Motivated by Love: Seeing the New and the Good that God is Doing

A message based on John 12:1-8: Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.  There they gave a dinner for Jesus. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him.  Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped them with her hair.  The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.  But Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’s disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said,  “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”  (Judas said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.)  Jesus said, “Leave Mary alone.  She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.  You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”