Ephesians 6:10-20 / Luke 13:31-35
To fall in love is a beautiful experience. To fall out of love is a lousy experience.
To be in love, however, requires more than just an experience ; it requires a decision.
Because true love and unconditional love require a decision to be in love and to keep loving regardless of the situations and circumstances.
Indeed, to be in love requires a decision, which has to be renewed day by day, and hour by hour, and minute by minute.
But if falling out of love is a lousy experience, then unrequited love is indeed a very painful experience.
In fact, the bitterest tragedy in human life is to give your heart totally to the other party only to have it refused and broken.
That was the experience of Jesus as He laments over Jerusalem. For Jesus, it is not just unrequited love, but also they were going to kill Him if He were to continue with His journey of love.
So Jesus could have given up loving us because of the danger and the rejection. Why did He continue His journey of love all the way to the cross?
It is because God loves us unconditionally and Jesus is the love of God who came to give up His life as a ransom for us.
So nothing can come between us and the love of Christ and nothing can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ.
So what kind of response we are going to give to God's love for us depends on us now.
Whatever it is, we have to make a decision to respond to God's love or reject it outright.
We have to exercise our human freedom of choice. Human freedom is awesome. Yet it is also supremely wonderful when we freely decide to love God and love others.