Someone To Love - A Christmas Message

Someone to love

“Everybody needs somebody to love” goes the song by Blue Brothers. “Find me some one to love” cries out Queen the singer. “I want to dance with somebody who loves me”, croons Whitney Houston. Even the new generation of singers like Justin Bieber sings about some one to love. Closer home, Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar would have sung thousands of songs on the need to have some one to love. The new generation of Bollywood singers likes Sonu Nigam and Sunidhi Chouhan continue to sing on the same theme of love. There is a virtually no movie which is not centered around the theme of love. “Someone to love” is not just a rhetoric, it is a reality that we cannot escape.

How many of you are married? I and my wife are married for 20 years now. Of all the questions that get asked between a husband and wife, the question “Do You Love me?” must be the one that gets asked the most. But I better be careful about talking about my marriage. I have go back home you know, after all. So let me talk about another couple who were married for more than 20 years. The wife complained to the husband, “You don’t tell me that you love me, any more.” The husband replied. “Well. I told you I love you 20 years back, if that situation changes, I will let you know.”

Jokes apart, I am sure all of us must have been faced by this question one time or another. We might have been asked this question, or we might have asked this question. If not loudly, we might have asked this question in our mind.

This Christmas season, it is important that we face this question one more time. Does some one love us? Do we have some one we love? Knowing the limitation of time, this evening, I would like to restrict ourselves to love in just one relationship, the relationship between us and God.

So, let us start with the question “Does God Love me?”. For those of you who are seasoned Christians, who know our bibles well, I am sure that this is purely a rhetorical question. There is only one answer to that question. God’s love to us is the undeniable, unquestionable and everlasting truth. He has loved us from the very beginning and He continues to love us despite what we do or how we do not deserve that love. God had made this very clear in multiple ways. One of the passages that sticks to my mind is found in Isaiah 43:1-4. I read from the Message translation of the Bible.

“But now, God’s Message, the God who made you in the first place, Jacob, the One who got you started, Israel: “Don’t be afraid, I’ve redeemed you. I’ve called your name. You’re mine.

When you’re in over your head, I’ll be there with you. When you’re in rough waters, you will not go down. When you’re between a rock and a hard place, it won’t be a dead end—

Because I am God, your personal God, The Holy of Israel, your Savior. I paid a huge price for you: all of Egypt, with rich Cush and Seba thrown in!

That’s how much you mean to me! That’s how much I love you! I’d sell off the whole world to get you back, trade the creation just for you.”

God is saying “ I paid a huge price for you… That is how much you mean to me. That is How much I love you.. I am willing to trade the entire creation just for you, I will sell off the whole world to get you back”. This is amazing. Just look at the passion in those words. Just feel the depth of God’s love in that pronouncement. Let me ask you, Husbands and wives, when is the last time you heard your spouse say some thing like that? Parents, when is the last time you heard your children say some thing like that? Children, when is the last time you heard your parents say some thing that powerful? God, the creator of the entire universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the almighty, the all powerful one is saying, “I will sell off the whole world to get you back, I will trade the entire creation just for you”.

And God did not stop at just saying this. He demonstrated his love for us. We know that God made good this promise in John 3:16. Christmas is nothing but the demonstration of God’s love for His people. The final demonstration. The final proof of God’s love for us. Through Jesus Christ, the new covenant was sealed. A new covenant of love. A covenant that cannot be broken any more. Paul puts it beautifully in Romans 8: 38-39 “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”