Love Granbury Fall Service Opportunities

Well the kids are all back in school and summer is winding down (at least according to the calendar), and Love Granbury is getting ready to kick off it's Fall and Winter schedule of servant evangelism projects! Here's what we've got scheduled so far:

September 26th 12 noon - 2:00pm
Hot dog cook-outs at City Park soccer fields, Moore Street Baseball Complex and the Granbury Middle School football field (Pee-Wee Football Assc.). Free hot dogs, chips, and soft drinks/water.

October 31st 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Fall Festival Block Parties in Indian Harbor, Comanche Harbor and Canyon Creek neighborhoods. Free hot dogs, chips, soft drinks/water, bounce houses, face painting, kids games and lots of other fun stuff!

December 19th 12 noon - 2:00pm
Free gift wrapping at Walmart. Free Christmas gift wrapping for anyone who wants to bring their purchases to be wrapped. We will also be providing free coffee and hot chocolate.

Please come out and join us for any or all of these service opportunities!

Radical Forgiveness

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, when my brother won't stop doing wrong to me, how many times must I forgive him? Should I forgive him as many as seven times?"

-- Matthew 18:21 (ERV)

Like so many of us do, Peter wants to know the limits of the Lord's demand for radical forgiveness. While by human standards Peter's "7 times" principle is quite generous, in Jesus' Kingdom, to even ask for a limit to forgiveness is to reveal that his mind is still dominated by worldly thinking. Heavenly thinking means going to a cross and forgiving your crucifixion executioners! Jesus takes the heavenly
number of 7 and multiplies it exponentially to stress that we are to forgive as we have been forgiven and want to be forgiven. In the Father's Kingdom family, the children must forgive like the Father!

Service Gives Our Lives True Meaning

“Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body” (Romans 12:5 MSG).

We are going to give our life for something. What will it be—a career, a sport, a hobby, fame, wealth? None of these will have lasting significance. Service is the pathway to real significance. It is through ministry that we discover the meaning of our lives. The Bible says, “Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body” (Romans 12:5 MSG).

As we serve together in God’s family, our lives take on eternal importance. Paul said, “I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less . . . because of what you are a part of” (1 Corinthians 12:14a, 19 MSG).

God wants to use us to make a difference in his world. He wants to work through each of us. What matters is not the duration of our lives, but the donation of it. Not how long we lived, but how you lived.

There really is no reason good enough to not be serving in some manner. Consider these excuses from scripture:

• Abraham was old,
• Jacob was insecure,
• Leah was unattractive,
• Joseph was abused,
• Moses stuttered,
• Gideon was poor,
• Samson was codependent,
• Rahab was immoral,
• David had an affair and all kinds of family problems,
• Elijah was suicidal,
• Jeremiah was depressed,
• Jonah was reluctant,
• Naomi was a widow,
• John the Baptist was eccentric to say the least,
• Peter was impulsive and hot-tempered,
• Martha worried a lot,
• The Samaritan woman had several failed marriages,
• Zacchaeus was unpopular,
• Thomas had doubts,
• Paul had poor health, and
• Timothy was timid.

That is quite a variety of misfits, but God used each of them in his service. He will use each of us, too, if we stop making excuses.

Accepting Children

"If a person accepts a little child like this in my name, then that person accepts me." -- Matthew 18:5 (ERV)

There are two key thoughts here. First, Jesus is talking about actual
children. His rebuke of the disciples when they didn't welcome children, but pushed them away, is clearly an example of that.

But, there is a deeper issue that will dominate the rest of the chapter. Because children in Jesus' culture were powerless, without rights, and vulnerable, they became the symbol for people who are powerless, without rights, and vulnerable. On the surface, they may not have anything to offer the community. But Kingdom thinking is upside down to "the way men think."

To be on the side of God means to be on the side of welcoming, accepting, and receiving "little ones" whether they are actual children or simply people who are little in the sight of the world. Because Jesus adamantly rejects the normal channels
to fame and fortune and instead walks the way of the cross -- the punishment reserved for the powerless, those without rights, and those who are vulnerable -- his disciples should welcome and care for those like their Savior!

A Christian Who Doesn't Serve is a Contradiction

The Bible says, “He saved us and called us to be his own people, not because of what we have done, but because of his own purpose” (2 Timothy 1:9 TEV).

