Dear Occupant

When you pick up your mail every day don’t you love to get those letters from this that or the other business that just knows that you need their product or service? They have spent so much time getting to know you and what you need they neither know your name, nor do they really care who you are. You are just another consumer that they hope to entrap with their offer of easy credit cards, or junk you don’t need. They refer to you as occupant.   How different it is when you discover a letter from a friend.

It is certainly rare to actually get a letter in the mail. I almost hesitate to use the analogy for fear that a younger generation might not be able to even relate. Like VHS, and human controlled cars, it will eventually be completely replaced by superior and more reliable technology. But there is still that little jolt of excitement when surprisingly, mixed in all the junk, you find a card or a letter from a friend.

As we continue to explore the idea that Jesus coming and dying on a cross, and ultimately being raised from the dead, is believable, we are forced to consider motivation. We know that “God so loved the world that He sent his Son…”(John 3:16), and we know that Jesus went to the cross for the glory of the Father (John 12:27-28) but we too are in the mix. Jesus says this in John 15:13 “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus loves His friends, and when we consider that, it makes the extraordinary understandable, even believable.

Are you a friend of Jesus or are you standing afar, distant, occupant? Come discover the ways he demonstrated His friendship and how it should cause us to worship Him!

See you at church,

Pastor Chris