The Bible and Culture

Take a close look at the two Greek manuscripts in this post. What I want you to concentrate on is the lower right hand corner of each of these pieces of papyri. What you should notice is the fraying, deterioration, and disappearance of this part of the manuscript. Contrast this with the left hand margin of these two papyri which are in tact. This pattern is regularly apparent to the observant student of Greek papyri. Why? Because in antiquity as in the 20th century with VHS tapes, people didn’t not always heed the advice— ‘please be kind and rewind’. Greek is a language read left to right, and so the extreme right of a document would often be left exposed to the elements. The results are readily apparent. One loses the end of the document.

Papyri, as we have said earlier in our ‘Memory’ posts last Fall, deteriorated quite readily in moist climates. They were made up of Nile reeds, vegetable matter, after all. It is then no surprise that we find so few papyri in Galilee and so many in the arid conditions at Qumran or in the deserts of Egypt. You can’t judge literacy very well on the basis of where you find manuscripts since ‘absence of evidence does not indicate evidence of absence’ in a moist climate when it comes to papyri and literacy, and this brings us to Mark’s Gospel and its ending.

I remain utterly unconvinced by the arguments that Mark 16.8 is the original ending of that Gospel, an ending that involves all sorts of problems including the fact that it is unprecedented for a document to end with ‘ephobounto gar…’ (See Clayton Croy on ‘The Mutilation of Mark’). No, it seems quite likely the ending of Mark was lost due to deterioration as with the papyri shown above. If for example p46 is a guide, we can well account for the loss of say 10 lines or so of script in the final column of the Gospel, just enough for a version of Mt. 28.9-10 and an edited form of the appearance to men and women in Galilee later in Mt. 28. In other words, I don’t really think the ending of Mark is totally lost. I think the First Evangelist used Mark in Mt. 28 as elsewhere he has used 95% of Mark’s Gospel. What should be added is that the second and later century additions such as the Freer logion, or the long ending (16.9ff.) were attempts in the early church to supply an ending because the church recognized Mark 16.8 couldn’t have been the ending.

Of course this is bad news for the KJV only/Majority Texters, but good news for Protestants in snake handling Kentucky, as it means that those verses about snake handling and drinking poison are not an original part of the inspired text of Mark’s Gospel. In short, ‘text should determine canon’ not the other way around, and this being so, if Mk. 16.9ff. is not an original part of Mark’s Gospel, which it surely is not, then it shouldn’t be in our English translations. Final note— Mk. 16.9-20 is probably too long anyway, to have fit at the end and bottom of the final column of Mark’s Gospel if it was written in a fair hand in majuscule, or even if it was written in minuscule Greek script.

E Stanley Jones was a giant when it comes to missionary work in India, but less well in our day are his wonderful writings as well which are Biblically challenging and spiritually rich. Some of you will know that it was in fact Jone’s biography of Gandhi that so influenced Martin Luther King Jr. in his decision to pursue a non-violent approach to the civil rights movement.

In this post I simply want to commend one recently re-edited and republished devotional work entitled The Word Became Flesh. I have personally used this book recently and found it soul-nourishing, a very appropriate resource for personal devotions during Lent, but also very challenging as well. Jones was a creative and gifted thinker, and we at Asbury count his legacy as a blessing (our mission school is named after him, and we were one of the first schools in America to have a proper accredited PhD. in missiology).

Here is the personal testimony of one missionary influenced by Jone’s writings.

“I have seen that the writings of E. Stanley Jones are much deeper and open up many truths that should be known that modern day denominationalism does not touch. I have been so touched by the truths that were brought that I have ordered nearly every book that he has written and have been bless by all of them. I have been starting churches in Mexico for the past 29 years and have a direct call from God to that work for that reason, it has had a success and is yet bearing fruit of souls. E. Stanley Jones lived the life of a true missionary in India and had a profound impact on that nation and opened up India to the gospel and we today are seeing the result of his sacrifices.
Jimmy Crowder
Disciple Makers for Jesus Int.
1218 N. Glasscock, Mission, Texas 78572-4518″

I can think of few better resources for the 2012 Lenten season than this one.

