Review from 12 September

Hey 56ers.

   Hope you are having a great week.  In case you have forgotten, here is a little reminder of what our lesson was about last Sunday.  We are talking about friendship and how God wants us to relate to others.  Our topic of the day was "what if they are different than me?"   My, my, my how we like things to be easy and stay safely withing the boundaries of being comfortable.  But what if we meet up with someone in our neighborhood, or on our sports team, or in our class, or wherever, and they are different.  Maybe they like different things, maybe they have different beliefs than we do, maybe they are from a different family situation, or a different country, language, religion, or whatever.  Our discussion on Sunday was about what God expects us to do when faced with people who are different. 

We read from Genesis 1 where we learned that we are made in the image of God.  How cool is that.  We are all different, we are all unique, but at our very creation, the idea is that we would share this common bond with God.  And so with that in us, despite our differences, we are all at our core, very similar - designed to honor God and desire relationship with Him. 


Next, we read from Romans 5.   Verse 5 & 6 are our memory verses for this week.  It says that we are to live in harmony with each other and to treat each other with the attitude of Jesus. What a challenge!!  But the passage has lots of great things in it before our memory verses, too.  Verse one reminds us that we are not living just to please ourselves, but to please Him  It also tells us that God will help us be patient and encourage us as we attempt to follow His example of loving all people, no matter how different they are. 

Finally, we read 1 Corinthians 12. 12-18. 
This is a familiar passage about the body of Christ being one body with many different parts.  We have different backgrounds, different talents, different ways of thinking and seeing things.  However, we share the common bond of Jesus Christ and that connection that we have in Him is much stronger than the differences we have.  And we must also understand that we need each other.  Each member of the body of Christ has a role to do to help the body function.  If we try to separate and do things on our own, we will wind up unable to be used at all.  We have a role to play, but we also need each other.

That being said, it is important that we act on our challenge for the week.  That is to see others the way God sees them and to let His love in us be more powerful than our eyes so that we can love others with a genuine love that comes from Him, instead of writing them off because they are different.

It was a great discussion - hope you enjoyed it too.  This coming Sunday, we will look at "What if Someone Hates me?"   Hope to see you there!