Sis Melinda Song
INTRODUCTION
How time flies! Can you believe that this is the last Sunday of February?
February is a very busy month for all of us. We celebrated Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day and today is Chap Goh Meh!
In the past today is the day when the nyonyas and babas come out in full force to celebrate the last day of CNY. The young nyonya maidens would make their way to Gurney Drive or the Esplanade to throw oranges into the sea. Since properly brought up young nyonyas live a cloistered life this is the one opportunity for the young babas to have a sneak peek at them. And so Chap God Meh became regarded as the Chinese Valentine’s Day.
Since Chap Goh Meh also falls on February this year, love is really in the air and it is appropriate for us to take a look at “The Greatest Love of All” which is found in . . .
John 15:12-13 (NIV) My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You might think it strange that love should be linked to death. Why so serious? But love is a serious matter.
News: On Friday, 14 December 2012, Dawn Hochsprung - principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut - together with several other teachers were in a school staff meeting when they heard the terrifying sound of a gun being fired.
School therapist Diane Day told the Wall Street Journal, she said, "We were there for about five minutes chatting when we heard, 'pop pop pop'. I went under the table. The principal and the school psychologist Mary Sherlach had other ideas. They jumped out of their seat and ran toward the sound of the gunfire." They encountered and confronted the gunman who shot and killed both women.
The shooter then entered a first-grade classroom where he shot and killed the substitute teacher and most of the students. Next, he went to Room 10, another first-grade classroom. Teacher Vicki Leigh Soto was reported to have attempted to hide several children in a closet and cupboards. As the gunman entered her classroom, Soto reportedly told him that the children were in the auditorium. Several of the children then came out of their hiding place and tried to run for safety and were shot dead. Soto threw herself in front of her students and tried to shield some of them from the rain of bullets. She was fatally shot. Her first instinct - and her final act - had been to try and save her pupils. She was hailed a hero because she died trying to save her students.
Life is precious. All of us have a natural, inbuilt instinct for self-preservation. When faced with the question, “Your money or your life?” any sane, rational individual would rather surrender their wallet than to lose their life.
Let me give you another proof of our instinct for self-preservation. Do you know which is the most dangerous seat in a car?
Info: The front passenger seat is the most dangerous spot in a car. With a risk coefficient of 101, it means that the front passenger would be in a more dangerous position compared to the driver [risk coefficient of 100]. This makes sense because a driver’s natural instinct is to steer away from an accident. As a result, the front passenger is more likely to be heading toward an accident.
Whitney Houston’s hit song “The Greatest Love of All” is a realistic look at this self-love that beats within every human heart: The greatest love of all is easy to achieve, Learning to love yourself, It is the greatest love of all.
It is normal and perfectly natural for us to love ourselves. If sacrifices are demanded of us, it is difficult but not impossible for us to sacrifice time, money and effort for the well-being of another person. But it is not easy when it involves giving up our life.
Jesus declared that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. When you give your life, you have given everything.
Whitney Houston was wrong. The greatest love is not self-love. According to Jesus: the greatest love humanly possible is to lay down your life, that is, to willingly die, for another person.
This was demonstrated in Room 10 of Sandy Hook Elementary School on that fateful morning. As I thought of what Vicki Leigh Soto did I am confronted with 2 questions:
1. Who would I be willing to take a bullet for?
2. Who would be willing to take a bullet for me?
Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "If a man hasn't discovered something he would die for, he isn't fit to live." "Not fit to live"? That sounds rather harsh but it's precisely in being willing to give up one's life, that one's life – while one is alive – gains tangible meaning.
So here’s a good question for you to discuss over lunch today. How many people are you willing to die for? If the chips were down, the moment came, and in a split second you had to make a decision, how many people would you be willing to lay down your life for—with no hesitation or reservation?
I thought of asking Linken to dress as a gunman to barge in through the doors of TOP right at this point in the message but I didn’t because we don’t want anyone to suffer a heart attack. If a gunman were to enter the sanctuary and start shooting, what would your response be?
How many people would you die for? As I thought about it, my list is very small but this one thing I know, I would willingly die for my husband. If such an act is called for I just pray it would be a quick death and not a torturous one. I also pray that none of us will ever be put in that agonizing position. But what if you were? Who would you die for?
A word of clarification here: I am not asking us to entertain suicidal thoughts or tendencies. Take this as an evaluation of who and what you love and value most in life.
a. We would die for someone we love. Vicki Leigh Soto did.
