The Real Thing

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I am thankful to the one who showed me what authentic love is. Not only by what he said but by what he did. 

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I recall vividly the time I was sat listening to a gruff voiced man from South London as he began to address the assembled audience of which I was a part. "Love is fake man! What you hear about love is fake. The music we listen to sing of love when they mean sex. A boyfriend says to his girlfriend, I love you, but then he is with someone else the next week. Love is fake man!"

 

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The speaker told the story of a man arrested for treason in the English civil war hundreds of years ago. The accused was tied to an oak tree and then the military commander lined up his archers in preparation for the execution which was to happen on the hour.  At that moment the young man's fiancee appeared and threw herself at the commanders feet, begging for mercy.  His response? He grabbed her roughly by the arm and threw her to one side with thinly veiled contempt. She was unrelenting. Continuing to cry out she begged for mercy. The commander took her by the throat and told her in no uncertain terms what he thought of her husband to be and that if she did not leave them alone he would not be responsible for what his men would do to such a pretty young lady as herself.  Seeing the futility of her pleas she mounted her horse and rode away in tears leaving the commander and his men to their task.

 

There was a tradition in those times whereupon a condemned man would be executed on the sound of a church bell. Some distance away was a huge bell tower containing a great bell which could be heard for many miles.  In this tradition there was but one tiny hope for the condemned. There was a superstition about the bell that if it failed to ring upon the hour of execution the guilty party was to be released and pardoned. The failure of the bell to ring being seen as a sign of divine intervention. A message from heaven bestowing pardon upon the condemned.  The soldiers waited...and waited...and waited but no bell was heard.  Eventually the commander ordered his men to untie the accused and let him go with the warning that he should run as fast as he could "lest we change our minds."  The commander, however, was curious.  He was adamant he heard something but it certainly wasn't a bell.  Puzzled by this he got on his horse and rode the distance to the church and to the tower where he was confronted by a sight that would stay with him for the rest of his life.  Tied to the hammer inside the bell was the young wife to be.  In desperation she had raced to the tower, climbed to the top and tied herself to the huge hammer inside the bell in a frantic attempt to muffle the sound. The commander stared for a few seconds at the crushed lifeless body before having to turn away. He has seen death in abundance on the battlefield but this was different. He had just seen the aftermath of the ultimate act of self sacrifice to save the life of another.

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"That story describes exactly what Jesus did for all of us." he proclaimed. 

We, as God's creation, are guilty of rebelling against his authority and will for our lives. We are the condemned man. Every single one of us, and God's response was to send Jesus to die in our place so we could be pardoned."

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The preacher looked out at his audience. "How many of you love someone enough to die for them?"  Well he'd got me on two counts.  Not only did I fail to love anyone but I also held to the arrogant belief that I could do pretty much anything if I tried hard enough. I found this potential inner superhero fade away into the fantasy realm he belonged to.  No matter what I believed about myself I knew the one thing I feared most was dying.  There was simply no way I would ever die for anyone.  You get one life and that's it.  I intended to hold onto it for as long as possible through sheer willpower if need be. I wanted to believe I could do anything but I knew I couldn't do that. I certainly didn't love anyone enough to do that.

 

That night changed how I saw things forever.  I no longer looked at love as fake. I could no longer be satisfied with a cynical view of love as something shallow or superficial. I was confronted with a virtue far higher than even the vastly over inflated view I had of myself and with it my self centred insecure little world began to crumble. The preacher continued with perhaps the most profound statement I have ever heard.

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I couldn't tell you how many times I ridiculed religious people. I considered them to be deluded, soft in the head and more than a little weird. They became to butt of so many of my joked yet here I was faced with something that demanded I take it seriously. Only the most foolish of people would ridicule this.  I was well and truly put in my place and it was all down to an encounter with real, authentic, love.

 

To be perfectly honest, up to that point, I had lived my life for the god I believed in and that god was myself. I lived my life all out for whatever pleased me and what pleased me was doing wrong. I got a buzz out of it.  I just had to cause mischief.  I gravitated to all the wrong people and I pretty much enjoyed every wrong thing I did.  What is more I was proud of it. I had done almost as much as anyone to merit God's judgement {and if anyone has the right to judge it is God himself}.  If anyone whose lifestyle was begging for judgement it was me and yet God's response was the complete opposite.

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That's real love.

That's authentic love.

That's the message of the gospel.

 

It's the message that God loved every one of us so much that he gave up his one and only Son  so that whoever puts their faith in him would never perish but have everlasting life.

 

As I look back over the last 20 or more years I am thankful for that night. I am grateful for that message and I am eternally grateful for that preacher.  I am thankful that although I am not yet the person I want to be I am not the person I used to be.  I am thankful for the chance to see things differently.  Most of all I am grateful for the one who taught me what real, authentic, love is and not only by what he said but by what he did.

 

You and I find ourselves living in a world where love is so often transitory, fickle, superficial and unreliable {even when it exists at all!}  I am thankful for the one who showed me what real love looks like.  The love Jesus has for us is, after all these years, still the most inspiring and life transforming thing I have ever experienced. Quite poissibly the greatest thing about it is that it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we deserve it.  Jesus love for every one of us, every human being on this planet, is based purely and simply on who Jesus himself is. It flows from his own benevolence. His love is truly unconditional.

 

There are so many ways I could express this but perhaps the best is in the following statement.

 

"For a good person some might even dare to die {whether we'd actually go through with it is another matter} but God commends his love to us in that while we were sinners, ignoring him, breaking his laws and living independantly of him, Christ died for us."

 

That's authentic love. That's the real thing.