Come Into the Room

I could define for you what it looks like when the love of God pours through a person. But you do not come to know love by reading its description. You come to know it the way you come to know a person — by being in the room while they love.

So come into a few rooms with me. Watch the love move. We will name it afterward, if we need to name it at all.

Here is the first room. A man is walking a road, and he is half dead in a ditch beside it — beaten, robbed, left to die. Two respectable men pass him; they have somewhere to be. And then a third man comes, a foreigner, a man the dying man's people would have despised, and he stops. He kneels in the dust. He pours out his own oil and his own wine on the wounds. He puts the bleeding stranger on his own animal and walks beside him on foot. He pays, out of his own pocket, for the man's care, and promises to come back and pay whatever more it costs. Jesus told that story, and at the end of it He did not say now you understand mercy. He said, go and do likewise. That is the love. It stops. It kneels. It spends itself on a stranger who can never pay it back. When that love pours through a person, the world gets a Samaritan in a ditch.

Here is another room. A younger son has taken his father's money, spent it on nothing, shamed the family, and come crawling home with a rehearsed apology, hoping only to be taken on as a servant. And while he is still a long way off — still down the road, still rehearsing — the father sees him. And the father, an old man in robes, does the most undignified thing a man of his standing could do: he runs. He runs down the road and throws his arms around the boy and kisses him before the apology can even get out. He does not wait for the explanation. He does not extract the promise. He runs. That is the love. It does not wait at the door with its arms crossed. It runs to meet the one coming home. When that love pours through a person, the prodigal gets a father instead of a verdict.

Here is a harder room. It is evening, in a borrowed upstairs room, the night before everything. The Teacher gets up from the table, takes off His outer robe, ties a towel around His waist like the lowest slave in the house, kneels on the floor, and begins to wash His friends' filthy feet. He washes the feet of the man who, before the night is out, will sell Him for silver. He washes the feet of the man who will swear three times he never knew Him. He knows exactly what they are going to do, and He washes their feet anyway. That is the love. It kneels in front of the one who is about to betray it and serves him with its own hands. When that love pours through a person, the betrayer gets his feet washed.

And here is the last room, the one that holds up all the others. It is a hill outside the city, and the man who told the story of the Samaritan and the story of the running father, the man who washed the traitor's feet, is nailed to a cross and dying in the open air. He is being mocked. He could come down. And what comes out of His mouth, toward the men driving the nails, is this: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. That is the love. At the very bottom of everything it can lose, with nothing left to give, it gives forgiveness to the ones killing it. When that love pours all the way through a person, the executioner gets prayed for.

These are not different loves. They are the one love that God is, shown to you from different sides — the stranger lifted out of the ditch, the son met on the road, the traitor's feet washed clean, the killer forgiven. And here is the thing I most need you to see, the thing this whole book is built to show you: that is the love the empty thrones were waiting for. That is the love the fallen sons of the council would not let pour through them. The lifting of the low. The running toward the lost. The kneeling in front of the unworthy. The forgiving of the guilty. They had the power and would not do it. And God, having watched His council fail to love His world, decided to fill the empty seats with children of clay through whom that love would finally, actually, flow.

You. He decided on you.