"Behold, what manner of love..."

By Barb Tousley

Barb Tousley is a charter member of Community Church and one of the featured blog writers for Peak Reflections. Barb has a heart for discipleship and will be posting messages that help us cultivate spiritual maturity and intimacy with God.

There exist in our lives those startling moments of truth that shape all the moments of life that follow. The moment when God first wrote on my heart the very personal message of the cross was one of those.

I was sixteen years old. Our youth fellowship group was meeting in the basement of the First Congregational Church of Dearborn. Some unexpected visitors had caused a shortage of chairs. Since the male members of the group were totally engrossed in a highly competitive ping-pong match, I slipped upstairs to retrieve the chairs that were always stowed at the back of the sanctuary. Our church was located on a busy city corner, so the outside streetlights made it unnecessary to turn on the sanctuary lights.

As I crossed the room, something caught my eye – it was the brass cross on the altar. A light from some unknown source filtered in through the window and was reflected in the cross… and it seemed to be almost on fire. The sight drew me apart from the noise downstairs, the city sounds outside, and the urgency of my ‘chair mission’. I sat down in a back-row pew… and was filled with a quiet presence I had never before experienced. In that breathless moment, the Lord spoke to my heart, and that brass cross became more than just an altar decoration, more than the familiar symbol of my religion.

In that moment the cross became a very PERSONAL manifestation of God's great love for ME. My heart reeled with the conviction that the blood shed on the cross, for masses of believers through the ages, was also shed just for ME. Jesus' suffering, His humiliation, His separation from God in that awful moment when in His agony He cried, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"…it was all in payment for MY sin. At the sight of that cross, it all became clear: "Behold, what manner of love…"

It was many years before I fully responded to the truth of God's sacrificial love – to take up MY cross and follow Him. As a child I memorized those words from John 3:16 that have only grown richer with time: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." In adulthood, God took me by the hand and moved me to answer an altar call that acknowledged Christ's sacrifice for ME, and shaped my response to the conviction that "I am not my own. I was bought with a price." (I Corinthians 6:19).

What other response could we offer in return for such love as this, but a life lived for Him?