The Power of Total Freedom

At The Journey Church we have been spending a lot of time exploring the Gospel as we have been working our way through the book of Galatians. This past week there was a lot of discussion on what our freedom looks like.

You can go to The Journey Church website and listen to the message I preached last Sunday if you want to hear more. I had broken down different kinds of people who are found in the church who have responded to the message of freedom differently.

• There were the not yet free – people who haven’t come to faith in Christ for salvation. These could even be religious people who call themselves Christians without knowing the Christ of Christianity.
• There were the ignorant free. These are people who have come to Christ for salvation and haven’t been grounded in the Gospel and the fullness of Christ’s work. They are immature (even if they have been a Christian a long time) and tend to be easily led astray.
• There were the rebellious free. These people are people who know the truth but choose to live their own way. They are the controllers, the law-makers, the legalists in the church. Most often they are the Christians who don’t smile.
• Then there were the knowledgeable free. These are people who have got it and it is evident in their lives through their joy, peace and witness. They don’t always have things perfectly worked out but they are seeking to let the Gospel impact their whole lives.

Where do you stand?

I came across this message by Terry Virgo, who leads New Frontiers, that was preached recently at Jubilee Church in London. Maybe it will be a blessing to someone. He has a good handle on the Gospel and it’s impact in our lives. You can find it at this link http://vimeo.com/35898565

 

New Years Resolutions

It seems like this time of the year is a time of evaluation and planning for a lot of people. It certainly is for me. It is a great time to look back and evaluate how the past year was, and then to look forward to what needs to be prioritised in the new year and the years that follow.

But if you are like me, the new year comes and we often forget about the resolutions and the new year becomes the same as the year just past. So how can we make that different? If you are one to make resolutions, here are a few of my suggestions to make them as meaningful as possible.

• Make your resolutions prayerfully. Many times I have found them to be made from musings over the past year and from a desire to make the next year to be better. There’s nothing wrong with that but, it’s just not enough. We should always want everything in our lives, including our resolutions, to result in the glory of God. For this to happen a good place to start would be to invite God to have a say in the resolutions that you make!

• Evaluate the motivations behind any resolutions. It will answer the questions of “Why is that resolution so important for the year ahead,” and “How will this result in God getting glory.” Maybe we don’t remember our resolutions after 1 January because they are nothing more than good intentions.

• View your resolutions through the lens of the Gospel to ensure that they have an eternal perspective. This will help us to live beyond the next year. On Christmas day I had a young man ask me what message I had for him and other students with him. The only thing I could come up with is, “Live with eternity in view.” The Gospel helps bring this into reality.

• Write down your resolutions. For most us, we realise how frail we are when we forget important things. By writing things down we are able to remember so much easier as well as articulate the resolution far clearer. Dawson Trotman, the founder of The Navigators, once wrote, “Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and the fingertips.”

• Don’t feel pressurised to make resolutions. Jonathan Edwards wrote out a series of 70 resolutions between the years 1723 and 1724. He was 20 at the time. He made a habit of reading through these resolutions every week for the rest of his life. Maybe he had others, but it seems like these were the 70 that he went back to for the rest of his life.

• Remind yourselves. Why should we do this? Because we forget. If God has had a role in the making of these resolutions, I think we will want to be reminded of them and keep them.

2012 is around the corner. What is your resolve for this new and exciting year that God has given us? Maybe the Apostle Paul can help us when he speaks in 1 Corinthians 2:2 and says, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified!” That’s a worthwhile resolve for everyone!

 

Sacrificing to the Green Gods

We are bombarded by messages by the Green agenda in these days that we live. It seems like it has become the latest buzz word. The sad thing is that this is seldom from a Biblical perspective. If this is of interest to you, I would recommend you look at an article written by a friend of mine, Canon Dave Doveton, and can be found at http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2011/11/21/sacrificing-to-the-green-gods/#more-52947. It’s definitely worth reading!

