In the last installment of our series, we discovered the first tenet of our series, “Jesus is Our Reality.” We’re doing this to help us see that all of creation, even the Marketplace, is “in” and “with” Christ.
We don’t have to bring Jesus to anyone!
He’s already there!
We need to simply discover where he is as we invest in the lives, show them, and help them build on it.
I’ll recapitulate Tenet 1 here.
The Solidarity of All Creation (Even the Marketplace) With Jesus Christ
Smiling Icon believes in:
A Christ-Centered View of Reality
• The Creator and God/human Jesus Christ is the central truth of the cosmos (Col 1:16-17).
In this month’s blog, we’re going to look at Tenet 2. Smiling Icon believes in:
A Christ-Centered Unconditional Love
• God loves us more than he loves himself (1 John 3:16).
• God’s good creatures fall into sinful self-destruction.
• But in his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ has embraced all persons at their worst to rescue and redeem them for a renewed relationship with the triune God (Rom 5:5-10, Col 1:13-14).
A Mother’s Love Pictured by Christ
There is no love greater than a mother’s love, second to the love shared with us by God the Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
It’s timely to consider this in the month we celebrate Mother’s Day, and mothers in general.
I love Jesus telling his disciples, and the city of Jerusalem, and all of humanity by extension, how much like a “mother hen” Jesus loves us.
Matthew 23:37
New International Version
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”
God is often spoken of as our Father, and He is. And Jesus is our brother, for sure. But ladies, when Jesus was bleeding his heart out, going to Jerusalem to be her sacrificial savior, dying for people who were actually killing him, he chose the love of a Mother Hen to picture how much he loves us.
They say once a woman carries a child, her body is forever imprinted with the DNA of her offspring. God fills that way about us.
Isaiah 49:15
New International Version
“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!”
God Loves Us More Than He Loves Himself
Consider the words of this Scripture.
1 John 3:16
New International Version
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”
God put it all on the line. He gave up His son, His “only begotten son” (John 3:16), the Son that has been naturally emanating from the Father’s being for all of eternity. He took the risk of not letting him just bear our son, but become our sin!
God loves us more than He loves Himself, and that is self-sacrificing love, which is probably the key to all the equations in physics that they just haven’t quite figured out.
If they mathematically express God’s love that self-sacrifices, dies for us, and self-renews, I bet physicists will finally find the missing equation that makes all the equations describing our reality come together and make sense.
God loves us more than he loves himself (1 John 3:16).
God’s good creatures fall into sinful self-destruction—a lot.
But in his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ has embraced all persons at their worst to rescue and redeem them for a renewed relationship with the triune God (Rom 5:5-10, Col 1:13-14).
You can study Romans 5:5-10 on your own, but let’s rehearse together this Scripture.
Colossians 1:13-14
New International Version
For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
A Mother Hen and Two Wild Cats
There’s an old story you may have heard before, but let me paraphrase it. Two marauding cats were doing their best to destroy the chicks the mother had just hatched. And if things weren’t bad enough, the barn caught on fire and was totally consumed. The cats fled. But the Mother Hen, apparently flustered by the fire and the cats, couldn’t. When the embers finally cooled down, the farm owner went to estimate the damage. To his surprise, he found the mother hen, frozen in place over the ground, burnt to a crisp.
“Why didn’t she flee?” he wondered, scratching his head.
Then he saw why. Out of the bottom of the burnt body of the mother, a bevy of chicklets began to scurry out. Alive and saved by a mother who lost her own life to save her brood. He fought the cats valiantly. And who fought and beat the consuming flames as well.
That mother hen loved her babies more than herself. And God loves us, and all humanity, and everyone you meet in the Marketplace that much too.
Live in that love. And share the good news of that love with others as well.