Love One Another 1 John 4 19 21

Love One Another 1 John 4: 19 -21

And he said to them ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus, Matthew 22: 37 -39

Fellowship

Fellowship • And this commandment we have from him; whoever loves God must also love his brother

Fellowship “They have all but destroyed the ability to maintain a community. People no longer have a reason to be outside where they can talk with their neighbors. Months can go by when neighbors never see each other. Six foot privacy fences also block the simplest efforts at communication. ” Later in the article “where can one go in these places to connect with other people? ” -Peter Martin, The Dallas Morning News

Community Makes us More Like God • We love because He first loved us. 1 John 4: 19

Community Makes us More Like God • Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4: 8

Community Makes us More Like God • It is the potency of family connection that guards adolescents from emotional harm and gives them succor from a world that’s rough, a niche where they may express their most vulnerable and warm feelings in the open without fear of ridicule. By protecting them from the harm of disconnection, we are in turn protected from BEING HARMED by violence as their desperate, last attempt at connection. ” -Brown University

Community Helps Us Learn to Get Along And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. 1 John 4: 21

Community Helps Us Learn to Get Along There is pain that exists in all significant relationships. C. S. Lewis

Community Helps us Prepare for Eternity • If anyone says ‘I love God’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 1 John 4: 20

Community Helps us Prepare for Eternity • By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. 1 John 3: 10 • We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. 1 John 3: 14