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Published on Leave a comment on This is the life – 1 John 3:11-24 sermon

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A few days ago I was strolling along the beach with my wife.  We bought some amazing tropical fruit from a roadside vendor, I went for a swim and then lay down on a deckchair sipping a cold beer.  I said to Emma “This is the life.”

When have you said that phrase?  “This is the life”?  You might not like hot holidays. Maybe you’d rather go skiing with friends and then sit down by a roaring fire with a big hot chocolate, extra cream.  “This is the life.”

Or you go out and celebrate some success at your favourite restaurant with your favourite people. “This is the life” we say.

It’s funny how rarely we use that saying isn’t it?  We live for awfully long stretches of time without saying “this is the life”.  Apparently most of life isn’t “the life”.  Evidently only very rarely is life THE LIFE.  We have to stop doing everything we have been doing and fly halfway around the world before our life starts to be THE LIFE.  Is that right?  Is it the case that most of our lives aren’t really “the life”?  That would be a real shame wouldn’t it?

Because 36 hours after I said: “this is the life”, we were locked outside our house in the freezing rain, rummaging through our suitcases before concluding our house-keys were somewhere on the continent of Australia. Was this “the life”?  “The life” seemed far away at that point.

But I wonder whether for most of us “the life” seems out of reach.

But John, the author of this letter, thinks very differently about “the life.”  For John “the life” is not a time or a place.  “The life” is a person – a person who was there in the beginning.  A person with whom we now have fellowship.  Look at the first few verses of the letter:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

This is the life.  Not a time or a place.  A person.  This is the life: Jesus.  He was there in the beginning.  There with the Father.  He came in the middle to live out “THE LIFE” on full display to the world.  John had seen THE LIFE.  He’d walked the dusty roads of Israel with THE LIFE.  When he saw Jesus saying and doing His thing, John said to Himself “THIS is the life.”  Jesus is the life.  And so John wants to tell the whole world about THE LIFE.  Verse 3:

3 We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

It’s John’s greatest joy to pass on THE LIFE to us.  So that you and I can enjoy THE LIFE, not just when we’re sunbathing by the pool or having drinks with friends, but when we’re locked out of the house in the freezing rain, when we lose our jobs and our health and our friends, our family, even our own lives.  We can lose everything in life and still have THE LIFE.  Because we have Jesus: the Author of Life, the Word of Life, the Meaning of Life.

In all of life we can have THE LIFE.

But it’s a different kind of life to “THE LIFE” we enjoy sitting by the pool.  THE LIFE we seek is usually pretty self-indulgent.  THE LIFE that Jesus gives is self-giving.  THE LIFE we pursue is about sitting back and relaxing.  THE LIFE of Jesus is an outgoing life.

Did you notice in these opening verses: Jesus goes out from the Father into the world.  He “appears” to the disciples who receive THE LIFE and then they go out and tell others.

THE LIFE is Jesus and it’s not a self-indulgent, sitting-back kind of life.  It’s a self-giving, out-going kind of life.

And with that as background, come now to a crucial verse in our passage – chapter 3, verse 16:

...continue reading "This is the life – 1 John 3:11-24 sermon"

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Published on 10 Comments on In the bosom of Jesus in the bosom of the Father – A Sermon on 1 John 1:1-4

A sermon on 1 John 1:1-4

Audio here

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3 We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 We write this to make our joy complete.

It was a good meal, good friends, good wine.  People were relaxing around the table. One man seemed even more relaxed than the rest.  We’re told that

23 the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to Jesus… Leaning back against Jesus, he asked Him a question… (John 13:23,25, NIV)

This is the Apostle John – the author of this letter.  And the author of John’s Gospel as well.  John remembers this night very well.  He remembers leaning back against Jesus.  And the Old King James version is a lot more literal about the closeness here, even if it uses old fashioned language.  It says:

23 [John was] leaning on Jesus' bosom …

and in the next verse it describes him

lying on Jesus' breast … (John 13:23, KJV)

He’s laying his head on the chest of Jesus.

John was one of the younger if not the youngest disciple.  And he calls himself “the disciple Jesus loved.”  Clearly he felt completely at ease with Jesus – leaning back on his chest.  Jesus had just washed their feet, He was teaching them about His Father and because it was Passover they would have been singing hymns around the dinner table.  We can imagine throughout Jesus’ arm around His young friend as John leant back on Jesus.

John knew he could find rest and peace and welcome in the arms of Jesus.  But he also knew just who Jesus is.  You see John begins his gospel reminding us that this Jesus is God’s Eternal Word, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. The opening line to his gospel says, “In the beginning was the Word.”  In the beginning was Jesus. Before the universe – Jesus was there.  In fact He wasn’t just there, John chapter 1, verse 18 says Jesus was “in the bosom of the Father.”  To use the old King James translation.  In the beginning Jesus was in the bosom of the Father.

