The other day I had lunch with a friend under the Brooklyn Bridge at the Bridge Café in Manhattan and met a woman from Australia who’s a newspaper sports reporter there. I told her I was once a sports reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

She said she primarily writes on football in Australia but has no interest in American football. I told her college football was my absolute favorite thing to watch on television.

She asked me why women in New York seemed to take life so serious. I said, “Well, they’ve been trained to buy into all the hype here. I know a lot of women from my age group, for example, fell for that stupid show Sex and the City. ”

This woman seemed real impressed when I told her I was now writing about the Bible. She asked from what perspective and I told her, “As a Christian.”

A lot of people don’t know this but many of the citizens of Australia have historically been atheists. Australia was settled by England and it was a kind of prison outpost for criminals.

Somebody would be picked up for shoplifting in England and given seven years in exile in Australia. The problem was once their sentence had been served, they weren’t provided boat fare home.

In my files, I have a passage from an old sermon in which my pastor (Richard Jordan) recalled sitting next to an Australian on a long plane flight and talking to him about Jesus Christ. The man identified himself an atheist.

“This man knew absolutely nothing about the Bible; nothing about the Lord,” relayed Jordan. “I said, ‘Tell me what you do know,’ and the way he came back was, ‘If there’s a God,’ and he told me his impression of Him was that He was a God of anger, wrath, hate, vengeance and torturing. He said, ‘That’s why I couldn't believe in Him.’ ”

Jordan continued, “Do you know that any other religious book you read doesn't give you the message the Bible gives you about God? You never get that kind of God out of the religious books of the world.

“The God of the Bible is a God of great love. He's a God who loves you, and it's that way from Genesis to Revelation, and when you come to the Pauline epistles, God's love is magnified to a pinnacle that never before could have been imagined because God takes His Son, who died at Calvary, and tells us all about that.

“The Book so full and so focused on the love of God for us in Christ that there’s only three times He ever even uses the expression ‘the love of Christ’ and it’s only in Paul's epistles that that expression’s found.

“For many people, Romans 8 is their favorite chapter of the Bible. Paul writes, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
[36] As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
[37] Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
[38] For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come.’

“Agape is that special kind of love Paul’s describing. It's a mental attitude kind of love. It's not emotional love. It's not warm personal feeling. It's not ‘luv,’ the l-u-v of the world's. It’s not the love of Harlequin romance books. It's not the love of the religious system where everybody pats everyone on the back.

“It's not a back-slapping, handshaking, grinning, Madison Avenue kind of love—it's a mental attitude of value and esteem.”