Showing Comprehensive Love

Finding a balance in our life is very important. If we are to be balanced in our life as believers in God and followers of Christ, we find out what we are missing, then add that to what we have and seek to balance them out. As local churches we often tip the scales sharply to one side or another of that range of God's love. Many local churches are focused on strengthening their congregants' spiritual development. Supplying a full dose of inspiring and relevant preaching, effective biblical teaching, intense prayer meetings, and offering both contemplative and charismatic worship experiences. All these are meant to provide God's love through well-rounded and biblically based spiritual nourishment.

Many other local churches are focused on Christ's missional goals that seek to provide sustainable material assistance to those who are the working poor, under-educated, hungry, homeless, routinely discriminated against, and are political pawns for the power brokers of our society. All these efforts are meant to provide God's love through tangible acts of care, social justice reform, and supplemental educational programs that seek to lift them out of their impoverished and socially deficient circumstances consistently over time. However, neither one of these models are comprehensive in their approach to showing God's love.

This weeks' reading is from John 6:24-35. John relates the story about the crowds of people following Jesus across the lake hoping to get another miracle feeding. Jesus told them that he knew they spent a lot of energy traveling a good distance just to get another meal. Then he said, "Don't work for the food that doesn't last, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you."

Later Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."

What can we do as believers in God to model Jesus' comprehensive approach to supply both tangible and sustainable acts of God's love, as well as leading people to the spiritual "Bread of Life" that will feed and fill them eternally?