Jesus had enjoyed for eternity what John enjoyed for those few minutes.  Companionable, contented, joy and love.  That has always been Christ’s experience “in the arms of the Father” if you like.

And then, without breaking fellowship in any way with the Father, Jesus came down into our world as flesh.  As one of us.  Fully God and Fully Man.  So that we might rest in His arms.

...continue reading "In the bosom of Jesus in the bosom of the Father – A Sermon on 1 John 1:1-4"

Published on Leave a comment on Church in the Wilderness 8 – Christ in the Wilderness

In this 8 part series we look at our experience through the lens of the children of Israel in the wilderness.

Wilderness Church 1  Introduction  (Deuteronomy 8)

Wilderness Church 2  Saved by the blood  (Exodus 12-13)

Wilderness Church 3  Brought out  (Exodus 14-15)

Wilderness Church 4  Sustained  (Exodus 16-17)

Wilderness Church 5  Guided  (Numbers 9)

Wilderness Church 6  Lead  (Numbers 27)

Wilderness Church 7   Promised  (Numbers 13-14)

Wilderness Church 8  Fulfilled in Jesus (Matthew 3-4)

Published on

From my sermon this morning (Isaiah 9:2-7).

Audio here.

Don't have the spirit of Scrooge.

Don't have the spirit of Winterfest.

Don't have the spirit of Santa.

Look again to the manger.

Text below...

...continue reading "Santa is anti-Christ"

Published on Leave a comment on All Age Christmas Talk – Galatians 4

Wonder of wonders, I've prepared Sunday night's sermon by Wednesday!!

And, well, Tis the season to nick other preacher's talks.  So if anyone wants to plunder, here are some child friendly slides on perhaps the second best Christmas text (after Hebrews 2) - Galatians 4:4-6:

Powerpoint slides:

1. Everyone loves a wedding

2. Well... ahem... most people love weddings.

3. But can you imagine if Prince William wasn't marrying the beautiful Kate?  What if he was marrying a right old hag?

4.  In fact, imagine he married on old leathery homeless woman

5.  Don't get me wrong, Prince William spends time with the homeless.

6.  Last year he even spent a whole night sleeping rough.  But that made the news because it was so odd.

Can you imagine if Prince William set his heart on a homeless woman and decided to win her heart by becoming homeless?  Not just for one night, but for life??!  You say, that's ridiculous, it would never happen.  I tell you, it has happened.  But not with Prince William.  Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, did something even more amazing.

7.  Galatians 4:4.  He didn't just leave a palace, He left heaven.  And He didn't just put on homeless clothing, He became one of us in every way.

8. At 4 weeks He was no bigger than a watermelon pip.

9.  At 6 weeks, no bigger than a baked bean.

10.  At 12 weeks, no bigger than a small tomato.

11.  At 20 weeks, the size of an orange.

12.  At 32 weeks, the size of a small cabbage (if anyone's pregnant here, I'm sorry if I'm making you queasy!)

13. And then born as a wriggling, speechless, helpless baby.  Amazing.

14.  We have fairytales about a prince who became a pauper.  But this is so much bigger.

15. CS Lewis once asked whether you'd become a dog if it meant saving your dog.  Would you?  Of course you wouldn't.

But Jesus left heaven to become a wriggling baby for you and me.  And to remain a human being forevermore.  Isn't it amazing - a member of the Trinity is now a member of the human race.  A member of the human race is a member of the Trinity!  But why did He do it?

16.  Gal 4:5.  To redeem us who are under law.  What's it mean to be under law?

17.  In the OT  there were rules about what it meant to be in God's family.  Family manners!  Actually it was all about what Jesus, the Son of God, would do when He was born.  But the people of the OT were asked to behave with family manners.  Do you think we're very good at obeying God's law?  Nah.  Some of us shake our fist and say No Way!

18.  Others say "I will!" but we don't really mean it.  No-one really behaves with family manners.  No-one actually lives up to God's law.  But then...

19.  Jesus came. And He is God's Son.  So how do you think He is at family manners?  He's a natural!!

20. God loves His obedient Son Jesus.  But our verse tells us that Jesus obeys God's law so that we can get all the stuff that's owing to Jesus.  God says of Jesus "You are my beloved Son."  But because Jesus obeys the law for us, God says the same thing to us "You are my beloved sons and daughters."

You might wonder how that works.  Well remember the royal wedding?

