I love the passage in Psalm 67 which says “God, our God, blesses us.  God blesses us that all the ends of the earth may fear Him.”  Think about that for a minute.  God doesn’t simply bless us so we can be comfortable or feel good about ourselves or simply enjoy the good life.  He blesses us so that people around the world will stand in awe of Him, and will love, trust and obey Him.  God wants the nations to know of His mercy and grace that is found in Christ and proclaimed in the Gospel.  And He invites us to collaborate with Him in this great work.

One of the ways that we can join God in this is by giving.  Now there are two ways that you and I can give.  We can give by sight or we can give by faith.  Giving by sight is what you would imagine.  It is simply pulling out your budget and going over your income and expenses and then deciding how much you can afford to let go of.  Giving by faith doesn’t completely overlook this process;  you still look at your budget and evaluate where you are financially.  But when you give by faith, you take it a step further by asking an all-important question:  Lord, how much above my regular giving can I trust you to channel through me for your work?  At this point, it’s not a matter of how much you can afford – but how much can you believe God to supply through you out of His resources.  And so as you pray about this, you simply ask God to put an amount on your heart that He wants you to give (and it’s usually an amount that is greater than you could imagine giving), and once He does that, you promise to give that as He provides.

Over the years, our congregation has been able to support numerous missionaries around the world through our Faith Promise Giving.  Our congregation has accepted the challenge to help reach the nations by giving generously to this work.    Now the time is here once again for each of us to prayerfully consider what the Lord would have you give to missions over the next year.  Our commitment to various missionaries and missions over the next year is $122,400 but our hope is that we could even surpass this number so that we could expand our world outreach even further.