Peter adds, “You were chosen to tell about the excellent qualities of God, who called you” (1 Peter 2:9 GWT).

You are called to serve God. Growing up, you may have thought that being called by God was something only missionaries, pastors, nuns, and other full-time church workers experienced, but the Bible says every Christians is called to service (Ephesians 4:4–14; see also Romans 1:6–7; 8:28–30; 1 Corinthians 1:2, 9, 26; 7:17; Philippians 3:14; 1 Peter 2:9; 2 Peter 1:3).

Anytime you use your God-given abilities to help others, you are fulfilling your calling. The Bible says, “Now you belong to him . . . in order that you might be useful in the service of God” (Romans 7:4 TEV).

How much of the time are you being useful in the service of God? In some churches in China, they welcome new believers by saying, “Jesus now has a new pair of eyes to see with, new ears to listen with, new hands to help with, and a new heart to love others with.”

Giving Respect

In community outreach, there are many variables that can determine success or failure in terms of our effectiveness. One of those variables is attitude. The attitude of the one serving toward the one being served can either be the "attraction" to Christ's message of unconditional love, or the "distraction" from that same message. Simply put, our attitudes many times determine the results of our outreach. One component of our attitude is respect...respect for those we encounter during the course of our outreach. Many times you'll hear the saying, "respect has to be earned." However, Christ's example shows us a different way.

Respect is given automatically, it is not earned.

When we set ourselves up as people that insist on having others earn our respect we are not living in a serving capacity. If we are living from that perspective we are really asserting that all others serve us. We are living from the vantage point that it is within our capacity to discern the motives of people. I in fact don’t understand the motives of those around me very well at all. I am pretty well convinced that this level of discernment is better left in the hands of God.

I don’t know about your life but mine happens at a rate that is so fast that I can’t manage to keep ahead of the pace of things in such a way that I can conceivably make people earn my respect. I meet a lot of people. I am therefore more or less forced to believe the best about people on a regular basis. If it were necessary that I had to make each person earn the right to be respected there would be very few functional relationships happening in my life. Most people would never know where they stood with me because they would be waiting for me to let them know that they had earned my respect. What a horrible, arrogant way to live.

I figured out a long time ago that I must defer to people, even when sometimes those people don’t seem to have the same values as me. Sometimes the differences are even more subtle. We can differ on the grounds we come from different backgrounds, thus we don’t communicate in the same way. When we get to heaven some of us are going to be dismayed to discover that the people we categorized as being unworthy of our puny respect were great in the eyes of God.

As we serve people is it essential that we show respect to every single person we look to serve. We don’t have the time to play a game of “Who is worthy” and who is not. If we were to wait until all earned our respect before we gave it, life would look quite odd. We would live standoffish lives that would hold off from getting involved with others until we felt they were somehow worthy of our little bits of respect and adoration. Life moves at a rapid pace. As we give respect to all, we are behaving like Jesus. We are assuming the best about the person in question and we are not placing ourselves above that person as their judge. Truly, the last place in the world a person needs to be who is jaded is involved in outreach. We need to assume the best about others before we connect with anyone.

The question comes up “Is it ever appropriate to use the term ‘respect’ as something we earn?” I want to suggest this is entirely the wrong word to use. Most of the time when people use this word they are really searching for the term “trust.” One can speak of having a relationship of high “trust” with someone else and speak in truthful, healthy communication. To have that is to possess a beautiful and rare thing. When that is called for, use it, but realize it is going to be the occasional relationship, the rare connection. That type of relationship is so rare, you will only experience it during a handful of occasions in a lifetime.

(adapted from Steve Sjogren's "Serve" E-Zine)

More Healthy Kids Praises

From Thursday, June 4th through last Friday, August 7th, a total of 29,561 hot, delicious, and nutritious lunches were served to the children of the greater Granbury area!

A very sincere and heartfelt thanks to all of you and your volunteers who worked to deliver and distrbute the lunches, to Alicia Hernandez and her amazing Child Nutrition Department at Granbury ISD, and to all the rest of you who supported the effort through your prayers.

Many of our churches have committed to the extended summer program and will be preparing their own lunches and delivering them to their respective lunch sites for the next two weeks before school starts. Please pray for these churches and their volunteers as they continue the work of Healthy Kids. God bless.

