This week we will shift our “focus” onto Equipping. For many of you that might sound a bit boring… however I will suggest it actually might be one of the most exciting things we could do at this point in life of our church and in your own personal lives. The heart of equipping is to help every person be effective and fruitful in their private lives as well as their public lives, in their personal walk with God as well as in their ministry with others. We live in a time when Christianity is sliding into being completely irrelevant to the culture and even more tragic we are becoming irrelevant to God Himself. The culture has moved farther and farther away from the traditional Judeo-Christian foundations that in large part has defined America in the last 200 years. As the culture has moved, the church in America has done one of two things.
First, much of the church has moved with it in an effort to ‘keep with the times’. Unfortunately, that has forced Christians to compromise many absolutes of God’s heart. Therefore we have become irrelevant to God and as a result we will be irrelevant to our culture as time marches on.
Second, other parts of the church have hunkered down in an effort to protect itself from the cultural on-slaught. In an effort to retain it’s distinctives much of the church has become so isolated from the culture that it has no voice into it. As a result, we have become not only irrelevant to the culture but we become irrelevant to God as He wants to use us to speak into it with our words and our actions.
The only hope we have is a fresh movement of the Spirit that would begin in the church. He wants us to renew our commitment to His Word, refresh our hearts with a love for Him and those around us, and infuse our lives with a maturity that will be able to weather the storms of a culture that is forgetting who God is and therefore who they truly are.
In the next four or five weeks we will discover how to engage the spiritual battle that we face. We will look at spiritual gifts that God has given us to use in bring glory to Him and to help those around us. We will look at the qualities of our faith that will make us useful and fruitful that Peter has left with us. I think this month will be a critically important time as we head into the next season of the life of our church and in your lives.
Kevin