Perfect Love
Perfect love. It seems as elusive as a Yeti or an honest politician, and we are left wondering if there really is such a thing. Our world has many ideas on what love looks like. Universally, we recognize that we need more of it. We sing about it, talk about it, and try to live it out, but we still struggle to understand what it means to love and be loved.
In a world that is increasingly good at hating, how do we love in a way that bridges the vast divides that separate our diverse world? The religions of our world try to tell us how to love. They each tell a story of what love looks like. Even those who do not believe in a god recognize the importance of love. So with so many different views of love, how do we find perfect love?
Only one story paints a perfect picture of love. One of the greatest things I have ever experienced in life is becoming a father. The moment I held my daughter in my arms my life changed. It was at that moment that I experienced love like no other time in my life. It was the type of love that would gladly lay down my life for her. It is in this relationship that God chose to relate to us. He chose to write His story through the most intimate relationship we can comprehend by sacrificing His Son for us.
I John 4:9-10 says “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
My pastor loves that word propitiation. The more I sit under his ministry the more I understand why. God revealed His love for us by identifying with us in the most intimate way and then allowed His perfect Son to die in our place. This perfect payment of love is why we must tell the story through the lens of the cross, because love is inextricably linked to Christ’s act of love. Love does not minimize the cross, but magnifies it as the perfect example of love.
Our family is thankful that this perfect love casts out fear and because of God’s love for us we can proclaim the gospel with confidence. This is a gospel that speaks to the poor and brokenhearted, the wanderer and the refugee. Through their pain and suffering they identify with the Christ who suffered for them.
Click here to Donate a Ball
As we move toward our goal of reaching the people of Berlin in July, we are thankful to have picked up a number of church partnerships and family partnerships this month and look forward to meetings over the next couple of weeks. OneWorldFutbol has approved our campaign to donate ultra durable soccer balls that we plan to distribute in refugee camps in Berlin as we launch ministry next year. If you would like to donate (or purchase a ball), you can click the picture to the right to be directed to our campaign.
Praise and Prayer
- We received the girls passports and applied for them to attend the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin. Please pray that they will be accepted.
- Pray for our upcoming meetings with churches
- We are thankful to have the opportunity to begin studying German with a friend from our church who recently returned from serving in Germany!
- We are thankful for our Christmas box from our sending church! (yes, we opened it early and have enjoyed the contents on the road:)