series: Letters of Love
title: #9 My Brother’s Keeper
date: June 3, 2018
scriptures: 1 John 3:11-18, Genesis 4, Matthew 5:21-26, Matthew 25:31-46
To live our lives as if "we are not our brother's keeper" is the way of Cain, and we can not allow our minds to buy into that lie. The church exists not just for itself, but in order that it can be a flesh and blood example in our modern world of what the love of Jesus Christ actually looks like.
It is a scary place to be when the non-religious world begins sounding more like Jesus than the church does, and yet in some ways that is exactly what has happened over the last few years.
We need to be transforming more and more into the image of Christ every day, not sacrificing it on the altar of self preservation.
Especially in a sermon as loaded as this one, you may have questions. If so, please submit them by clicking the "ask questions" image and we will try our best to respond to them to the best of our ability.
The below book is one of many recordings of the ways the Christians responded to the plagues mentioned in the sermon.
Here is the PEW RESEARCH ARTICLE that was referenced during the sermon.
When Pastor Jacob said "No group agrees less with the idea that the U.S. has a responsibility to help refugees than Christians do" he was quoting this article in the Washington Post, which cited the pew research article.
Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete.
…And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.
How is it that some people can read a passage, and it be guilt and condemnation and tragedy… and someone else can read the same passage, and it be life, and love, and hope and grace?
“I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
Pastor Austin kicks off our series on the Epistles of John by explaining much of what was going on when John was writing.
Compassion sees the world through the eyes of others, and it is stirred to action by what it sees. It can not sit by while injustice is done around it.
The world is watching how the church will continue to respond to the issue of racism that is so evident in our world today.
