Jesus's love is not cheap

Manong Ralph, my older brother, was invited to a Maundy Thursday reunion service and ceremonial foot-washing at a friend's church. It was his first time. He had every reason to get self-conscious, of course—his feet don't look too good.

But here is what he wrote about that experience (and the Kristy and Keith Getty song that follows at the end of the entry is among my favorite modern hymns we sing in church):

If there is one thing that I took from that experience, it is the truth that God’s grace is not cheap. It is free. It is a gift. But it is not cheap. A cost had to be paid. And it was the Son of God, His only begotten, who paid for it. The foot-washing ceremony brought me back to the truth that Jesus Christ was under no compulsion or obligation to do that to his disciples. After all, He is God. He is the one who had the right to expect service from His creation. But He did it anyway. As Philippians 2: 6-7a says, 

….though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant…. 

Jesus Christ did not stop there. The manifestation of His great love did not end with the washing of the disciples’ feet. He bore the cross on Calvary, and along with it the sins of man. He endured the torturous pain of the scourging and the crucifixion. But worst of all, He learned what it was like to be separated from God as he carried on His shoulders the weight of man’s sins. 

O the deep, deep love of God in the Lord Jesus Christ!

May we celebrate the greatest demonstration of love this world has ever seen—Jesus Christ dying for the sins of the world.