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28th May 2025
WednesdayReflection
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John Piper
Founder and teacher of Desiring God.com
'The depth of Christ's love
revealed in its costliness'
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Today I want us to see the depth of Christ's love revealed in its costliness.
Let's look at Ephesians 5 v 1-2
Since you are God's dear children, you must try to be like him.
Your life must be controlled by love, just as Christ loved us and gave his life for us as a sweet-smelling offering and sacrifice that pleases God. (GNT)
Be sure to see four plain and wonderful things here.
1. First, be sure you see that Paul is showing us the depth of Christ's love for you.
Verse 2: "Christ loved you, and gave himself."
2. Second, notice that the cost of his love was himself - his life.
It was not just money or time or energy or inconvenience or even suffering; it was the full extent of sacrifice. He gave himself.
3. Third, notice that this love and this self-giving was for you.
"Christ loved you, and gave himself. Paul is talking about believers
4. Finally, notice that God the Father was pleased with this act of self-sacrificing love.
Verse 2: "Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma."
Sometimes we are so familiar with spectacular it doesn't move us as it should.
We have to look at something lesser, be amazed, and then look back to really feel the wonder of the original.
Chuck Colson told the story of a group of American prisoners of war during the Second World War, who were made to do hard labour in a prison camp.
Each had a shovel and would dig all day, then come in and give an account of his tool in the evening.
One evening 20 prisoners were lined up by the guard and the shovels were counted.
The guard counted nineteen shovels and turned in rage on the 20 prisoners demanding to know which one did not bring his shovel back.
No one responded.
The guard took out his gun and said that he would shoot five men if the guilty prisoner did not step forward.
After a moment of tense silence, a 19-year-old soldier - the age of my son - stepped forward with his head bowed down.
The guard grabbed him, took him to the side and shot him in the head, and turned to warn the others that they better be more careful than he was.
When he left, the men counted the shovels and there were 20.
The guard had miscounted. And the boy had given his life for his friends.
Can you imagine the emotions that must have filled their hearts as they knelt down over his body?
In the five or ten seconds of silence, the boy had weighed his whole future in the balance - a future wife, an education, a new truck, children, a career, fishing with his dad - and he chose death so that others might live.
Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."
To love is to choose suffering for the sake of another.
Jesus has loved you this way.
Only, O so much more!
One of the reasons that story hits us so hard is because the boy was 19 years old.
If he had been 89 years old and the others 19, we might say it was a beautiful act of love, but with a full life behind him it would not feel like the same kind of sacrifice as when your whole life stretches in front of you.
And consider now not only the life that Jesus sacrificed for us, but consider also what the sacrifice involved.
To get to the point where he could die, Jesus had to plan for it.
He left the glory of heaven and took on human nature so that he could hunger and get weary and, in the end, suffer and die.
We should ask in closing, how personally should we take this demonstration of love?
Should you feel personally loved this way this morning and later on today and tomorrow morning?
Or should it remain a kind of general, great, historic wonder that you look at from a distance with admiration - like the depths of the Grand Canyon?
The answer is given by the testimony of the same writer, Paul.
The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.
This is what the apostle and the Lord himself are calling you to this morning.
To see the depths of the love of Christ for you.
To believe the love that he has for you.
And to send the roots of your life down, down, down into this bottomless love.
And say with Paul,
The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me [me, personally], and gave himself for me.
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This is an edited version.
The full article and Bible references are avaiable on request
John Piper
is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning:
Education in Serious Joy.
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