There are countless movie scenes where someone takes the bullet or the knife in order to save someone they love. There are as many if not more real life stories of parents who die saving their children when they could have walked away unharmed from a fire or an accident.
Illustration: When the California gold fever broke out, a man went there, leaving his wife in New England with his boy. As soon as he got on and was successful he was to send for them. It was a long time before he succeeded, but at last he got money enough to send for them. The wife’s heart leaped with joy.
She took her boy to New York, got on board a Pacific steamer, and sailed away to San Francisco. They had not been long at sea before the cry of "Fire! fire!" rang through the ship, and rapidly it gained on them. There was a powder magazine on board, and the captain knew the moment the fire reached the powder, every man, woman, and child must perish. They got out the life-boats, but they were too small! In a minute they were overcrowded. The last one was just pushing away, when the mother pleaded with them to take her and her boy. "No, they said, "we have got as many as we can hold." She entreated them so earnestly that at last they said they would take one more.
Do you think she leaped into that boat and left her boy to die? No! She seized her boy, gave him one last hug, kissed him, and dropped him over into the boat. "My boy," she said, "if you live to see your father, tell him I love him."
She took her boy to New York, got on board a Pacific steamer, and sailed away to San Francisco. They had not been long at sea before the cry of "Fire! fire!" rang through the ship, and rapidly it gained on them. There was a powder magazine on board, and the captain knew the moment the fire reached the powder, every man, woman, and child must perish. They got out the life-boats, but they were too small! In a minute they were overcrowded. The last one was just pushing away, when the mother pleaded with them to take her and her boy. "No, they said, "we have got as many as we can hold." She entreated them so earnestly that at last they said they would take one more.
Do you think she leaped into that boat and left her boy to die? No! She seized her boy, gave him one last hug, kissed him, and dropped him over into the boat. "My boy," she said, "if you live to see your father, tell him I love him."
Even God acknowledges that a mother’s love is supreme.
Isaiah 49:15 (NIV) “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!
So much for parent and child. What about brothers and sisters? Here's a story
Illustration: In his book Written in Blood, Robert Coleman tells the story of a little boy whose sister needs a blood transfusion. The doctor explains that she has the same disease the boy recovered from two years earlier. Her only chance for recovery is a transfusion from someone who had previously conquered the disease.
"Would you give your blood to Mary?" the doctor asks.
Johnny hesitates. His lower lip starts to tremble. Then he smiles and says, "Sure, for my sister." The two children are wheeled into the hospital room--Mary, pale and thin; Johnny, robust and healthy. Neither speaks, but when their eyes meet, Johnny grins.
As the nurse inserts the needle into his arm, Johnny's smile fades. He watches the blood flow through the tube.
With the ordeal almost over, his voice slightly shaky, Johnny finally breaks the silence. "Doctor, when do I die?" Only then does the doctor realize that Johnny believes giving his blood to his sister means giving up his life.
b. We may even die for a friend. We have read many reports in the newspapers of people who perish when they jumped into a raging river or the sea in order to save their friends.
Illustration: One night, during the Vietnam War and a Marine sergeant is talking with his men. They are far into the jungle, deep in enemy territory. It’s cold and the men huddle around a tiny fire to keep warm. Suddenly a grenade flies in from the darkness, landing at the sergeant’s feet. Without thinking, he throws himself on the grenade, taking the full force of the blast with his body. He is blown to pieces, but in his death he saves his men. He gave his life for his friends.
When we hear stories like these, we feel as if we’re standing on holy ground. And indeed we are, for such sacrifices are rare indeed.
c. We may even die for a stranger. Firemen have died to rescue survivors of the September 11 Twin Tower collapse.
Illustration: In the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” Tom Hanks portrays an Army captain whose unit is assigned to find a private named Ryan in the dangerous aftermath of the D-Day Invasion. Ryan's brothers have both been killed in combat and he is his mother's only surviving son. Private Ryan is located and his life is saved by his captain who dies in the process.
d. We may even die for a cause we believe in. Think “Braveheart” William Wallace, missionaries like Jim Elliot, human rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr., environmentalists who tie themselves to trees to prevent them from being cut down, reporters and health workers who serve in war-torn countries. Throughout history there have been those who sacrificed their very lives for the sake of others or in service to a cause beyond themselves.
These examples show us friends dying for friends and loved ones dying for loved ones. We can at least understand what those people did when they sacrificed themselves for those they loved or what they believed in or in the line of duty.
