What’s in Your Wallet?

What’s in your wallet?

What’s in your message? How do you as a Christian portray the God of Heaven? How is the Good News shared where you go to church? Is your God waiting to punish you or bless your socks off? This will make a difference in those that you talk with about God’s nature.

As in the Capital One Visa Card commercial, do you feel as if God is like a band of Viking looking barbarians pressing down on you about to take off your head if you don’t have His credit card? Or do you see God as a loving and forgiving God who wants to rescue you from a tormented or unfulfilled life? Do you carry His card?

For the life of me I can’t understand the legalistic message of so many churches today. Yes, God hates sin, He wants to eradicate it from the face of the earth. God is opposed to Satan and wants to take back for Himself all that the devil has stolen. And He has a plan to do so. That plan is for His church to tell the Good News about His redeeming grace to as many as will listen. A message that speaks only of all that is wrong and the subsequent penalty for that wrongdoing is not the Good News. It leaves the hearer with the wrong perspective of God.

It is equally erroneous not to warn the sinner of his way. The Bible is clear about the hopelessness of the unrepentant soul. But forgiveness and God’s desire for mankind to escape the consequences of their sins is the message. Christ alone offers this escape through the blood of His cross…nothing else. Not condemning, guilt casting, blame laying nor “hell if you don’t change before you leave this building,” is able to convert the wayward sinner to Christ.

Christ is the Hope!

People need hope. They need hope for finances, family, friendships, and forgiveness. They need hope and they need it now. Thank God for the Gospel of Hope!

We preach Christ crucified and raised from the dead for the hope of the world. Every need is met through the sacrifice of Christ and every issue that mankind faces is addressed and relieved in God’s word.

Being relevant means the church ministers at the level of people in their daily experience and lifts them up to the place where Christ sits…at the right hand of the Father on our behalf. He is our mediator, reconciling the world to God.

Hungry people need food, the depressed need a reason to live, the lonely need a friend. The destitute need a place and provision, and the tormented need deliverance. The unfulfilled need fulfillment and the insignificant need significance. This is where the people that Christ died for live. We focus on the place where people live and the place where the knowledge of Christ can bring them. Then we share the Gospel from this perspective and all that hear are helped.

The Christian needs a place to be built up, a place to bring family and friends to find fellowship and godly relationships, a place where grace and truth is offered and hope is lavishly dispensed every time the Word is brought. This is relevance…this is knowing people and what they need…this is giving it to them when they need it in a spirit of love and compassion.

What’s in your wallet? The Word of God that brings to light the plight of the sinner and the hope of forgiveness though the Cross of Christ…it is the answer to everything.