18U Baseball Players Serving This Week

Reality Sports 18U baseball players are taking a few days away from competitive baseball this week (June 28-30) to serve around Tacoma. Coaches and players worked all day yesterday pulling weeds, mowing lawns, edging, and cleaning gutters at a number of homes in the Parkland area.

The team was able to serve two widows during the day (one of them on the far left in the picture), helping around their yards and homes.

Coaches and players will continue their work today and tomorrow. 

Players are learning that we don't work to earn God's forgiveness; we can receive his forgiveness by faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on our behalf. Believing that we can do something, a checklist of sorts, to earn God's forgiveness and love is called religion. Religion says, "Do these things and God will love you." God says, "Receive forgiveness as an undeserved gift through the work of my Son, Jesus, on the Cross. Open your empty hands and receive it." 

Once we personally receive and realize the amazing gift God has offered us in Jesus Christ, we will want to serve and love those in need around us. In fact, we'll give our lives to it.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this:  to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.  James 1:27

All other "religion" is a futile attempt to work our way to God.

May we humble ourselves to receive God's grace and then graciously offer ourselves for the good of others.