But would I, would you, die for your enemy? Someone who hates you or have hurt you grievously. We wouldn’t but God did. God went far beyond what we would do. We would never imagine doing what he did.
Romans 5:6-8 (NIV) You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
This is the greatest love of all - that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Today's sermon has a simple point: God loves you to death. Because Christ died for you.
We discover two vital truths in these verses:
A. THE TRUTH ABOUT WHO WE ARE (v. 6)
"You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly" (5:6). Here's the spiritual diagnosis of our condition outside of Christ: weak and ungodly. We are weak in that we can't save ourselves, we can't set ourselves free from sin, we can't earn a relationship with God on your own merits. We are ungodly in that we think and feel and we live in ways contradictory to God's will for us. Apart from Christ, our lives are a mess and there's nothing we can do to fix it.
Verse 8 adds that we were sinners, and in verse 10 we are deemed God’s enemies!
Powerless . . . ungodly . . . sinners. . . God’s enemies. Those words describe what we were by nature from the moment we were born. They also describe the spiritual state of every person in the world apart from Jesus Christ.
In God’s sight there is nothing in us that is worth loving. There is no reason for God to love us. No reason except this: That’s the kind of God he is. God is love and he can’t help loving us even when we are his enemies. His love is both greater than our sin and in spite of our sin. God shouldn’t love us. . . but he does. This is the wonder of the ages. That God would love his sworn enemies.
We cannot understand the magnitude of the amazing love of God until and unless we realise how ugly, horrible and repulsive our sin is to God.
But "at just the right time Christ died for the ungodly." When we were drowning in deep water, at just that time Christ reached out to save us. He didn't merely throw us a rope, but rather exchanged places with us, drowning in our ocean of sin so that we might enjoy his place of safety.
So this is the truth about who we are: powerless, ungodly, sinners, God’s enemies. And yet these verses reveal to us . . .
B. THE AMAZING EXTENT OF GOD’S LOVE (vv.7-8)
We are in deep trouble and we are heading towards doom and damnation but God offers a solution to our problem that is so unusual that it goes far beyond human reason. We would never think this up on our own. Only God could conceive of this solution.
Verses 7-8 reveal the unearthly nature of God’s love. Two statements summarize this truth:
1. He Went Far Beyond What We Would Do (v. 7)
Romans 5:7 (NIV) "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die."
A righteous person is someone of exceptional character. He does all that the law and justice requires and gives everyone his due.
A good person besides being of exceptional character, is distinguished for goodness, kindness, generosity and is a benefactor to society, promoting the well-being of him with whom he has to do. Someone like Mother Teresa.
Here is a true observation on human nature. We might actually risk or even give our lives to save someone worth saving, but not to save someone who was truly evil like Hitler or Stalin. More often than not, we think that they deserve to die, like the five men who raped and murdered the Indian medical student!
When Christ said, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends," it is the ideal of human love. But where men's love ends, God's love begins.
A.T. Pierson wrote, “When you have reached the highest ideal of human sacrifice and human affection you are only on the mountain-top with the heavens infinitely above you, and it is in the heavens that God dwells. Not until you can estimate the difference between the height of the highest mountain of the earth and the great distance from the earth to Sirius, or those great stars that sparkle in the firmament, can you begin to express or understand the difference between the height of human love and the height of the Divine love.”
Which leads us to the next verse that is one of the greatly loved and most frequently memorized verses in all of Scripture. It puts in a nutshell one of the greatest of all truths, including the reason for Christ's death on a cross. "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (5:8).
2. He Did What We Would Never Do (v. 8)
Romans 5:8 (NIV) But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
The word “demonstrates” does not simply mean to “show or exhibit” God’s love. It actually means to bring something out where it can be seen in a better light, like a jeweler displays his jewels in the best light.
There are different ways that God has proven His love like causing the sun to shine and the rain to fall in order to give us life. But there is only one way that God could so showcase His love that it is presented in the best possible light. And God has done precisely that.
The verb “demonstrates” is also a present tense verb, meaning that God is still using that means to show in its best light His great love for us.
When we read this verse, we like to emphasize, “Christ died for us,” but the emphasis is clearly on the first phrase—"While we were still sinners.” The wonder is not that Christ should die for us—though that would be wonderful enough. The wonder is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners, still ungodly, still powerless and still enemies of God! He didn’t die for his friends. He died for his enemies.
