Love Is an Action

In one paragraph

Dave Hatfield, who serves with his wife Kim in Nakuru, Kenya, brought a message about what it actually looks like to love your neighbor and why that matters more than fixing the world around us. He drew on seven years of work in a dumpsite community, the conversion of a gang leader named Wesley, and daily Bible reading with a growing church of 120 to 200 people to show what the gospel does when it...

Read together

1. Isaiah 61 Jesus unrolls the scroll in the synagogue and reads that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him to bring good news to the poor
2. John 1 Dave and Wesley read the opening of John together, leading to a daily Bible reading church community
3. John 14:15 quoted as Jesus saying if you love me you will obey my commands
4. Philippians 2:13 cited to show that God is working in believers giving them desire and power to do what pleases him
5. James 4:11 do not speak evil against each other, cited as an expression of God's will
6. Luke 6:27 love your enemies, do good to those who hate you
7. Luke 6:35 love your enemies, do good to them, lend without expecting repayment
8. Romans 12 do not copy the behavior of this world but let God transform you by changing the way you think, then you will know the will of God

Talk about it

1. Dave described the Beatitudes not as upside-down thinking but as the way God actually sees things, saying our poverty and lack are what drive us to seek God with our whole heart. Where in your own life has a situation you could not fix been the thing that brought you closest to God?
2. Dave said he went to Kenya having read maybe a quarter of the Bible, but he said yes anyway. What tends to hold you back from saying yes to God before you know exactly what he is asking you to do?
3. Dave talked about how Wesley and the gang members built a church and kept showing up every day to read the Bible together, and how that daily time in the word changed lives in ways that education and programs alone could not. What does your own daily time in Scripture look like, and what has it produced in you?
4. Dave pointed to James and to Luke 6 and said that loving our neighbors is not a feeling but an action, giving specific examples like giving a coat, healing the sick, touching the untouchable. Where is there a person in your life right now who needs that kind of concrete, costly love from you?
5. Dave asked the congregation to look at each other and say, 'You are the temple of the Holy Spirit,' and said we tend to look at others only in their worst moments rather than as people built to hold God's Spirit. How would it change the way you treat a difficult person in your life if you genuinely saw them that way?