Be Mine: Excerpts from the sermon on St. Valentine’s Day

We love because God first loved us. God so loved that he sent his one and only Son, Jesus, who came into the world to rescue sinners. He personally bore our sin in his own body on the cross so that we might be dead to sin and alive to all that is good.

That’s really the whole of the good news, is it not? God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son, the one who loves us to the uttermost…

And Jesus loved so much that he humbled himself—yes, even humiliated himself and came and became one of us. Jesus proclaims the height and depth and breadth and intensity of God’s love: in his birth, in his life, in his preaching and his healing, in sharing our laughter and our tears, in sharing our trials and temptations, and in his death; yes, in his every word and deed Jesus proclaims God’s deepest desire for you and for me and for all creation, “Be Mine.”

Be Mine.” This is no mere theological concept. God really, really loves you. This is not love “in theory,” but a passionate, burning, longing, hurting, deep, wondrous, amazing, beyond-the-deepest-heartache you or I have ever experienced, like a knife in the gut, like the spear piercing the side of the Savior. Passion means suffering. Christ is passionately, heart-wrenchingly in love with you.

And he asks just one thing. “Be Mine.”