and Christians, in a word, are...

John 13

34 So now I am giving you a new commandment:

Love each other.

Just as I have loved you,

you should love each other.

35 Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.

(this is Jesus speaking to His disciples a few hours before he was betrayed & arrested.)

Want an eye opening experience?

Google “what do people think of Christians”.

Or “what is a word people associate with Christians”.

Or something like that.

Here's a word associated with Christians today...

Mean.

And in our pop culture world, a lot of the time I think that's pretty accurate.

In the years that I've been a follower of Jesus (almost 50 years now) I always thought that we were supposed to be about one word...

Love.

We were supposed to love

when we didn't feel like it,

when we didn't actually like the people we were loving,

when no one else would.

Love defined us.

To love God & love others was the whole purpose to life, in a nutshell.

But our “street cred” has decayed to something else...

we're seen as just plain mean people.

What can we do about it?

Well, don't develop a program for it!

Don't write a New York Times best seller about it!

Don't go on all the talk shows & gab about it.

And certainly don't dump a lot of stuff about it on social media!!!

What should we do then?

Ask God to channel His love through us.

Ask God to help us see the people around us like He sees them.

And then start channeling God's love to the people all around us.

And not just love in general.

Love the people around us individually.

Our job is to love - not to convict, or to judge.

Love is how people will know we follow Jesus.

The only way our pop culture will start to think of us as people who love is if we actually spend the overwhelming bulk of our time loving the people around us.