So what is the connection between loving God and loving our neighbour? If there is real love of God, there will be love for ourselves, and love for our neighbour.

See how complete Jesus reminds us this love for God is meant to be: all our heart, soul and mind.

We are so often tempted to hold something back. We want to love ourselves on our own terms – to love ourselves fully, like we should love God. But that would lead to a world full of Gods, and how would that work out?

Or we are tempted to put these two loves in opposition. I can either be good, ethical, and law-abiding to love God, or I can just love people. The problem with this is that true love of our neighbour flows from the love ofGod. Our love for God leads to love of our neighbours, which leads us to want to act right toward them. Without love for God, and an experience of his love, we each have to define love for ourselves, and we all have different ideas about what love is!

We’ll see tomorrow how Jesus’ self-giving love sets the pattern for our love, while freeing us from the traps of loving ourselves first, trying to use others to earn our salvation, or any other attempt to manipulate God or others.

Question: Define love.

Ryan Sim - October 28, 2013

Monday - A New Idea - Growth - in Discipleship

We are beginning a new series on “Becoming Like Family” as our online community begin to share the daily challenges with friends, and we begin to gather our larger community together. We want to have five main characteristics, and the first is to be bound together by some common learning experiences. In October I attended my university’s homecoming reunion, and reconnected with a lot of friends. Our friendships were forged through four years in a common learning experience. The same weekend, I went to a church where I’d done a student placement. There was personality, familiarity, and comfort there, too. We were gathered around a common purpose, to learn about and grow as followers of Jesus. We want Redeemer Church to be that kind of community. Hard in suburbia, commutning, but we have our own unique way of pursuing a common learning experience through mobile apps, social media, and our web site. Our next step is to become a network of groups, where we build strong relationships with existing friends and family members, where one of the things that binds us together is we are all learning the same things through discussion, challenge, encouragement and prayer. Question: Who was your best learning group or team? What made it so? Coffee Hours this Week: Have questions about the challenges, do you want to meet others exploring the same content, or connect with Ryan? Join us for our coffee shop drop-in this Wednesay, October 30th from 7:30pm-9:00pm at the Starbucks in the Ajax Chapters. Look for Ryan Sim in the drink line, or a Redeem the Commute postcard on a table. If you know in advance that you’re coming, please RSVP here http://bit.ly/1aHVTy2

From Series: "Becoming Like Family"

This series looks at becoming “like family” with others learning to follow Jesus. We're exploring how the church is not a building, institution or event, but a community of people. It's important that explore what church means as we prepare to launch a new church in Ajax in 2014.

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