LOVE, GROW, SERVE

Archive for January, 2010

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone has had an awesome, exciting, enjoyable holiday season and all you students are well on your way to doing great at exam time…right?  I’m sure you were studying all during Christmas break. 

I am consumed.  I am filled with thoughts about…you guessed it!  Love!  Anyone who knows me knows that I can’t really ever stop talking about love.  Love and God are pretty much inseparable…because God is love.  Therefore, I am consumed.  This Sunday, Michelle is going to get us started on a series about our new process/vision/mission as a church (and that includes us, Common Ground): LOVE, GROW, SERVE.

My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given.  You received Christ Jesus, the Mater; now live him.  You’re deeply rooted in him.  You’re well constructed upon him.  You know your way around the faith.  Now do what you’ve been taught.  School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it!  And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.  (Colossians 2:6-7)

You better get used to that verse, because you’re going to be hearing a lot of it around Life Church.  After Michelle gets us geared up with the idea, I am going to start talking about the nuts and bolts, the specifics of what it means to love God & people, grow deeper in our relationship with Christ, and serve God & the world around us.  Hence, I’m all caught up in love right now.

Some ideas to chew on:

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt. 22:37-40)

If you love me, you will obey what I command.  (John 14:15)

If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar.  If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see?  The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people.  You’ve got to love both.  (1 John 4:20-21)

Stay tuned for January 10, 17, 24, and 31 at Common Ground as we wrestle with LOVE, GROW, SERVE!