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They Will Know You By Your Love
We have been using these pastoral letters over the last two months to examine many of the different “one another” passages in the New Testament. I hope it has been an encouragement to you; it has certainly encouraged me as I have watched you live out these commands from God in the life of our church. As we conclude this topic with this pastoral letter, I want to return to a quote I shared in the first pastoral letter in this series: “Holiness is not a mystical condition experienced in relation to God but in isolation from human beings. You cannot be good in a vacuum, but only in the real…
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Five Blessings of Hospitality
This week in our pastoral letter, we’re going to think about a topic that is vital for life in the church: hospitality. We will look at several New Testament exhortations to hospitality in this letter, but I want to focus on 1 Peter 4:9: “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.” Life in the early church to whom Peter wrote these words was exceedingly difficult. Internally, there were the pressures of theological controversy, division, and relational strife. Outwardly, there was the reality of increasing persecution from the Roman government. There was nothing easy about being a Christian in the first or second century. If ever a group of people had…
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Count Others More Significant Than Yourselves
This week, I received a very sweet email from a young lady in our congregation who said something that absolutely overwhelmed me with joy. Speaking of the family at First Scots, she said, “the way y’all treat the people in that building is probably one of the most heaven-like things I’ve ever seen.” She’s right: in the divisive, selfish world in which we live, a church that treats one another well is a foretaste of heaven. I have read and re-read that email about 50 times this week, every time praising God for His work in this body. Her words also made me cry out to the Lord again and…
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The “One Another” Passages in the New Testament
The phrase “one another” is frequently used in the New Testament to govern how we as believers are to treat one another within the context of the church. God emphasizes this because, after loving God with our whole hearts, love for one another is the most important evidence of true spiritual vitality (Matthew 22:38-39). In the following, I have categorized 52 “one another” passages from the New Testament to help us think about how we are to treat one another. Love one another: This is the most common of all “one anothers”, especially from the lips of Jesus in the Gospels. Our attitudes toward one another: Love for one another…
