JESUS LOVES YOU DEEP AND WIDE!

"Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of the world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." John 13:1

I have read and have cherished this verse for many, many years. I have especially needed it lately. It gives us an amazing view into the heart of Christ. When you look into the window of the heart of Christ, at this very moment, what is on His mind towards you is intensive and extensive love.

According to verse 1, it is before the feast of the Passover. It is actually on Thursday night of Passion Week, We are told that Jesus knew what lay ahead of him, that his hour had come to depart from the world to the Father. In the language of John, the time of day was over; night was coming. Everything that was going to happen to Jesus was part of the Father’s plan, and Jesus was in charge. He was not a victim of a group of crazy people. He knew he only had a few more hours with his disciples, and his focus was on his last words and actions for them. Jesus feels this Passover is the divinely appointed time. All through his ministry he knew he was to be the "Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world," (John 1:29). He also knew this would occur when the nation was gathered to offer the Passover lamb, the feast that was instituted in Egypt as the angel of God's wrath passed over the houses of the Israelites when he saw the lamb's blood upon their doorposts. In that rich and redolent symbolism, our Lord sees himself. The time has also come when he, as the grain of wheat, must fall into the ground and die. He sees, as a result of his death, a great harvest of Jews and Gentiles to follow.

I. WHO JESUS LOVES First, notice whom we loves: “Having loved his own who were in the world... he loved them to the end.”

Who are His own? The answer has been given many times in John's gospel. “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out" (John 6:37) "He calls his own sheep by name and they follow him.” “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:3, 15, 27). “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). “I do not pray for these only but for all who will believe on me through their word” (John 17:1). So who are His own? "All that the Father has given Me" “His own.” “His sheep.” “His friends.” “Believers.”

Jesus was moved by an overwhelming sense of love for his disciples. Near and dear, those who belong to Him. Here is something very precious and powerful and life-changing. The love of Jesus for those the Father has given Him, His own, for His sheep, for His friends, for believers is more than the love held out to the world, the compassion that fed the hungry and healed the sick and preached good news to the poor. And in this verse John wants those of us who are “His own,” his gifts, his sheep, his friends to hear something uniquely for us. These are His own beloved bride, His covenant people people. Each one of them, a love gift from the Father. Each one chosen by the Father. Each one a divine expression of affection for the Son. Each one beloved by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Ponder what precious reality there is in the words “his own.” “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

II. THE LENGTH AND DEPTH OF JESUS' LOVE

Then, finally, ponder the two directions of his love: “having loved… he loved to the end.” We are told that Jesus loved his own in the world to the end. Notice the way that John describes this love. "Having loved" (past tense) ...He loved" (aorist, He was then doing and about to do: love).

The word “end” could be taken several ways: adverbially, meaning “to the uttermost,” or temporally, “to the end of his life or their lives,” or eternally, meaning "to the end of ends" or "without end". In the Greek the word is telos which literally means "perfection". With a knowledge of His coming death, His resurrection, His glory, with the task of sin-bearing on the cross He was still pre-occupied with a totally perfect consuming full love for these of His own disciples. All the way to the cross and all the way through the grave and all the way through eternity He loves them fully, totally, completely, to the uttermost.

There is no word that can better define that kind of love. He loved them to farthest possibility that love could go. That's how He loved them. Jesus loved His very own, loved them perfectly. Jesus had loved his own all along; he now showed them the full extent of his love. In short, in the whole range of Jesus contact with the disciples, He loved them! In John 13:34 He will say, "As I have loved you so you must love..."What a great word of comfort and encouragement, that Jesus will love us too to the very end. Nothing can take us from his care and keeping. “No power of hell, no scheme of man, can ever pluck me from His hand.”

Jesus loved us in life and he loved us in death. Having loved us in the easiest times he loved us in the hardest times. Having loved us with words and bread and touch he loved us with blood and pain and death. Having loved us extensively over years he loved us intensively to the depths.

We are moved to believe that someone loves us when two things appear—they stick with us over time, and they stick with us when it is costly. So this means that Jesus has loved us over the years (patient with all our sin and misunderstanding) and he now loved us to the uttermost, to the depths of suffering for us.

