True Love

I loved the movie Frozen. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to do so.  It is cute , funny and engaging .  My favorite line from the movie is, “Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart.” I immediately thought, “True love’s kiss…”, and so did the writers of the movie, and most everybody in the movie theater, but I believe true love means more than just what we see portrayed in Disney movies and other fairy tales.   

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16 , NIV

The fact that God sent Jesus to earth is definitely an act of true love, and the fact that Jesus knew his mission from the beginning of creation only adds to that love. You see, not only did Jesus have to die for our sins, but he had to live a perfect life leading up to that terrible death.  Have you ever thought about that?!  In her book, Found in Him, Elyse Fitzpatrick writes, “Jesus willingly hid himself away in Nazareth for thirty years. Generally ignored, he toiled without complaint, suffering humbly on our behalf. He lived as Jesus the child, big brother, carpenter, and single man providing for his family. He voluntarily adopted all these roles for us.”  

In the book of Leviticus, God gives the requirements for bringing different kinds of offerings to the temple...peace, sin, guilt, but all of these offerings require an animal without defects. Again, Elyse Fitzpatrick in her book, Found in Him, writes, “the entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament was simply a foreshadowing of the ‘good things to come,’ the sacrifice made on the cross of Christ.”  God only accepts a perfect animal for offering, therefore in his humanness, Jesus had to be perfect.  He had to keep all the laws, resist those 40 days of temptation in the desert with no food or water, because that was the only way his death would provide the offering God required for our sins to be forgiven. As Elyse Fitzpatrick notes, “If he had sinned even once, then his death would not have benefited us in the least.”

After living the perfect life and dying a terrible, painful death, Jesus still had to suffer the wrath of the Father, the just wrath that we rightly deserve. Imagine it...having the one person in your life that you have always been with, suddenly turn his face from you!  Oh, the pain that must’ve caused Jesus, for the first time in his life, to not be able to see the Father’s face.  He was abandoned, forsaken, all so that we could be reconciled to the Father and become Christ’s perfect bride.  Forget about Prince Charming, this act of true love is more than enough to “thaw a frozen heart.”