Chuck Foreman – Teaching Pastor

God’s love is never from a safe distance. It’s always up close and personal, meeting us right where we are. He comes to us at our point of need. That’s the very substance of Christianity. Immanuel is a relationship—God with us!

We, on the other hand, tend to “love” from a safer distance. It’s easier just to write the check, isn’t it? But how can we really love someone we don’t even know? Shane Claiborne said, “I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that rich Christians do not know  the poor.”

Seeking God’s righteousness—his justice, right living toward others—will not happen until we engage in genuine, inconvenient and challenging relationships with the poor in our communities. There are wrongs that need to be righted by God’s People, there are outcaste who need to brought inside, there are untouchables who need to be touched, there are unlovely people who need to be loved BY US so that they can begin to experience God’s love, perhaps for the first time. God’s design and desire for “the least of these brothers and sisters of ours” will only come to them through a relationship with someone like you and me who claims to know and follow the One who came to be with us—Immanuel.

“Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and truth.”

–John the Apostle (1 John 3:18)