 

Mission–Part 4

Have you ever thought of the place of faith in the Christian life. Have you ever thought that faith was a key ingredient to the completion of the Mission that we have been called to?

Galatians 2:20 says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” What I get from here is that it is by faith that we are saved (In what Jesus did at the cross), and it is by faith that we live as followers of Christ. Faith ought to be a characteristic of God-fearing people.

There is another verse that speaks of faith and the importance of it in the Christian life and that comes from Hebrews 11:6, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Both drawing near to God and seeking Him are acts of faith. Surely then faith should be a natural and observable part of our Christian lives.

But what is it? Hebrews 11:1 gives us a clue, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The NLT helps make it a bit clearer, “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.”

In actual fact, the whole of Hebrews is showing practical examples of people who live with the conviction of the unseen God who called them to do radical things. RT Kendall, in his classic work on Hebrews 11 says that faith is “Believing God.” Jim Cymbala wrote a brilliant definition, “It is total dependence upon God that becomes supernatural in its working.” There is something about living by faith that brings a God dependence and a God awareness to us and those who we meet.

Why do I bring this up today as we are looking the story of Jonah? The answer is simple, because Jonah needed to get to the place in his life where he responded to God in faith so that he would complete his mission. When I look at Jonah 1, I see a time when a faithless man begins to come back to the place of faith – he comes back to an awareness of God.

A question to ask ourselves today is, “What am I doing that I could not do apart from the power of God?” So often we can be just like Jonah, crippled by fear, driven to isolation, pursuing comfort, and yet that is not where God wants us!

So what is it that stirs faith in us. We’re often opting for the passive approach where we want faith to rise in us without doing. I think God speak and calls for us to follow and when we do we find faith rising.

Reclaim your true identity

Who you are before God is who you really are. Jonah got back to the place where he got this and said in Jonah 1:9, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” You can even feel faith rise as he speaks those words. If you are a Christ-follower, you belong to Jesus! It does wonder to a person when they can walk with the confidence, “I belong to Him!” Christian, know whose you are to know who you are!

Return to your calling

Jonah needed to go back to what God had called him to. Sometimes we have heard God’s voice in the past but never responded in faith and we wonder why things are not working out as we expected. Go back to what God has told you to do but you haven’t obeyed. Maybe it was something simple like loving your husband or wife. Maybe it was letting go of something that you value too highly. Maybe it was something that God called you to sacrifice but you haven’t believed you could trust God to supply.

Respond in faith

For faith to be real there always needs to be action! We are called to walk by faith and not by sight. I think an alternate spelling to faith is RISK. Sometimes there is great risk to ourselves. We can be crippled by our self consciousness and don’t want to jeopardise our comfort, our family, our standard of living, our jobs etc. We miss this fact – we experience God in ways we couldn’t otherwise when we step out in faith! God has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you!” Do you believe it? What are you going to do about it?

Let me ask again, “What are you doing that you could not do apart from the power of God"?”

 

Lecrae–I am second

Whether you like Hip-Hop or not, Lecrae has emerged as a guy who is passionately in love with Jesus and committed to reaching his generation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But his life wasn’t always like it is now. This is his story!

 

Speak–a new sermon series

Last Sunday, at The Journey Church, we started a new series called “Speak” where we will be looking at some of the speech gifts that the Bible talks about. We are keeping this to 4 weeks and they will be Preaching (which we did last week and can be downloaded here), Prophecy which we will look at this week, Tongues and Interpretation, and then finally Words of Knowledge and Wisdom.

We realise we could easily have carried on with other gifts, things like evangelism and encouragement, but felt that for the place that we are at as a church, these would be most beneficial. Feel free to go to The Journey Church website and download the messages there.

 

Goals In Preaching

A number of years ago I came across these goals for preaching and I have often referred back to them because of the relevance they have for my preaching. I am surprised when preachers run out of things to preach on when we have in the Scriptures the portrait of a Transcendent God whose love is limitless and whose grace  is free. I am also surprised when so many preachers won’t do the hard yards and prepare a fresh message each week but rehash someone else who has done the hard work. I don’t want to be like that!

