Every Family in God's Service

“Love the Lord your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”   ~Matthew 22:37-40

We see all of these member expectations, primarily, as a response to God. And these responses are to be compelled by and characterized by love.

Love is the beginning and the end of our righteous relationship with God --- and everything in the middle. Love pushes us. It moves us. It defines us. Love is what Scripture says binds everything we do together in perfect unity. We must place unconditional, God-ordained love in the supreme position of our hearts and minds and in this church.

God’s love for us depends completely upon his character, not ours. Everyone stands before our God equally. No human being can ever do anything to earn God’s love. The fact that we are sinners is woefully inescapable. The fact that God still loves us anyway is amazingly wonderful. And we respond to that matchless grace and undeniable love by loving him back and by loving all people the way he does.

And that doesn’t mean surface relationships. It doesn’t mean love at arm’s length. It doesn’t mean love all people, but don’t get involved in their lives. It means imitating God’s gutsy love, his all-in love, a love so full and so complete that it compelled Christ to suffer and die to show us.

The Legacy focus from here on out is spiritual growth and maturity and discipline. Christian accountability to God and to one another. Christian responsibility. And the expectation for all our members is that you develop a strong foundation of Christian love as the motivation for the ways you respond to God.

May we be a people who receive one another as Christ receives us, who forgive others as we’ve been forgiven by God, and who love God and others as fearlessly and unconditionally as he loves us.

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