Church as an Ideal: Love God and Neighbor

Jesus does not quote Confucius or Forrest Gump. Instead, he quotes some scripture that as a faithful Jew, he would have prayed twice a day, every day for the entirety of his life. He says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. The center of all you do, with all your soul, the thing that makes you you, with all your mind, what you think, what you believe, with all your strength, all your energy. And he says, you shall love your neighbor yourself. Anything you would seek for your own good, seek that for your neighbor too. And he says, there is no greater commandment than these. [00:37:57] (73 seconds)  #LoveGodLoveNeighbor

There is no other way forward for us than to fully accept that we will not be able to live perfectly into the ideal set before us, but that they are the goal on which we set our eyes and work toward. Oscar Wilde once said, in fiction, good people do good things and bad people do bad things. That's why it's called fiction. Because in the real world, even really good people do bad things. So the task before us is not to lower the bar, but to accept and be honest about where we fall short and to be gracious to others where they fall short and to strive together to live more fully into that high bar that we say is our ideal. [00:45:39] (52 seconds)  #StriveForTheIdeal

Every time we fail to make someone feel welcome, every time we forget an important detail in someone's life, every time one of our volunteers or leaders feels underappreciated in their efforts, every time we get a name wrong in the bulletin, every time we say, you matter here, and then we do something that makes you feel like the opposite is actually true, we fail to live into the ideal that we've set for ourselves. So what are we to do? I think the first thing is that we don't throw out the ideal simply because it's hard. The solution is not to lower the bar. That's why we have ideals because they help us set our sights on something worth working and struggling to become. [00:43:45] (58 seconds)  #HoldFastToIdeals

I will never forget the Sunday morning that I set up here as the service was beginning and Fred Jacobs, God bless him, someone was sitting in his seat and he said to the person sitting in his seat, you are in my seat. I sit there. You have to find somewhere else to sit. And he said it loud enough that while the piano was playing and I was sitting here, I could hear every word of it. I will give you one guess how many more times that family came back to worship with First Baptist Church. Our words, our actions, our attitudes, our expectations have consequences. And we are at our best when we choose to love. [00:47:51] (63 seconds)  #WordsHaveConsequences