I wish I knew who wrote these but I never took note of it at the time when I wrote these down. 

1. I never want to stand up to preach again without a good grasp of the Scripture. I’m tired of not being clear about the text in front of me.
2. I want the message from God to have a firm grasp on me, to grip my heart. I want to preach with genuine passion.
3. I want a good rapport with the congregation. I’m tired of that "glazed-over" look on the people’s faces. I want to make contact with them, to communicate effectively.
4. I want to see lives changed. If the point of preaching is for the Word of God to make a difference in people, then it must be in order to ask the Father to give me success in doing it.

 

Unleashing Everyday People

Here’s a message from Jeff Vandersteldt that is definitely worth 15 minutes of your time. Jeff is pastor with Soma Communities from Tacoma Washington in the USA. He has been challenging me in terms of missional communities and this message will help in so many ways to realise the call God has given to each Christ-follower.

 

 

Mission Part 3

Let me start this post today by asking you a question. “If people were to believe in God by looking at your conviction, would they find Him?” World they be drawn to a good and gracious God, or would they have to find out about that family member that we choose to not talk about? Would they know that encountering the living God was the key event of our life, or would it be obvious to them that this God was part of your life but not the part?

Looking at Jonah, I am not convinced his faith in God radiated. These sailors would not have known about God were it not for divine intervention and their cross questioning. Jonah has gone down into the boat and he is blissfully unaware of the devastation and chaos that he is about to cause since he is the one who is running from God. So God sends a perfect storm.

Have you ever thought that God sends storms into our life on purpose? 

God’s Purpose

Everything God’s does is with purpose. There is never a time when he is not intentional in what he does. Romans 8 :28, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him…” Psalm 115:3. What is God doing?

- He’s saying – You’re not God! I think that this was Jonah’s lesson – and it’s ours! We are not Sovereign. We get these storms in life that are big and we stupidly go about trying to be God and bring deliverance. God is saying He’s the deliverer.

- Yahweh is God. These guys are crying out to their gods but none are real! After a while, Jonah get’s here – He knew who was in control. That’s why I asked at the beginning, if people looked and listened to you, would they be impressed by your God. Do you really believe that your God is powerful and can use any circumstance for His glory? I just think we often take a while to get to that point – don’t you? We’re a lot like Jonah.

- God is wise and good and just. We can’t always see that, but that doesn’t mean that He’s not – it means we just can’t see that. You can’t live with confidence in the storm unless you believe this.

- God wants a response. It happened. It was a storm of such note that the sailors were afraid, cried out to their gods and they started doing things to save themselves – this is they were being their own functional saviours. How do we respond? Do we turn to our functional saviours? So this was really a faith testing storm.

- Renewed identity. When facing storms we are taken back to the question, “Who are you?” This is what Jonah had to answer. I think that this is one of the most fundamental things that we need to get as Christians.

If you are a Christ follower, you must get back to your true identity. You are a child of the King of kings. He has saved you, adopted you, you are His. He has sent you, what honour. He is the God who made the heavens and the earth, this world and everything in it. He is the one who opens the heavens and pours out the rain. He’s is the One who stops it. He is your provider. He is your peace. I know He sent me.

Pointed to another storm (Mark 4:35)

Storm of seismic proportions and there is another asleep in the boat. The New Testament says that He was asleep on a cushion and there is again great fear in the boat. Jesus calms the storm and says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Being a follower of Christ doesn’t mean freedom from storms, but in them you can know Christ’s presence. You might be in the storm but you need to get in the boat that Jesus is in. God is making you aware that you are weak. Only in Christ’s boat will you reach the other side.

People need to see the conviction of a great God in our lives, even in the midst of storms. How are things with you.

 

Community: Taking Your Small Group Off Life Support

Here is another excellent promo to a new book and this video is definitely worth the watch. It is by Brad House as he introduces his new book Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support (Re:Lit, Crossway).