John 15:13New International Version (NIV)13Greater love has no one than this: to lay down ones life for ones friends.

Ernest Gordon was a Scottish POW in Word War II. He wrote a book entitled Miracle on the River Kwai which detailed his experience along with other soldiers at the hands of their Japanese captors as they were forced to build a jungle railroad.As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived was increasingly poisoned by selfishness, hatred, and fear. We were slipping rapidly down the scale of degradation.We lived by the rule of the jungle, red in tooth and claw the evolutionary law of the survival of the fittest. It was a case of I look out for myself and to hell with everyone else. The weak were trampled underfoot, the sick ignored or resented, the dead forgotten. When a man lay dying we had no word of mercy. When he cried for our help, we averted our heads.We had long since resigned ourselves to being derelicts. We were the forsaken men forsaken by our families, by our friends, by our government. Now even God had left us.Hate, for some, was the only motivation for living. We hated the Japanese. We would willingly have torn them limb from limb, flesh from flesh, had they fallen into our hands. In time even hate died, giving way to numb, black despair.Then Gordon becomes sick and is nursed back to health by two other men. This act of sacrifice along with others began to create a change in Gordon as well as the other men in the camp. One anecdote from his book that is pretty well known goes as follows:One day a shovel is missing. The officer in charge becomes angry and demands that the missing shovel be produced or he will kill them all. No one budges until finally, one man steps forward. The officer beats the man to death. At the next tool check, there is no shovel missing and the men realize that there had been a miscount at the first check point. The prisoners are stunned. An innocent man was willing to die to save everyone else. In the midst of abject suffering love was stretching out, straining to cover a midst of sins, stretching out in sacrifice.Gordon goes on to describe a greater recognition of the suffering Christ and as a result, the men began to treat each other with more care and kindness. When the Allied forces finally penetrated the jungle and arrived to liberate the camp, they wanted to shoot the Japanese guards on the spot so outraged were they by what they saw. But the skeletal prisoners placed themselves between their liberators and their captors. The change was so significant that when the skeletal captives were liberated, they could, instead of attacking their captors, say to them:No more hatred. No more killing. Now what we need is forgiveness.In the midst of abject suffering love was stretching out, straining to cover a midst of sins, stretching out in forgiveness.If the sight of men sacrificing their lives in suffering love can transform a prison camp, what is it to see the sight of the Son of God himself sacrificing everything for us?John 15:13New International Version (NIV)13Greater love has no one than this: to lay down ones life for ones friends.

Amazing love, how can it be?
That You, my King would die for me?
Amazing love, I know its true
It's my joy to honor You

Let us pray.