Our Vision 2019 Take Off The Cloths

Our Vision 2019—Remove The Cloths

Ezekial 37:1-10 John 11:17-37

We are celebrating the 6 years that God has given to us and are looking forward to the new ways of loving and serving people that God has for us in the future. We can thank God for each of the testimonies that we have heard because it means that what you do here at New Life At Calvary for the cause of Christ matters in people’s lives.

You see, you not only touched these lives, your touched many others indirectly through their lives. From Cleveland to Nigeria, God has been using you to make a difference.

We want you to know that we are encouraged by the number of you who signed up during our Ministry Fair for different ministries in the church. Some of you were willing to move out of your comfort zone to try something new.

Some of you realized from your Spiritual Gift tests that God was calling you to do more than just showing up at church. Some of you realized with your Leadership Personality assessment, that God has equipped you with some leadership skills that are needed in the body of Christ.

If someone were to ask you, “why is that we are here as a church?”, would you have an answer ready to give to them? We might think we are here to have a place to worship. We might think we are here to hand out food. We might think we are here to encourage each other. We might think we are to do things for God. Those things are all good and we are thankful for them, but that’s not the big why behind we are here.

The real reason we are here goes back to the beginning and it can be found in John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but shall have everlasting life. We serve a God who is compassionate. WE serve a God who is just. We serve a God who is loving, and we serve a God who cares about us.

Have you looked around us lately and seen what the world has become. We can’t turn on the tv without hearing about a mass shooting, or road rage incident in which someone’s life is brutally taken over a senseless argument of being cut off while driving.

We look at the world and find that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world today being jailed, killed, kidnapped, raped, having their limbs chopped off simply for refusing to deny Jesus Christ. It really seems as though the world has gone mad.

Yet God looks at the world and still chooses to love the people in it. Our vision for the future is that we can look at the world and begin to see potential children of God when we look at those who do not know God. Every sinner is a potential powerful child of God who doesn’t know it yet.

When God looks at the world, he doesn’t see the divisions of race, ethnic groups, or socio-economic classes. Our vision for the future includes being a church in which you can be sitting next to a person who goes out of these doors into a different place in society, yet they love the same Jesus that you love and that they would love each other.

We want everybody to leave the titles and the positions at the door and recognize we all have to come to the same feet of Jesus Christ in worship. It does not matter to us if you are dressed in a suit, or wearing your t shirt and jeans, your goal is to come and worship the Lord Jesus Christ.

At our Leadership Conference we started praying that God will give us fifty new people who are going to become actual covenant partners before this year is over. We will have a chart before us to keep us up to date on where we stand. We want those fifty to be from all different walks of life, races, ethnic groups and economic levels.

God so loved the world that He gave his one and only son Jesus Christ. God’s love cause him to give Jesus Christ.

Our love should cause us to want to give Jesus Christ. Our purpose in life is to honor and glorify God with our lives. That happens best when we are offering Jesus Christ to others in the way we live, in the things we do, and in the words we share.

Our vision for the future is that everyone of us recognize God is going to hold us accountable for what we do with Jesus.

Every organization in the church, is to do at least one thing yearly that’s geared to reaching people who don’t know Christ. If we can’t come up with one thing, then we need to shut down and go be a part of a group that is committed to Jesus’ command to go into all the world and make disciples of all people.