Sermon Podcasts

Perfect process

Sun, 5 Sep 2010 14:09:55 +1000

James 1:1 Joyful greetings from James, a servant of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, to the Jewish Christians of the far flung Nation of Israel, wherever you may be living.
2. My friends, make sure you maintain a positive and joyful attitude when you go through different kinds of challenges and temptations.
3. Try and realize that the testing of your faith at these times strengthens your character and endurance.
4. Let that perfect process of patience and endurance achieve its true goal, which is a robust faith in the goodness and love of God that does not crack under pressure.
5. If you need to know what is the correct response or initiative to take in your life decisions, ask God to show you. He is happy to guide you in a most caring and uncomplicated way.
6. Just make sure you fully trust and believe in God to do this. If you are not anchored by this certainty you will be swept to and fro by storms of internal conflict.
7. No one in that state of turmoil can expect to get a simple and clear-cut leading from the Lord.
8. If you cannot resolve your internal conflicts about trusting in God, your faith and your will and your resolve to do anything will be compromised.

1. The internal conflicts we experience emerge when the desire we have to embrace our human independence conflicts with the divinely implanted desire to be embraced by a loving God. (Independence is freedom from the control or influence of any other person – a reality or an attitude?)
2. Every challenge and temptation in our lives teases out this conflict as the darkness of our human confusion struggles with the light of God’s love and truth. The desires of an independent humanity, when energized by the powers of darkness, hold out a promise of self fulfillment and tempt us to abandon the unseen world of God’s goodness. A person can choose the tangible possibility of self satisfaction and self gratification, unaware or uncaring of the cost of an inner well being and richness in being found in God’s embrace.
3. The choice to be wooed by a loving Jesus is always opposed by the choice of an independent stance, and so we experience the inner conflict. When we yield to God’s love and goodness it involves patience and endurance against that human impulse to be independent.
4. However Jesus even embraces our independence and accommodates it within his reconciling love. That was the power of his death and resurrection when he joined us to his life without blaming us for our flawed and sinful humanity. His enemy is darkness, not us. God wants to preserve our uniqueness and individuality as The Holy Spirit guides our human journey of personal life decisions with his caring and loving generosity. He understands our need to have the wisdom necessary to respond correctly to what this complicated life continually throws at us. He does this in an uncomplicated and straightforward way that amazes us with his interventions that we often suppose must be mere coincidences. We can be individuals with free will but not an independent attitude.
5. When we anchor our souls to this certainty of his goodness towards us we will not be shipwrecked by the storms of the internal conflict of our humanity, but grateful in all things.

Life on the outside

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:03:32 +1000

Hebrews 13:1. Continue to show love to one another as members of Father’s family.
2. Be kind-hearted and generous to people you don’t know also. Scripture shows there are those who have done this and received an angelic blessing without anticipating it.
(Gen.19:1, Jud 6:11, Jud 13:16)
3. Be mindful of other Christians who are in prison, as if you were sharing their prison cell, and of other Christians who are going through the same pressures as you are.
4. Respect and honor the state of marriage, and regard the act of marriage as innocent and pure, and be aware that God will deal firmly with adulterers and the sexually corrupt.
5. Don’t live a greedy materialistic lifestyle, but be satisfied with what you have. God has promised to never let you down or abandon you.
6. That way we can confidently trust God and his provision for us and not fret about other people taking advantage of us.
7. Consider the spiritual leaders you have had and the word of God they have taught you. Learn form the faith and the fruit of their lives.
8. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, and today, and forever.
9. Don’t be led astray by weird and wonderful doctrines. Let your heart be at rest in God’s goodness to you, and don’t get preoccupied with religious ceremonial
niceties that achieve nothing for anybody.
10. We partake of a spiritual sacrifice that provides nourishment which that kind of religion has no capacity to offer.
11. The bodies of the animals sacrificed as sin offerings were burned outside the border of the camp and the high priest brought the blood back into the sanctuary.
12. Jesus was also sacrificed as an offering for the sins of humanity outside the walls of the city, so that he could separate us out for himself.
13. So let us join Jesus out there, and share his life as an outsider, beyond the walls of worldly and religious self-interest.
14. This world system offers no permanent security, because our hearts live in another kind of world.
15. It is because of Jesus that we can offer a better kind of spiritual sacrifice; a continual and ongoing thank-you to God.
16. But don’t forget to be kind and generous to others, because this is also offering a spiritual sacrifice that delights God’s heart.

