What is an Anabaptist Christian?

1. What is an Anabaptist Christian? Part 3

2. Core Value #1: Jesus is the center of our faith. • Core Value #2: Community is the center of our lives.

3. “You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty.

4. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.” Matthew 5:43-48 (The Message)

5. “As the father has sent me, so send I you.” John 20:21

6. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.

7. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:16–21

8. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 1 Peter 2:23

9. Core Value #1: Jesus is the center of our faith. • Core Value #2: Community is the center of our lives. • Core Value #3: Reconciliation is the center of our work.

10. Reconciliation is the center of our work. • Accepting Jesus leads to transformed living.

11. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21

12. Reconciliation is the center of our work. • Accepting Jesus leads to transformed living. • Transformed people “thinkreconciliation.”

13. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Colossians 1:19-20

14. Reconciliation is the center of our work. • Accepting Jesus leads to transformed living. • Transformed people “thinkreconciliation.” • Transformed people work for peace.

15. ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty. Zechariah 4:6