Out of the stories I shared in the last blog, God revealed His Serving Values for us. I didn’t write the values down because they just became who we are, but I soon learned God wanted me to share them.
I started getting calls from other churches saying, “Peggy, what is going on over there? What curriculum are you using?” I had to tell them, “We change curriculum all the time. That’s not what you’re hearing about.”
From that, I realized I had to sit down and write what God had done.
These serving values are not a set of rules, not an expectation of perfection by any means. Basically, they say, “We are going to honor God in this ministry. And we’re going to hold one another to that.” That is the basis for the values — our relationship with Him and our relationship with others.
The first value is Loving God, loving Him with all of our heart.
All of our values filter through this one: Loving God. Apart from this relationship, it’s just good behavior. So the question is always, “Where are we with God, really?” From His perspective, where are we with Him? We are all in different places, but are we moving toward God? Is He becoming more of who we are?
Is He the core of who we are? Because He will not be an add-on in life.
More than being nice people
In Kids Community, I say, “You can love the children. You can mourn with them when their grandmother dies. You can go to their baseball games. But unless you are connected to the heart of God, where this transforming love comes through your heart to the heart of the child, unless you are connected, you are just nice people who love children.”
God is not interested in His children just being nice people who love kids. He’s interested in us stepping up and surrendering to Him and having Him love the children through us. It’s a transformational, supernatural love.
As we have talked about this through the years and have gone over this value again and again, God always brings a newness to it.
So what does loving God with all our hearts like? It looks like obedience. It looks like our actions — how we live our lives. But there’s emotional love for God. In the next blog we’ll look at the first part —action.