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Part One - L IS FOR LOWERED

How Far Will Love Descend?

Every February, love fills the air — chocolates, roses, cards signed in a hurry between errands. But strip away the pageantry, and one question remains, as old as Eden and as urgent as your next breath: What is love?

The Bible does not answer that question with a definition. It answers with a Person. "The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:81). Not "God has love," as though it were one attribute among many. Not "God shows love," as though it were an occasional performance. God IS love — eternally, unchangingly, right now.

But if God is love, and God is also infinite and incomprehensible, doesn't that make His love equally beyond our reach? Isaiah warned us that "My thoughts are not your thoughts... as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways" (Isaiah 55:8–9). Left there, we would be crushed under the weight of a love too vast to hold.

But grace does something remarkable. It takes the incomprehensible and brings it within reach. It lowers itself so we can grasp it. That is where our journey begins — with the first letter of LOVE: Lowered.

A FOREIGN LOVE

When the apostle John tried to describe what he had witnessed, ordinary words failed him. "See what kind of love the Father has given to us!" he wrote (1 John 3:1). The Greek word behind "what kind" is potapos (POT-ah-pos)2, and it carries a startling literal sense: "from what country?" John is not merely impressed — he is disoriented, the way a traveler is disoriented by a customs stamp from a nation he's never heard of. This love, he is saying, did not originate here. It is foreign to us. It comes from another realm entirely - a heavenly realm!

That is the whole problem with human love left to itself — it is native to earth, conditional, transactional, easily exhausted. But agape (ah-GAH-pay), the love John is describing, is an import from heaven. And love that stays in heaven cannot rescue anyone on earth. So it had to come down.

LOVE MANIFESTED

John explains exactly how that happened: "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because God sent His only begotten Son into the world" (1 John 4:9, KJV). The word "manifested" translates the Greek phaneroō (fah-ner-OH-oh)3 — to make visible, to bring into the open, to put on display where it can be seen and touched. God did not merely announce His love from a distance. He put skin on it. He caused it to walk among us, eat with us, weep at our tombs, and bleed for our sins.

This is the meaning of Lowered Love: not that God simply loves from a throne far away, but that His love left the throne to find you.

THE JOURNEY DOWN

Think for a moment about what that descent actually cost. Paul describes it in staggering terms: Christ, "though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:6–7). He traded the worship of angels for the mockery of soldiers. He traded eternal glory for a feeding trough in Bethlehem. Every step of His earthly life was a step further down.

And nowhere is that descent pictured more vividly than in a small, dusty town called Jericho.

THE LOWEST CITY ON EARTH

"Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through" (Luke 19:1). It's easy to read past that sentence. But geographers will tell you something remarkable: Jericho sits roughly 846 feet below sea level, making it the lowest permanently inhabited city on the face of the earth.4 Of all the towns Jesus could have walked through on His way to Jerusalem, He walked through the lowest one.

And in that lowest city, He sought out its lowest man.

Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector — a Jew who grew wealthy by extorting his own countrymen on behalf of Rome. He was despised, and he knew it. He was also short, unable to see over the crowd pressing in to catch a glimpse of the traveling rabbi. So he did something no dignified man of his position would do: he ran ahead like a child and climbed a sycamore-fig tree (Luke 19:3–4) - a culturally unacceptable practice for a man in that day.  Yet, he ran still, in order to see Jesus!

When Jesus reached that tree, He didn't walk past. "He looked up and said to him, 'Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today'" (Luke 19:5).

"I MUST"

That word "must" is not casual. In the Greek it is dei (DAY)5 — a word denoting divine necessity, not mere preference. Jesus was not being polite. He was keeping an appointment set before the foundation of the world. Of all the trees in Jericho, He knew which one held a desperate man. Of all the names in that town, He called this one — by name.

There is something almost unbearably tender in that detail. Jesus didn't say, "Tax collector, come down." He said, "Zacchaeus." A name spoken by love sounds different than a name spoken by judgment. It sounds like belonging.

The crowd muttered. "He has gone to be the guest of a sinner" (Luke 19:7). They were right about the sin. They were wrong about the shame. By the time Jesus left that house, Zacchaeus had given half his wealth to the poor and pledged to repay four times what he had stolen (Luke 19:8) — and Jesus declared, "Today salvation has come to this house... For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:9–10).

