Greater love has no one than this,
that he lay down his life for his friends.
—John 15:13
Lloyd Ogilvie, Chaplain of the United States Senate from 1995-2003, recounted an incident concerning an eight-year-old girl in a Pennsylvania orphanage who had been terribly abused. She was understandably distant and defensive. She had no friends, not one.
One resident child told the supervisor that she’d seen the girl write a note and hide it in a tree outside the stone wall surrounding the campus.
The suspicious supervisor retrieved it, read it, hung her head and wept. The note, scrawled with a crayon, said: “To whoever finds this, I love you.”
The enemies of Jesus took him outside the walls of Jerusalem and nailed him to a tree. There’s a note for you on that tree. It says: “To whoever finds this, I love you.”
It’s hard to imagine that he loves us enough
to die for us. But he does, and he did.