One of the more exciting new developments in the Protestant tradition is the writing of new tunes and new paraphrases for the Psalms. The Psalms are of course the songbook of ancient Israel, used in the Temple, which is why we have the name of tunes and even conductors from time to time in the Psalter. There is of course a long rich tradition in Protestantism of singing the psalms, indeed the earliest publication in America seems to have been the Bay Psalter songbook from New England.

The first of these fresh resources for worship comes out of Austin Theological Seminary and the Christian Church tradition and is called ‘Timeless’ and has as its general editor R. Mark Shipp. I was honored to participate in this project and wrote the lyrics for ‘Unshakeable and Standing Firm’ based on Psalm 15 with tune by Marva Hughes. Here are the lyrics. Before the new tune was created I worked from the tune we associate with ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’.

Unshakeable and standing firm
Are those who speak the truth
Who have no slander on their tongues
And are beyond reproof.

The blameless and the righteous ones
Who do their kin no wrong
Shall dwell in peace in sacred space
Secure their whole life long.

Compassionate, and keeping oaths
Are those who fear the Lord
Their walk is blameless in his sight
Their bond is just their word.

Unshakeable and standing firm
The righteous speak their minds
They keep their oaths in troubled times
And leave vile ways behind.

In sanctuary holy ones
Will dwell upon God’s mount
If they display integrity
And know their lifestyle counts.

(If you obtain the book, you will see how the General Editor emended some of my lyrics, just as George Whitefield did to Charles Wesley!)

A second new valuable resources is a product of the work of J.D. Walt and others here at Asbury and is simply called SING, and serves as our Spring 2012 reader. This is the first major product of Seedbed publishing and owes much to Julie Tennent the wife of our President who has masterfully edited a guide to daily worship using the Psalms, among other things. My one small lament about this volume is that there are places where inclusive language could and should have been used, but then the attempt was to expose the audience to original old renderings of the Biblical text, so, I understand why it reads as it does. Anyone wanting a copy of this can go to www.asburyreader.com.

On Friday Last I was in Charlotte to view a very small portion of the Green Collection of Biblical manuscripts, including not only old Bibles (e.g. Tyndale, KJV, Coverdale) but original OT and NT manuscripts, Qumran manuscripts, cuneiform tablets, and a host of other things (there are some 40,000 pieces to the Green Collection and counting). This collection has been assembled at an incredible rate, since 2009, with the Green’s buying up all kinds of manuscripts and artifacts on the open market through Sotheby’s and other such auction houses. The results are stunning. Here is a little summary from a relevant website—

The Green Collection

The principal holdings of the collection include:

The third largest holding of cuneiform tablets in North America (over 10,000 pieces);
The second largest holding of incantation bowls in the world and a substantial holding of biblical-era ceramic ware and statuary;
The second largest holding of Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts outside museums in Israel and Jordan;
The largest holding of biblical papyri in North America and more than the sum total of all institutions in North America and the fifth largest holding in the word and a wide range of holdings of classical texts including substantial third-century BC literary texts;
A large and very significant holding of 1st -5th century AD amulets and thousands of earlier seals, bullae and royal jar handles;
An extensive holding of biblical MSS including the fifth-earliest near complete Bible in the world, the earliest codex in private hands in North America, the earliest Latin biblical codex in the world and several of the earliest Greek biblical codices in private hands in the world;
Early manuscripts in Palestinian Aramaic, Sahidic Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Slavonic and Ethiopic (Ge’ez) including a lavishly illuminated Ethiopic Royal Library consisting of more than 150 items dating to the fourteenth century;
Middle English biblical texts including an extremely important, extensive unpublished ms of Richard Rolle’s Psalms and Commentary and Wycliffe manuscripts as well as other vernacular traditions represented in Dutch, German, Bohemian and French;
A wide range of incunables from the only complete Block Book in private hands in the world, to an extensive portion of the Gutenberg Bible and many other later editions;
A comprehensive collection of sixteenth to nineteenth-century Bibles and historical items consisting of over 25,000 items, a large collection of Tyndale works and translations, and other Bibles up to the KJV, including one of the largest holdings of KJV ‘He’ Bibles and seventeenth-century folios in the world.”
——-

The scholars I met who are currently involved with the collection were two from Baylor— Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale. Here is part of what they are doing.

