Love Others

Love Others

People are messy; they are a masterpiece created in God’s image, but they have a lot of junk in their lives. If the church is reaching out to a lost culture, it is going to have to deal with the sin that is so prominent in American culture. We can not expect lost people to act like saved people. If churches are filled with lost people, we can not expect everyone to be in a white pressed shirt with a smile on their faces. By committing to love our neighbor as ourselves, we need to love those people who come into the church, even though they might be addicts, drunks, homosexuals, and suicidal. We need to care for them, even if they have scars on their arms and scars on their hearts. “Think about it this way,” John Burke says

If you are reaching the average person under age forty, more than likely, one out of every three women you interact with will have had an abortion. One or even two out of six women you talk to will have been sexually molested. More than six out of ten people you speak with will think living together before marriage is the wisest way to prevent divorce, and five out of those ten will already have lived with someone. Most will have been sexually active, and the thought of waiting until marriage will sound totally foreign and will need explaining. Most men will have struggled with pornography or serious problems with lust. One in five to ten people will struggle with substance abuse. At least one in five and as high as two out of five people who come to your church will smoke. These are the people Christ came to seek and save.