What is Your Standard of Love?

Church Family:
What have you set as your standard for the depth of love you show one another as a part of GCT? Is your standard the world’s standard: “I will tolerate you because you are so difficult to be around?” Or maybe it is a love of compromise that has grown into an attitude of neglect in settling for not knowing others at their level of need. Church family, I know the level of need easily overwhelms. These needs are the individual and family needs that will be met only through relationship, the relationship of brothers and sisters in Christ coming alongside each other and serving in deed and truth (1 John 3:18).

The needs of GCT are summarized in questions such as: How can we be a husband and wife who stick together when we have failed one another? How do we raise Godly children when it is more difficult than we imagined? How is God going to redeem the mess I have made of my life? How can we be friends when we feel we have nobody in our lives? God has designed for these endless questions to be answered in the loving relationships within the Church.

John the Apostle tells the Church that the way in which we know we are a part of God’s family, children of God, is if we love our brothers and sisters at the level Christ has loved us. The depth of this relationship is to be one of sacrifice for our brothers and sisters in the Church. We are to be ready to sacrifice ourselves for each other, laying down our lives for the sisterhood and brotherhood. This is the standard of love that Christ has called us to in his body, the Church. He, laying His life down for us, has commanded us to ensure our brothers and sisters in Christ have what they need, that we do not close our hearts to them.

How do you love your brothers and sisters at GCT like Jesus has loved you? First, you believe that as a Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Christ, with the power of the Holy Spirit, you have everything you need to understand the issues of the heart brought before you by others. Next, you move and interact with others in the same ways Christ does, at the heart level, caring for the other person more than you are caring about yourself. Then, you desire to be in relationship with others, even as others are not like you. You develop eyes to see those who are in the background, alone, forgotten and isolated. You tune your ears to hear words of hopelessness, fear, anxiety and condemnation. You keep the attitude that you always have something to give—yourself. Give yourself up for other brothers and sisters as Christ did for the Church (Eph. 5:25). We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death (1 John 3:14). Who is on your heart to go and love sacrificially?

See you Sunday, loving as Christ loves: Steve