Have you ever had a tragedy strike? Has tragedy ever struck someone close to you? How did people respond to you during the tragedy?

For some of us that answer might be that no one helped. Others might be blessed enough to respond that the help and the response was overwhelming. If you find yourself on the side of the fence that there was never any help in the face of tragedy, I am sorry. And I would like you to ask yourself a few questions.

First, how involved are you in your local church? As I was growing up I often heard my parents tell me that in order to have friends I need to be a friend. Before your tragedy struck were you involved actively in your local church? We live in a day and age  where we want to put the burden of being involved upon the church, but ultimately that burden lies with ourselves. Hebrews 10:25 encourages us to not forsake the gathering of fellow believers. We should not put our level of involvement in the local church contingent upon other people. Ultimately our involvement with the local church lies with our desire to want to serve rather than to be served.

Which leads to the second question. When you go to church do you go to get something out of it, or to put something into it? Mark 10:45 tells us that even Jesus did not come to this earth to get something out of it, but rather he came to put his whole life into it. It’s the last part of that verse I want you to focus on. He gave his life… When we get involved with another body of believers are we going there to invest our life to better other peoples lives? Or do we merely wan to be part of the church to make our lives better? If we go to church to only make our lives better we will never see true growth. But if we go to give our lives to others, amazingly we will find the most blessed life we could ever live. We are living out the mind of Christ as we are considering the interests, the tragedies, the heart aches, the sufferings, the good times and the bad as more important than our own junk.

So if you are in the church or if you are out of the church I’m challenging you to consider asking yourself these two questions and responding in the way that Jesus Christ himself would. First realize that Jesus Christ did not stand outside the world and just shout: “come be my friends”. He came into our midst, he got dirty and even broken by us so that we could have fellowship with him. Secondly, he did all of this for the benefit of those he loves and not his own benefit.

So I challenge us as believers to love as God loves and see how our tragedies look when we live this way. For even God had to love us first before we would love him in return. And the same can be said of today that we must first love others in order for them to love us. 1 John 4:7-8.