by Mac Frazier

We're getting ready to expand our horizons, and you're invited to join the fun! On February 27th, New Way Church will be officially opening the doors to a new kind of Christian community. Come celebrate a great new beginning with live music, an inspirational message, free refreshments and meaningful connections for everyone in your family. Start of your week with a blast of fun, and launch new friendships at the same time!

This is something we've been building to as a team since our first monthly worship gathering in a hotel conference room last August. And on a personal level, I've been praying, planning, speaking and working towards this public launch literally for years. So am I excited? You bet! Nervous? Uh huh. It feels very much like getting ready for a new birth.

So we are pulling out all the stops to let everyone around us know that New Way Church is here, and we are warmly inviting everyone and anyone to come try us out. We've done a good bit of advertising, both online and through the mail, but the most important way of getting our invitations out is through people like you.

So please forward this email to a friend. Or have a conversation. Or send them a link to our website. Or send out a Facebook invite. We're not asking for anyone to commit to anything. Our invitation is, simply, "Come and see!" I think we have something special--unique to Central Texas, even--and it's important to me that everyone who might benefit from participating in this community in some way have a chance to do so. And the only way that can happen is if they all know we are here.

To kick off New Way, we will be starting a four-part series, "The Love Secrets" that will present powerful spiritual principles that anyone can use in real life situations. For more information about this series, see the description elsewhere in this newsletter. 

Want an easy way to invite a friend? Click here to go to the Facebook event for our Launch, and then click "Select Guests to Invite"... 

Something to Think About

We all know it's important to treat other people well, but is this just "common courtesy"? Or is there something more spiritual involved?

Take a minute to read over the following from number 444 in the book, True Christian Religion, and then reflect on how love plays a spiritual role in your life:

When our moral life is also spiritual, it is a life of charity, because the practices involved in a moral life and in a life of charity are the same. Charity is wishing our neighbors well and therefore treating them well. This is also a moral way of life. The following statement by the Lord is a spiritual law:

All things whatever that you want people to do for you, do likewise for them. This is the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

This same law is universally applicable to a moral life as well. But listing all the practices related to goodwill and comparing them with the practices related to a moral life would require many pages. Just take six commandments from the second tablet of the Ten Commandments for an illustration - it is clear to everyone that they are principles for a moral life. (As for their containing all aspects of loving our neighbor, see 329, 330, and 331 above.)

The following statement in Paul makes it clear that goodwill fulfills all the commandments: 

Love each other, for those who love others have fulfilled the law. The commandments that you are not to commit adultery, you are not to kill, you are not to steal, you are not to bear false witness, you are not to covet, and anything else that has been commanded, are included in the following saying: "You are to love your neighbor as yourself." Goodwill does not do evil to its neighbor. Goodwill is the fullness of the law. (Romans 13:8, 9, 10)

People who think only with their outer selves cannot help being astounded that the seven commandments on the second tablet were proclaimed by Jehovah on Mount Sinai in such a miraculous way, given that these same rules were legal principles of civic justice in all the countries on earth, including Egypt, where the children of Israel had just come from. No country can survive without these rules.

The reason why Jehovah proclaimed them, however, and wrote them with his own finger on tablets of stone was that they are rules not only for all civic communities and therefore rules for a moral earthly life, they are also rules for all heavenly communities and therefore rules for a moral spiritual life. Acting against these rules then is acting not only against other people but also against God.