In this part of the question I will use quotations from the scriptures to explain how we as Christians should live out our lives outside of church. Firstly in John's Gospel Jesus says 'I have a new commandment to give you, Love one-another
A02 In this part of the essay I am going to show how members of the Baptist and Catholic Churches try to live out what they have celebrated in Church. The actual meaning of the word Eucharist is 'thanksgiving', when Christians of all denominations gather together to ay thank to you God for all he has done for us, much like the American feast of thanksgiving, the Eucharist is a time of community, unity and solidarity, as by sharing the bread and wine together as a family, we are symbolizing that we are sons and daughters of God. In this part of the question I will use quotations from the scriptures to explain how we as Christians should live out our lives outside of church. Firstly in John's Gospel Jesus says 'I have a new commandment to give you, Love one-another as I have loved you. A man can show no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends'. This is a very powerful and important quotation, because it pretty much sums up how we should live our
lives, in general it tells us that we must love one-another as Jesus loved us, so we must care about our friends as well as our enemies, it also tell us that the greatest love we can show is to lay down our lives for our friends, I believe that there is a literal and non-literal meaning to this, literal because if anyone was about to be knocked down by a car then it is the duty of any good Christian, as it is such a pure unselfish thing to take your life in order to save another's, however it ...
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lives, in general it tells us that we must love one-another as Jesus loved us, so we must care about our friends as well as our enemies, it also tell us that the greatest love we can show is to lay down our lives for our friends, I believe that there is a literal and non-literal meaning to this, literal because if anyone was about to be knocked down by a car then it is the duty of any good Christian, as it is such a pure unselfish thing to take your life in order to save another's, however it can mean that we must spend time in our lives dedicated to our friends, we should aid them, help the through times of difficulty and strife, laying down our lives can in fact be just simple things like giving up some of my leisure time in order to help a friend through a tough time. In this Gospel we also find the parable of the sheep and the goats, this is quite important as it tells us how to live our lives, and when combined with the above passage, together they can give us a pretty good idea on how we can live our lives it tells us that we should love god with all your heart, with all our soul, with all our body and with all our mind, we must also love our neighbour as we ourselves, we must love our friends and our enemies equally, so when all these are put together we find some good guidelines for our lives that we can run by. However I find the story of the sheep and the goats particularly interesting because it tells us about judgement day and how God will separate the sheep from the goats and he will question them and say, 'when I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked you clothed me' and Jesus goes on talking as if he were the homeless person or the person who you think the least of, and then he will turn to the goats and say 'when I was in prison you abandoned me when had no shelter you turned me away'. The Goats will reply, when did we see you hungry, or naked or with no shelter, and Jesus will reply by saying one of my favourite bible quotes, 'when you did it to the least important of men, that was done unto me', so we must not act like the sinful goats, but be the followers of Jesus like the sheep, so Christians have a duty to treat others with respect, no matter who they are, because Jesus will take it as a personal offence to himself. So what I'm trying to say is that as Christians we are duty bound to practice what we preach and what we celebrate. As Christians cannot celebrate communion and then not try to reflect what they've learnt in their everyday life. We should try and be a source of unity and love in the world to those who need it, as these are the values we learn by attending communion. In this section I am going to look at two different Christian denominations and look at how they try and live out Christian values into their lives. First I am going to examine Catholics. Some Catholics appear to be quite lax in the way they attend church and live out their values, however some feel that there is more to being a good religious person than attending mass, going to mass is a good thing however I believe that we only get encouragement and good values for mass, with which we then go and preach to the rest of the world. And doing other good things like helping others, are also ways of living out the values. Things like choosing careers my mum could have been a regular teacher, however because of her religion she decided to go into special needs and help children there. Some Catholics believe that laying down our lives for one-another is of critical importance, whereas others believe that going to mass will suffice. Catholics also believe that helping those less well of is important too, as in my church there are various charity drives and fund raisers, to help those in less well off countries, as they believe that if we ignore people like this and go on with our lives then we will be like the goats and will be condemned.