love

If all Christians were more like Christ, could our post-Christian and even anti-Christian culture remain the same?

Martin de Porres serves as an example of how Christians should aim to live. During his lifetime, Martin was considered a living saint. After his death, many miraculous healings were attributed to him. Through discipline in prayer and faithful service, and by avoiding distractions, he strove for faithfulness, not success.

The church has the power to stop the epidemic of loneliness. Ask God to help you deepen your connections today—then seek to be the friend to others that Jesus is to you.

When Paul wrote that “the greatest of all is love,” he was not mouthing a romantic cultural idea. He was pointing out the supreme divine virtue that is strong enough to hold together our diverse, global movement. Love is our theological superpower in a world — and church — riven by divisiveness, hate, religious extremism, political polarization, racism, genocide, health crises, and poverty.

Though the volume has increased in recent years, the American Church has been dividing over whether it should be primarily about proclaiming truth or about serving others since at least the mid-20^th century. But, it’s an unnecessary choice to make. These two things need never be separated and should never be separated. On the same night Jesus commanded us to remember how His broken body and shed blood rescues us from sin (that’s the truth), He commanded us to demonstrate our new life by serving others (that’s love).

This week, we’ve been exploring practical ways to experience Jesus more intimately during this Christmas season. Today, let’s focus on the wrong way to respond to his unconditional love, then we’ll choose the path that leads to his best for us.

Yesterday, we focused on God’s call to trust him not just for our salvation but also for our sanctification, yielding every dimension of our lives to his lordship. As Oswald Chambers noted, our Lord “never asks us to decide for him, but to yield to him, a very different thing.”

Today, let’s consider the countercultural nature of such a lifestyle, then we’ll focus on two simple but transforming ways to “yield” our lives fully to our Lor

How can we make God’s offer of redemption in response to our repentance more available and attractive to those who need it? Consider two sentences I believe every American needs to hear.

Jesus judged not to shame but to love. Not to lift up Himself but to lift up the one in need of judgment. Unlike the Pharisees who arbitrarily judged others against their own self-imposed standards of living, Jesus judged others against God’s Word, the only standard by which Christians are called to live and hold one another accountable.

We often think that Jesus died to save us because we were worth saving. The fact is, he died to save us because he loves us. In fact, he loves us enough to die for us again, right now. And he loves us because he is love. Not because we were or are lovable. Not because there is anything in us that merits his love.