Today's Sermon:
A Series on Character: Week 2- Love

I. Primacy of Love

II. Definition of Love

III. Demonstration of Love

IV. Source of Love

V. Effect of Love

“Church” is not an event. It is people—people whom God calls us to love. What is more, it is in a very important sense an involuntary community of people: we don’t choose our brothers and sisters—God does. And sometimes (oftentimes) those people are not terribly compatible with us—not the people we would choose to hang out with. But it is this very incompatibility that is so important, for at least two reasons. First, learning to love the people I don’t like is by far the best way to learn how to love (it’s easy to love people I happen to like). Second, the church is supposed to be a sociological miracle—a demonstration that Jesus has died and risen to create a new humanity composed of all sorts of people.
-Tim Challies, The Next Story

What makes the church both a mystery and a magnet to the world is when we love in this way, God’s way. This love makes us relevant. Its absence makes us irrelevant, regardless of whatever else we’re doing. Question: is the love in your church such that people in the world and of the world would be willing to forsake all other loves just to know this love? Would they give up their addictions, their diversions, their compromises, their resentments, because the love your church has is better and truer and deeper than anything they’ve found anywhere else? If yes, your church is relevant to the world. If no, it’s irrelevant.
-Mark Buchanan, Your Church Is Too Safe