“We raise our glasses and drink to a love that never gave up.”

Whether your glass has wine or grape juice or sweet tea or just water, I hope you will find time sometime before the day is over to raise a toast to this Easter love that found a way through the cross and the tomb to find you in your moment of darkest despair. I hope you will drink to the reckless love of God that spared no expense to buy you back when so many said you weren’t worth saving.

Because of Easter, everything has changed. We’re no longer outcasts and strangers to the promise. We’re no longer without hope in the world. We’re no longer dead in our sins and trespasses and enemies to God because of our rebellion against everything He stands for.

Easter love is hesed love, the love that gave absolutely everything to those who had the right to expect absolutely nothing. Easter love is the essence of unconditional love with the sacrifice of life for those who would ultimately ridicule and reject it. Easter love is where God so loved the world — that God so loved you and me — that He gave His one and only Son so that we might not perish and be lost forever but have an eternal and abundant life with God.

We drink to love that never gave up every single time we take the cup that symbolizes the blood shed and the bread that symbolizes the body broken. Every time we take Communion in remembrance of Jesus, we are eating and drinking to this love that never quit.

“Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him” (Romans 5:6-8, The Message).