STILL DESCENDING

That was not a one-time visit. It is a pattern that has never stopped. Isaiah promised, "Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save" (Isaiah 59:1) — His arm still reaches to the depths.

Michael Franzese once ran criminal operations worth millions a week as a caporegime in the Colombo crime family; Fortune magazine once listed him among the wealthiest mobsters in America.6 In a prison cell, a guard tossed a Bible through the bars. It fell open to Proverbs 16:7 — and love reached the bottom of that cell.

David Berkowitz spent a decade behind bars for six murders that terrorized New York City, convinced he was beyond forgiveness.7 A fellow inmate spoke four words to him during a walk in the prison yard: "Jesus Christ loves you." Years later, in a Gideon's Bible, he read Psalm 34:6 — "This poor man called, and the Lord heard him" — and love reached the bottom of that prison yard too.

Neither man cleaned himself up first. Love came down to where they already were.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

Maybe you've never robbed anyone, never worn handcuffs, never made headlines. Or maybe you have. Either way, the question is the same one Zacchaeus faced up in that tree: will you come down and let Him in?

Consider this honestly:

  • Is there a place in your life so low you assume God won't go there?

  • A shame you carry, a failure you haven't told anyone, a season so dark you think you've disqualified yourself?

  • Where is your "Jericho" — the low place you keep hidden from God — and have you ever really believed His love is willing to go there?

The story of Jericho answers otherwise than your fear does. Jesus did not wait at the top of the hill for people to climb up to Him. He walked down to the lowest place on earth to find the lowest man in it.

LIVING IT OUT

Beloved, don't try to clean up before you come to God — come as you are, in whatever "tree" you're hiding in, and let Him call your name. Set aside a few quiet minutes and simply say to Him, "I'm coming down." Then tell Him the one thing you've been most afraid to bring into the light. That's not a formula. It's simply what Zacchaeus did.

AN INVITATION

If you have never surrendered your life to Jesus Christ, or if you've wandered far and quietly assumed the door was closed, hear this clearly: it isn't. The same Jesus who descended to the lowest city on earth to save a hated tax collector is descending toward you right now, calling your name the way He called Zacchaeus'.

You don't need to fix yourself first. You simply need to come down.

If you're ready, pray this — and mean it from your heart:

Heavenly Father, I have sinned, and I need You. Thank You for sending Jesus to come all the way down to where I am. Jesus, I believe You died for my sins and rose again. Come into my heart.  Take control of my life. Be my Lord and my Savior. I trust You completely, starting today. Amen.

If you prayed that prayer in sincerity, you have just experienced Lowered Love of God for yourself — the love that left heaven's throne to find you exactly where you were.

"For God so loved the world, that He gave..." (John 3:16). That is Lowered Love. And it is still coming down — today, to you.  Embrace it fully!  Amen? 

Endnotes

  1. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). Quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version.

  2. The Greek potapos (ποταπός) functions as an interrogative denoting quality or origin — literally "of what country" — emphasizing the foreign, heavenly source of God's love. See Walter Bauer et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 855.

  3. The Greek phaneroō (φανερόω) means "to make visible, to make clear, to bring into the open, to reveal publicly." See BDAG, 3rd ed., s.v. "φανερόω."

  4. Jericho's elevation of approximately 846 feet (258 meters) below sea level is confirmed by archaeological and geographical surveys; it is recognized as the lowest permanently inhabited city on earth, located in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea.

  5. The Greek dei (δεῖ) denotes divine necessity — "it is necessary, one must" — indicating that Jesus' visit to Zacchaeus was divinely ordained rather than optional. See BDAG, 3rd ed., 214.

  6. Fortune Magazine listed Michael Franzese among the "Fifty Most Wealthy and Powerful Mafia Bosses" in 1986; his criminal enterprises generated an estimated $8 million per week at their height. See Michael Franzese with Dary Matera, Blood Covenant: The Michael Franzese Story (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2003).

  7. David Berkowitz's testimony of his conversion, including his encounter with a fellow inmate and his reading of Psalm 34:6, is documented in "From Son of Sam to Son of Hope," CBN News, April 15, 2019.