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Yes, And…

One of the matters I love most
about the Church, the Body of
Christ, is its ‘SOP’. I didn’t know
what a ‘SOP’ was until last
week. It’s a ‘Standard Operating
Procedure.’ If I were to ask you
what the baseline ‘Standard
Operating Procedure’ is for the Church, you’d most likely agree it is
to, “love one another as Christ loves us.” You may even be more
specific and say, “to do unto others as we would have them do
unto us.” Wouldn’t that be a wonderful world?

‘Love’ is a bit vague for me, although I understand how easy it is to
grasp doing to one another what we’d like done for us. If you’d like
someone to send you a birthday card, make sure you ‘do’ that for
others. If you’d like someone to befriend you and give you a warm
welcome, make sure you ‘do’ that ‘unto others’. If you’d prefer
people to be kind to you… well, you get the picture!

I prefer another word: ‘encourage’. This is because a verse
became branded onto my heart like a divine tattoo when I read
it. It’s Hebrews 3:13, which says, “…encourage one another daily,
as long as it called ‘Today’, so that none of you may be hardened
by sin’s deceitfulness.”

That’s so simple, isn’t it? Is today, ‘Today’? Yes! What do we
need as top of our ‘to-do’ list today? “Encourage one another!”

Oh, it gets better. The word used in the Greek is the same word
used of The Holy Spirit – the Comforter, the Encourager, the ‘One-
called-alongside-to-help-us’. Thus, our Daily Mission, our Standard
Operating Procedure in the Body of Christ, is to Encourage One
Another… which is the very same Daily Mission of The Holy Spirit!

Combine this with Jesus declaration of why He came, and I think
we know what we’ve got to do! He said, “I have come that they
might have LIFE and have it more ABUNDANTLY!” I’m ‘shouting’
there because it gets me SO excited. He made it even clearer by

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