Hey, this is Beth. Listen, what we live for at Living Proof is to serve people the Word of God.

We base our ministry on Hebrews 412 that tells us that the word is alive and active.

We pray this message is going to serve you in some way today and that God

is going to speak through it. Thank you so much for giving us this privilege. Look with me at John

chapter 15. I want to read familiar verses 12 through 17. My command is this. Love each other as I have

loved you. Greater love has no one than this than he laid down his life for his friends

now you'll recall with me last week's lesson we looked at it from the perspective of friendship with Christ

this week I promised you we would look at it from the perspective of love, of how we live this thing out.

Verse 14, you are my friends if you do what I command.

I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business.

Instead, I have called you friends for everything that I learned from my father.

I have made known to you.

You did not choose me, but I chose you

and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. Then the father will give you

whatever you ask in my name. Verse 17, he puts the other book in on it. This is my command. Love

each other.

A few days ago, I opened up the front page of the Houston Chronicle, and on the bottom of it, it says this, dietary advice at a glance, our do's and our don'ts.

And then it had a nice bold letter, because I was going to see, it's a new year, all of us are concerned about maybe this is when we're going to really think this through, do something a little bit different in our diet. So I begin to glance at it and what it says and a nice bowl thought is exercise and load up on veggies. Well, I yawned. And I folded it up and I put it down. You know why? Because there was nothing new. It bugs me that health advice is the same as it's always been. We're going to have to exercise and we're going to have to load up on some of our veggies. How boring we've heard that. That's why we like new diets because we want new advice, because new advice falls a new way on our old minds.

And if it's not new, it does not grip us because familiarity breeds contempt.

And if not contempt, familiarity breeds coldness.

I want to show you something as you and I are preparing to hear a lesson on love. We are going to be tempted to do the same thing I did with the front page of that

paper when it told me the same thing I've been hearing for the last 20 years. We're going to have to

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