Let’s go back to Vietnam, only this time the Marine sergeant has been captured and is taken up the Ho Chi Minh trail to Hanoi. Because he is a sergeant, he is beaten unmercifully. His teeth are broken, his cheekbone shattered, his legs disfigured, his ribs cracked, his back permanently stooped from hanging upside down in mid-air. His captors torment him day and night, trying to break his will.
At length a rescue operation is mounted. As the American forces move in, his captors surround him. Suddenly out of nowhere comes a projectile. It’s an American grenade. It lands in the middle of the group. Two seconds, one second. Just before it explodes, the Marine sergeant throws himself on the grenade, taking the full force of the blast, dying in the process but saving his Viet Cong captors. Blown to bits, he dies so that those men who savagely beat him might be spared.
Who would ever do anything like that? It doesn’t make sense. I know only one person who would do something like that. His name is Jesus Christ.
He didn’t die for good people. He died for bad people.
He didn’t die for saints. He died for sinners.
He didn’t die for his friends. He died for his enemies.
He didn’t die for those who loved him. He died for those who hated him.
We would never do anything like that! We might die for our friends but never for our enemies. But that’s what Jesus did for us.
If we were really great and wonderful and virtually sinless people, it might be possible to understand Christ's sacrifice as something we actually deserved. But we are sinners. We're rebellious people who have chosen to disobey God and to dethrone him from his rightful rule over our lives. Even more strikingly, as we read in verse 10, outside of Christ we are God's "enemies." We oppose God and his ways.
Therefore, Christ's death for us is not something we in any way deserve. Quite the opposite is true. So the fact that Christ died for us proves that God loves us. Only his love explains such an extraordinary and undeserved sacrifice.
Frederick Buechner in The Magnificent Defeat wrote:
"The love for equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.
"The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
"The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
"And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world."
The death of Jesus is the final proof of God’s love. Sometimes in this crazy, mixed-up world, people say, “Where’s the love of God?” Look to the cross. Gaze upon the bleeding form of the Son of God. There you will see the love of God.
The problem is that we can grasp this point with our minds yet miss it with our hearts. It took me a long time to fully to grasp God's love, or, rather, fully to be grasped by God's love for me.
I was already a Christian of more than 10 years when I went to Bible school. One day, we were discussing the attributes of God. Even though God is love, I argued that His holiness precedes His love. After all, didn’t the angels in the book of Isaiah and Revelation cry out “Holy, Holy, Holy”? You see, I understood intellectually that God is love but it never dropped down into my heart.
Say to the person next to you: God loves you. Turn the other person and say: God loves you. Now say it to yourself: God loves me. Say it again. Do you believe it? Very often it is easier to tell someone that God loves them than to say that God loves us.
Let us return to the story of Saving Private Ryan: As Private Ryan attends to his mortally wounded rescuer, the captain speaks his last words in a hoarse whisper - “Earn this.” The camera merges from the young private's face to the face of an old man, standing by a white cross in the cemetery at Normandy. It is Ryan many years later, near the end of his life. He kneels by his captain's grave and says: “Every day of my life, I've thought about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I've done my best. I hope at least in your eyes that I've lived up to all you gave for me.”
Like Private Ryan, somebody else has to come to our rescue us from sin and death, and that Somebody was Jesus. Neither you nor I or any of us can earn the grace of God. But we can and should respond to His love by laying down our lives for the Lord, and laying down our lives for others.
Paul wrote: “that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10, NIV).
Laying down your life, whether for Christ or for others is only possible and only makes sense if the motivation is love and PTL! . . .
Romans 5:5b (NIV) God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
The image is of a shower of rain soaking parched ground. So God soaks our parched hearts with his love through this work of his Spirit (Jn. 7:37-39). One of the Holy Spirit's main roles is to "make us deeply and refreshingly aware that God loves us."
And this is not something that God does only for a few, privileged super-saints. This is something he does for all who put their faith in Christ to justify them.
Today’s sermon has a simple point: God loves you to death. He died for you.
Maybe you have come to understand that God loves you because he gave his Son to die for you. But knowing this intellectually, as wonderful and necessary as it is, does not make you a Christian, and it does not fill the void in your heart. For that, you need to actually experience God's love for you on a personal level. And God is ready and waiting to pour out his love within your heart, if you will only open the door of your heart and invite Christ in. Why not do this today?
But while this "pouring out" happens initially when you receive Christ, God wants it to be an ongoing shower on your soul. For some of us, our hearts are parched ground. God wants to send you a downpour of His love today. If you are the person I invite you to come forward as an act of faith and trust in a loving God who wants to tell you that He loves you.
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