Thursday, January 18, 2023
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 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. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. 1 John 4:7–12
It Is Not About Them – It’s About You
We have been singing a song at church the last couple of weeks called “The Jesus Way” that goes along with the sermon series Pastor Jim started at the beginning of January. I love the song because it is all about what it looks like when we really live The Jesus Way.
Sometimes as Christians we want to do the Christian things that are clean, easy, and make us look really good. But if we are really living The Jesus Way, it is not going to be clean, or easy, and it won’t make us look good in the eyes of some people. Living the Jesus Way is about living a life that shows we have Jesus in our hearts. When He is the Lord and Savior of our lives, we are called to a higher standard and sometimes it is not pretty. Living the Jesus Way means there will be messes, it will be hard and will rarely make a picture-perfect social media post.
Living the Jesus Way starts in our hearts when we are transformed by God. Without that transformation we are just living “religious” lives like the Pharisees. The Pharisees were much more concerned about how things looked than they were about the condition of their own hearts.
Living the Jesus Way is about our hearts, not about their sin. It is about the way we love the unlovely, treat the sinner, and do the hard work of ministry. It starts from within and swells up flowing out of us. If we cannot love the unlovely, show the sinner grace, or do the hard and messy things, we are not going to be living the way Jesus showed us to live out His Gospel and truth with our lives. What did Jesus do for His enemies? He died for them – for us. While we were still sinners, He died for us. He loves us when we sin, He loves us when we don’t act like His children, and He has given us the greatest gift ever given – the sacrifice of His own life so we could have eternal life.
What is the condition of your heart? Have you allowed God to transform you so that your life will reflect Jesus and point everyone to Him? How are you treating people – the unlovely, the sinners? Are you ready and willing to do the hard work of ministry? How we treat others will tell the testimony of our hearts.
