This past Sunday Abie was the guest speaker at His House Fellowship, www.hishousefellowship.net. Below is the introduction to the sermon he shared with them…
John 20:1-18
When love is defined in I Corinthians 13, the first thing that is written about it is “love suffers long”. We like to think of love as an emotion that gives us wings to rise above all the difficulty of life, a magic elixir that makes difficulty feel joyful but the reality is that love is not a tool to get us out of difficulty it is the strength to endure and overcome it. Before the world was created Jesus was the “Lamb of God slain”. God is not slow in keeping His promises but rather, He is patient, long suffering, enduring, desiring that all would come to repentance. The love of God has endured our sin, our rebellion, our idolatry, our doubts, our unbelief and our selfishness and has overcome all of those things and offered us, time and time again, His great mercy and our salvation in the blood of Jesus. Love is not fleeting, it is enduring because it is the endurance of love that both describes God and that moves God.
In John 20 we often reflect on the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection, as we rightly should but there is another miracle that we often overlook. Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early in the morning only to find that the stone had been removed from Jesus’ grave and His body was no longer inside. She ran and told the disciples, most didn’t even believe her, Peter and John ran to see for themselves. After they saw the tomb was empty and Jesus’ grave clothes were folded neatly and set aside they left, they simply went home. Mary would not leave, she stayed at the tomb, she wept, she looked for Jesus, she asked the angels what they knew, she asked a man that she assumed was the gardener if he had taken Jesus away and then the miracle happens, Jesus speaks and then, He makes Mary Magdalene, the woman whom He had cast out seven demons, the only person that would ever see Him before He ascended to His Father to be “glorified”. Of all the people He could have shown Himself to He chose Mary. I’m not even sure that the plan was to show Himself to anyone, but Mary, it wasn’t just that she wouldn’t leave, it was that her love endured. She was the last person at the cross and the first person at the tomb. She was the one that wasn’t sure why Jesus wasn’t in the grave but was not going home until she knew where He was. The way that Jesus had endured through her demon possession, through her torment and bondage so that she could know His love she was going to endure through confusion and doubt, through heartbreak and tears, she was not leaving until she knew where Jesus was, Jesus was so moved that not only would He see that she would get the answer to her question, she would see Him in a way that no one ever had before.
The truth is, we move in what moves us. The things that matter to our hearts are the things that move our hearts and cause us to move. I John 4:8 says that “God is love”, He is the very definition of love, He is the God that endures and He is moved by the enduring love of His children. Today there is no need to try to impress or win God’s approval, He is the lover of our souls, He is moved by our love for Him. I pray that today we would take off the heavy weight of needing to get God’s attention and realize that He set His heart on me before I was ever born or thought of, it is not my service that moves His heart it is my love in response to being loved by Him and even in that movement, it is not to give me what I want, but rather it is to show me an even greater realization of HIs heart of love for me. I am convinced that these are the “things I did not know”, the things that God wants to reveal, they are simply the greater glories of His love for me that have existed and endured in His heart since before there was even time.