Serving Like Jesus

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to share my dreams with you by describing my organization’s REACH program. We’re trying to create a generation that has come alive in Christ.

REACH starts with water. Water is the source of life. But people all over the world live without access to clean water. Their water makes them sick. They need wells.

For eight thousand dollars your youth group can build a fresh-water well. You’ll change a community of fifteen hundred people! It’ll erase 90% of diseases in that community. They will flourish!

Generation Alive is trying to get youth groups and young kids to try this. Suppose you have a youth group of one hundred kids. We want to get one hundred kids to figure out some way to raise eighty dollars each in three months. Eighty dollars! That’s it.

Do you think we can do that? Absolutely we can! That’s how you empower young people. You don’t challenge them to come up with eight thousand dollars. All they need to do is raise eighty dollars. That’s what you tell the kids: “Each of you come up with eighty dollars.” Are they able to do that? Yes, absolutely!

When you do that, when your youth group of a hundred kids comes up with eighty dollars each, you have the money you need to build a well. And when your youth group builds a well, you can tell each of them, “You, a young life, have now helped a community of people. They’re in a foreign land, and they think nobody cares about them, and you helped them.”

Because they do think nobody cares about them. When they’re dying of dysentery and they need good water, they think, “We’re going to die, because we have no hope. No one knows about us.” But now that’s not true! Your youth group knows about them, and has helped them! Now you have a group of one hundred young people who have changed the lives of a whole community of people in Africa, or Mexico, or Haiti, or India. You have a group of young people who have reached out to a community somewhere in the world, and changed their lives!

You can remind your youth group that they did this even though they didn’t know anyone from the community. That’s Jesus, because that’s unconditional love. That community hasn’t done anything for your kids. But it doesn’t matter. Your kids decided to put a well in anyway. They decided to cure 90% of their diseases. You know what that is? That’s serving like Jesus.

Now you’ve empowered your youth group. You can show them pictures, or you can organize a mission trip over there to see the community they helped. You’ve empowered the young people to say man, we love doing this. We want to do that again!

And that’s not it! I’ve got big dreams about the next step too. I’ll tell you about that next time. See you Friday.