Cadyville Wesleyan Church
Identity. It influences every area of your life. It dictates what you do. If you see your identity as somebody worthless, you will act in a worthless manner. If you see yourself as smart, you act smart (or at least as a smart aleck). If you identify as an idiot, you'll act accordingly.
But who does God say that I am? When you spend some time in the Scriptures, you will begin to unpack the identity that Christ desires for you and the Holy Spirit empowers you to become. In a new series that launches this Sunday, we will discover our identity in Christ and who that empowers us to become.
Our identity matters. Discover a new way of seeing yourself as we launch our new series Identity: Who You Are Defines What You Do!
Misanthrope (n):
“a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society.”
God's call for us is to love the unlovable, to serve them, care for them, and be Jesus to them because God is never more evident than when we love the people who deserve it least.
Ephesians 5:1-2 NLT
“When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners… God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”
- Romans 5:6,8
Luke 10:25 NLT
Luke 10:26-28 NLT
“For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
- Galatians 5:14
We must never separate our love for God from our love for others. Loving our neighbors as ourselves is one of the central ways that we love God.
Luke 10:29 NLT
Jesus’ contemporaries- and, sadly, modern Christians, developed an ever-expanding definition of what it means to be a “sinner.”
The central question of the lawyer...and many of us is:
“Exactly how far does this command to love my neighbor go?”
Luke 10:30-37 NLT
Jesus challenges everything his listeners held dear and turned the establishment on its head.
The story of the Good Samaritan challenged everything Jesus’ listeners understood about how they saw the people around them.
Instead of asking if somebody is your neighbor, Jesus places the onus on us: “How can I best be a neighbor?”
The lawyer had used this opportunity to place limits on Scriptures’ commands,
but Jesus expands them!
Loving your neighbor becomes offensive because it calls us to demonstrate the love of God to the people who deserve it the least.
Christ is challenging us to
re-evaluate how you see the people around you.
Matthew 5:43-44 NLT
Matthew 5:46-47 NLT
Christ is transforming how we see our enemies, how we see outcasts, how we see outsiders. To God, there are no Samaritans.
Jesus challenges his listeners to rethink everything they know about who God has called them to love!
“The thing that more than anything else demonstrates the reality of the loving, triune God is that we embody the reality of the triune God in our relationships with one another and with the world. “Nothing less than the credibility of the gospel, the reputation of God, and the salvation of people hangs on our fulfilling the commandment to love.”
- Gregory Boyd
Jesus sets the new standard for what it means to love your neighbor because it re-writes who our neighbors even are!
Jesus demonstrated that true love risks everything in order to show the love of God.
God is inviting us to see people the way that he sees, to love people the way that he loves.
Who in my life do I need to take a risk today to demonstrate the incredible, overwhelming, insurmountable love of God?
Jesus was willing to leverage his entire ministry, his whole life on love.
Jesus has modeled for us a new way of living, a new way of thinking, a new lens through which to see the people in our lives.
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did… When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good in return, you will find yourself disliking him less.”
- C.S. Lewis
Radical, distinctive, worth-ascribing, self-sacrificing, Christlike redeeming love has the power to change everything.