22 Sep Community

Community

Level One Community………………Your Nuclear Family.

• Where are you in your family’s life cycle?
• Are you the Parent, Grandparent, or Child?
  • Grandparent.  Do you have the Preparedness resources needed?
    • Spiritual Resources?  Are you the Spiritual Parent, or are you being parented by your children.
    • Mental Resources? Are you good at Planning, or will you need to have help in your planning for crisis?
    • Emotional Resources?  Can you handle stress? Have you gone thru Bad Times like the 1930s, or are you vulnerable to outside stressors?
    • Physical Resources? Do you have the cash, dwelling, etc. to provide for your younger children? Or will you need to be dependent upon them for the physical?
    • Parent.  All of the above.
    • Child.  All of the above.
    • You have to be honest with yourself and your family about all 4 areas of preparedness and your strengths and weaknesses.  Have a family get together to talk through these 4 areas.  Elect one as a leader, and then parcel out some of the preparedness tasks on a volunteer basis. Who will take this or that on as a responsibility to perform or complete?  This will bring you ALL closer as a family, and hopefully remove some, if not most, of the issues that may be stumbling blocks to your relationships if they exist.
    • Get back together on a regular basis to check milestone achievement and progress.
    • LEADER.  Be strong in encouragement of others.  Praise even the small progress of some. Recognize the great achievements of the other.
    • Remember.  You are all in this together.

Level Two Community……………….Your Church Family

• Where are you in the Church life cycle?
  • Are you Paid Staff, Lay leader, Server/Mature believer, Server/Growing believer, or a Server/New believer?
  • Paid Staff.
    • Have you taken on other family members to help?
    • Do you have capacity to take on more people from the church family?
    • Is your best contribution to be made in directing others in helping?
    • Do you have resources you can share?
    • NOTE: It is a given that you ( In Leadership ) have already got your house in order.
    • Lay Leader.
      • Same as above.
    • Mature, Growing/Beginning believer.
      • Some of above. 1 & 2.
      • Can you come under other leaders in helping other church family get prepared?
      • Do you have resources you can share?
      • Are you resource deficient in any area?
      • It is a given that the rest of the believers will most likely need help.

Level Three Community……………societal Family.

• We as the Church should have our act together.
• We should not assume that our neighbors do also.
• Host events to get neighbors together to talk about who might be at risk if problems arise.
  • Pot Luck, Bar-BQs, Deserts, Cookie exchanges, etc.
  • This is the time for the church to reach out to the people around us.  If they see us concerned for people we aren’t of Family with, they just might see a little Jesus in our actions.
  • I believe society has put us in a box, in which they see us as a clique, a stand off society, in the overall American culture.
  • They see us rally around and support each other when something bad happens to one of us. Littleton, COLO.
  • I believe they are waiting to see us rally around them when they have need of help.  Will we be there for them?  Do we care enough for the love God has shown us when we were outside of him, to show that same love to our neighbors who are outside of HIM now?  Let’s call the rest of the human family HOME, Now!
  • Now is the perfect opportunity to start, without belting them over the head.  Let’s just love them HOME.

How do we LOVE them HOME?

• Show concern and caring.
• Provide assistance, in any of the 4 areas of preparedness.
• When GOD provides the divine appointment, EE.
  • Heaven is a free gift & can’t be earned.
  • Sin is that which separates us from GOD.
  • GOD must punish Sin, but has found a way out.
  • Jesus is the way the truth and the life.
  • Faith is the key to receiving Jesus & Heaven.
    • Faith as expressed in belief/trust.
    • Faith as expressed in confession.
    • Faith as expressed in baptism.
    • Faith as expressed in doing good works.

We do good works because we ARE saved, not to BE saved.