The Gift of Encouragement – Week of April 1, 2011 – Holy Week

As a believer in Christ, the capacity to give is not measured by what we give but by how much of Jesus is inside of us to give to others.  Jesus makes us givers.  His love, His heart, His compassion, His desire to care are reflected in our reach to others.  Christians measure their giving based on a dying to self so Christ can live and be the fullness from which we give.

Grief is a severe yet honest barometer as to how much of Jesus one truly possesses.  When we lose someone or something dear to us, how deep we go in faith to reach for Jesus’ comfort indicates how much of Him lives inside of us.  When we watch someone we know live with sorrow and pain, the degree to which we enter into that pain to help them is an indication of how much of self lives in a heart or how much of Jesus lives in a heart.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday.  Each day reveals the provocative and deep emotions the Saviour experienced in order to love you and to love me completely and eternally.  The cost of Christ’s expression of love is too dear for words.  It is an expression each of us feels in our hearts as we read His Word and meditate on the details that brought Him to Calvary.  Love is the reason why He did it.  Pain is truly part of love.

As we live with losses in our lives of people, places, dreams, and possibilities, we are to remember the Jesus who carried His death-cross for love,and then died on the cross to prove His commitment and His desire to keep us with Him forevermore.  Those who grieve can take comfort in the fact that Jesus is alive, and that all who know sorrow still have His love on which to lean and on which to hope.  Those who grieve can look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who gave all so that we could draw from His heart to be givers beyond grief and even because of it.