Too many believers settle for secondhand encounters with our Lord. Like Zoom teleconferences, we meet Jesus through filters that can minimize his immediacy.
Too many believers settle for secondhand encounters with our Lord. Like Zoom teleconferences, we meet Jesus through filters that can minimize his immediacy.
God hates racism. He hates prejudice. He hates it when we discriminate against each other. His word demands that we see each other as he sees us: children of the same Father (Genesis 1:28), members of the same human race (Genesis 3:20; Acts 17:26), each of us equally valuable in the eyes of our Lord (Galatians 3:28).
When Hawk Nelson frontman Jon Steingard declared that he no longer believes in God, I was glad to see fellow Christian artists respond not with criticism but with love and compassion.
We can allow Jesus’ horrific sacrifice to be an event like Memorial Day that we remember occasionally with gratitude. Or we can allow the One who died so we could live to lead us into “life in all its fullness” today (John 10:10 GNT).
We’ve focused this week on ways to love our neighbor during the pandemic by loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30-31). We’ll close today by focusing on loving God “with all your heart” (v. 30).
How can you and I love God with “all our souls” more fully today than ever before? As with any relationship, spending time together is vital. This works on two levels.
One is private: making time to focus on our Lord by practicing his presence through intentional solitude. The other is public: walking at his side as we experience the events of the day.
Let’s think about ways to love God with our minds so that we can love him more fully with our strength and thus love our neighbor as ourselves.
Yesterday, we focused on the second Great Commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:31). Today, we’ll begin discussing the first Great Commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (v. 30).
Early Christians face many challenges, but despite them all, they "turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6). How can we emulate them today?
It will obviously take longer than we want to develop effective medical treatments for COVID-19, assuming researchers can develop them at all. But we are not the first people to wait for help in the future while suffering in the present.
