If you would simply spend your days listening very specifically for how God is guiding you to help preserve and share the message of Jesus, the message of Messiah, and then doing whatever you hear God directing you to do, YOU, yes YOU, will influence the future of creation in accordance with God’s will. It’s up to YOU. THAT is God’s message of Joseph this Advent and Christmas season.
When we start recognizing how much we allow outward circumstance to direct with whom we build relationships, and when we begin enough relationships with all different kinds of people to allow something ELSE – inward merits – direct the relationships we build, then, THEN we will be living out Jesus’ law of love that commands us to love ALL our neighbors, love all our neighbors as we love ourselves.
Y’all, a church building that had been reduced to rubble just a few years prior to that service now stood as a beacon of hope for a community and a testament to what faith-in-action can do. Which gets me wondering: what can God accomplish when and if WE, First Christian Church, Grand Junction, put our faith into greater action?
Y’all, the answers to these questions, the direction of the choices you make – every SINGLE choice – they will determine the future of humanity, of this world, of creation? Because God doesn’t ALWAYS work but sometimes, lots of the time, chooses to rest, and God has given us, YOU, the power to participate in creation. What will your participation be?
So even when we – when you – get it right and think that Christmas is about what God was doing through that little baby born on Christmas morning, I hope these four stories remind you of just one more thing. Christmas is ALSO about God deciding to include US in God’s plan…even relying on US, people, to help implement God’s plan. When we go along, God can and WILL do amazing, miraculous, Christmas-like things.
I don’t know about you, but I have a suspicion that if we start becoming known by the agape love we share with the world around us, if we start becoming known by agape love in the way we interact with one another and with EVERY other in the Grand Valley, the same kind of explosive growth that was characteristic of the first church as described in the book of Acts – great numbers being added to the Church each and every day – will be characteristic of the Church here in the Grand Valley of Colorado.
When I read Jesus’ greatest commandment, I hear Jesus saying we’re supposed to love God, we’re supposed to BE church, not exclusively or even mostly by gathering together for Sunday worship but MOSTLY but loving other people with actions that HELP them…the way Jesus spent his ministry loving people by helping them. So…First Christian Church, what can we do to love our neighbor?