This week we continue in 1 John with Pastor Duane Clayton teaching us about the power of showing Christ's love to everyone around us – not only those it's easy to love.

The bible says that by our love for one another they will know that we are his disciples! The reason why God wants you to love is because he is love. God showed that love by sending Jesus Christ to earth to die for you. Out of that great love, he is asking us to pour it back out on our friends, neighbors, family, and community so that they would see his love through us.

“For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.”
1 John 3:11-15 (NIV)

“Giving up on reality as a whole, either we place ourselves in one of the two realms, wanting Christ without the world or the world without Christ-and in both cases we deceive ourselves. Or we try to stand in the two realms at the same time, thereby becoming people in eternal conflict, shaped by the post-Reformation era, who ever and again present ourselves as the only form of Christian existence that is in accord with reality.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Ethics 57-58

We have to align ourselves with the way God sees the world and he commissioned the church to do it’s part of his great rescue mission! God sees and hears his people! And his heart breaks for the Israelites back then, but also for his heart is breaking today for the people of Little Rock. What does he do? He acts! And his call to us is to be a part of what God is doing.

“For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.”

2 Corinthians 2:15

“The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

-William Temple