love

Challenge: Show His Love to the World

/ bmoore121 / Leave a comment

There is no tangible resource to give this week. That’s not because there aren’t great resources available in abundance, but instead, it’s because each and every person who has faith in Jesus with the Spirit living inside them has what it takes to accomplish the theme for this week: love one another.

Instead of a resource, I’m giving a challenge to all my readers: Find one tangible way to love two people this week.

First, love another brother or sister in Christ by serving them, encouraging them, or even going old-fashioned and sending them a thank you note.

Second, love your neighbor. Find one person in your life who doesn’t know Jesus and clearly and tangibly show them the love of Jesus.

That’s your mission: Tangibly love two people this week.

Now go out and do it!

Displaying the Gospel

/ bmoore121 / Leave a comment

Everyone reading this post is viewing it on some sort of computer screen. The millions or billions of images you can see on your computer is pretty amazing. They captivate our attention, and many of them stun us visually. These displays aren’t some magic mirror on the wall, but they are controlled by the computer code feeding into them.

Turn off the display, mask the code. It’s still present within the computer, but it’s effect on the outside world is limited.

Change the code, change the display. It’s that simple.

In a similar way, God has given us a code to be displayed. He has given us the Gospel: the good news that Jesus has lived, died, and rose again for our sake. We are to be displays for this Gospel.

If we do not display the Gospel by the way we live, then the message of the Gospel will be rendered ineffective. God has made us to be the conduits through which his message is spread throughout the world.

This week’s passage, 1 John 4:7-12, makes this perfectly clear.

God made his love known through Jesus’ love, and now we are called to be the displays of that love for the world around us.

In verse 12, John writes: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Though, no one has ever seen God, one of the major ways we know and experience Him is through the love shown by fellow Christians. This can also be extended to the world around us. Those who don’t know the love of God can see and experience who God is when our love for one another is evident in our churches.

A major way the Gospel is communicated is through the love we display in our everyday lives.

In addition to this, as I said before, if you change the code in a computer, you change what is on the display. If we aren’t receiving this Gospel message on a daily basis by spending time in God’s Word, and if we aren’t communing with God regularly, then our lives will look differently. For instance, according to verses 7-8, those who know God will love others. There is a very specific characteristic that our lives will display if we are truly connected to God’s Word: Love.

But if we aren’t connected to God through the Gospel, we will not display the fruit of the Spirit, and so prove ourselves to not know God.

However, if we know God, but fail to dwell upon His great love in the Gospel, our lives will fail to display God’s good news for all of humanity.

So let us be plugged into His Word, and most importantly, let us love others that God’s Gospel might be rightly displayed through our lives.

Death by Duty

/ bmoore121 / Leave a comment

Five of the seven churches in Revelation were on decline. Jesus doesn’t mess around, but He goes right to the heart of the issue and calls each to repentance. The first church that Jesus addresses is Ephesus.

Jesus encourages the church for the fact that they have remained steadfast in their good works and defending against false teaching. Yet these outward actions stand in clear contrast to their inward motives. After his encouragement, Jesus says, “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.”

Ephesus continues to do and say all of the right things, yet they have lost the central aspect: love. Satan has sought to undermine the motives of the church at Ephesus. With loveless motives, every good work and teaching is practically worthless. Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians 13. In Spiritual Warfare & Missions, Ed Stetzer and Jerry Rankin make a good point: “Churches can be right and committed but ineffective because their motivation is wrong. Orthodoxy is never an end into itself” (255). Satan attacks the motives of churches, for they will begin to decline as long as their motives are wrong.

Instead of maintaining their institution or continuing in legalism, Jesus calls the church at Ephesus to passionate loving service for the sake of His fame. And he drives the seriousness of this problem with this weighty declaration:

“If not, I will come to you and remove your lamp stand from its place, unless you repent.”

Is your church just going through the motions? Are they just maintaining the status quo for the sake of comfortability? Are they defending right teaching and doing good works only out of duty? If so, they must return to the love they had at first. 

Don’t let your church die the slow death by duty. 

Repent, pray for a filling of power and passion from the Holy Spirit, and hold the glory of the love of Christ in the Gospel before them.