LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1965, Page 43

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DOCTRINAL-DEVOTIONAL ESSAYS 43

You are His ambassador, His messenger, His priest, His

representative, His child.
“All the earth is Mine.”

stay Thine forever. Amen.

V
The Loving Lord Provides a Model

“Even so send I you.” In the afterglow of Easter,
in the eventide of the history of the world, there still
remains with us the Lord’s mandate, His message, and
His method to win the world. For 20 centuries the Lord,
our Creator and Redeemer, by the Holy Spirit whom
He sends as Teacher and Comforter, has been continu-
ing to equip His messengers, the ambassadors of His
worldwide empire. The mustard seed of which He
spoke during the days of His humanity has grown into
a mighty tree, in the branches of which the birds of
many nations have found a home and are building their
nests to raise their little ones.

Our question today is: Did the same Lord who gave
us mandate, message, and method, and who equips His
messengers, also give us a model to follow? If He did,
what is that model? Our Lord Jesus left us the model
of His own life as a loving example to follow.

Please, God, help me to

The Loving Lord Provides a Model

This is the burden of my message to you today.
Basic to this thought are the words of our Lord in
John 15:12: “This is My commandment, that ye love
one another as I have loved you.” One the basis of
these words I invite you first to look at the complete-
ness of His love.

The Completeness of Christ’s Love

Is there anything this Christ has neglected to do
to make His children supremely happy in all eternity?
Go back into that eternity when as yet He had not
clothed His divine nature in His human garment. What
was done in that eternity of the past was the drafting of
the blueprints of love. God, in His deep knowledge of
all the unborn ages, foresaw what would happen. But
in that timeless age it was already true: “God is love.”

The Universe Created in Love

When the zero hour of God’s plan arrived, there
came into existence a universe. This universe came
from His hand of love, a world that held everything
for man to enjoy, companionship with God, companion-
ship with each other, a perfect body in all its appoint-
ments and organisms, a mind that could think God’s
thoughts after Him. God’s work was complete in its
inception. “And God saw everything that He had
made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). There
was no mistake, no error in judgment on the part of
God. Everything came forth out of His love.

The Incarnation of Love
And then came the lovelessness of man. Man spoiled
it all. Man’s destruction of himself, however, did not
change God. God still remained the God of love. Now

there goes into execution God’s great plan of redemp-
tion. When the zero hour on God’s clock was striking,
the mysterious event of the incarnation took place.
“Made of a woman, made under the Law” (Gal. 4:4).
Purpose? “To redeem them that were under the
Law.” The yoke of the Law was pressing hard upon
the neck of the human family. It pressed man’s face
into the dust. There had to come the one perfect man
in the history of the world to lift that yoke. Who could
it be? It could not have been Adam. He sinned. It
could not have been Moses. He sinned. It could not
have been David. He sinned. It could not have been
His own mother. She, too, had sinned. It could not
have been Peter or Paul. They both had sinned. It
had to be God’s holy, immaculate Son.

The Bible says, and we do not question its truth,
that at this moment the angels of heaven desired to
look into the deep mystery of the incarnation (1 Peter
1:12). They should like to have fathomed the fathom-
less depth of God’s love and interest in His wayward
creation. I ask you, if the angels of heaven could not
fathom it, which theologian is ever going to fathom
the mysteries of the incarnation? All we can do is
stand in astonishment and amazement and say, “Lord,
I believe.” Here was naught but Love Incarnate.

A Life of Loving Obedience

Look at the acts of love of our Lord. In the days
of His flesh He walked the perfect pathway of obe-
dience to God and kept His law. Why did He obey
His parents in the temple? Because He loved us. That
act became in the mind of God the substitute for my
disobedience to my parents. Why did He feed the
hungry, comfort the neglected, take part in every act
of which His divine person was capable to alleviate
suffering? Why did He heal the sick, cheer the broken-
hearted, and love the loveless? Every act of his loving
obedience took the place of my lovelessness. He be-
came my Substitute, “the Just for the unjust.”

Dying in Love

In love Christ went to the cross. In love He suf-
fered the tortures of hell, so that He cried out, Eli, Eli,
lamah sabachthani? Oh, that heart-rending word lamah!
Why? Why hast Thou forsaken Me, O Father? This
was hell in reality, but it was love in action. And it
was an act of love that the Son of God permitted His
own creation, the earth, to swallow up His holy body
in burial. There lay the price of man’s redemption.
Love in its completion.

The Validation of His Love

The validation of His love we find on Easter morn-
ing at the the empty tomb. Hush money is being spent
in Jerusalem because living men could not keep a dead
man dead. Because He was the Son of God, He claimed
that no man takes His life from Him. “I have power to
lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John
10:18). The resurrection, the miracle of miracles, is the
validation of His love for all mankind. If you doubt