Your favorite candidate will win or lose based on how our country votes this November. However, the church will win or lose based on our behavior between now and then. 

Becoming a Christian is easy. It won't cost you anything. But Jesus never invited anyone to become a Christian. He invites us to follow. 

The reason we often struggle to love “those” people is that we don’t agree with them. That’s problematic when “those” people are over there, but it gets infinitely more difficult when “those” people become “that” person—in our families, our neighborhoods, or even our workplaces. Paul had lots of “those” people, and he gives us some great advice on dealing with them.

“Those” people are the worst. In most cases, we believe we can keep “those” people over there, and when they are over there, we can avoid dealing with them and relating to them. But what if being over there doesn’t actually keep them out of our relationships? And what if what’s “over there” is hurting us?

Those people can be the worst. You know who “those people” are, right? We all have them, and they are difficult to like, much less love. So it’s helpful to know that Jesus had “those people” too, and his love for them drove him to understand them.

There is more to your circumstances than meets the eye. Your current circumstances are a chapter. They are not the full story.

While we don't always choose our circumstances, we do have the ability to choose our responses. But the response that has the potential to reverse the natural course of things isn't natural at all.

For many of us, there's something we wish we'd been doing all along to prepare for what is happening now. Whatever lessons we’re learning, now is the time to start putting them into practice.

We avoid things we don’t like. But sometimes things come our way that we can’t avoid. When our circumstances deteriorate, what do we do when there’s nothing we can do?

Perhaps nothing characterized the life of Jesus more than his pursuit of people whose lives and lifestyles did not look like his. If we fail to listen to people who don't experience the world the way we do, we will never bear their burden.