Better Me Than You

"The Lord, in His wondrous mercy, beat me to the piercing, and the pain, and the blood. It was a sacrifice. Because He loves me even more than I love my own children.

When they tied his arms to a post with his back exposed, and He braced Himself for what was to come, He said, Better Me than you.
When they raised the whip, it's tendrils tied with pointy pieces of glass and metal and bone, He said, Better Me than you.
When they brought the whip down on His back, with full force, over and over and over and over and over, He said, Better Me than you.
When the skin had been shredded and the arteries and veins in the muscles in His back began to hemorrhage, He said, Better Me than you.
When they dug the crown of thorns into his head, He said, Better Me than you.
When they grabbed His beard in their hands and pulled as hard as they could to rip the hair from His face, He said, Better Me than you.
When they called Him the foulest names they could think of, He said, Better Me than you.
When they slapped and punched His bleeding cheeks, and mocked Him, and spit on Him, and beat Him with a staff until His bloody tortured body was unrecognizable as human, He said, Better Me than you.
When they forced him to lift the seventy five pound crossbeam, lay it across his scourged and lacerated shoulders, and ordered his failing body to walk, He said, Better Me than you.
When the loss of blood and the pain from his injuries caused him to stumble and drop the cross, He said, Better Me than you.
When they stripped off all His clothes and threw His naked, mutilated body down on the cross, hammered thick, heavy, wrought-iron nails into His wrists, then lifted Him into place, He said, Better Me than you.
When they crossed his ankles and hammered similar nails into the arches of his feet, He said, Better Me than you.
When He struggled to breathe, causing Himself excruciating pain no matter how He moved, He said, Better Me than you.
When He looked into the face of a mother, His mother, watching the murder of her precious child, her baby boy, He said, Better Me than you.
When His Father turned His back on Him, when He felt most forsaken, when He cried out in agony and heartache and despair, He said, Better Me than you.
When His chest filled with fluid and He felt His own heart drown within Him, He said, Better Me than you.
When He cried out before He finally suffocated to death, He said, Better Me than you.
When He took on the wrath of God and paid the penalty for your sins, and my sins, and our beloved children's sins, He said, Better Me than you. "

This is love:
not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10

From Missy @

http://itsalmostnaptime.blogspot.com/2010/07/better-me-than-you.html