Covenant Life Church

Labor Day was started to honor the hard work and contributions of the American workforce. God’s been honoring hard work since the beginning. Everything you see is a result of God’s work. Genesis 2:1-2 tells us that creation was the work of God and that He rested after six days of working. He didn’t rest because He was tired; He rested because He had finished the job. The fact that God did work and gave work to Adam means that work is honorable. God stopped after the sixth day, but there is more work to do. We love because God loves. We give because God gives. We forgive because God forgives. What should be our response to the fact that God is a worker? We should work! This week’s message is called In Honor of Work.

This week, we are welcoming kids of all ages into “big church” with us for CL Family Day — a special service we have every fifth Sunday to give our Next Gen volunteers a break and allow parents and children to worship God together. Plus, now that our young people are back in school, it’s the perfect time to dive into a message called Kingdom Math. Together, we’ll look at three pairs of mathematical formulas to help us see how our thoughts and actions should be inverted by the Gospel, and at the end, Jordan Weathers, communications director at Covenant Life, will share some practical things we can do as families this week to grow closer to God and make a greater impact on the lives of others.

Over the past three weeks, we’ve been exploring the “core four” values of becoming more like Christ. So far, we’ve talked about humility, unity, and integrity. Each one of these messages could have been a series of its own, but we wanted to put them all together into a single series to demonstrate how powerful they are together. We’ve saved the most important value for last. This week, we’re talking all about love. Love is the foundational and essential core value. If you want Christ to be fully developed in you, don’t start with rules, spiritual gifts, or mission fields. Start with love. Attorney and Christian author Bob Goff says the whole point of the Christian life is for us to become love. Makes sense, right? If God is love and you want to become more like Him, you must become love. That’s the only way Christ will be fully developed in you.

We are in the third week of a four-part series called The Core Four. There are four values at the heart of following Jesus, which form the core of who we are supposed to be in Christ. These four core values don’t get a lot of attention and are growing harder to find in the body of Christ, but as a church, we must adopt them as our own. Over the past two weeks, we have talked about humility and unity. This week, we are going to talk about integrity. Integrity is behavior and belief in perfect alignment. It’s faithfulness to an unshakable foundation. The word “integrity” is not widely used in the Bible, but it was a part of Jesus’s character and should be part of ours, too.

Last week, we started a new series called The Core Four. If we are to represent Christ to the world and allow His nature and character to develop fully within us, then we are going to have to have the same values that Jesus had when He was on the earth. Last week, we talked about humility. Jesus was the most humble man who ever lived. He said you can’t even get into the Kingdom of God without humility. Humility is the first of four core values of the Kingdom, and this week, we’re going to explore the second. Jesus said, “There is one thing that I am praying to God about that will demonstrate to the whole world that you belong to me and that I am God’s Son.” It isn’t spiritual gifts, money, power, influence, talent, charisma, or a huge platform. It’s unity — coming together as brothers and sisters in Christ.