“The Green Scholars Initiative

Gordon Campbell’s research on the King James Bible has led to a productive collaboration with the Green Scholars Initiative. The ‘Green’ of the title is not an environmental allegiance, but rather an acknowledgement of munificence of the Green family, a benevolent and beneficent American family whose fortune rests on the chain of Hobby Lobby stores and whose burgeoning collection is centred on Biblical materials.

The Green Collection will soon be installed as a non-sectarian museum of the Bible. The family takes the laudable view that the collection (which is described below) should not be inert, but should be the wellspring of scholarship and pedagogy; this aspiration is being realised through the visionary work of Dr Scott Carroll, the director of the collection and a formidable student of the ancient Biblical languages.

Project outline

The Green Scholars Initiative, which is directed by the educationalist and ancient historian Jerry Pattengale, selects senior scholars and places them over a team of scholar-teachers working mostly with undergraduates on a research project. The provision of hands-on original research opportunities for undergraduates reflects an aspiration to revolutionize the undergraduate research experience for generations of students.

One such project has already started: academics and students from a dozen universities are working under Dirk Obbink at Christ Church College (Oxford) on a papyrus project that will lead to major publications.
Green Scholars Initiative and the King James Version

Gordon Campbell and the Reverend Professor Alister McGrath (King’s College London) will be the senior scholars on a project that explores the sources for the KJV and the most important revisions made until the modern text was established by Oxford University Press in 1769.

Students from one group of participating universities and seminaries will examine the sources used by the KJV translators, including earlier English versions, the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) contemporary translations into languages other than English (especially Protestant Bibles in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German), and early Bibles (and quotations from Bibles) in other languages on which the translators drew (notably Syriac, but also Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic (Ge’ez) and Samaritan).

Students from another group of universities will track changes in the text from 1611 to 1769. In both cases scholarly and pedagogical methodologies will be developed through a mentoring system that flows downwards to classrooms and then upwards to a scholarly edition of the KJV which tracks origins and changes through critical annotations. The scale of the project is huge – and unprecedented – and so will probably begin with a single book of the Bible.”
——

The brief lecture by Scott Carroll at GCTS Charlotte last Friday night highlighted some of the most exciting aspects of the Green Collection. It is possible that a very early copy of the Gospel of Mark in Greek, possibly the very earliest is a part of this collection. An epigrapher from Oxford has already prepared to say that it is a first century copy! While I doubt this, and various eyes will need to go over the manuscript before any firm conclusion can be drawn, even if it were from the second-third century it would still be the earliest evidence of this size (it does not include the whole Gospel, sadly it does not include Mark 16) that we have.

Equally exciting was the discussion of mummy masks which the Green Collection has acquired. While the masks are interesting in themselves and of historical importance, some of these masks used ancient manuscripts retrieved from a scrap heap in Egypt in places like Oxyrhynchus to serve as the paper mache inner lining of the mask. Scott Carroll says they have found both early Biblical manuscripts and early classics manuscripts (a lost work of Aristotle, the earliest copy of some of Demosthenes etc.). If so, this is tremendously exciting.

The exhibit leaves to be displayed at the Vatican next week, but it will be back to the States in due course, and you should look out for it, as it is well worth seeing. There are a lot of Holocaust Torah scrolls, rare or otherwise uncatalogued original copies of Tyndale and Wycliffe’s Bibles as well as papyri fragments from the OT and NT and Qumran. One interesting point made by Carroll was that there is evidence of a first century copy of a NT text in codex form, whereas various scholars thought Christians probably didn’t use this practice before the second century. Stay tuned for more.

John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers of all Christian history once said: Homileticians “should not be governed by their desires. It is impossible to acquire this power except by these two qualities: contempt of praise and the force of eloquence. If either is lacking, the one left is made useless by the divorce from the other. If a preacher despises praise yet does not produce the kind of teaching which is ‘with grace, seasoned with salt,’ he is despised by the people, and his sublime words accomplish nothing. And if he is eloquent but a slave to the sound of applause, again a equal damage threatens both him and the people, because through his passion for praise he aims to speak more for the pleasure than the profit of his hearers.” (On the Priesthood 5.2).

In other words, skill in rhetoric is an essential skill for the art of preaching. With that in mind, here is a sermon I preached on the love of God (1 John 4), in the National Cathedral in D.C. If you can’t be persuasive about love, then you simply can’t be eloquent).

