reVerb --- what makes us rich [+] Tuesday E-Devotion

We are in the middle of our summer mission trip and are working at SonRise Baptist Church in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Pray for our team as well as pastor David and the SonRise Church family.

 

This past Sunday I continued sharing our reVerb with The Community family, and we talked about what we really treasure.  Here are some of those notes:

 

What creates REVERB in your home?  Out in our community?  Or right here?  It is time to find a way to get the attention of our community and while we have their attention, tell them about Jesus.

 

Yet here is the fact.  It is hard for me and for many of us to really understand where lost people, what unchurched people think, how lost people respond.  That means we have to find some common ground.  Who do you think is gonna move?  It has to be us.  No question. 

 

We are trying to be cutting edge and sharp.  We want to be touching lives of people out there and away from God.  Far too often we trying to relevant, we are answering question, we are talking in some of the right places, but we are not answering the questions that lost people are asking and nowhere near where lost people really are.

       

I long to be where lost people, answering question that people who aren't in church are asking and seeing God work in huge, huge ways.  But that takes some changes and major adjustment.  Are we willing?  But it might be uncomfortable.  Are we willing?  The big question is: do we really care about lost people?  If we do, we have to take some new direction as individuals and as a church.

       

Jesus created REVERB.  We are to do the same.  My point in this series is that we must reflect and amplify the love of God.

 

1 John 4:12 (nlt) --- No one has seen God as any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.

 

Matthew 13:44-46 (nlt) --- The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field.  Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant on the lookout for choice pearls.  When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and bought it!

 

In those verse these people were all the time looking for God, living with real purpose and so very often doing some strange things.  Why?  Because they knew that life is not about what is here and now.  Life is really about God, heaven and the purpose that He blesses us with.

 

We are rich ONLY when we treasure and want what God treasures and what God wants.

 

Frances Chan in Crazy Love quoted C.S. Lewis.  "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.  It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." (page 73)