Here are the final numbers for each of our four Healthy Kids lunch sites for the "official" Healthy Kids Summer Lunch program:
Brazos River Acres (Triple Cross Church) 5,081
City of Granbury City Beach (St. Francis Cabrini) 1,475
Oak Trail Shores Pool ( First Baptist Granbury) 1,759
Oak Trail Shores Ruth's Place (FUMC Granbury) 2,226
Montego Bay (Acton Baptist) 1,268
Sky Harbor (First Baptist Granbury) 983
Whippoorwill Bay (First Baptist Granbury) 846
Arrowhead Shores (FUMC Granbury) 1,416
Rancho Brazos (Acton UMC) 2,311
Sandy Beach (Acton UMC) 746
City of Granbury City Park (Granbury COC) 1,631
Lake Granbury Harbor (Granbury Baptist) 3,843
City of Granbury City Beach (First Presbyterian) 1,039
Indian Harbor Teen Center (Lakeside Baptist) 937
Comanche Harbor (Lakeside Baptist) 1,548
Canyon Creek (Lakeside Baptist) 1,382
Indian Harbor Pool (Lakeside Baptist) 1,070

If you or your church would like to volunteer to work with Healthy Kids this summer, you can contact Micky Shearon at 817-408-5273, or Norma Wright at 817-279-0313, and for further information you can visit the Granbury ISD web page or the Love Granbury home page.

Redemptional Wisdom

Then Jesus said to his followers, "If any person wants to follow me, he must say 'No' to the things he wants. That person must accept the cross (suffering) that is given to $him, and he must follow me. The person that wants to save his life will lose it. And every person that gives his life for me will save it. It is worth nothing for a person to have the whole world, if he loses his soul. A person could never pay enough to buy back his soul." -- Matthew 16:24-26 (ERV)

Up is down. Down is up. The high cost is cheap. The cheap cost is high. First will be last. Last will be first. The least will be greatest. Jesus preached an upside down Kingdom. In many ways, his values are against "Conventional Wisdom." Instead, Jesus teaches a "Redemptional Wisdom" -- a wisdom that calls us to surrender our lives to the will of God, live for him, and serve others. It is in giving up our lives for something and Someone greater that we truly find life.

There are so many things we can invest our lives in that ultimately become our masters. The harder we work to attain them, the more we find we have lost that vital essence of living that is God's gift to us. The radical example and call of Jesus is to follow him in laying down our lives to honor God and redeem others -- there are no short-cuts.

God's Economy

Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received ... but only what you have given: a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.

- St. Francis of Assisi

Tell It Like It Could Be

"Then he touched their eyes and said, ‘According to your faith will it be done to you;' and their sight was restored” (Matthew 9:29–30 NIV).

You can set people up for success or failure by your expectations.

People tend to become what they think we expect them to be. If you communicate to the people around you that you expect them to be lazy, uncreative, and negative, that’s probably how they will respond to you. On the other hand, if you treat people like winners, they’re likely to become winners. In the same way, if we treat people like they are unimportant and don't matter, they will respond in that manner. Psychologists call it “The Pygmalion Effect.”

• The best salesmen expect customers to buy their product.
• The best executives expect employees to have creative ideas.
• The best speakers expect audiences to be interested.
• The best leaders expect people to want to follow.
• The best teachers expect students to learn.

Would you like to bring out the best in those around you? Here's the key: Treat them the way they could be! Don’t just “tell it like it is.” Tell it like it could be.

Jesus said, “According to your faith it will be done to you” (Matthew 9:29 NIV). What are you expecting this week from yourself . . . from others . . . from God?

Think About It

There are only 2 reasons everyone is not a christian: 1) They do
not know a Christian or... 2) They do.

Sunday...assemble...Body of Christ...the Church...Sunday...worship...discipleship...service. This Sunday, as we assemble as the Body of Christ...the Church...may we focus on our corporate worship of the God who loved us so completely that He literally laid down His own life for us. May the realization of that great love move us to a deeper level of discipleship-desiring to know more intimately this God who so passionately and radically loves us. And as we come to know him more intimately, may we be moved to a life of service to others as we realize that God's most intimate desire is to love others through us...so that they will come to know Him. Enjoy your Sunday!