“And Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Because God loves us, we can love […]
Clearly Peter and John, as we saw yesterday, came away from that evening meal with Jesus with the impression that love was their lifelong assignment. They were to reach the nations with the message, and love would be the wind that carried it from God to an inattentive world. If we love, it will get […]
Because God loves us, We can love one another. 1 John 4:11 states, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Here is the progression of love we have explored so far: God first loves us, which empowers us to love Him in return, and then to love ourselves. This […]
Matthew 19:19 states, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” So, because God loves us, we can love ourselves. Sounds simple. However, for some, there is no person more difficult to love, to forgive, to tolerate than the person who appears before us in the mirror every morning. Yet when Jesus says, “You shall love […]
The Bible states: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins … We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:10, 19). We didn’t love God, but He loved us. We didn’t deserve this gift of […]
The Church as we Know it is Coming to an End Church as Usual Is Coming to an End (and Revelation-Driven Churches Must Emerge to Fill the Void) Around the world the Church, as we know it, is in trouble Most church leaders are unaware that they are in trouble or have chosen to simply […]
“Be hospitable to one another without grumbling” (1 Peter 4:9) I don’t know what you thought when you read the word entertaining in the name of this blog. You may have begun to put on your dancing shoes, pick up your harmonica, or dust off your old Reader’s digest book of jokes. That’s because we […]
“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:11) The New Testament word most often translated “encouragement” is parakaleo. This term comes from two Greek words: para, meaning “alongside of”; and kale, meaning “to call.” When people come alongside us during difficult times to give us renewed […]
The Bible states that we love one another by edifying one another. Ephesians 4:29 “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” We can better understand the word […]
One of the most inspiring stories of a man loving his enemies is that of John Perkins. John grew up as a black man in Mississippi. He dropped out of school in the third grade, and in his teen years he headed for California, seeking better employment. While there he became a Christian. Perkins soon […]