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By EVA WOLEVER
Witness Correspondent
WORSHIP Family musical ensemble Annie Moses Band led in worship during the FBSC. Joni B. Hannigan
In a world full of tragedy and death, that song is continually interrupted, Sanchez said. It was interrupted when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, when planes crashed into the twin towers in New York City, and when a soldier opened fire on the people at Fort Hood.
“What the world needs now is not just a fuzzy sentimental feeling that some people call love,” Sanchez said. “It needs God’s love desperately today, God’s redeeming, transforming and sustaining love.”
The world will only know this love if Christians exhibit it, Sanchez said. Drawing from the Gospel of John, Sanchez said God’s people must recognize that God loved them first and that His abounding love is the source and initiator of their love for Him. Reading from Romans 8, Sanchez said God’s love is eternal and inseparable.
Citing Jesus’ command to love God with all your heart, mind and soul, Sanchez exhorted Christians to imagine living each day in the truth of God’s unfailing love.
“With all your heart fix all your attention supremely on God more strongly than anything or anyone else,” Sanchez said. “With all your soul be willing to give up your life and be willing to devote it to Him in service. With all your mind let God’s love permeate your intellectual life, dispositions, attitudes, thoughts, ideas, and convictions. With all our strength we are to offer our physical capabilities, strength and power to Him as a living sacrifice.”
Sanchez told about a pastor who one Sunday told the congregation that the following week he would collect the church’s largest offering. The next Sunday deacons filed in carrying extra large offering plates. When the time came for the offering, the pastor asked members of the congregation to come to the front and stand in the offering plates offering themselves to God.
“Imagine if we love the Lord with our total being,” Sanchez said.
“Imagine if we loved one another.”
Pulling a piece of the Berlin wall from his pocket, Sanchez said nothing is impossible with God. Referring to 1 John 4, Sanchez said Christians should love one another as Christ loved. Recalling a story from a time just after the fall of the Berlin wall, Sanchez shared how one woman exhibited love for an enemy.
After the fall of East Germany’s communist government, a man attended a church service and responded to an invitation to accept Christ. As members of the church greeted him, a woman walked up to him. She told him that he was the communist judge who had sent her to prison for telling people about Jesus. She then told him he was now her brother in Christ and hugged him, welcoming him into the church.
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