Jesus Army: Magazine - Rant and rave

THERE IS something wonderfully beautiful about a people who are willing to put friendship above everything else.

In our church, some of us choose to make a deliberate promise of friendship and commitment to each other and to God. We call it covenant.

Making a covenant like this, with each other, is amazingly potent stuff because it means people will really choose to put others before themselves. Friendship is secured, fears are stilled, emotions are healed, paranoia stifled.

When commitment like this takes place in a church, people are free to be themselves and discover who they were meant to be. No-one's going to be dumped - we're in it for the long haul. Love has its way. People commit to look out for each other -for good.

Covenant commitment of this kind doesn't start with us - it starts with God. This is perhaps best seen when Jesus sat round a table with His friends and told them "the meal we're eating now, the bread and the wine, symbolises the life I'm going to share with you for ever. Even as this bread gets broken and the wine poured out so I'm going to pour out My life for you."

It's a meal Christians have been sharing for thousands of years since He made that promise. It's powerful. Just as Jesus laid down His life for us; we lay down our lives for Him and for each other. This means the death of selfishness, but, as Jesus said at that first famous meal:

"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command." (John 15:12-14)

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