1. Paul’s final plea to the Hebrew Christians is for each of them to live ‘life as an outsider’ sharing the life Jesus lives with Father God and the Holy Spirit.
2. He explains that ‘Life on the inside’ is determined by self interest, whereas life on the outside is determined by faith and trust in God in all things, in an unseen world where we depend upon the goodness of an unseen God instead of upon a tangible and material system of cause and effect and personal self interest..
3. Our approach to this life on the outside with Jesus is one of having a heart of ongoing thankfulness to God for who he is and what he does. The fruit of this is a pure heart of giving rather than taking, and of peace and joy rather than corruption, discord and strife.

Staying on course

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:27:11 +1000

Hebrews 12:12. So do the spiritual training for your spiritual hands to carry what you have to, and spiritual training for your spiritual legs so you can go the distance.
13. Choose a good even spiritual track to run on, or you could end up injuring your spiritual muscles instead of strengthening them.
14. Seek to live in harmony with others, and seek to live a life devoted to God. You won’t see God at work in your life if you are not devoted to him.
15. Be careful not to ignore God’s goodness towards you so that you don’t get crowded out with toxic inner regrets and disappointments. This ruins many people.
16. Don’t get caught up with immorality, or lose sight of spiritual values, like Esau did. He threw away the spiritual treasure he was born to enjoy.
17. Later, when he realized what he had done and wanted the spiritual blessing he was born for, he couldn’t have it anymore because his father couldn’t change his mind and reverse his decision, even though Esau wept and pleaded for another chance.
18. But you haven’t arrived at the physical Mount Sinai that you can reach out and touch, with it’s fire and lightning above and the black storm clouds below,
19. And the trumpet blast, and the booming voice of God that they heard which made them plead not to have to directly hear its sound again. (The voice of Moses would suffice Exodus 20:18) 20. (They could not cope with what they heard. If an animal so much as touched the awesome mountain it became such a holy hazard that it had to be stoned or speared to death. 21. It was such an awesome sight that even Moses said he was shaking from head to toe with fear.)
22. Instead, you have arrived at the spiritual Mount Zion, and the heavenly Jerusalem, the spiritual city of God, where there are multitudes of angels,
23. Where there is gathered the universal church of the saints of the former age, whose names are recorded in heaven. You have come to where God is, the judge of all mankind, and where there also reside the spirits of the saints of this age.
24. This where Jesus is, the person responsible for the New Covenant, and to his shed blood, which has greater things to say than the blood of Abel.
25. So don’t reject what he says from heaven, because if those who rejected what Moses said could not escape the consequences of their rejection, then what chance do we have of escaping the consequences of rejecting God’s voice, who speaks from heaven. 26. God’s voice once shook the earth, but now he is proclaiming that there will be another great shaking, and it will it not only be the earth that is shaken, but the heavens also. 27. And when he says ‘another shaking’ he is referring to the fact that every material thing in the universe that can be shaken will be shaken to pieces and destroyed, and that only the eternal things, which cannot be shaken, will remain. 28. So let us realize that we are part of this eternal Kingdom which cannot be shaken or moved. Let us embrace the gracious goodwill of God towards us, so that we can delight his heart with the utmost of respect and admiration for him. 29. Our God can wipe out the entire universe and everything in it.

1, Staying on course means having right expectations of God and of yourself in your life decisions.
2. It means knowing what you have been born to enjoy and being committed to it.
3. It means knowing that God will always be dealing with your unbelief to get you back on track.
4. It means you are unshakeably safe in his hands.
5. It means an awesome, humble respect for the command and control of God over all things.