LOVE’S LABOR’S WON
( JOHN 15.9-17; 1 JOHN 5.1-5)
Preached at the National Cathedral May 21rst 2006

‘FEELINGS, NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS’

Our’s is an affective age. So much is this the case that even the best of counselors often begin their therapy sessions with the question—- ‘How do you feel about……?’ or ‘How does that make you feel?’ Feelings are assumed to be the touchstone, the talisman as it were, of what is really going on in a human life, what really matters. This is so, in spite of the fact that we all know that feelings can be tremendously deceptive.
In the earliest days of aviation in America, planes regularly crashed. One of the puzzles was why pilots, when they went into a cloud would often come out of it in a spin and then crash. One pilot who survived such a crash was interviewed by a major reporter and he explained that when he went into the cloud his inner ear, indeed all his inner feelings gave him the impression that the plane was not upright or level, and that he needed to bank to the right to be parallel to the ground once more. In fact this inner sense of his, this strong feeling deep inside him was all wrong, and it was precisely responding to this feeling which led him to bank in such a way that he went into a spin and crashed. Thereafter, altimeters and other gauges were installed in the planes so the pilots could fly even through clouds on a level plane without getting the urge to bank in some precipitous way leading to a crash. Human feelings, even profound ones, are often no good guides to what is true or what is good or even what is helpful.
Ah but what about the feeling we call love? Surely that feeling is more true, a better barometer and guide to life? Sadly, it often is not so. We could all name persons who have spent, or misspent their lives following their feelings and their deep desire to be loved, and the result has been one train wreck of a relationship after another. In light of this, one has to ask—- is the Bible really commanding us to live our lives based on our feelings, even our deepest feelings? Even more profoundly, is Jesus really insisting we do so in one of our Scriptures for today? In fact, as we will now discover, he is not. Love in the Biblical sense, while it certainly involves feelings is nevertheless not all about feelings, indeed it is not primarily about feelings as we shall now see. And then too, the love which is being talked about here has a Christological shape, orientation, direction, and source. Jesus is the source, exemplar, director, and object of this love. It is not just any kind of love that is referred to here.

THE COMMAND TO LOVE
Have you noticed that in the Bible we are frequently commanded to love? It should have struck us as odd that love is commanded, if we are used to associating love with mere feelings. Jesus says that love of God and of others is the greatest commandment. He even commands us to love our enemies, which surely does not mean love them to death by killing them. But is he really ordering our feelings to march in lockstep in a particular direction? Have you ever said to your children—- “I demand that for the next three minutes you will feel happy and cheerful!” That’s rather like that wonderful starfish in ‘Finding Nemo’ commanding itself “Go to a happy place, go to a happy place, go to a happy place” while the aquarium is being thumped right where the starfish is attached by a mean little girl. If you have tried such an experiment of commanding others feelings or even your own doubtless you have discovered it is an exercise in futility not fertility. Feelings cannot be commanded. They come and they go and they are subject to the vicissitudes of life, affected and prompted by a thousand different factors— whether or not we are healthy, whether we are hungry, whether we are sleepy and a host of other factors.
So here is where I tell you that in the Bible love is normally an action word. It refers to a decision of the will that then leads to an action. Most often it refers to an activity, not a feeling at all. This is why for example in the Christian marriage ritual the bride and groom to be are asked when it comes to professing their love to say “I do” and “I do”, and “I will” and “I will”. They are not asked to say “I feel like it” and “I feel like it”. This should have given us a clue that love is not mainly about feelings, from a Biblical point of view. In fact in Jesus’ own words for this morning he tells us— “greater love has no one than he lay down his life for his friends”. That’s love in action, love as a self-sacrificial deed. There are of course lesser loves, but Jesus is not speaking of those in this text.
Too often we get real love mixed up with lust, or even just plain desire or loneliness. Young people often say “we’re in love” but alas all too often they are simply “in heat”. In fact the English lexicon is tremendously impoverished when it comes to love. Greek has no less than four or five different words for love— one for physical love (eros), one for family love (storge), one for brotherly or sisterly love (philadelphos), and one for divine love— agape. And the love that is being commanded in the NT is almost always ‘agape’. But now you may be saying— how in the world can Jesus command us to love as God loves? Its hard enough to love like the best of humans, how can we be commanded to love as God does? Isn’t that a bridge too far? Should we all be singing now the theme from Man of La Mancha— “To dream the impossible dream…” Is this command the stuff of fairy tales? The task becomes all the more daunting when we realize that God’s love for us is so vast.
There is an old hymn written by a man whose last name is Lehman. He was a man who lived before modern psychology and its medications, and seems to have been bi-polar or manic depressive. There were times of lucidity and times he would lose his grip on reality. Not surprisingly, living in the early 20th century he was institutionalized. Now the man was both a musician and a devout Christian. Despite his institutionalization he wrote some wonderful joyful hymns, and the most famous of which has a story behind it. The most memorable verse of this hymn was the last thing Mr. Lehman ever wrote, for it was found scrawled on the padded wall of his cell, in which he was found dead. It reads as follows:
“The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can tell; it goes beyond the highest star and reaches lowest hell…Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies a parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole if stretched across the sky.” Should we then despair of ever loving like God loves, or as God has commanded us to love?

