We know, dear brothers and sisters, that God loves you and has chosen you to be his own people.
We have all kinds of resources at our disposal. Walk into any library and many of our homes, and there are thousands of books to read. Search the internet, and you will find endless information both useful and useless. Pull into the gas station, and most of the time you can buy fuel till all our money is gone (that is happening as gas prices rise). Go to the grocery store or large discount store, and there are isle after isle of goods to feed, clothe, clean and do all kinds of thousands of things. Yet those and others are not our greatest resources.
The Community Fellowship has become known as a church that helps and encourages people. As we interact with people we know and many we don't, it is sad to see the huge needs, yet the most difficult thing we deal with are hurt relationships. Unless you are a hermit, you have to deal with people almost every day. Family, friends, co-workers, neighbors and people everywhere cross our path.
Our greatest resource is people. For me, I have to be careful to not get tied up in details and miss working with people. Often our lives are complicated by the stuff we have or the bank accounts we try to manage or the bills and stuff of life. But it is the people in our lives that makes our lives so much richer. It is those people that God has connected us with that will talk with us through the tough times of life as well as celebrate with us when things are good.
People are the most important thing in the world. God didn't send his son to die for stuff. Jesus died for people. If we are not careful, we will allow other things to get in the way of our dealing with and loving people.
In fact, one of the things that I am most excited about in my future and in the future of the work I get to do is The Community Dream Center that will help the broken people that we encounter. We have been and will continue sharing much needed items with those in need. We have been blessed with recourses and dollars to help people, but one concern that I have for us and for every church and ministry is that we need to be careful where we spend our resources.
If people are our greatest recourse and the most important thing we deal with, then the majority of our resources need to be used to build people and not buildings and not in accumulating stuff. Do you hear my heart? God has called us to Himself for a relationship with Him. He has called us to serve for relationships with others. Our calling is so we can make a difference in the lives of people we meet. Yet if we don't have any resources left, we can't help people.
This can even spin over into the area of emotional resources. If I spend all my time managing stuff, I have nothing left to give my family, my church family and the dear people I get to meet. So let me ask us all a couple questions:
1. What do you believe is the greatest resource in your life?
2. How will you adjust that resource to agree with what God says is the greatest resource of all?
We need to transition ourselves to be able impact more people for Jesus. Further, we must place ourselves where we can meet God in sweeter ways. I believe the only way to do that is to value more and more our greatest resource, people. What do you think?
The man answered, "'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.' And, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
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