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What a blessing God poured out this last Sunday through so many people willing to volunteer with Project PG! We had close to sixty people sign up to partner with this ministry either through providing physical needs for our adopted children or by starting a mentoring relationship. This is one of the most important things we can do to corporately show the love of Christ to our community. Thank you to all who came and said, “I will answer the call of Christ in the voice of these children.” Perhaps you need some more information, if so please click the link above to send an email to projectpg@bowlinggreenchristian.org and you will be contacted by a Project representative.

In preparation for Sunday’s sermon I considered many texts that could be used to talk about Christ’s compassion in us. The healings, the feedings, the weepings of Jesus all exude lessons of compassion. One particular story however stood out, the woman healed of bleeding in Mark 5. I chose to not include that text in Sundays’ sermon due to the delicate nature of her ailment and the diverse age range of children in our audience. But, if I could preach a PG-13 version of this Sunday’s message it would be from Mark 5. Here we have a woman who suffers from a non stop period! Talk about a major problem. This is in the day before modern feminine hygiene products and she would have had to go down to the river to wash her rags daily in full view of the public! She would have grown a great stigma about her and perhaps an odor. It’s conceivable she couldn’t conceive and because of that her husband may have divorced her under their laws. What makes everything worse is that her ailment made her completely untouchable to anyone! If she merely touched the clothes of any other person that person would be unclean for the rest of the day. While her primary problem may have been a physical ailment, she had acquired a social problem that was far worse.
With all of these personal health issues why does Jesus call her out in the midst of a crowd? She snuck up, touched him and wanted nothing more than to run away. Jesus foiled her plot by stopping and asking, “Who touched me?” Why? Because he wanted to heal her social stigma as well! He wanted not just to stop the bleeding but also the exclusion and the judgment. He wanted to silence the whispers behind her back. He wanted to restore her to the community to heal the whole person. It was awkward, it was embarrassing for her (and him once it all came out), but it was worth it. This is how we as the church are to minister to people, we need to minister to the whole person. We need to stop throwing money at them, stop sending doctors to them and start including them in the community. When we do that will we heal the whole person and start being like Jesus.

No minister I know likes to talk about money, especially for a prolonged period of time as in a series or campaign. But, it is so important to talk about this subject! Our church is presently in a campaign designed to encourage us to “assess our lifestyle, arrange our priorities and allocate our resources to please God and honor him.” This is not a small task, especially when it will come to the “resources” discourses. Yet, it’s in these discussions about our resources (read as “money”) that we explore and correct the most sensitive of all the areas of personal surrender. I can love God, but do I have to give to God? This is what many Christians question. The problem is primarily this: the church has been overly interested in people’s money for the wrong reasons, while God has always been interested in how well you manage your money for the right reasons.
The task of teaching financial stewardship is difficult. So many commercials and desires pull at our finances. Debt accumulates and our ability to serve God with our money is diminished. We are all called to boldly go after a right understanding of stewardship, tithing, giving and sacrificing all for the cause of Christ. We do this because God (not the church) is interested in our money. I would challenge any believer to use these six weeks of our campaign as an experiment. Try giving to God – give first to him. Then give to an organization. We would pray that God would guide you to support your local church, but that’s between you and God. Regardless of how, we are called to give to God, because God wants to be honored with our finances.