This is what we long for, and this is what we have by faith—an experience of being loved with a love that lasts, that is not fickle, or uncertain, or capricious, but durable, constant, stable.

 But not only a love that is extensive, that lasts over time, all time, but also a love that is intensive. We long to be loved radically, deeply, excessively, passionately. Jesus is madly in love with you!And the word tells us, “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” It went long and it went deep. Nothing we do, or fail to do, in foolish ignorance, will stop him from loving us unto the end. Paul writes in Romans,"Who is to condemn us? (He asked) Christ Jesus is the one who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For thy sake we are being killed all the daylong; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us" (Romans 8:34-39).  God is always 100% for those He loves! He may have to discipline us. That is an act of his love. He may bring remarkable experiences into our lives, but we may be sure that underneath all is his loving concern for us.

How important it is for us to remember that. Jude, one of Jesus' brothers, writes, "Keep yourself in the love of God," (Jude 1:21). Paul writes, "May the Lord direct your heart into the love of God" (2 Thessalonians 3:5). God loves you, and out of that love everything he does with you will flow. This is our assurance: Having loved his own, even though he was about to be tortured and to pass into a dark struggle that no man can comprehend, he did not think of himself but only of those whom he loved.

To be loved by Jesus Christ is literally an indescribable thing. It is deeper than any of us knows. And O how Paul wanted us to know the love of Christ the way he knew it! Do you remember how he prayed for us in Ephesians 3:18-19? "… that you might have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." Paul virtually equated knowing the love of Christ with being filled with the fullness of God. Being loved by Christ means being full of God.

In another place he said, "The love of Christ constrains us" (2 Corinthians 5:14).

Being loved by Christ was the controlling force of his life. When he turned into any wrong way it was the love of Christ that constrained, held him back, and put him in the way of truth. The most unshakable reality of his life was being loved by Jesus Christ. It was the granite foundation under a life of immense suffering. It made Paul utterly indestructible in his confidence toward God.
                                                                                                                               So I pray that this week you think about being extensively and intensely loved by Jesus Christ. May you have the sense of being loved by Christ that the apostle Paul had and the disciples have. AMEN

Pastor Bill

3 KEYS TO FULLY LIVING IN THE MOMENT WITH GRATITUDE

"And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." Luke 22:19

I have been thinking allot lately about gratitude. William Law once asked a question: "Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world?" His answer is fascinating: "It is not he who prays most or fasts most. It is not he who gives the most money ... but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, and who receives everything as an instance of God's goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for it."

Throughout the Bible we are encouraged to give thanks. 1 Chronicles 16:8 urges us to "Give thanks to the LORD." Ephesians 5:20 emphasize this, saying we should "always [give] thanks to God the Father." 1 Thessalonians 5:18 is even more direct: "Give thanks in all circumstances." Thankfulness is one of the most beautiful, and spiritually strengthening, attitudes of a Christian. It is true that God deserves our thankfulness, but duty and obligation are hardly good motivators. Thankfulness, as an attitude of the heart; is like a fuel that powers the Christian life and keeps us moving on the pathway of spiritual growth, even when the climb is steep and the trail rough. Unless we learn how to cultivate a thankful heart, we become stuck in bitterness. An attitude of gratitude is power to the soul. God offers it to us to drive out the spiritually degenerative illness of bitter, negative thinking.

I like to think of thankfulness as God's "spiritual air freshener." It replaces the stale odor of resentment with clean, fresh smelling air for the soul to breathe. It is precious smelling to God and to all those who live with us. Gratitude comes from the word “gratis” that without price or payment. Gratis is from the same root word of grace. Thanksgiving comes from the same root as “think”, so that to think is to thank. Thinking is the key to a thankful heart.

When we're not thankful, we rob God of His glory, lose sight of His beauty, our hearts become darkened, and we lose perspective. In other words if your heart does not respond to God with gratitude, your mind with be darkened. You surrender yourself to the blinding work of Satan. Gratitude is the guardian of the lamp of the soul. If the guardian dies the lamp goes out. Guard yourselves with gratitude!

