The Grace Blog

Remember, God does not abandon the faithful. Leveraged giving spends your intellectual, emotional, spiritual, financial, physical, and time capital, sacrificially. Sacrificial and responsible giving makes the community stronger. Mike Slaughter in The Christian Wallet writes, “Responsible investing means taking all that God has placed into our hands and fully deploying it in every sense of the word toward God’s preferred future picture—both for our own lives and for the lives of others. Investing in tomorrow also requires a simultaneous trust in God’s provision for both today and tomorrow.” Leveraged giving spends your intellectual, emotional, spiritual, financial, physical, and time capital, sacrificially. It is responsible investing.

Dependency on God combines God’s action and human action into experiencing the kingdom of God. According to Barna Research, U.S. teens and adults have reported that, while they have mostly positive opinions of Jesus, their perceptions of the Church and Christians as a whole have often led them to doubt Christian beliefs. Other data from Barna studies shows that the Church’s reputation in specific areas like pursuing justice and stepping up to help solve local problems is wavering among both teens and adults alike. It appears that most Christians (57%), including over seven in ten practicing Christians (76%), are at a point in their spiritual journeys where they want to help the Church refocus on what’s truly important. Christians want to help the church realign with Jesus’ priorities. (Adapted from Barna’s State of the Church Initiative, 2024). What are Jesus’ priorities? Micah 6:8 reads, “He (God) has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Let’s make justice, kindness, and humility our priorities.

Grace Presbyterian Church exists to demonstrate and offer others a better way to live. We do that by leveraging our giving. Jesus says, go, sell, give, come, and follow. Leverage your giving by spending your intellectual, emotional, spiritual, financial, physical, and time capital, sacrificially. Let’s combine our action with God’s action and see Grace continue its transformation from a mindset of “doing church” into “being church.”

 

On the journey of Christian discipleship and spiritual formation with you, I remain faithfully yours,

 

Steve

 

The Rev. Dr. Steven M. Marsh

Interim Pastor

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