Living Life Well — Week 2

Building on the call to love God, this message turns to the second great command from Matthew 22 : love your neighbor. The people Christ commands us to love are real, imperfect, and varied, including those who look, believe, and vote differently, and any response other than love is not a Christian response. The teaching uses the image of a solar panel rather than a reflector: we cannot manufacture love on our own but must continually absorb it from God before we can give it out. This is why loving God must come first. From 1 Corinthians 13 , love is shown to be an action rather than an emotion, and from John's letters, a sacrificial, costly love modeled by Christ, who got dirt under his fingernails and laid down his life first.