This weekend we wrap our series which began at the start of the year. One Another has been our theme. It’s also been the driving challenge for our lives.
Serving others was Jesus’s last action for those who would carry on his ministry. Jesus never minced words when he connected eternal life directly to how his followers would care for, serve, and love others. 59 times in the New Testament followers of Jesus are commanded to be about one another. Throughout Jesus’s ministry, he expressed and modeled an urgency for our love for others. He told his disciples that people would identify them as such by the way in which they loved.
Our tendency is to see our faith more about our beliefs and our habits. Though these are critical pieces of our walk with the Spirit, we can slip into a mode of self-serving religion and judgmental pride forgetting that “one another” is the theme of Jesus’s ministry and the aim of his mission.
Cyprian, a church leader in third century north Africa, wrote this, “Now I am calling you to broaden your view…by loving your neighbors. Visit them, too; encourage them; provide bread and water for them. I know that in recent months some pagans have been involved in persecuting you. Pray for them; pray for their salvation, and help them. You are God’s children: the descendants of a good Father should prove the imitation of his goodness.”
Our identity is as son and daughters of a good Dad in heaven.
He has equipped every one of his kids to love and serve him through the power of his Spirit.
Imitating our good Father is the mission for he has deployed each of us.
One Another isn’t a sermon series or a challenge written on a card for us to accomplish.
One Another is a focus and a driver for our year here at White Oak. We want to focus our attention, our hearts, our programs and events, and our resources for the sake of others. We want the people around us and in our communities to experience the saving love of Jesus. We want to turn White Oak’s attention outward beyond ourselves and onto those who don’t know Jesus. We will…
Learn to consider how Jesus has worked in us and tell our faith story with others.
Discover how God has equipped us with a unique shape in order to serve his Kingdom and one another.
Experience mission trips in new ways.
Invite toward the biggest Easter attendance in recent White Oak history by engaging friends and neighbors to experience the life-giving news of Jesus’s resurrection!
Step out in generosity with steps of trust toward a Holy and Good Heavenly Dad!
And more!
When we are for one another, people meet Jesus, and we will be blessed when we show him to them.
John 13:34-35 is one of the last acts of Jesus’s ministry and the crowning example he gives to show us what we are to be about. Here is my prayer for our White Oak family for 2023:
Heavenly Father. Your love stretches to the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the sky. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains. Your justice goes down to the depths of the oceans. Your unfailing love is everlasting. Father, we submit our lives to you. We are your sons and daughters. We admit that we don’t always live as such. We repent of the ways in which we have put ourselves, our preferences, our opinions, our family, and even our beliefs ahead of your will. I ask for the power of your Spirit to remind us of our place with you. We are sealed with the promise of sonship and eternity. I ask the that power of your Spirit would stir in us a longing for others to know you. May all that you have given us (our time, our treasure, our gifting, our relationships, our attitudes, our finances, our future hopes and dreams) be aimed in the direction of your mission for lost and hurting people (to your eternal glory, Lord)! Because you love us so well, may we be your Church and shine your light to our communities in Cincinnati and around the world. Amen!
Let us One Another well!
Nathan
Nathan Hinkle
Lead Pastor
White Oak Christian Church