For some people, God is merely a concept … and a distant, irrelevant concept at that. Others though, have experienced His love firsthand and once that happens, life can never be the same again.

A few years back I was talking with a man who’d been a major in the Rwandan Army during the 1994 genocide, when one million people were slaughtered in just 100 days. He’d seen terrible things and, not surprisingly, he was very anti-God. “If there were a God,” he once said to me, “how could He possibly have allowed this terrible thing to happen to my people?”

I guess you’d have described him as a staunch atheist.

A year or two later though, he sent me an e-mail that began like this: Yezu Akuzwe (which is Kinyarwandan for “Praise Jesus”)

Those words began one of the most amazing e-mails I’ve ever read. It turns out that somehow, as he’d listened to the story of Jesus Christ, it had powerfully touched his heart. It had cut through all those incredible hurts and scars of his bloody past, and the truth of God’s love moved him deep inside.

That’s the power of God’s love. That’s the power of what Jesus did for you and me on the cross. It’s a bloody, brutal message of God suffering for you and me. It’s a message of incredible love and sacrifice.

No matter what you’ve been through, no matter how much it hurts – that same God wants to touch you deep inside with His love today.

Zephaniah 3:17 The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (NRSV)

God loves you more than words can say.

That’s His Word. Fresh … for you … today.