This is going to be a part two of a series of a sermon I started a few weeks ago called It's a Risky Business. The fact of the matter is the way of Jesus is the way of risky love. The way of Jesus is a way of risky love. I look at how the world talks about love and you listen to radio and sometimes I'll listen to K-fan, the local sports station and get caught up in all the significant important things in life. You just listen to the dialogue of so many of the people on the radio and how it's just so clearly plain, they don't really get it. Everybody has a cry in their heart to be needed, to be loved, to be valued. That's how God made us. And yet so few people truly understand how to truly love somebody.

We had a dear friend, Dan Grooters, who is still part of this church, who 25 years ago got his video camera out and would video tape and then he would make duplicates and take it down. He did all the work. There was this guy from out of town, I think New York or out east somewhere. He ended up showing up at our church service. Well, we've ended up forging a 25 year friendship and he and his wife Jo, were part of our church for many years. I'd like to introduce Nick and Jo Lambo. Why don't you please come? They are going to share with us this morning.

Today is the anniversary of 9/11. You recall the many people who lost their lives that day. There is an echo that sometimes goes throughout our country about never forgetting. There is a balance that we have to have between being vigilant and not holding anger and bitterness in our hearts. There has been sins committed against each other since the dawn of time. The real antidote for letting those sins affect your life all the way to the grave is for us to learn how to walk in a way of releasing those sins against us and stuff. We all have them, we've all committed them and we've all had them committed against us.

I do believe that God has something very special for Hope Community. Not that he doesn't have anything special for other churches; he does. But the unique thing that God really wants for us is to follow the word that he said to his disciples when he said, "A new command I give on unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you." We don't even ask God to help us love in the way that we want to be loved, but rather we need to ask God to help us love as he has loved us and keep that as our model.

What was astonishing to me as I have read some history on, obviously, the tragedy of slavery in our country is that the golden rule was actually used by ministers to perpetuate slavery rather than to abolish it. So if the golden rule was used by Christian ministers to support both sides of the slavery issue. You have the abolitionist who used the golden rule to prohibit slavery, and you had the pro-slavery people that use a golden rule to purport it. I began to think to myself and ask myself, there seems to be a real limitation here on the value of the golden rule. It all depends on who the focus is of it. And I concluded that we needed a different gold standard.

Jesus is good. He's good all the time. Picture in your mind, the condition of the world, when God had to write on tablets of stone that his people should not kill each other or shouldn't take another man's wife, covet another man's property, that if another man was blessed and he had a nice plow you shouldn't steal it and kill him in the process. Picture a world where God had to write on tablets of stone, that you were to actually tell the truth to one another instead of lying to one another. Just picture that world for a moment and realize how sad a day it was when God wrote The Ten Commandments.

There is so much in this one sentence or phrase: do to others, what you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is in the law and the prophets. Before his time on earth was done, Jesus would teach his followers to actually transcend this moral principle. It was a relatively new thing. It was obviously a new thing in a very stunning way for his listeners. Believe it or not, Jesus wasn't actually the first person to make a religious maxim of a statement like this.

It's more important we live our mission than we know it. Then we can articulate it. Hallelujah. A couple weeks ago, I shared on this wonderful, wonderful story of Jesus encountering the woman at the well. And all of the religious and cultural things that in that one single encounter that Jesus was coming really against, there were five, what I would call, external identity markers. That's a term I wanted to use intentionally today because in our culture today, people are identifying as fill-in-the-blank.

It's so easy as Christians to buy into the culture that we live in. Our culture today is saying, you need to put a boundary around yourself. You need to do this. You need to stop people from doing that. I just don't see anywhere where the life of Jesus was a boundary. He was tired. He was weary. People would come to him and he wouldn't say, "Well, I'm not in my office right now. These are not my office hours."

How many like new and improved things? Sometimes people talk about the good old days and they are referring to a time that they have forgotten most of what the good old days were like, when you had to carry water to the cabin or go out to the pump and get it and heat it for just a sponge bath, no hot showers. Some of those kinds of things. And let me tell you something; I do not long for the good old days. amen.

God is always doing something new. How many know that? If you go back to the dawn of time, there are some things that God instituted and implemented that have simply been closed for good. In other words, he is gone out of business.