Helping families after natural disasters by equipping churches to respond quickly with Sheds of Hope!
The crippling of our hearts can only be undone by looking to Jesus.
“But Peter said, ‘I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!’…And they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.” Acts 3:6,10b
My latest favorite movie is Wreck-It-Ralph. I have to admit up front, this is just the latest in a long line of movie favorites.
Ralph is the “bad guy” in a thirty year old arcade game. Each night, after a hard day of wrecking, he goes home to his pile of bricks – alone. On the other hand, Felix, the “good guy,” gets a medal each night and is praised by everyone in the building where he has fixed everything Ralph had wrecked during the day.
Ralph hears in passing that a medal is given out in another game, and he sets out to see if he can get that medal. To do so he has to game-jump – not a good thing, because if you game-jump and die outside your game, you don’t get regenerated when it is reset. Game over for you. But the lure of the medal is to great for Ralph, and he sets out on his adventure to get a medal in another game.
When Ralph focuses on being passed over, his feelings lead him to a very dangerous place. Now in a dark and hostile environment, but still bent on getting a medal for himself, he unwittingly unleashes forces that endanger those in his own game and the people in the other games as well. Feelings have a nasty way of turning on us.
Have you ever felt like everybody around you gets all the praise and the medals, and you get none? What do you do when life and opportunities pass you by? How do you deal with it? You don’t want to go Turbo and game-jump.
What could your church do to connect with people who feel they’ve been passed over in life and may be thinking of game-jumping? Let’s talk! Share the Love…
Listen to Lightning Storm by David Dunn
Genesis 2:20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
John 17:24 Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
Connectivity has never been so easy! Whether sitting in a meeting or separated by great distances, we can connect almost instantaneously with one another. Even hard copies of documents can arrive within hours, or at least overnight. Today, I just sent our kids pictures from our oldest son’s wedding seven years ago. I got a Facebook invite from a family whose house I helped build over 35 years ago. Yesterday, I read that a school district in Los Angeles will need 640 thousand iPads for the new school year. Last night I watched an ad geared toward kids as they get ready for the upcoming school year. The company was still in the business of selling paper, writing books, back packs, calculators, pens and pencils.
I recently changed from paper sermon notes to using my iPad. For the first few weeks, I would go into the pulpit with both the iPad and my notes printed out, just in case. Now that I’ve made the switch, I don’t see myself going back to paper. There’s still a mix of paper and plastic in the hands of the people I’m talking to, but change is in the air.
What could your church begin to offer the person who brings their iPad/Tablet with them on Sunday? Let’s talk! Share the Love…
1. If you are still looking at people within the church as they once were – crippled and broken by sin – your heart is crippled and needs to be transformed
2. If you are seeing people within the church as they now are in Christ – your heart, once crippled by sin, is beginning to be transformed and changed to a heart of praise and wonder
And they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him. Acts 3:10
The web is changing faster than we have time to digest, and people are surfing it faster than ever before. Flip book shows how fast people are scanning the news. Are you Old School? You know that If a book doesn’t grab your attention in the first few sentences, it’s too late. The church website is no different. You only have a few seconds to show that you are relevant. Here is a Test: Go to your church website and see if you have any events older than last Sunday listed.
The same is true of visual communication. Speed. Add to that “ease of delivery” and you have YouTube. “Over four billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. Seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute” Source: youtube.com/yt/press/statistics
To put this in perspective. This means that every minute of the day represents 90,000+ hours of video being watched by people across the globe. People are watching short videos on their phones, tablets, and computers.
Getting people to spend more than a few seconds on your church website is not something that just happens; it takes work. What would you do to help your church website get noticed? Let’s talk! Share the Love…
Heaven is filled with once-crippled sinners who were unable to praise God; but our brother came and demonstrated His love for broken and crippled people. in doing so, he rescued our hearts and restored us to the Father, enabling us to praise Him for healing us.
