Be Inviting By Showing Love – Like Jesus

Word-Of-The-Day: ‘(34) <Jesus said,>“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. (35) By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another.”’ (John 13:34-35)

We do indeed live in strange and trying times; we have those who blatantly break laws and causing harm to others to run unmolested while those who are innocent or righteousness are persecuted or besmirched.   However, this is nothing new; we know that Jesus suffered persecution at the hands of the ‘woke’ of His day (the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Romans, among others).  The early church through medieval times also suffered by their ‘woke and enlightened’ as well, like Galileo and Martin Luther (the Crusaders, or Knights Templar, were on both ends; first they did the persecution and then they became the persecuted). 

There are differences, of course. (Roman internet latency, or the time to send and receive messages, was measured in weeks, thanks to the transmissions being carried by horse.)  Although we do live in a different environment, in many aspects we need to be in commonality with the early church, though the early church was in its infancy and growing.  Today, the church is unfortunately older and established, but diminishing in the eyes of the current society. 

How can the church today survive?  The early church survived by its fellowship, by becoming a community of followers within its local geopolitical community.  This community within a community would help each other, and grow by helping those outside of it when the need arose, or when it was realized what the church was really about by those outside of it. 

Different locales likely have different ways of defining their community of believers; that was true then as it is today.  The early church in Ephesus likely had different aspects in how they performed outreach and assisting others than the church of Jerusalem or Rome, due to differences in customs and location.  The message and worship of Jesus, though, had to be the true Gospel message and could not change.  However, the interactions of the church community to the community at large had to adapt; for example, how we message our outreach locally will be different than the message of a church in a remote village on a different continent. 

The key, though, is the influence of the church community needs to influence the community at large.  We know the early church had an impact, to the point where the Roman Empire went from polytheism (the worship of many false gods) to Christian worship, which then carried Christianity over its extensive networks of roads and shipping lanes throughout Europe.  The question today is, does our church community have an impact?  How do we influence those of the secular world with their ‘common thought’?

Sometimes, the Bible is counter-intuitive to what is considered ‘common thought’.  However, how do we show our society at large how they should act?  We first have to ‘love ourselves’.  This sounds greedy or self-centered, but we must love ourselves to care enough to accept Jesus and follow Him.  People abuse themselves out of a loathing of what they are or how they see themselves.  When you love yourself, you can then love others.

We then, as Christians, need to love upon those in our fellowship, starting within our Life Groups or Bible Study Groups, and then spread out to our Christian brothers and sisters, both within our home church (like MBC) and Believers outside of it.  We have to be able to love upon one another, help each other, pray for each other, to show those outside in our local community. 

A church that bickers with each other, gossips about each other, and disparages each other would not be a church worth going to.  A church that is split is not a church that someone outside of it would want to visit.  Why would someone seeking shelter from the evils of the world want to walk into a chaotic and dysfunctional group like that?  So before a church can do outreach, it must ‘in-reach’ and love itself, with each member caring for other members.

When we are a united and close-knitted family within our church can we go out to influence our greater community outside of the church walls.  We need to be a church that takes care of those on the ‘inside’, and we are.  In our Life Groups we have fellowship of helping each other out, listening to each other, even getting a bit dirty when some physical labor is needed.  We can then be that church that can reach out and help those outside of it, especially with organizations who do Biblically-based outreach to those in need.  United with these organizations, we can show our community what Righteousness looks like, and it is our prayer that people on the outside are influenced to join us.