Welcome!

Joy! Lutheran Church is filled with Over the Top Fans! An Over the Top fan is not something you are…it’s something you become. It’s a process that begins when you first encounter God’s grace (reaching UP). Then it wells up each time you engage with the Joy! community (reaching IN), until you overflow and express your joy through serving others and sharing your faith (reaching OUT).

Listen to the Encounter/Engage/Express sermon series at: Joy!Cast.

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Fans! Over the Top with Radical Love

We are passionate about…Christ’s radical love.

Radical surgery goes after the problem with every tool possible. It is radical because the problem or threat is so great that it is time to get over being timid. There are no half measures that will do. This is not an incremental approach. It’s all or nothing.

Christ’s radical love is an “all in” kind of love. There is nothing halfway or timid about it. Here’s what Paul writes in Romans:

“…at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8 NIV)

Christ’s death reveals his radical love. It is a love that isn’t focused on the easy to love, but it reaches the “powerless…ungodly…sinners.” It isn’t a love that finds a particular group to love it is love that reaches out to all. Paul wrote “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) “All” are the target for this love. This isn’t love that shows up in a hug or kind words but in a broken body and shed blood. That is radical!

What does radical love do? It meets each of us in our sin, guilt and shame…beckoning us to come to the cross with Christ who has taken everyone’s sin, guilt and shame there ahead of us. At the cross we are united with him and in his resurrection we are freed from sin and death…no longer to be slaves to it. It is a radical surgery.

Again we read Paul:

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:4-11 NIV)

This is radical love given for you. It is love that removes the problem and the threat so radically that we come out of it anew…a new life and a new identity. “…count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

We are passionate about Christ’s radical love because it has changed us.

Pastor Scott Hackler

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Most Recent Blog Posts:

• Fans! Over the Top with Radical Love
• The Fan: A relationship with Jesus?
• Becoming an "Over the Top fan"
• Our Mission: A New Creation
• Our Strategic Mission