This coming Lord’s Day we will continue moving along in our series of messages on ‘ The Church Under the Cross.’ And we will consider another dimension of our life together as God’s people, a people who are called to follow our Savior in this world, to walk just as He once walked, and to do so as ‘under the cross.’

The specific dimension of our discipleship that we will think about on this Lord’s Day is how the cross of Jesus impacts and totally transforms our relationships, and especially our relationships with each other in the Body of Christ. Our sermon text will be taken from 1 John 3:16-18:

“ By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”

In the first part of our message we will look especially at where we go to discover what love actually is. And you can see that in these verses the Apostle John does not refer us to a dictionary for a definition of Christian love, but to an event in history!

Then, in the second part of our message (for Sunday August 16) we will consider how the cross of our Lord and Savior is not simply the one and only means of our eternal salvation, but is also the very pattern that we must follow as we relate to one another.