True Love
February 16, 2025
Dr. Paul Cannings
On April 6, 2000, Ricky and Toni Sexton were taken hostage inside their Wytheville, Virginia, home by a fugitive couple on a crime spree. Toni had taken her poodle outside when Dennis Lewis, 37, and Angela Tanner, 20, roared into her driveway, pointed pistols, and yelled at her to get back inside the house. Inside the house, the Sextons turned their hostage experience into an opportunity to demonstrate Christian love. The Sextons listened to their captors’ troubles, fed them, showed them gospel videos, read to them from the Bible, and prayed and cried with them. During negotiations with the police, Ricky Sexton refused his release when Lewis and Tanner suggested that they might end the standoff by committing suicide. The standoff had an unusual ending. Before surrendering to the police, Angela Tanner left $135 and a note for the Sextons that read: “Thank you for your hospitality. We really appreciate it. I hope he gets better. Wish all luck & love. Please accept this. It really is all we have to offer. Love, Angela and Dennis.” (Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion – – Perfect Illustrations: For Every Topic and Occasion.)
This kind of love is displayed in God’s love story for man. Even if, by world standards, we were considered good people before we were saved, God said that our righteousness was as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). He said that we did not desire Him (Romans 3:11). We were born in sin (Psalm 51:6) and did not have any hope of experiencing heaven as Gentiles (Ephesians 2:12). We were all destined to hell. It is God who “so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This is why the Bible says, “for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-9; NASU) This kind of love makes a difference in the individual receiving it and in the individual sharing it.
W. Farrar tells how, when Dwight L. Moody was an ignorant, ragged, shoeless boy in the streets of Chicago, he found his way to a Sunday school by one of those unseen providences that men call chance. He was shy, sensitive, and very nervous lest the other boys laugh at him because he could not find the places in the Bible. The teacher observed his embarrassment and, with gentle, silent tact, saved him from shame by finding the place for him. But for that little nameless act of love and sympathy, Dwight L. Moody might have lost a career of memorable beneficence to the world. Dwight L. Moody became a well-known preacher and founded the Moody Bible Institute, which serves people worldwide.
Love may seem like a small act that makes a person vulnerable, but when God controls it, it is an act that can change the world, and true love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).