Don t be satisfied with any water other than the holy water of God s redeeming love in Jesus Christ. Nothing else transforms the stagnant waters of our culture. When we apply this lesson to our sermon series of an assault on poverty, we might agree that there is no better place to attack poverty than by making fresh and creative investments in family life. Investing in families is our best way to reach them. My thesis this morning is that an investment in families will do more to turn poverty around than any other single effort we can make.
Families are the keepers of our springs.
The first thing we can all do is to re-invest in our own families. A high school teacher in New York wanted to tell her graduating seniors how much they had meant to her. Then she gave each of them three blue ribbons embossed with the same words and asked each student to pass them on to others. One student went to a junior executive in a local company who had helped him with his career planning. Then this young man went to his boss and gave him a ribbon.