Engage: Being present in the community with an encouraging influence
The year 2025 is already well underway and we are living in significant and exciting times. Now is not the time to just go through the motions of being a Seventh-day Adventist Christian. It can be easy to leave faith on the backburner. You may know what I mean - occasionally having a time of devotion, reading Scripture and offering a prayer, expecting little. Turn up to church most Sabbaths looking for a blessing and life goes on. Sounds humdrum, but God wants our faith to be a centre of excitement and engagement. I would like you to accept the challenge to think about what God can do through you as you offer your life to make a difference.
Understanding God’s passion for people
As I read the stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John it is clear all four tell of the love of Jesus. His love was radical, inclusive, and outside-the-box, drawing the outcasts, marginalized, and ostracized into His circle. People felt comfortable around Jesus, and he was fully Engaged with them. Jesus, who is God, was so different to the religious people of his day. He was revolutionary, but not in a political sense. He was revolutionary in revealing God’s love and grace to ordinary people. Jesus brought a healing picture of God that we all need to know and experience: God is abundantly gracious and inclusive.
The cross of Jesus Christ brought me hope when I first came to faith as a teenager who struggled in a church bound up with its rules. Amazing love saved me and the story never loses its power to bring me hope. I know God loves me with all my imperfections and his love has made such a difference to my life!
Accepting the gospel means living the gospel. Accepting the cross means living the way of the cross! If we accept the grace of God, then that same grace compels us to share our hope with others. This is not out of any sense of earning points with God or anyone else, but if we believe it then it motivates us to Engage.
Valuing people as we see them through God’s eyes
Jesus came to reveal the character of God as a man. He asks us to trust him and to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul and to love our neighbour as ourselves. If people are important to God, then as followers of Jesus, we see them as God sees them – as people who are loved by God. Like us with their warts, faults and even glaring sin that can make them hard to have a good relationship with.
We can all struggle in this space, and it is nice to blandly stay within out comfort bubble and just do our routine thing. But this is not what Jesus asks or even commands us to do. He wants us to Engage with the people He loves.
The key place to start is to pray, and this is a powerful connection with God. It allows the Holy Spirit to prepare us - to develop the right attitude towards people that comes from the fruit of the spirit. People will become important to us, and we will have the kindness and love towards them that is needed. The Holy Spirit will also lead us to people, and He will make divine appointments for us. This is an exciting journey to be on with God – as he places love and a burden for people on our hearts, we begin to see God at work. The humdrum that we called faith now comes alive and we see God doing miracles that we did not see before.
Pouring love on people through extravagant generosity
It is important that we value people and demonstrate this through extravagant generosity. It is about building relationships and getting to know people. This is not about seeing people as projects that we can witness to and then move on. People to people conversations which involve us listening more than we talk is a good starting point.
We can still run programs like ADRA projects, Elia Wellness Hubs (training at Easter Camp 2025), Evangelistic Series, Prophecy Seminars. Gospel Centred Sermons on Sabbath morning that value everyone is a simple step – we value and greet people from the car park. We go out of our way to talk with people and make the decision that we are not here to get a blessing, but rather to be a blessing. We make the effort to connect with people over lunch or invite them to our home. Then perhaps our churches will be ready to welcome visitors.
This should be the subject of our board and business meetings – Engaging with people. But at the simplest level, we can do this in our own space and time. Pray and see who God leads us to – our neighbour, the shop assistant, the person at the gym, our school or university classmate, the people at work. God wants to work a miracle and invites us to Engage with people and let him do the work as we show generosity to others.
