Young Mary humbled herself, broke open an alabaster jar, and poured
costly perfume over Jesus’ head.
Guests in the room, indignant, scolded her for the waste.
But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She did what she could. Wherever the
Good News is preached throughout the world, this woman’s deed will be
remembered.”
In her small but powerful book, She Did What She Could: Five Words of Jesus that Will Change Your Life, author Elisa Morgan sheds light on Mark
14:3-9 for us.
Jesus loved Mary—and Mary knew it.
Mary carried out an extravagant, expensive act of worship because she
loved Jesus—and Jesus knew it.
Elisa said,
Mary had
“absorbed in her soul
how very much he truly cared.”
“She acted out of her love. She knew that Jesus loved her, and she loved
him back. She lived loved,” writes Elisa. “That’s the whole point of the
gospel, isn’t it?”
Lloyd Ogilvie tells the story of meeting with a friend who was usually grumpy,
a man with a negative attitude. But one day, his friend acted like a new
person. “His face was radiant, his voice had a lilt to it, and he was full of
fun. ’What happened to you?’ I asked.
“He burst out the good news, ‘She loves me!’ The lady he’d dated for
years finally confessed her love for him, leaving him a radically changed man. “It’s
amazing! Being loved, really knowing you’re loved, gives me a wonderful feeling
of freedom.” (Silent Strength for My Life)
Think back to a time when someone acknowledged his or her deep, abiding
love for you.
How did that love change you?
I’m guessing it melted your heart—even remade your heart. Your anxieties
lessened, you relaxed around him or her, and life seemed so good, so right, so
settled. Your perspective on everything changed for the better. And you wanted
to express your gratitude and love in return, right?
“Now multiply the finest expression of human love
ten million times
and you have just begun to experience
the unlimited love the Lord has for us.”
Read that again.
The Bible describes God’s love for us
as unfailing (Psalm 6:4)
and everlasting (Jeremiah 31:3).
“Thinking about this love, building our whole lives around it,” Ogilvie
says, “makes us joyous people who are free to enjoy life. It makes us free to
give ourselves away, free to care, free to dare.”
Ogilvie’s talking about people who, in Elisa’s words, “live loved.”
And that brings us back to the past two week’s posts about our Old Testament friend, David, who lived loved.
David was just an imperfect guy like the rest of us. “He had feet of clay
like the rest of us if not more so—self-serving and deceitful, lustful and vain,”
writes Frederick Buechner, (Peculiar Treasures), but God in His unfailing,
everlasting love, forgave him and transformed him. And called David a man after
His own heart. And used him in mighty ways.
Once David grasped the enormity of God’s love for him, he responded with
an overflowing love for God. David delighted in knowing God loved him and, as a
result, David yearned to please God.
I have no doubt that because David lived loved, he longed to accomplish
God’s purposes for his life, his generation.
Neither David nor Mary did what they did because
of a sense of duty or obligation or fear that,
if they failed to live up to God’s expectations,
they’d pay a price.
Instead, it was all about love,
utter bliss in being loved and loving back.
We—you and I—can make a difference in our world, for our generation, by
living like David and Mary: by humbly carrying out God’s specific, unique
purposes for our lives—as an act of love.
Elisa wrote, “…We—any of us—can change our world when we finally ‘get’
how much we are loved in a relationship with God. God’s love changes us.
Radically. All of us. And when we are different, we make a difference in our
world.”
Seventeen years before Dave and I moved to
Africa, we lived at a remote mission center in Colombia, South America, working
with Wycliffe Bible Translators (the same organization we worked with in
Africa). There we worked with amazing colleagues, people who had asked
themselves something similar to what Elisa Morgan asked:
“What if I believed
God loved me so much
that I wanted to love Him back by doing what I could?”
A few months after arriving there,
“I was beginning to realize how much that bunch lived
on the edge, especially our administrators and those working in and traveling to
some of the world’s most isolated communities—our linguists and pilots. They
were willing to take risks. Big risks. They had given their hearts to God who,
in return, gave them a burning desire to go, even when it meant living dangerously.
They offered Him their skills, careers, resources, families, and even their
lives” (from Chapter 14 of my memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir, by Linda K. Thomas).
How’s that for living
loved?
Yes, they lived loved, but
remember:
They were just ordinary
folks—
like you, like me—
slogging along because
of God’s grace.
Fourteen years after leaving our jobs in
South America, Dave and I moved to Africa where we met hundreds more people
there who were just ordinary folks slogging along because of God’s grace, people
who were living loved.
To paraphrase Elisa,
have you absorbed in your
soul
how very much God truly loves you?
Marie Chapian urges us to see ourselves
the way God sees us.
“If you were
to think of yourself
as I think of you,
how different you would be”
Let’s live loved, dear friends!
If we did, what would that look like?
