Status Updates From God so Loved the World

^There has only been one man in the history of the world who supremely matters to the world. This one man made man, was man, saved man, and is man to all eternity, and apart from him no other man has any manhood at all.^

^”Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?” He endured the blows and jeers, as he had endured the lies, in silence, but a French writer, Père Perraud, has said that if he had answered the question he would have said to them, as to each one of us when we strike him with our sins, “The one I love.”^

^It is all intensified now; the mystery, the sense of love and reverence, of holiness, of guilt; and added to it all there is a feeling of terror because this had to happen, because the only absolutely sinless man who has ever lived had to suffer more than the greatest sinner who has ever lived, because God Almighty had to die, and we—every one of us—caused his death.^

😧😧😭

^How could Judas have endured it when Our Lord reached so humbly for his feet and gently washed them?^

^There is so much for a man to watch who knows his death is near. The beauty of earth is not lost for those who die, for all beauty exists in God, and God is never lost, but the dying know that they will never again see it in just this way, out of these eyes, touched with this hand that will soon be dust, the warm air soft upon this body.^

😢😢😢

^this riding forth of Our Lord and our Gos to his death takes our thoughts back to his birth, for it is the angels’ song that we hear again in the shouts of the happy people. “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest,” they cried. “Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.”^

^Long ago, in Eastern countries, when some conqueror came riding to a city bent upon war he rode a dark war horse, but if he came in peace he rode a white ass.^

^They had given their gold and frankincense and myrrh, their wealth, their prayer, their pain, to the King, to the Priest who is also Friend and Mediator, and to the Saviour, and Mary now did the same. The gold of the gift was its costliness, the aromatic scent filling the room was the incense of prayer, and spikenard, like myrrh, was used to embalm the dead^

^Worldly growth is an expanding process, a building up and a swelling out, but the paradox of spiritual growth is a refining process; we have to shad one layer of useless and grubby accretion after another until there is nothing left at all but the golden kernel of a child’s humble, loving, and contrite heart.^

^Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to the kingdom of heaven. The path is narrow as the needle’s eye, the kind of little path that children love, the gate small and easy for them to unlatch, the lintel above it adjusted to the height of a child.^

^Very soon now he would deliberately lay aside all his power and give himself into the hands of death. But before he did this he made this tremendous affirmation of his dominion over death.^

Oooh, this may be the reason why Lazarus’ death was so close to His own

^He wept for the sorrow of Mary and Martha, and in this moment he bore also the weight of the grief of the world and wept for the grief of every one of us when we suffer in parting from those we love. And he wept too for the dreadfulness of this death that the sin of man has brought into the world.^

^”Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.”

The fact that both sisters said the same thing to Our Lord shows how often they had said it to each other.^

^In this very place where he had saved the woman taken in adultery from stoning Our Lord was himself stoned.^

Was it??

^Men wonder sometimes if their work and sacrifice are worth while, but God does not. If Our Lord has healed only one body and saved only one soul down there in Galilee he would have thought it well worth his labor; he would have thought it fitting to die on the cross ten times over to save just one small child.^

^They [the Pharisees] would have expected to be nearer to him than any, in his confidence and the delegates of his authority. But this Christ had chosen his closest friends from among the poor, the suffering, the penitent, and the meek, and his very choice was an unspoken judgment of those who were none of these things.^

^O merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother,
Grant that we may
See thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.

Amen.^

^Though Our Lord was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief yet he must also have been the happiest man who ever lived.^

cont’d

It is not such a terrible rejection as the one at Nazareth, yet to read of it frightens us all the same. For it seems that if a mere man wants to push God Almighty, eternal and glorious, his Maker and Redeemer, right out of his life, he can.^

^They could have had among them for a little while a man who, if they had let him, could have changed every single one of them as he had changed the happy man sitting at his feet. But they did not know what such a change might cost them, and they were afraid; and so obedient to their wish Our Lord went quietly down to the shore to go away.

^He had helped a suffering body but he had not through the body reached the soul. He never left anything half done. He was not going to move an inch further down that street until he had found that soul.^

Jairus’ daughter was 12 years old and the bleeding woman suffered for 12 years…🤯🤯🤯

^When our pain stops we know that it has not really vanished but that he has now taken the whole weight.^

^Calmly, bravely, he escaped from the men who would have murdered him, and lived to die for them another day.^

😢😢

^Our Lord tried to make his children understand the great power of this life that they were living now, this life of love that was the life of the kingdom.^

“Life of love”…I love that 🥹

^Now that the Christ had come he knew that his own work was over. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” he said. There was no bitterness in that, only the quiet and humble acceptance of a fact. And he was immensely happy to draw back into the shadow in the presence of the shining of his Lord.^

^The times of greatest suffering in Our Lord’s life came at the beginning and the end of his three years’ ministry. At the end he suffered at the center of a crowd of brutal men, with noise and confusion all about him, but at the beginning he suffered by himself at the center of silence. It is hard to endure being looked at while you suffer, and it is also hard to suffer quite alone.^

^Then he heard a light, quick, firm footfall. It had a dear familiarity about it and his heart leaped. It always had leaped when he heard that step.^