking care of the poor is…it really opened my eyes to the many many verses on taking care of the poor…
Not to mention, he makes it all so incredibly real and sad…we are so busy, and so blind to the REAL problems in this world.