Matthew 5:48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Romans 12:21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

1. Being a child of God means constantly fighting against the __________ of the __________ and our natural ____________ in order to __________ God's will.

2. Just as children __________ their parents, we are created in the image of God and will reflect His love towards others, even our ____________.

3. While we were God's __________, God __________ our evil with His gracious love in Christ.

Scripture Readings
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37

Take It With You!

Here we will offer thoughts and meditations on the message to help us as we contemplate and discuss and wrestle with what we are hearing.

How then does love conquer? By asking not how the enemy treats her but only how Jesus treated her. The love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross and into fellowship with the Crucified. The more we are driven along this road, the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred. For then it is not the disciple's own love, but the love of Jesus Christ alone, who for the sake of his enemies went to the cross and prayed for them as he hung there. In the face of the cross the disciples realized that they too were his enemies, and that he had overcome them by his love. It is this that opens the disciple's eyes, and enables him to see his enemy as a brother. He knows that He owes his very life to One, who though he was his enemy, treated him as a brother and accepted him, who made him his neighbor, and drew him into fellowship with himself. The disciple can now perceive that even his enemy is the object of God's love, and that he stands like himself beneath the cross of Christ. God asked us nothing about our virtues and our vices, for in his sight even our virtue was ungodliness. God's love sought out his enemies who needed it, and whom he deemed worthy of it. God loves his enemies - that is the glory of his love, as every follower of Jesus knows; through Jesus he has become a partaker in this love. For God allows his sun to rise upon the just and the unjust. But it is not only the earthly sun and the earthly rain: the "Sun of God's righteousness" and rain of God's Word which are on the sinner, and reveal the grace of the Heavenly Father. Perfect, all-inclusive love is the act of the Father, it is also the act of the sons of God as it was the act of the only-begotten Son.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship