This is my first post to our new website and pages, and I of course want to say something that is encouraging and useful – but where to begin?

I want to write about that thing which causes ordinary people to do ordinary things that can make an extraordinary difference in the lives of other people.  Love is that common thing that can make the most uncommon difference in the lives of those people around us. The Oak is a brand new church that I and a small group of people have just recently started to work on building.  I believe that it will be, is, a body of people shaped and formed by the love of God.  It must be to make any real difference.

Love is truly the need in this day.  Not just any form of love, but what I will call true love.  True love is that love manifest by Jesus Christ as He lived a life of selfless devotion to those around Him and to His Father.  True love is best illustrated by the action of Christ dying on the cross for our sins.  In all of history past no single person has given up more, suffered more or acted in a more directly loving manner than Jesus did when He died on the cross for our sins.  While the actual act of being willingly crucified was truly a great sacrifice, the great actions of the cross also occurred beyond the simple vision of those who drove in the nails and pummeled His body with whips.  The greatest acts of love by Christ were contained in the choices that outlined the cross when He willingly came to this place of suffering, leaving the glory of heaven to intentionally bear the wrath of His Father. In all of eternity past they had never been apart and nothing could divide them. Now they chose to give up this perfect union for a time so that the Son could become the scapegoat for our sins.

The perfect nature of their love and communion cannot be expressed by mere words or even completely understood by our human minds.  We have just a taste now of what that love was like, we know just a glimmer of the glory that was and now again is their fusion of the brightest love in all of heaven.

Jesus’ love is stated simply in the book of Philippians by the Apostle Paul:

Philippians 2:5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10  that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

In this passage we see the heart of the greatest act of love, how truly costly it was and how profoundly it will affect every life that has ever lived.

With that stated, the amazing thing is that Paul starts this account by calling all of us to “have the same mindset as Christ…”

Wow, that challenges me beyond anything that I am capable of!  Really, I mean it, I cannot possibly do that.  I, in myself am just not able to love the way Jesus did.  But, I am not alone!  Jesus defeated death and now lives again and He is standing at the right hand of God ready to help me in times of need.

So, I have the greatest lover in the world now calling me to love the way He loved and ready to help me do it.  That is a promising statement.  That is what the world needs now!

The world needs a group of people who know that they have not got it, knows where to find it and knows the joy of giving it away!  I have become one of those people more and more in recent days.  The bankrupt nature of my own broken soul has been dramatically touched by the overflowing torrent of clean, beautiful, kind, generous affection that is Jesus Christ. And in that place of overflowing joy I have heard His call to love and I have begun to know the extreme joy of giving that love away.

In the light that love creates I have seen an old and a new hope born for our world.  It is an old hope! This hope was born two thousand years ago when He acted to destroy the power of sin and death in mankind.  It is a new hope born each day as His people choose to receive and give away the greatest love ever manifest.  This is my hope and joy and inspiration.  This is my prayer for the Oak Christian Fellowship!

I pray that we would be rooted and established in love and know that Love that is beyond just knowing but must be lived out.

My first series of blog entries will be on the theme: “What Love Does.”