Chuck Foreman – Teaching Pastor

The Apostle John drills down without apology here to the bottom line of our discipleship and the message hasn’t changed, it’s still all about loving one another. In fact, this is the marker that we have crossed over from death to life. You can tell, we can tell, because we love each other. And we know what love is because we learned it from Jesus himself—he laid down his life for us. So the real bottom line is this:

…we too should lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. Jesus set the bar pretty high for us. There’s no low bar under which we can slide into being genuine followers of this guy, Jesus. For John, the litmus test of our love is what we do for our brothers and sisters who are in need, or not.  For Jesus and for his best friend John, truly having the love of God within us means that it will flow out of us to others in tangible ways, not just in talk.