REAL LOVE, A GIFT FROM GOD
In fact the answer is no. St. Augustine gives us the clue when he says to God “give what you command Lord, and command whatsoever you will.” The capacity to make the decision of the will, to put love into motion, and even to make the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice of one’s life for others is in fact a gift from God. St. Paul puts it this way when he says that if anyone is in Christ “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Rom. 5.5). So let us talk about God’s love for a moment.
Victor Furnish, one of the great NT scholars of our era has put the matter in this fashion— ‘God’s love is not like a heat-seeking missile which is triggered by something inherently attractive in the target, the object of love’. Indeed not, God loves us when we are unlovely, indeed in some respects seemingly unloveable. God loves us whether we love God back or not. God’s love is unconditional, in the sense that it is given freely, and not because of anything we have said or done or felt. Indeed, God’s love is often given in spite of what we have said or done or felt. It is pure grace— God’s unmerited favor, God’s undeserved, unearned benefit freely and lavishly poured out by God into our lives. The key then is that for human beings to love as God and Jesus have commanded us, they must first be open to receiving that love from God. Paul says it is a matter of believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and receiving the gift of love by means of God’s Spirit who comes to indwell the believer.
Ah ha, you may say— “I knew it—so there is a catch. I must first believe, before I can receive, I must first trust before I can have such love.” Its not really a catch though. God is not requiring of you some herculean effort or any sort of quid pro quo. Its just that you must unclinch your fists, and open your hands if you are to catch what he keeps throwing in your direction. No love has ever been received, even of the purely mortal sort without there first being some trust, some openness, some vulnerability involved. You cannot be loved unless you allow yourself to be loved, and that involves a modicum of trust. But oh what a wonderous thing it is when you allow yourself to be transformed by God’s love. Then indeed you are capable of even truly and totally self-sacrificial love. You want proof? I have time for just three brief examples —– my wife Ann, Jim Elliot and Albrecht Durer.
My wife, unfortunately is afflicted with periodic migraine headaches, even the sort which leads to loss of vision for a while in one eye. When my wife has one of those headaches they are not accompanied by warm mushy feelings. But when she gets up and prepares a nice meal even in the midst of having such a headache, that, my friends, is love, even though she is feeling horrible. That is love in action, and in this case it is truly and freely given IN SPITE OF HOW SHE FEELS. It involves willing and doing, not, in this case warm mushy feelings.
Jim Elliot was a missionary to the Auca Indians in South America. It was a dangerous undertaking. In fact on one furlough he was interviewed by a reporter who asked why he was dealing with such a violent tribe, especially since they seemed so hostile to him and his message. He replied “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” He was talking about giving up his own life for these Indians, showing them the love of God in Christ, knowing that even if they took his mortal life, he could not lose the everlasting life God had given him as the ultimately gift of divine love. Shortly after offering this word of wisdom to the reporter, Jim Elliot was martyred by the Auca Indians. Several decades later, and in fact only a couple of years ago at a Franklin Graham Crusade one of my good friends was present in Florida when one of the chiefs of the Auca tribe gave his testimony. He said “Formerly, I lived badly badly. But now I live for Jesus, for Jesus sent Jim, and he laid down his life for me. ‘Greater love hath no one, than he lay down his life….’

