Our Slogan "Becoming Like Jesus, Serving in Love

I am very excited about our new slogan and vision. If you want a six words to live by, you can't do much better than these -- becoming like Jesus, serving in love. They remind us that our central purpose in life is to model our life around Christ. Think about it. We read His words... pray to Him... obey Him... imitate Him... teach Him... . In all these ways we are striving to think, act, be like Jesus.

We do not become like Jesus solely or even predominately by our own effort, but by cooperation with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit works to bring us to faith. Once we choose to receive the gift of grace, then the Holy Spirit is activated within us in a new and wonderful way. Day by day He urges and encourages us to live our lives in the way of Jesus. Growing in faithfulness, we mature into the likeness of Christ. Paul says, "We are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit," (II Corinthians 3:18 NIV). The NRSV translates this "we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." It is the journey of a Christian to become like Jesus.

As we gain knowledge of Christ, we understand that our mission is to take his love out to everybody in this needy world. And God sends us out to serve the world in love. These are not sequential events. They occur at the same time in our life. As we are called to reshape our lives in Jesus image, we are also called to take this experience of grace out into the world. In other words, as Jesus loves us we are likewise to love the world. That is what we mean by "serving in love".

As a congregation, we strive to manifest this slogan. We provide many opportunities for people to bring God's love to hurting people. We do this through our adult deputations to far off disasters like the Gulf Coast hurricanes and to nearby ones in our own state like in the Lewis County flood. We do this through our Presbyterian Women's ceaseless efforts to help vulnerable women and children throughout the globe. Those are just two of the dozens of ways we serve others.

God has invited us to deepen and broaden both our service and our love of Him. This call is expressed in our Vision and in our goals and objectives. I'll write about those later.

Let our prayer be to daily become more like Jesus in character and service!