The Cost of Love

Someone said, “There’s no free lunch.” While that may be true, there is free love, at least in a manner of speaking. God’s love for us is free, meaning it cost us nothing to receive it and nothing to keep it. God said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). “Everlasting” means it lasts forever. Free, unchanging, eternal! What a love! The very fact that God’s love is based on nothing of our doing makes us all the more secure. We can do nothing to earn it, deserve it, facilitate it, support it, or maintain it. We can only receive it – and respond to it. Ah, there is the cost! Not to purchase, but to reply. We do not serve in order to get God to love us. We serve because God loves us with an everlasting love. In response to God’s great love, what service will you render this week?

Begin by joining me in remembering a few of God’s global concerns:
• Continue to pray for Carrie in Austria as she recovers from tongue reconstruction surgery.
• Pray for volunteer mission support for new work in Bryansk, Russia, an area southwest of Moscow about 250 miles.
• Pray for Refuge and Hope as they begin a project to serve youth who are either former child soldiers or who have been traumatized by the war in Democratic Republic of Congo.
• Pray for the intentional acts of kindness cookie outreach during the Gentse Feesten (Gent Festival) this summer in Belgium.
Pray for Steve and April and their family as they relocate to Prague, Czech Repub