In the absence of an Associational Missionary to share a few words of wisdom, the cover story of upcoming issues will spotlight people or events within our Association that have brought glory to God.
On March 27, 2021, the Women on Missions group at Friendship Baptist Church hosted an Annie Armstrong Spring Tea. Jessica Bryan, wife of Chris Bryan (our BCM’s campus minister at GSU), was the guest speaker as we celebrated a “Tapestry of Friendship.”
As Jessica shared some of the lessons she learned through God’s blessing of adoption, we were reminded that “We have an opportunity to be woven into God’s picture of reconciliation spanning the course of history, a picture so radically different from the world that it draws people to Jesus.” [Selah Ulmer, “The Diverse Beauty of God’s Tapestry: the Unlikely Friendship of Annie Armstrong and Nannie Helen Burroughs” (Missions Mosaic, Feb. 2021)].
Christians have been adopted by the Creator—God the Father. We have experienced what God the Son proclaimed in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” It is our privilege to live in such a way that we reflect His perfect, sacrificial love, “draw[ing] people to Jesus.”
How does this magnetic love look? “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails” (1 Cor. 13:4-8).
We “have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer [we] who live, but Christ lives in [us]; and the life which [we] now live in the flesh [we] live by faith in the Son of God, who loved [us] and gave Himself for” us (Gal. 2:20). THIS is the life of a child of The KING of kings!
As mere humans, living in the midst of such turmoil, loving this sincerely, this selflessly, is by no means an easy task. But did our Redeemer ever promise that it would be? No! He simply expects His followers to obey Him in faith (Jn. 14:15 & 2 Thes. 1:6-9).
That obedience demands we “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. … Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:8 & 10).