Strategic Faith Launch/Communion Sunday

This is also our annual celebration of God’s faithfulness to us in and through a church financial crisis.  We collectively sought the Lord to use the crisis to help us to gain something better than a solution to the crisis.  Those things were to know Him better, to love each other more deeply and to allow Him to use whatever gifts He has given us to address the situation.

The Strategic Faith Launch is not only a commemoration of past events but also a forward-looking approach to living out our faith daily.  It is not only good for once a year in June, but also for Monday morning.  You can use it tomorrow.

1.  Know Him Better.  Ephesians 1:17 (NIV) ¹⁷ I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

• A prayer for us to be caught up in the joy and fascination of a relationship with the living Christ. To realize He is what Scripture calls the fullness of life.  The satisfying substance of life we all long for.

Psalms 63:1-5 (NIV) … my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, …  I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.  Because your love is better than life…  My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;

• The challenges of family, of ministry, and of life itself have embedded in them the opportunity to grow closer to the Lord, to experience Him in this way.

• Knowing Him means believing He is giving you the most generous and most loving responses to your requests today. “Those who know Your name will put their trust in You” (Psalm 9:10).

2.  Love each other.  John 13:34-35 (NIV) ³⁴ “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. ³⁵ By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

• The promise is an effective ministry promoting Christ if you love one another.

• Instead of what the evil one intends when there is a crisis – the pulling apart of relationships – we trusted God to strengthen our love bonds.

3.   See our value as members of His body.  Ephesians 4:16 (NIV) ¹⁶ From Him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

• If you are in Him, You are bringing something from An expression of Christ hat flows from your connection with Christ.

1 Corinthians 12:11 (NASB77) ¹¹ But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as He wills.

1 Corinthians 12:18 (NASB77) ¹⁸ But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.

Don’t think you are God’s gift to the church.  Know that you are! Not in arrogance but with gratitude and with the realization that every other brother and sister in Christ is equally so.