I believe that most people want their lives to count. We want to make a real difference in the world. We want our lives to be significant — even if that means simply touching the lives of a few people. And this is true especially in the church. We’ve experienced so much, we’ve been blessed with so much — and we want to express our gratitude, we want to help other people experience what we have in a relationship with God. We want our lives to count.
But that’s as far as it goes. That’s as far as we get in our thinking about this. We don’t have a PLAN to make it happen — and so we don’t make very much progress.
Tom Sine has said recently that the biggest challenge we face in the church today is what he calls a “crisis of vision.” That is, vision of what our lives COULD be. A vision of how we can make a difference with our lives and be a part of something significant. Many of us go through our whole Christian lives without ever really being intentional, or thoughtful, about what our lives could be — by the grace of God.
Lily Tomlin once said, “I always wanted to be somebody. I just should have been more specific.” And the problem with not being specific about the kind of person we should be is that we’ll tend to DRIFT. We’ll allow other people to dictate that vision for us, and we’ll drift into adopting the goals and mindset of the people around us — rather than God’s.
Because let’s face it — there’s no shortage of people who have visions for the kind of person you and I should be. If we don’t think hard about and decide what our values and goals should be — there are plenty of other people who would love to do that for us.
Unless we take time every so often to raise questions about our sense of purpose — we’ll just drift with the tide. And drifting with the tide is dangerous business. Every once in a while a ship that just drifts just might drift into a pretty good place. By chance it might drift into a harbor. But most often the ones that drift tend to run aground somewhere, or crash into the rocks on the coastline.
At Bridgewood, our vision is based on what could happen in this community if all of us in this church really become the intentional about our calling as followers of Christ. What if we would discover that our real mission in life is wrapped up in our relationship with God, and what if we’d commit ourselves to using our gifts and talents to serve Him and reach out to the people around us with the message of His love?
This past month I’ve been focusing our message series on the plan we have at Bridgewood for helping people do just that: helping people take the steps of growth in the various areas of the spiritual life so that we can become the kind of people God wants us to be. Our desire is to help people make commitments in these areas:
STAYING CONNECTED TO CHRIST — by worshiping regularly and spending time in prayer and Bible study daily
GROWING IN CHRIST — by participating in a Learning Community, Grow Group, or Bible study
SERVING CHRIST — by using gifts to serve God in ministry
SHARING CHRIST — by praying for and reaching out to the people God has placed in my life who need Him
If you missed one or more of these messages, and would like to hear more about this, contact the church office. We can send you copies of the text of these messages, for your own thinking and study. In fact, if you give us your email address, we’ll send you a copy of the message and weekly announcements each week. Our goal is to help you grow, and in the process make a significant and positive difference in the world.
[see #30649 for a similar essay]