Saturday morning, Mike said,” You know what’ s strange? Somehow, being there eating off that cafeteria tray with that man-being present with someone who only needs or wants the presence of a companion-it expanded my soul and filled me with refreshment and life in a way that fancy dinner I was daydreaming of never could’ ve touched.”
He went to that hospital thinking that these suffering people needed his service, but he discovered that it was actually the other way around. He needed that suffering man’ s presence. Because in his company, Mike encountered Jesus.
Sacrificial love is what Jesus modeled around a table the evening before Passover when he picked up a rage and started washing feet. And it’ s what Jesus carried on a cross the following afternoon.
These days the miraculous ministry of the early church often gets all the press, but in their own time, the scandal of this new community that set the world on fire was their willingness to sacrifice. Supernatural expressions of love will always widen more eyes. And sacrificial acts of love will most often go unrecognized because sacrifice rarely makes an immediate, obvious impact. With sacrificial love there tends to be no big
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