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hope and community


One of the biggest things we do at The Community Fellowship is to create community by interacting with people every day, not just during worship.  Our lives, both words and actions should literally demonstrate the love of God to our community as we live.  I walk out of the building we use now and even think about our future campus all the while asking God to fill me with big vision and His dreams.  It happens again.  God gives us more and more pieces.  We have been blessed with more resources to bless more people and to honor God.

I hate saying no.  I love saying yes.  I am talking about all we get to do in regards to serving people and meeting their needs.  We live in tough, tough times.  Job lose continues to be a daily issue.  There are needs on top of needs that we see each day.  Do you know what else is a daily issue?  God is still God, and He is still offering His best and giving real hope to any one who will accept it.

"The person who loves the people around them creates community everywhere they go." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By creating community around the purpose God has given us we are a living testimony of Jesus.  That's my calling.  That's what I believe I am to lead other people to do as well.  We are touching lives one at a time for a cause much bigger and far outside of what we can do on our own.  Offering hope creates community.

Have you noticed that when the people of God get together to accomplish a great task that the effort and the overflow leads to more and more people to meeting God?  It is like a bomb going off, and the results, what is left behind, the evidence of the goodness and grace of God.  We have a saying that we began with at The Community Fellowship ... we are to get the attention of the people around us and while we have their attention, tell them about Jesus.  That is huge.  And that creates real and living community.  Lets offer hope in Jesus' name and know that is the outcome.

This is why we work hard and continue to struggle, for our hope is in the living God, who is the Savior of all people and particularly of all believers.

In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope.

And his name will be the hope of all the world."

Offering hope creates community as we share the love of God with those we meet.

NOTE: much of this post was shared in 2009 with readers of my e-devotion.

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