Finally I must tell you a truly ultimate love story, the story of Albrecht and Albert Durer.

Back in the fifteenth century, in a tiny village near Nuremberg, lived a
family with eighteen children. Eighteen! In order merely to keep food on
the table for this mob, the father and head of the household, a goldsmith
by profession, worked almost eighteen hours a day at his trade and any
other paying chore he could find in the neighborhood. Despite their
seemingly hopeless condition, two of the elder children, Albrecht and
Albert, had a dream. They both wanted to pursue their talent for art, but
they knew full well that their father would never be financially able to
send either of them to Nuremberg to study at the Academy. After many long
discussions at night in their crowded bed, the two boys finally worked out
a pact. They would toss a coin. The loser would go down into the nearby
mines and, with his earnings, support his brother while he attended the
academy. Then, when that brother who won the toss completed his studies,
in four years, he would support the other brother at the academy, either
with sales of his artwork or, if necessary, also by laboring in the mines.
They tossed a coin on a Sunday morning after church. Albrecht Durer won
the toss and went off to Nuremberg.
Albert went down into the dangerous mines and, for the next four years,
financed his brother, whose work at the academy was almost an immediate
sensation. Albrecht’s etchings, his woodcuts, and his oils were far better
than those of most of his professors, and by the time he graduated, he was
beginning to earn considerable fees for his commissioned works. When the
young artist returned to his village, the Durer family held a festive
dinner on their lawn to celebrate Albrecht’s triumphant homecoming. After
a long and memorable meal, punctuated with music and laughter, Albrecht
rose from his honored position at the head of the table to drink a toast
to his beloved brother for the years of sacrifice that had enabled
Albrecht to fulfill his ambition. His closing words were, “And now,
Albert, blessed brother of mine, now it is your turn. Now you can go to
Nuremberg to pursue your dream, and I will take care of you.”
All heads turned in eager expectation to the far end of the table where
Albert sat, tears streaming down his pale face, shaking his lowered head
from side to side while he sobbed and repeated over and over, “No… no
…no …no.” Finally, Albert rose and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He
glanced down the long table at the faces he loved, and then, holding his
hands close to his right cheek, he said softly, “No, brother. I cannot go
to Nuremberg. It is too late for me. Look … look what four years in the
mines have done to my hands! The bones in every finger have been smashed
at least once, and lately I have been suffering from arthritis so badly in
my right hand that I cannot even hold a glass to return your toast, much
less make delicate lines on parchment or canvas with a pen or a brush. No,
brother… for me it is too late.”
More than 450 years have passed. By now, Albrecht Durer’s hundreds of
masterful portraits, pen and silver-point sketches, watercolors,
charcoals, woodcuts, and copper engravings hang in every great museum in
the world, but the odds are great that you, like most people, are familiar
with only one of Albrecht Durer’s works. More than merely being familiar
with it, you very well may have a reproduction hanging in your home or
office. One day, to pay homage to Albert for all that he had sacrificed,
Albrecht Durer painstakingly drew his brother’s abused hands with palms
together and thin fingers stretched skyward. He called his powerful
drawing simply “Hands,” but the entire world almost immediately opened
their hearts to his great masterpiece and renamed his tribute of love “The
Praying Hands.” These were the hands of genuine, painful, suffering love, the same sort of hands we see on the Christ with arms outstretched to the world while on the cross and words saying “Father forgive them they know not what they do.”

You see, in the end Biblical love is all about action, not talk. When it talks about love its all about self-sacrifice not self-aggrandizement or self-fulfillment, though if you love in this sacrificial way one by-product is you indeed will be fulfilled, in fact you will be filled up to the full with God’s love, as God has an endless supply. In the end it’s all about love’s labor’s won, not lost. It is this sort of love which makes the world go round, and indeed makes life worth living. It is this sort of love which is both given and then commanded by God. And best of all, God long ago sent his one and only Son so that we might have love and have it in abundance. Jesus lived and died not merely to make real love possible, but to make it abundantly available to whosoever will believe on Him unto everlasting life. AMEN

Shots from the December 2012 release– ‘An Unexpected Journey’