Do You Love Me?

Jesus asked Peter a question; "Peter, do you love me?"  In fact, Jesus asked that same question of Peter in the Gospel of John not once, but three times.

Now this all took place after Jesus' resurection.  Jesus met Peter and a handful of other close friends on a beach and cooked them breakfast.  It was after they had all eaten that Jesus asked Peter the same question...three times.  "Peter, do you love me?"  Each time, Peter answered yes.  Each time Jesus then reminded Peter to feed His lambs.

In plain English, Jesus was asking Peter to show his love by taking care of those people that were in his circle of friends and community, and even to those who Peter hardly even knew.  So, what does this mean to us who are followers of Christ?

Tonight as I was getting ready for bed, I decided to check in at our church's high school youth group's Facebook page (click here).  Part of my "administrative duties" (chuckle, chuckle) is seeing if what we're doing at TrinityShine is helping our friends and our community, and even those who we hardly know.  One of the things that I use is Facebook's built-in analysis tool called "Insights".

As of tonight, the TrinityShine page has 71 friends.  That's pretty good considering we just started this page about 6 weeks ago.  Each week, there are about 4,000 "post views".  According to Facebook, that is the number of times that people have viewed a News Feed story posted by our page.

4,000 times!

Well, that got me thinking.  We have 71 friends on our TrinityShine page.  Each of those friends have on average 100 or so friends (actually the number is way higher).  Each of their friend's friends also have about 100 friends.  That's a huge number of people, even considering that my personal circle of friends over-laps your circle of friends and so-forth.

Just for giggles, humor me.  Let's assume that any 1 person's group of friends overlaps another person's group of friends alot.  So that in my group of 100 friends, you are friends with 75 of them.  If I did the math right, that would mean we have a potential of over 40,000 unique individuals that could become a friend of the TrinityShine page.

40,000 individuals that we could minister to as part of our outreach!

Do you think that maybe some of those 40,000 individuals are hurting tonight?

I think very few of us are motivated by guilt or fear.  Certainly, we would not do our best if our motivation came from these darker feelings.

But love motivates us differently.  Love brings out our best.  Love even gets me to take dance lessons because I know that my beautiful wife Kat enjoys dancing.  Love makes us "SHINE"...eh?

What would happen if each one of us, the 71 friends of the TrinityShine page; invited all our Facebook friends to "Like" our page?

What would happen if we encouraged each of our friends to also encourage their friends and so forth and so on?

Do you think that there might be 1 student out there that is thinking of suicide tomorrow?  Might we reach this person?  I wonder what his name is?

Or how about a student's mom that is drinking too much?  I wonder how lonely she is?

You can probably come up with a bunch of examples yourself.  Could Jesus use us to reach out in love by simply inviting your friends to "Like" our page?

I'll say this.  It took a wonderful old lady thay I did not know to reach out to me back when I was a student.  She simply asked me whether or not I was ready to accept the love of Jesus.

What might happen?

Please "Like" the TrinityShine page (click here).

"Do you love me?"

John 21: 15-19