Thursday, April 19, 2007

Simply, Jesus.

I grow more and more convinced every day that certain things about Jesus were much more simple than we give Him credit for. After all, it was Jesus who reduced the 613 commandments that the Jewish leaders had derived from the Old Testament into two commandments,
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"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." -Matthew 22:37-39 ESV
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That was not the only thing that Jesus simplified. In John 13, Jesus gave a new commandment. It is exciting to discover that this commandment was not a burdensome weight laid against His disciples, but was rather a joyous opportunity to show the world that they were His. In John 13:35, Jesus tells His disciples that the world will know who they are by the way they interact with one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.
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I often wonder if the opposite of that is true. I wonder if sometimes our churches are paralyzed because the message we send to the culture by not loving one another as we should is that we do not look much like Jesus's people at all. Jesus did not say that we need jerseys to be identified as members of his team, we need to love each other so that the world will know! Maybe when we start loving each other as we should, people will recognize the God who loves us and loves them and will want to be a part of Christ's church...it's so crazy it just might work!

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