This weekend is Memorial Day Weekend, and we will recognize this important holiday during our Sunday services. Each service will start with a moment of silence and prayer for the families of those who have lost loved ones in the defense of our freedom. Then I will share a message from John 15:13 – No Greater Love. There is no greater love than for a man to lay down his life for another. I hope you will include one of our services as part of your Memorial Day Weekend.

What would cause one person to be willing to sacrifice their lives for another person? It is the ultimate sacrifice. Our text this Sunday points us toward the answer: No Greater Love because Love is the only motivation for that kind of sacrifice. We are created in the image of God and on Sunday we will see we are most like our creator when we love sacrificially other people. Jesus is the ultimate example of that love with his sacrificial death on the cross for our atonement, so that we do not have to live in eternal death, separated from God. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is that, motivated by love, Jesus sacrificially died in our place so we would not have to face the wrath of God for our sins.

Jesus’ death for us is primarily a redemptive act because through his death he accomplished something no one could ever accomplish on their own: the forgiveness of our sins. The death of Jesus is also an example of what it means to be fully human in that we are to live our lives in service to others which often includes sacrifice. Memorial Day reminds us of the thousands of Americans that have done that very thing for the liberty and freedom we enjoy today. Motivated by love of family and country, they died for the freedom of others. While we may not be called to sacrifice our life for others, part of the human experience is to love others sacrificially for their blessing. Currently our society is pushing individualism, causing any of us to weigh the question,  “what will be in it for me if I make this sacrifice?” As Christians, God calls us to put the needs of others before our own by willingly making sacrifices for those who can never repay the sacrifice. The Gospel, and Memorial Day reveal the love of God as fulfilled through His image bearers. There is no greater love than to make a sacrifice for others.

From the Briefing – Dr. Albert Mohler

The Brave Boy in the Pear Tree: How a 12-Year-Old Hero in Ukraine Fought Back Against a Russian Attack

And in this case, I want to talk about a boy in Ukraine. He was at the time this happened just weeks ago, 12 years old. I’m not going to mention his name. I’m simply going to say that on one day, just a matter of a month ago, so we’re not talking about something in the distant past, we’re talking about a 12-year-old boy in Ukraine last month. At that time, he was up in a pear tree, sounds like a parable, but that’s where he was. He was up in a pear tree. He was helping a neighbor by cutting off a damaged branch. So you have a 12-year-old helping a neighbor, he’s up on a tree, able to pair back this particular branch in a pear tree. And then he heard the buzz of a drone. And reporters, Constantine Kudov and Steve Hendricks for the Washington Post tell us the story. He heard the buzz of a drone. “That sound often means death in Ukraine and not just for soldiers on the front lines. Increasingly, civilians are tracked, chased, and attacked by small commercially available drones equipped with cameras rigged with explosives and steered by fingers on joysticks a dozen miles away.” So now you’re talking about a 12-year-old boy up in a pear tree helping out a neighbor when he hears a drone.

Okay, here’s the interesting thing. He realizes the drone is passing under him. Russia now darkly refers to the hunting down civilians as a human safari. Just think about how dark that is. It’s a killing, an intentional killing of civilians in order to spread terror. We are told, “In recent months, it has evolved with new technology and spread to border areas around the country.” This 12-year-old boy knew that this warfare was ongoing and one of the ways it was known is because of the filaments that were the connection miles and miles away of those running the drones and the drone’s lethal attack systems, the drone was trailed by a very thin line and that line was what was controlling the deadly drone.

And so the boy knew that and there had been a drone attack days and weeks before in which the boy and his father had with a neighbor, talking with a soldier, come to understand how the line worked in this control. The boy up in the pear tree, again, 12 years old, he said, “It saw the children and started gaining altitude.” That’s children in the yard, including his own siblings, “That’s when I realized something was about to happen.” The Post then reports, “What the boy did next, something he had rehearsed, something few civilians in Ukraine had been taught might have saved the lives of those children, his mother changing a diaper inside or other neighbors on the block.” “His story [I’m reading here from The Post] and the fact that a 12-year-old in a pear tree knows how to fight back against a Russian drone illustrates how deeply a tactic that the United Nations calls a war crime has dissolved the line between soldier and civilian in the fifth year of Russia’s war.” These drone attacks against civilians, against families, against children and others demonstrate the extremity of this war, and frankly, the extent to which Russia is willing to target civilians in Ukraine. In this case, we’re talking about children and mother changing a diaper, et cetera.

Russia had the innovation of equipping drones of fiber optic filament is defined as “a hair thin tether that unspools in flight like a spiderweb for 12 miles” and they’re using payloads that are very deadly and in order to overcome Ukraine’s efforts at jamming the controls, they’re using these filaments in order to maintain control to deadly effect. This boy and his father had noticed these “glinting gossamer threads” in their neighborhood and they were trying to figure out what to do about them. They came across a soldier and the soldier who was an explosive specialist explained “how the fiber optic material like a fishing line was almost impossible to pull apart without slicing the skin. Then he demonstrated three techniques the soldiers had found to break it. A combination of loops and pinches best to count to 15 after a drone passes before trying it. This specialist said, so you’re out of the drone’s view and don’t become the target.” 

Okay, so the boy and his father heard this. The boy received it with what we are told was curiosity. The drones kept coming and on this day the boy is up in a pear tree and the drone passes by underneath and it passes by with obvious lethal intent. Listen to what happened. “As the drone moved towards his family, the 12-year-old boy dropped to the ground. He ran 20 yards and got his fingers around a hairlike umbilical running all the way to Russia. He made a loop, pulled it slightly and remembered the soldier’s instruction, count to 15. He said, ‘I didn’t have time so I counted to 10 and I broke it.’”

The Post then reports, “The line snapped. The drone abruptly veered upward, banked away from the children and the houses and spiraled into a section of wild ground next to the neighborhood.” The boy said, “I waited for an explosion, but there was nothing. It turned out that crashing into the swamp meant that basically the swamp just absorbed the drone and its deadly effect.” The very weapon specialist who had explained the technology to the boy, including how to break the line sometime back, he was one of the first persons to respond to the boy’s action asking the question, “How can a civilian person, especially a child, do something like that?”

He went on to say not every soldier would have been able to react in a split second like that. This is one of those stories of heroism in which we are reminded that God created us as moral creatures. He put us in a moral universe. He put us in a universe in which we right now, even as I speak, are drawing attention to the heroism of a 12-year-old boy who without really thinking much about it, armed with knowledge he’d received in a conversation with his father, jumped out of the tree to save his brothers and sisters, his mother and the baby and others simply by grabbing the line. He said he didn’t have time to count to 15, so he counted to 10 and he broke it. And in all likelihood, as the Washington Post makes clear, he saved their lives.

I’m not mentioning the boy’s name. It is mentioned at least a name is provided in the news sources, but it is also said that the Russians are now determined to kill him and his family. So the Ukrainian authorities have moved them many miles away. I just find this one of the developments, one of the things that could pass under our radar, that should be very much on our moral screen as Christians. We need to be the kind of people, by the way, who would produce 12 year olds to do something like this in a second.