God’s Friends and Family

Welcome Friends & Family!

Thank you for being a part of our Friends & Family Day. Throughout the year we have special days to invite those closest to us to come be a part of our worship and enjoy a meal together. We are so glad are with us today!

This year is a special year for us in that we are celebrating 65 years in this community. Though we have met in in various locations for over 80 years, we moved into what was to become this neighborhood in August of 1957. We are located near the very center of the Winstead Park community. We want to renew our commitment to you to be your neighborhood church!

Today, my lesson, is entitled, God’s Friends and Family. That’s how we see ourselves and we want to invite you into that relationship.

We all know how important friendships are in our lives. The Bible speaks to the enduring and supporting nature of these relationships.

Proverbs 18:24 A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 17:17 A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

How wonderful is it to know that God wants to be our friend!

John 15:12-17 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit– fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. 17 This is my command: Love each other.

God has invited us into a relationship with him and his family that will last for all eternity! Can you imagine the All Powerful, Creator, of the Universe wanting to be your friend? It is beyond our comprehension.

Romans 8:31-32 What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all– how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

John 3:16-17 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Through his death on the cross Jesus demonstrated the greatest love a friend could give by laying down his life so we could have this relationship with him.

The Bible also describes our relationship in terms of family. We are God’s children by creation—he made us, we are his. However, we also are God’s children in a very special sense. He has invited us to be like him and call him, Father.

1 John 3:1-2 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

I’ll say more in my lesson!

Joey