If you enjoy a fabulous meal at a restaurant or see a movie that immediately becomes one of your all-time favorites or read a novel that you can’t put down what do you do? You enthusiastically recommend that restaurant or movie or book to others don’t you? That’s the way I feel as pastor of Community Church Griffin.
What makes Community Church Griffin so special to me is the church’s purpose. We exist to exalt God and encourage others by practicing and promoting grace-focused optimism.
Optimism isn’t the first word that comes to mind when people think of Christianity. But we at Community Church Griffin believe it should be. In fact, we believe that Christians are the only people on the face of the earth who have reason to be optimistic!
The reason Christians can be optimistic is grace. That’s because grace is God’s determination to be good to believers in Jesus. This good isn’t the shallow, temporary, ultimately unsatisfying good of a pleasure-filled, pain-free earthly life. It’s the infinitely superior and inexpressibly more wonderful good of becoming perfectly and permanently like Jesus Christ in character and conduct. According to the Bible, God begins doing us this good by bringing us to faith in Jesus; continues it by causing everything He allows to happen to us to make us more like Jesus; and completes it by making us perfectly and permanently like Jesus on that great Day He returns. When we’re perfectly and permanently like Jesus we’ll be perfectly and permanently happy. Since this is God’s will for every believer, nothing will keep this good from happening to every Christian. This, and nothing less than this, is what the Bible means by grace.
Living with this optimism is crucial to living as a Christian amid all the stresses, strains, and struggles of life in a fallen world. But the only way to maintain this optimism is by staying focused on Grace. Focusing on grace is what Community Church Griffin does in Sunday worship. Through our singing, praying, preaching, and fellowshipping we seek to exalt God and encourage others by practicing and promoting grace-focused optimism.
We meet every Sunday at 10:30 A.M. We’d love to have you join us and share the optimism that’s ours because of God’s grace to us in Jesus!
In His Grace,
Charley
