Preparing for Commitment Sunday

With our annual commitment Sunday coming up in just two weeks, I thought I would take the time to write an article on the significance of this annual event in the life of our church and address some key questions to help you identify if you are ready for the commitment.

One of the unique things we do as a church is to have an annually renewed “membership.” Rather than keeping a long list of all the people who were once a part of our church and consider themselves to be members even if they haven’t shown up in years, we ask people to make a commitment to the church every year. We call it our “Community Commitment” because it is actually an expression of what we believe it means to be part of the Community we affectionately call LCC.

However, we know that some people won’t be able to make the full “Community Commitment” either because they are still learning about the church or because they haven’t yet made a commitment to Jesus. For them, we provide an opportunity to make an “Associate Commitment”

Here are the two commitments:

The LCC Community Commitment

Having put God first in my life through a commitment to Christ as his Son and the Bible as His Word, desiring to grow daily more like Jesus, motivated to use my gifts in ministry to others, and eager to follow God into the future he has for this church, I hereby commit myself to join the community of Lafayette Community Church for this year.

The LCC Associate Commitment

With a clear conviction that God’s will for me involves fellowship with the people of Lafayette Community Church, I commit to use this year to explore God’s simple commands to put him first, join in community, grow like Jesus, and use my gifts in ministry.

The Core Issues

Each of these commitments touches on our core values. See, we are convinced that the teaching of the Bible can be condensed into four simple commands from Jesus which translate to four core values that we live out by making four key commitments.

Our first core value is GOD himself.

Of course, loving God like this is about more than having positive feelings toward God. Loving GOD with everything you are means recognizing him as superior to everything else, and it especially means loving God for who he really is not just our idea about him. That’s why it’s so important for us to have a commitment to God that is based on how he reveals himself.

The core commitment to God goes like this:

I will give God first place in my life by accepting his Son as my Lord and his Word as my highest Authority.

Our second core value is COMMUNITY.

Community is a word that reminds us of where we live, and that’s a good thing because community is the value of “doing life” with other people. The Bible teaches that community is one of the core reasons Jesus came to the earth in the first place. Jesus came because God so loved “the world” (John 3:16) and because God has designed people to be in relationship with others as much as he designed us to be in relationship with himself. See Genesis 2 and Ephesians 1 for more on that topic. But if all that weren’t enough, Jesus himself said that the second greatest command was to love your neighbor as yourself.

In other words, after loving God, the most important thing we can do with our lives is to love other people.

The problem with that, however, is that people are hard to love!

Thinking on this topic a few weeks ago, I realized one reason it’s hard to love people… they are unpredictable! In fact, I think that’s one of the big reasons that it’s hard for us to build new relationships. We have been burned by the unpredictable people in our past, and we have no idea how to predict anything about the people in our present. That’s why living out core value number two requires making a commitment that takes relationship uncertainty into account.

I will invest my heart, my time and my resources into uncertain relationships with God’s people.

Of course, the church itself is an uncertain relationship. Making a commitment to a church is a hard decision for many people to make, but uncertainty is what gives relationships their power to change us too!

Our third core value is GROWTH

When we talk of personal and spiritual growth we mean one thing above all else—becoming more like Jesus.

Jesus says “follow me” 20 times in the New Testament, and he meant it. He was the model human being. He was everything we should be, and he promised not only that we could be like him, but that we would be like him. Sure, it’s not easy becoming like Jesus, but at least we have our whole lives to work on it!

It’s easy to think that growth comes naturally for living things, and in one sense, that’s right. However, what’s required to keep the living thing alive is different from what it takes to help it grow. Many malnurished children worldwide suffer from stunted growth and health problems because they haven’t gotten the right kind of food, while many obese children here in America suffer from their own health problems because they haven’t gotten enough exercise.

Healthy growth takes both nourishment and exercise, and when it comes to the spiritual life, nourishment is the truth of God’s Word, and exercise is living it out. That’s why the core commitment associated with this core value is this:

I will walk the path of truth and discipline to become increasingly more like Jesus.

Our fourth core value is MINISTRY

When we use the word ministry to describe our fourth core value, we could just as well be using the words giving, service, or something else because as far as we are concerned, ministry is anytime you take what you have been given and use it to bless others. If God blesses you with money, then giving money to the poor is a ministry. If God blesses you with a car, then giving someone a ride is ministry. If God blesses you with a good family, then coaching someone else on their family is ministry. If God blesses you with the promise of eternal life through his Son, then telling someone about Jesus is ministry. If God blesses you with a cool church, then inviting someone to join you is ministry.

Anytime you use your blessings to bless others, that’s ministry.

Matthew quotes Jesus’ final words to his followers before he ascended into heaven:

What Jesus had done for them, they were to pass on to others.

There are two problems with this, however. The first problem is that very few of us even know what our blessings are. We are so inundated in our culture with celebrity and commercialism that we are far more aware of what we don’t have than what we do. We can hear a world-class Bible scholar on the radio and therefore be intimidated against sharing our faith with our friends. We see the wealth of others and fail to realize our own affluence.

The second problem is related to the first. Since we don’t know how we have been blessed, it’s nearly impossible to know how we should bless others.

These two problems are significant, to be sure, but the answer to them both is far easier than you could guess. All we need to do is flip the equation… Instead of taking what I’ve been blessed with and blessing others, I just start blessing others, and I’ll soon realize the blessings I have!

Here’s the core commitment:

I will put my heart into blessing others so I can recognize how I’ve been blessed, and then bless others better.

Practical Suggestions

If you’ve made it this far, you are probably the kind of person who sincerely wants to know God, have strong relationships, grow spiritually and make an impact in your world. But perhaps you need some practical encouragement and advice on what it might mean to live these commitments out. Well, I read your mind, and here are a couple of suggestions for how you can make these four core values and four commitments become a part of you.

• Read your Bible and pray — God and Growth.
• Get baptized — God and Community.
• Come to church gatherings whenever you can and making it a priority so you can come regularly — all four.
• Practice off-the-top, percentage-based giving (using the tithe as a guideline) — all four.
• Join and participate in a Life Group — Community mostly.
• Volunteer repeatedly for service inside and outside the church — Ministry.
• Befriend and pray for people inside and outside the church — Ministry.