Friend Day

Remember you may re-preach this as Jesus in a couple weeks so think about parallels.

Re-write the story for 2-3 minutes today

Samaritan got dirty and bloody, Jesus, did literally and figuratively, reputation

You were the one beaten and bloodied

We didn’t deserve

Sometimes you sometimes me, always us

God understands our world. He understands how brutal we often are and how awful human nature can be. He sees our cruelty. Without God’s intervention in the narrative of the human story, life would be nasty, brutish, and short. Instead of letting our inhumanity by the final word, God entered the mess in human form through Jesus and conquered hate with love. We threw the worst of humanity directly at Jesus: hatred, abuse, ridicule, rejection, and death. And God turned it into life. And not just life for himself but also life for us, for humanity, for the very people who killed his Son.

The remarkable part of Christianity is not that we have a Savior who came to deliver us but that we have a Savior who sees us for who we really are and loves us anyway. Jesus stared hate in the face and met it with love. He confronted despair and made it abundantly clear it wouldn’t win.

The thrust of the gospel is that Jesus sees your hate and meets it with love. He sees your despair and counters it with hope. He sees your doubt and lobs? belief back at you again and again. All of our cynicism melts under the relentless hope of the gospel.

Your past isn’t your future. Not if you get Jesus involved. Bitterness can’t linger under the relentless assault of love. Hope cannot die if an empty tomb empowers it.

POST RESPONSE

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