The Love of God Part Four: Love Came Down....

I have been looking at the beginning of Luke's gospel and struck by the fact that Jesus birth was announced by kings and angelic beings yet He is born in the backwater, ordinary manger of all places. Why not on an impressive throne in a palace? Wouldn't that be a more suitable place for the King of the World? He deliberately came to relate to shepherds and kings. He does not distinguish with whom He comes too. He is power and humility personified in one. I am learning more of the breadth of His glory manifest on the cross this season. JESUS died not just for our sin but all our suffering too. I am reading the "Grace Outpouring" which describes a visitation of a woman to Ffald-y-brenin retreat centre who had been abused by a religious man. As she stood before the wooden cross at the retreat centre she started hitting it and sobbing and yelling at God. Then she felt God speak to her and  say that just as the staked wooden cross is immovable so is His love. He said to her, "you cannot move it, because its immovable. My love for you is immovable. I have been with you through your pain and through the abuse and I hate what you have been through. I am not for the abuse: I am for you. I am standing here so that you can pour out your anger, pain, hurt, and frustration onto me. I will carry it on the cross. My cross is immovable, just as my love is immovable. When you have poured all your anger and hatred on me I will just say to you that I love you." A similar experience is told of a man who comes to the retreat centre and stands before the wooden symbol and weeps out all his grief and anger for a wife he had tragically lost to cancer. Like the range of emotions expressed by Job and the Psalmist, Jesus can take any emotion and pain and pour out His love to heal. He loves like no other. Be real with Him and ask Him to show you more of the love He manifest to you by coming in His son to earth as a baby and dying on a cross for You (quote from the Grace Outpouring by Godwin and Roberts" 2008.)