The Gospel & Community: How the Gospel Transforms our Understanding of Living with One Another

REFLECTION QUOTES

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

~David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), celebrated author

“A life of hospitality begins in worship, with a recognition of God’s grace and generosity. Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a response of love and gratitude for God’s love and welcome to us.”

~Christine Pohl, author and professor

“Justification by faith alone frees me to love my neighbor…for his or her own…, not as the calculated means to my own desired ends. Since we no longer have to carry around the intolerable burden of self-justification, we are free ‘to be Christs unto one another,’ as Luther put it, to expend ourselves on behalf of one another, even as Christ also loved us and gave Himself for us.”

~Timothy George & John Woodbridge, theologian-scholars

“He who loves his dream of a community more than Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial…. Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German theologian-pastor

“Africans sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred or their clamor for an invincible Savior…. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.”

~Lamin Sanneh (1942-2019), Gambian, Muslim-born, scholar at Yale

“Christ called the church to a ministry of reconciliation. To reconcile all things back to Creator. In the USA this includes the incredibly difficult task of ‘racial conciliation’. Mediating the dispute in a manufactured division (race) that man created solely to oppress and divide.”

~Mark Charles, speaker and writer; born of Dutch and Navajo ancestry

“Those who suppose that the doctrine of God’s grace tends to encourage moral laxity are simply showing that, in the most literal sense, they do not know what they are talking about. For love awakens love in return; and love, once awakened, desires to give pleasure.”

~J.I. Packer, British-born theologian

SERMON PASSAGE

John 17:1-5, 22-26 (NASB)

1 Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, 2 even as You gave Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. 3 This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. 4 I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. 5 Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was….

22 The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; 23 I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.

25 “O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; 26 and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”