Love Defined: Devotions From Time of GraceSample

The evangelistic power of love

How much money would you pay for a “+1 pass” to heaven? If you could be guaranteed that your best friend or your brother or your son or your daughter or your mother or your father or whoever would believe in Jesus and be with him and you forever, how much would you give? If you love people like I do, I bet you’d give anything.

Obviously, you can’t pay for another person to get faith. But there is something you can do. Listen to Jesus—“I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:20,21). Jesus wants the world, your non-Christian friends included, to believe he is the Christ, the chosen one. And how might that happen? If we who currently believe would “be one.” If Christian love could make us one, our friends might know he’s the One.

That is a fresh thought for my faith. Often I think of outreach as how I treat my friends who don’t go to church. But Jesus thinks that how I treat my friends who do go to church is just as magnetic. If the world can watch a church that is defined by love—the kind of love that gives up its time, energy, and preferences—they might wonder what kind of Savior can make people so selfless.

How could you love your fellow Christians today? What uncommon love might the world witness at your local church?

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