This is my commandment: love each other just as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to give up one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I don’t call you servants any longer, because servants don’t know what their master is doing. Instead, I call you friends, because everything I heard from my Father I have made known to you. You didn’t choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you could go and produce fruit and so that your fruit could last. As a result, whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. I give you these commandments so that you can love each other. ~John 15:12-16 (CEB)
“The church is the worshiping community. We are that body of people who are learning together to repent, pray, and serve in the light of our history and an imagination that is teaching us to do so. The focus of our history and imagination is Jesus Christ in whom we see what it means to live in repentance, prayer, and service. We seek to follow him, to be his disciples, and to undertake the disciplines that such a life requires.
As we follow him, we see that we cannot be the church and remain a closed system of intimate and exclusive social relationships through which we are protected from the world. To the extent that we actually are being transformed in repentance, prayer, and service, we find that we must continually strive to rupture our own boundaries. The church is just not the church except as it seeks to incorporate within its mutuality enemies and strangers. Its repentance, prayer and service is for all people, for the world as such, and not just for others as Christians. In the church we are impelled by the very dynamics of what it means to be the church to meet the enemies and strangers of our lives.” ~From Vision and Character by Craig R. Dykstra
Help me this day Lord to step out of my comfort zones and intimate circles of friends. Help me remember that we are called to take Your good news to the whole world not just to those we are comfortable with. Help me remember that I may be the only Bible some people will ever read or the only church they will ever see. Help me to remember what it means to be a Christian. Amen.
Pieces of the Puzzle 