Welcome Back — Let's Serve!, Part 2

November, 2006

by: Jay Underwood

As I said in my last Calvary article, we’ve been studying the subject of “service” and the role it plays in the Christian’s life. To this end, we’ll be having more events that are service oriented, our first of which was a Bowling/Pizza/Gospel Outreach night on Friday, September 29. Leading up to this event, the Jr High leaders and I had been challenging the Jr High students to round up their friends and neighbors of the same age and bring them to our church for this occasion. In the past year when we have done this, the turnout for Jr High visitors has been minimal, not that we base success on numbers for if even one lost soul gets saved, the angels rejoice (Lk 15:10) but yet you always hope for God’s blessing and that lots of kids show up! Well a couple of weeks before the event, I found myself praying to God saying, “Lord, will you please just send even one or two new students?” Shame on me for thinking so little of the God of the possible (Mt 19:26)! Not only did God use our students to bring 1 or 2 of their friends, but 17!!! We had 21 students bring 17 friends, praise God!

Please Calvary family, pray for the students who came and heard the Gospel, especially those that had never been here before. Pray also for those students who reached out to their peers, that God would continue to strengthen their faith and give them a continued heart for evangelism. And lastly pray for me that I would never underestimate God and always be reminded that nothing is impossible for Him (Lk 18:27)!

To give you a better understanding of what’s been going on in our Jr High teaching times, as I said, “service” has been the name of the game on Sunday mornings with “learning the Gospel/evangelism” on Wednesdays. In the area of service we have learned that before we can serve others, we need to be serving God and this starts with the Gospel and a personal relationship with Christ, without which, none of us would be able to serve in a God honoring way at all. We have also seen that service is not just something we do when we feel like it, but rather it is an act of obedience to God (Jn 12:25-26) that comes from a heart of love for God (Mt 22:37-40) that starts because He first gave His love to us (1 Jn 4:19). This is all fueled by God’s grace given to the believer by the Holy Spirit so all the credit for anything we do in the way of service goes back to God. You see we’re like a car: God’s grace given by the Holy Spirit fuels us with faith and love, which causes us to give God glory, which propels us to obedience and acts of service, which is blessed by God ,which in turn builds up our faith and love causing us to glorify Him more and along with continued grace from God (because we’re still sinners, remember?) propels us to even more obedience and service, giving us more blessings, building up more faith and love and on and on it goes - you get the idea! So how’s your car running? Are you letting God’s grace pour upon you through His Spirit, building up your faith and love and propelling you to obedience and service? Or do you need to pull into the gas station of God’s Word to fuel up? Don’t try to run on ‘empty!’