It's spiritually dangerous to stop cultivating a heart of thankfulness. In Colossians 4:2. Paul makes a connection between watchfulness and gratitude. "Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving." Or, more literally, "Being watchful in it BY thanksgiving." The idea of watchfulness is vigilance and alertness. You recall in the garden of Gethsemane how Jesus admonished the sleepy disciples (Matthew 26:41), "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation." In other words guard your self from temptation by watching in your prayer, by being alert and vigilant. But now Colossians 4:2 Paul says that the way we watch is "with thanksgiving." Guard yourselves with gratitude! Paul says another time , "In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will GUARD your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6-7).

Thanksgiving is what Jesus counted  of most important 12 hours before He was arrested. "And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." (Luke 22:19). The word used for "given thanks" is "eucharisteo" where we get the word "eucharist, used in some churches for communion. The root word of "eucharisteo" is "charis",meaning grace. . So Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks. He took the bread and knew it was a gift and gave thanks to the Father for it.

But there is more. Eucharisto, giving thanks, envelopes the Greek word for grace, "charis", but it also holds its derivative, the Greek word "chara", meaning joy. So joy, grace, and giving thanks all are part of a thankful life. Deep "chara (joy) is found only at the table of thanksgiving where God's merciful, benevolent, grace is seen and savored. the height and depth of my joy is dependent on the depth of my gratitude and thanks to God.

If I can be thankful. I can be joyful. this means I can have joy here and now, even in trials and difficulties. Here in the midst of now, joy is possible, when God and His grace are seen as ever flowing, ever present, always giving and helping and providing.

I see a threefold cord of real life:
Chris-GRACE
Eucharisteo- THANKSGIVING
Chara-JOY
  Is it not amazing that a little Greek word can give such meaning to a life of gratitude? Whisper the word "eucharisteo! See the grace from the Father pouring out to you. Give him thanks! Feel the joy!   These three words are the keys to really living in the moment   Eucharisteo!
Jesus is about to die to save His disciples and the world And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." (Luke 22:19).
Jesus is surrounded by a hungry crowd and takes seven loaves of bread and a few fish and he took the seven loaves, and having given thanks, he broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before the people. (Mark 8:8)
Jesus faces a dead man buried in a tomb for three days and cries out. “Father, I thank you that you have heard me." (John 11:41)

Jesus sees thanksgiving as integral to the working of God and the faith that saves. I truly believe that we enter into the full life of faith only as we give thanks. God graces us, we see it poured out towards us, we are full of joy in it, and we express thanks.

If grace is a gift, than being thankful is receiving and accepting whatever grace He gives:healing, preserving, restoring, providing, testing, encouraging, comforting, renewing...and on and on. Gratitude is the echo of one who has received grace.


Sometimes the regular grace of God dulls our sense our sense of gratitude. But in reality grace, mercy, and love are new every mornin. Lamentations 3:22-23, "Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."  So much in this world eclipses God from my life and as a result pushes us to be disgruntled. I sometimes lag in the practice of thankfulness and have to remind myself that giving thanks is a discipline. As an act of my will, I must choose to dwell on good things, on the high qualities of my invisible but ever-present Father. I consciously bend my thoughts away from resentment and remind myself I must wait for God to work out His best plans in due time. Sometimes it helps me to pray prayers of thanksgiving out loud so I can hear the words of thankfulness. Once thankfulness becomes a habit, it takes on a life of its own and becomes a source of tremendous strength. Thankfulness is one of the surest paths to God and to a peace-filled spirit. God uses it to give us our life back and in fact, to give us a higher experience of our human life in a very fallen world. Many are those who waste their lives worrying, mourning, or crying out in complaint -and nothing good will come of it. For many of us, thankfulness starts out sounding shallow and trite. But the truth is, it leads us into a deeper journey with God than we imagined, taking us down to the core reason why we are here: to fulfill our own purpose for living-or His. Psalm 100:4, "Enter his gates with thanksgiving' " the psalmist wrote, "and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name."' If I want to enter God's gates and I do, with all my heart - it will only happen as God's spirit of thanksgiving enters me. Thankfulness isn't an obligation; it's my privilege as a child of God. It is our key, and your privilege, too.

Pastor Bill