Love God, Love Others

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength...Love your neighbor as yourself. Mark 12:30-31

It hit me again last Sunday. What a privilege it is to gather together as a community and engage in celebrating Jesus together. All Sunday long, throughout each of our gatherings, as the flutter of Bible pages turning filled our sanctuary, I wanted to stop time! While you turned pages, my heart was full. Thank you for hungering for God's word!

In his tremendous bok, Evangelism in the Early Church, (a book that is commonly regarded as the single-most authoritative work on the spread of the Gospel in the first four centuries) Michael Green highlights three factors that were crucial to the Church's explosive expansion in her first four centuries:

• The Church's ability to engage in persuasive apologetics and both engage and outthink her critics,
  
  
• The transformed character and biblical compassion of believers, and
  
  
• The manifest power of the Kingdom of God by the Holy Spirit displayed through supernatural lifestyles and actions.

I believe there is something here for us on the Peninsula in 2011. Our whole PCC ministry has these tenets at its foundation. While we need these components manifested in our lives corporately, it all starts with us embracing these realities personally. In short, the early church really loved God and others in a Mark 12:30-31 way and God took care of the rest! Would you take a minute to day and ask God to enable you to love Him with everything you've got and also to love your neighbors through you today.

This Sunday, we will continue our Reboot series, looking at what it means to love God with all our minds. Dr. David Nystrom, provost of Biola University will be teaching in all three worship gatherings. Dave is both an engaging and challenging communicator; you will love him.

I love being your pastor!