Faith and Father’s discipline

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:50:52 +1000

Hebrews 11:1. The faith lives of this gallery of heroes are set before us as examples of that kind of faith. We can now throw off the attitude of being weighed down by our problems, and the individual failures and flaws of our human nature. Let us now run the race set before us with a well-timed and measured pace
2. We can keep Jesus in our sights, the one who initiates and completes our faith life. He kept in his sights the joy and happiness that awaited him as he set himself to persevere the ordeal of the cross. He shrugged off the scorn that people threw at him, and finally took his place at the right hand of the throne of God
3. Just think of that barrage of self-centered and evil attitudes that he had opposing him. Compare this to what you are going through before you decide to give up because it is all too hard.
4. You have not yet had to battle against evil to the extent that your life-blood is drained out of your body.
5. Perhaps you have forgotten the challenge of Scripture which speaks to us as sons and daughters, saying ‘Do not despise the disciplinary training of the Lord, and don’t go to pieces when he corrects you.
6. Because God is showing you his love when he disciplines you and brings painful consequences to bear upon you. He does this to all that he would draw close to his heart.’
7. If you go through this training you are being treated like a dear child by God. Aren’t all children trained and disciplined by their fathers?
8. But if you distance yourself from discipline and training then you are acting like an outsider and not as if you are really part of the family.
9. Our natural fathers disciplined us and we showed respect to them, so shouldn’t we rather submit to our spiritual Father and be fully alive to his life.
10. They disciplined us for a few years, mainly to have us fit in with what suited them, but God disciplines us for our own advantage, so that we can develop in some of the virtue we see in his character.
11. No kind of discipline seems like fun and games at the time; it is painful. But when you go through the pain of it you do end up with the gain of it. You end up experiencing a peaceful harmony with God and with your own soul.

The examples of faith in the lives of the gallery of heroes reveal how they accepted and embraced the circumstances of their lives, believing that God loved them and was at work in the unseen world, doing good to them and through them, and to bring them closer to his heart.

THE LESSONS FOR US

1. God allows contrary and painful circumstances to confront us. These things challenge our trust and faith in him as a good and loving Father who wants the best for us.

2. Our response should be to believe that his motive is to do us good and bring us closer to his heart. (vs.6)
3. Our acceptance and patience and trust in him in at these times is the measure of our growth in faith.

4. The result is a life of harmony with God and with our own souls, and a release of his drawing power through us of others towards himself. As you change, your world changes around you.

Coming Home

Tue, 3 Aug 2010 16:50:50 +1000

Hebrews 11:4. Through that kind of faith Abel presented to God an offering far greater than Cain’s because it came from a thankful heart that was right with God, and his heart received God’s thank you. He died but his thank you still lives.
5. Through that kind of faith Enoch was lifted entirely out of this earthly domain and into the heavenly realm without ever seeing death, never to be seen again, because God took him off to be with himself. Before he disappeared his life was a testimony to the fact that he gave untold joy to God’s heart.
6. It is only possible to give this kind of joy to God’s heart by fully trusting and believing in him. If one wants to get close to God he must believe in who he is, and that he bountifully rewards the heart that longs to have close intimacy with him.
7. Through that kind of faith, Noah, being given private and personal forewarning of an event that had never been seen before, responded with awesome reverence, and prepared a floating ark that saved his whole family. His rescue marked humanity’s judgment, and passed on to us the heritage of a faith life with God.
8. Through that kind of faith Abraham, asked by God to leave his homeland and go off to a strange new territory that would one day of bear his name, said yes and went, with no idea where he was going.
9. Through that kind of faith he traveled through that land of promise where he felt like a stranger and lived in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who also shared with him in the promise
10. But he had eyes for a spiritual home, which was laid down, designed and occupied by God.
11. Through that same kind of faith Sara was able to conceive and have a child, through God’s power, when she was well past childbearing age because she trusted and believed in the faithfulness of God and his promises.
12. And so one man, Abraham, who was as good as dead as far as fatherhood was concerned, fathered more descendants in number than there is sand in the sea and stars in the sky.
13. Those we have mentioned all died in faith without experiencing the full outworkings of the promises made to them, but they saw them far into the future with eyes of faith, and were convinced that they were real They saw themselves as strangers and travelers through this material life on earth.
14. People who live like that show clearly that they are searching for a real home somewhere.
15. And if they had thought that their true home was the original country from which they came, they could always have gone back.
16. But they were longing for a much better place to call their true home. They wanted a heavenly home. That is why God is delighted to be known as their God, because he has made his home their home.

All the people mentioned above had experiences of faith in God that are prophetic of the life of faith that God wants for our lives individually, and also for the corporate expression of His Church in the Earth.

Their experience of faith was a genuine trust and hope in a living loving God of grace and goodwill toward them that allowed them to live above the powers of darkness that seeks to take us captive at its own will. (2Timothy 2:24-26).

However their faith saw afar off what we can experience NOW, because of the work of The Holy Spirit that Jesus has made available for us (Hebrews 11:39-40)