For Greater Richmond, Central Virginia, Our Nation & Our World
For Greater Richmond, Central Virginia, Our Nation & Our World
In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther taught about the Apostle’s Creed. Many of us say it every day of our lives and nearly every Sunday. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.” Those twelve words of the “first article” tell us who our Father in Heaven is and what kind of God he is. He made all the things we see and can’t see, and he made them for us. He gives them to us: our eyes, ears, children, vehicles, home, retirement account, and savings balance. What a comfort it is to recognize all that God has given us in the most prosperous nation in the world at the richest time in human history.
But, Luther says, this first article “ought to humble and terrify us all, if we believed it. For we sin daily with eyes, ears, hands, body and soul, money and possessions, and with everything we have.” But if we would “sense and see his fatherly heart and his surpassing love toward us.... the heart would be warmed and kindled to be thankful, and to use all such good things to honor and praise God.”
God has given you many vocations in your life. Perhaps you are a parent or grandparent, a son or daughter to
living parents, an employee or an employer, a citizen, and the like. To live out these many vocations, God calls you to use the possessions and money he has given you.
One vocation that we share is as members of Living Hope. By God’s grace, we have the opportunity to do a project together that, with the Holy Spirit’s blessing, could triple the number of souls God can reach through us in greater Richmond, daughter new congregations in central Virginia, and provide an offering to Martin Luther College to equip the next generation of Christian witnesses in our country and around our world.
And doing so will help us, but it’s not for us! It’s for our neighbors. And it’s not for our glory, but for God’s! And we do it not with our wealth, but with God’s! We are merely returning it to him in gratitude for what he has done for us in Christ.
Please consider how you can give sacrificially over the next four years to the Not Unto Us campaign for the growth of God’s Kingdom and the spread of his name.