If you say you love Christ…

In church on Sunday, flipping through my Bible just before watching and listening to yet another fabulous Christmas program at OCBF, a verse caught my eye. (For those of you that know me, you will know that I attend the greatest church in the world, led by the greatest pastor in the world, Dr. Anthony Evans. If you doubt it, attend just one service! That’s all it takes! Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship 1808, Camp Wisdom Road, Oak Cliff, Texas).


The verse is 1 John 4:20 ‘If someone says, “I love God” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God, whom he has not seen?’. And if you are in any doubt as to who your brother is, Christ answers that in Matthew 25:34-40; our brethren, the least of our brethren, are the poor, the needy, the sick, those in prison. Christ does not make any distinctions along ethnicity or even religion. In 1 John 4:12 John writes ‘No one has seen God at any one time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.’ Wow! Truly that was my reaction; because I was struck anew by the importance of what we’re doing; building this library, showing love, agape love to a community, actually illuminates God in us. It filled me anew with the determination to build this library, because imperfect as we are, God’s love is perfected in us, by the love that we show.

Kirk Franklin put it another way in one of his songs ‘The Last Jesus’ where in one of the choruses it goes –

‘If we say we love Jesus, but they can’t see our Jesus, tell me, what’s the use if they can’t see Jesus in you and me? No more excuses we give it all away because we may be, the only Jesus they see’.

What an awesome responsibility; yet a most rewarding one. I sincerely hope, that one day soon, with your love and compassion, the children of Iga, will see the Jesus in all of us, as we build ‘A Library in Iga’.