Fifty-two years ago three young adults loved God and me enough to pray for me, to alert me to my need for God’s forgiveness, and to tell me about Jesus. As is often the case, their loving action took courage, a character trait most people admire, but it all began with love.
That’s how it began in eternity past, when the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit loved each other and together created all that exists, including us, the creatures made in their image. And the cosmos continued in love even when a heavenly creature rebelled against God and deceived us, promising something he could not deliver: to be like God, simply by not trusting the One who made us, and accordingly disobeying Him.
Our sin brought death into the world, but God still loved us. He put into action a long-term plan that would reconcile us to our heavenly Father through faith in Jesus, the Spirit-conceived-and-led human Son of God who took our death penalty on Himself, an act of love for the Father and for us that restored us to eternal life.
All who are faithful in Christ are now learning to love as He loved, with action, and many acts of love take courage.
As I said above, most people admire courage, which we tend to identify primarily as physical courage: running toward the gunfire during a shooting, diving into the cold water to save a drowning child, going into a burning building to pull out a helpless person. And that is indeed courage on display. But we who are in Christ in America live in a time when a different kind of courageous action is needed: to speak truth to powerful liars, to stick with the truth when threatened with being driven out of the herd, to vote against one’s own financial advantage (at least in the short run), to remind one’s friends about the Word of God when you know it will rankle them, especially when your personality is that of a golden retriever.
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