Welcome to Waymaker Church! We are so excited to have you join us today! We exist to Encounter, Live for, and Advance the Kingdom of God!

What I love about the Kingdom of God is that we get to partner with him. When we talk about serving and being involved in the church, or being a light for Christ in the community; we don’t say this so that Waymaker Church gets recognition, our heart is for everyone in this building right now to serve somewhere to make the name of Jesus great. Yes we want Waymaker Church to be a lighthouse of hope to the community, where they know they can come here and experience the love of Jesus because of our dream team, small groups, outreaches, and because of our church service where we pray, worship, and hear the word of God preached.

At the end of the day, it is not just about our little “c” church but about the Big “C” church as a collective of all of the churches in our community, state, nation, and world working together in unity and sacrificially to make the name of Jesus known.

In verse 16 he says “we know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So first I must ask you this question, “do you know what real love is?” “have you experienced real love before?”

The Hebrew word for a God kind of love is the word “ahavah” Now this is a compound word, that means “love is giving.” We can’t understand this kind of love without first being shown how this kind of love works.

That is why John says we know what “real love” is because Jesus showed us real love. Love is not just a feeling, sure feelings are a part of it, but for the married people in here, or those with kids, you know that love is more than just a feeling. If love were all about feelings then we wouldn’t make it very far.

You see in our modern western world, we have made the word love into a feeling or an emotion, and that robs us from experiencing or showing real love.

If love were just an emotion we wouldn’t make it very far, that is why John says remember that you were shown real love Romans 5:8 “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

In another letter Paul says that we are to be ambassadors of Christ. Now if you know anything about politics you know that countries send ambassadors to different nations to represent their home country. So we have US ambassadors that are supposed to represent our country’s ideologies, politics, culture, and other things to the rest of the world. It is the same with the kingdom of God, Paul is asking us to be imitators of Christ, to be his ambassadors and imitate him to the world. So that the world will come to know him.

Ahavah is how God loves us, and it is how we show our love to God.

Ahavah also means we show how we love God by how we love others. John is all over the original meaning of love. That is why he says in verse 19 “Our actions will show that we belong to the truth.”

I love the saying actions speak louder than words, the more I think about that phrase, the more biblical it sounds every time I hear it. We can say we love God and we love people but what are our actions saying?

Our love actions will actually show what we believe about God, what we believe about ourselves, and what we believe about others.

I think a big hindrance to serving is that we don’t realize what is in us, or we haven’t really grasped whose we are. The same God that created the Sun, moon, stars, oceans, mountains, and everything we see also created us. In the Psalms it actually says that we have been knit together.

I love that Paul says we are God’s masterpiece. I like to think of it as art work. Some translations say handiwork. The thing about artwork is that you have to have the end goal in mind. I guess you could just start painting, but typically if you’re going to make a painting that you want to sell or display you have an end goal. So you pick the type of brush, the colors, type of paint, what you are going to paint on, and each of these things helps to carry out the end goal.

God did this when he created each and every single one of us. He pieced us together with an end goal in mind. He knew the life we would walk out, he knew the opportunities to love others that would be placed in front of us, and so he put certain things within us to help carry out his plans and purposes.

We have been bought back and have been born of God, so we can do the good things that he planned for us long ago.

God knew exactly what he needed to place in you and how to piece you together so that way you could do good things for God.

Serving others shows those around you 2 things: how you see God and how you see yourself. God knit you together to do good works and to serve those around you. We are to love others because we have been shown real love.

For those that are saved, you have surrendered your life to God, I have a question for you: Do you think today you could stand confident before God?

We are the church. We don’t just come to church, we have to be the church. The Holy Spirit lives in us and we are the mobile home of God. We should serve those around us, which is love in action. A God kind of love.

My heart and the staff’s heart for you is that when we see Jesus face to face we would hear “well done good and faithful servant.” This month we are simply trying to get you to see that we are the church, and we want to teach you what you may not know, or stir something up in your heart.

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