Your Furious Love For Others (Audio)

Para Vista Lutheran Church

Dominique was a Roman Catholic brother who at 54 discovered he was dying of inoperable cancer. He left his community to move into a poor neighbourhood in Paris and took a job as a nightwatchman at a factory. During the daytime he would sit on a wooden bench in a park opposite to where he lived. Hanging around in the park were marginal people, drifters, winos, dirty old men who ogled the girls passing by.

Dominique never criticised, scolded or reprimanded. He accepted the men as they were. He gave off peace and shared hospitality that led cynical young men and defeated old men to gravitate toward him. His simple witness lay in accepting others as they were without questions. He was the most nonjudgmental person you could ever meet. He loved with the heart of Jesus.

One day when the men asked him to tell them about himself, he told them that Jesus loved them tenderly, and that Jesus had come for rejects and outcasts just like themselves. His love for them and the love of Christ he spoke of gradually transformed the men.
One day he didn’t appear and later was found dead. More than 7,000 people from all over Europe gathered for this humble brother’s funeral. The last words in his diary were: “All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything, but the love of God is in Christ Jesus.” His friend, Brennan Manning, said: “In Domonique I saw the reality of a life lived entirely for God and for others. Any spirituality that does not lead from a self-centred to an other-centred mode of existence is bankrupt.”

How are you living your life?

Pastor David Christian

Bible Reading: Ephesians 4:31- 5:2 (NLT)