There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it up carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the jacket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell. 

C. S. Lewis – The Four Loves

“Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

The local church is the hope of the world. The local church who understands that Jesus is the Savior of the world is the hope for the world.

The way the church lives into her vision is not so much by trying to change the world around her as much as she presents herself as the proof that the world has already been changed by Jesus. How can the church do that? The only way the church can do that is by living as a people who are already living in the changed world. We are supposed to be different.

The world is supposed to look at the church, and even when they don’t understand nor can believe the things about Jesus, still desire that the message of Jesus to be true…because of the way the church lives.

Thy will be done.

Yes, Jesus. May your will be done. Here on earth as it is in heaven. How does that happen? As the church stakes everything – its traditions, its preferences, its norms, its very life – for the sake of accomplishing the mission to proclaim the saving faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord.

The church – the way we worship, the times we worship, the songs, the prayers, the liturgy or the lack of it – it has all changed over the years. These are tools to help the church accomplish her mission. When there are better ways, if there are more effective ways to accomplish the mission of Jesus Christ for the world – the church must change, adapt.

The message cannot ever change – Jesus will always be the only Savior of the world.

Methods must change over time. If they didn’t, we’d all be wearing monk’s robes, singing chants.

Yes, Jesus. May your will be done, here at the Little Church as it is in heaven.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die, 
a time to plant and a time to uproot, 
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a times to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to serach and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, 
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

The late great coach of the Miami Dolphins, Don Shula, would tell his players, “You haven’t learned a thing until take action and use it. Learning is defined as a change in behavior.”

You haven’t learned a thing until you change. You have to take what you know and apply it to make changes to your life. That’s the only way you get better.

Look at that last sentence again – that’s the only way you get better.

What is true for football is ever more true for the Christian life. Following Jesus means changing on a daily basis as we learn more about what it means to be a Christ-follower. Following Jesus means becoming more like Jesus. Following Jesus means we change and transform more to the image of Christ.