The Cost in the Garden

I have to take you to a hard place now, because I would be lying to you if I let you think this love is only warm. It is not only warm. It costs. And if I send you out believing the love of God pours through people painlessly, like sunshine through a window, I will have set you up to break the first time it asks something real of you.

So come into the worst room of all.

It is night, in a garden, the same night as the towel and the basin. Jesus knows — knows more exactly than any person has ever known anything — what the next hours hold. The betrayal that is already on its way down the road. The whips. The nails. The slow dying in the open air. The hiding of His Father's face, which He has never once been without since before the world began. He knows all of it, in full, in advance.

And He does not want it.

I need you to see this, because people rush past it, and it is the whole heart of the matter. He falls on the ground. He prays.

"My Father, if possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will." — Matthew 26:39 (NET)

Let this cup pass. He asked. Three times He asked the Father to find some other way. The dread was so heavy that His sweat fell to the ground like drops of blood. Do not let anyone tell you He walked to the cross serene and untouched. He was a man on the ground in the dark, begging for the cup to be taken from Him, because He could see in full what the love was going to cost.

And then — knowing all of it, wanting none of it — He said the words that hold the universe together. Not what I will, but what You will.

That is the love at its true depth. Not a feeling that carried Him pleasantly to the cross. A choice, made on the ground in the dark, against every desire of His own body, for the joy set before Him — and the joy set before Him was you, brought home. He drank the cup He begged to be spared, because the alternative was a world without you in it, and He would not have that.

Now hear why I have brought you here. The love that pours through the children of light is this love. The same grain runs through it. When the love of God moves through you toward a person who is hard to love, it will sometimes feel like the garden. It will ask you to stay when leaving would be easier. To forgive when the wound is still open. To keep loving someone who gives nothing back, through a long season with no visible return. To do the lowly, unseen, costly thing when no one would blame you for walking away. The love that pours through you is cross-shaped, because the One it comes from went to a cross to get to where you are standing.

There is a thing the gardener does to a vine that bears fruit. He does not leave it alone. He cuts it back — prunes it, takes the knife to the living wood — so that it will bear more. And it hurts. Both things are true at once: the cutting hurts, and the cutting is love. So when the love in you costs more than it returns, when the season is dry and the prayers seem to go nowhere and your obedience feels like dying a little — do not read that as proof that something has failed. More often it is the sign that the One who loves you most is doing His most careful work, growing in you the very love He poured in, pressing it into the shape of His Son.

The children of light are not the ones for whom love is easy. They are the ones who have let the costly love keep flowing through them anyway, because they know Whose love it is, and where it is going.

This is the part of the school no one signs up for and everyone must take. The hard lessons are not the school failing. They are the school working. The Teacher is not careless with the knife. He knows exactly what He is growing in you, and the pruning that hurts is the same hand that planted you. When the love costs more than it returns, you are not failing the course. You are in the deepest part of it — the part where the iron is held longest in the forge, the part where you stop loving for what it gives back and start loving the way He loves, because His love has so filled you that it spills even where nothing returns. You did not know, when you enrolled, that the curriculum would cost this much. He knew. And He went first, all the way to a garden in the dark and a cross in the daylight, so that you would never be asked to go anywhere He has not already been.