Love God. Love People. Change the World.

On These Two Commandments

This is the last of the sermons I’ll preach in 2018 on the theme for the year: Love God. Love People. Change the World. I will try to wrap it up, summarizing the theme as we end the year and look toward a new one. There’s plenty of evidence around us that loving God and the people he created will need to be a continual emphasis of Christians everywhere. We’re surrounded by hate and violence and political division. What the…

Lights in the World

On each month’s first Sunday morning in 2018, we’ve emphasized our theme: Love God. Love People. Change the World. As we near the end of the year I’m using a couple of these Sunday morning sermons to emphasize the last part of that theme: Change the World. God put us here to make a difference, not for us just to meet weekly and talk about how bad the world is, but for us to worship so that we might be…

And change the world

As you know, our theme this year has been “Love God. Love People. Change the World.” This Sunday we turn our attention to the last of those three descriptions of what we are called to do: Change the World. Few would disagree with the fact that the world is messed up in so many ways. Our country is struggling: raging political rivalries, persistent racial tension, widespread addictions, increasing immorality. But of course this is not a new development; the world…

Love Your Enemies

It’s hard to love people who make us angry, isn’t it? And the people with whom we disagree on very fundamental things, like God, morality, and good and evil. And people who have hurt us or our families, or who make life difficult for us at work or school. Or people who talk about us behind our backs. The list could go on, I suppose. Jesus says to love even them. Especially them. Part of what makes us different from…

Do you love me more than these?

Our 2018 theme is “Love God. Love People. Change the World,” and this Sunday we’re going to continue this emphasis by studying Jesus’ post-resurrection interaction with Peter. Just a few weeks earlier Peter had infamously denied any connection to Jesus and had almost certainly been dealing with overwhelming guilt and regret since then. Corresponding to Peter’s denial of Jesus three times, Jesus asked Peter if he loved him three times. We’re going to focus primarily on the first question: “Do…

Love God. Love People. But How?

As you know, our theme for 2018 is Love God. Love People. Change the World. That’s easy enough to say, and it’s so obviously taught in Scripture that none of us would argue against its importance. But still, this question remains: we want to do it, but where do we find the motivation? We want to love God, but how do we? We want to love people, but sometimes that’s really hard, so how can we? In other words, how…

Love God. Love People. Change the World.

Every organization must constantly reexamine its reasons for existing, why it “does business,” so to speak. If it doesn’t, it’ll wake up one morning engaged in frenetic activity that has little to do with its purpose. A company that provides products or services may find itself on the wrong side of changes in the market and may be left behind its competitors. Sales fall off, revenue decreases, and the company goes out of business. A similar problem faces churches. We’re…