21.  Right now, Is Kate Middleton royalty?  No.  Does she have any royal power?  No.  Does she have royal wealth?  No.  But the second she marries William she gets  it all.  Family, power, wealth.  And best of all... what's the best thing about marrying the Prince??

22.  You get the Prince.  The second she says "I will" she is united to her Prince charming.

And you know what else Kate can do?  She can call the future King of England, 'father.'  (She's quite posh so I imagine she'll call him 'Papa')  But that's another privilege of marrying into royalty.  She'll be able to call the king, daddy.

Well my friends.  Our Prince Charming, Jesus Christ, has left the palace of heaven.  He's joined us in our kind of life.  And He's lived the life we ought to live before God...

23.  And just as God says to Jesus "You are my beloved Son", so He says it to everyone who is united to Jesus.

24.  And just as Jesus gets to call God "Daddy!"....

25.  ... So we get to call God "Daddy!"

Could that be true?  Do we really get to call the King of Heaven "Daddy"??  Yes...

26.  Gal 4:6

27.  Just as Jesus calls God, 'Daddy'...

28.  So everyone who says "Yes" to Jesus is brought into the family by the Spirit.  And we get to call God "Daddy" too!

29.  So what's Christmas all about?  He became what we are so that we might become what He is!

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Published on 10 Comments on Psalm 72 – Christmas Sermon

Psalm 72 sermon audio
Powerpoint slides (quite important to teaching Gen 3:15 and Adam and Christ)

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Born in a shed, laid in a feeding trough, He was born into the poorest of poor families.  He spent his childhood on the run from His own king and his henchmen.  After being an asylum seeker, He then grew up in a northern backwater of a tiny oppressed nation, ruled by a ruthless super-power, the Romans, who would crucify sometimes scores of His countrymen by the roadsides as a warning about what rebels can expect.  His own people constantly taunted Him over His perceived illegitimacy – taunts that stuck throughout His life.

He learnt His adoptive father’s trade, a builder’s labourer, and worked at that for the great majority of His adult life.  Then aged 30 He collected together an unlikely assortment of no-hopers and miscreants.  Ill-educated fishermen, despised tax collectors, political zealots, notorious sinners.  And for three years, just three years, He toured little Israel as a penniless, homeless, sometimes wildly popular, sometimes wildly unpopular preacher.  Just three years in little Israel, an occupied province under the thumb of mighty Rome.  Three years before His own people hated Him enough to hand Him over to the Romans, and they did what Romans did best.  They snuffed out this upstart who claimed to be King.

Or did they?  Because this unlikely mob of followers swore, even as it cost each of them their lives, they swore that Jesus had risen bodily from death, just as promised.  And that He had ascended to the throne of the universe.  These former fishermen, tax collectors and sinners, spread the word that Jesus was indeed the eternal King, the long promised Messiah, the Son of God.  It was a truth that turned the world upside down.  And within a few hundred years the empire that executed Jesus confessed Him Lord and King.

It is without doubt the most stupendous fact of all history.  How is Jesus the central figure of human history?  Why is the whole world about to stop to mark His birth?

In His day, Jesus was ignored and completely insignificant to anyone with any power.  Then when He caused a minor and short-lived stir He was despised, rejected and condemned.  Today, He commands more allegiance than any other human being ever has or ever could.  Not bad for a kid born in a shed.

You see these are the facts.  They are not in dispute by any reputable historian.  Jesus – that penniless preacher, never entered political office, never entered religious orders, never entered the military, was never schooled in the customary way, never founded a school, never wrote a book, never led an army, never had an ounce of earthly power.  He was butchered as a blasphemer aged 33.

And He is the single most important human ever born and billions call Him Lord.

These are the facts, they are not in dispute.  Tell me, how do you account for all this?

I tell you, there’s only one way to account for it.  The bible’s way.  This is the only explanation for the most stunning fact of history.  So what we’re going to do is spend a few minutes unpacking how the bible explains the significance of Jesus.  ...continue reading "Psalm 72 – Christmas Sermon"

Published on Leave a comment on Christmas talks

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.  You got some Christmas sermon wealth you wanna share?  Here's the ones I could find.

Christmas is God laying hold of us - Hebrews 2:14-18

Evangelistic carols service - Light shining in darkness - Isaiah 9:2-7

In the beginning... - John 1:1-2

The Word became flesh - John 1:14

Christmas brings a crisis - John 1:15-18

All-age: Christmas turns slaves to sons - Galatians 4:4-7

All-age Carols Talk: Christmas is weird - Phil 2:5-11

 

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Published on Leave a comment on Bacon, Bible and the Boys 1 – Jesus Shaped in Everything

I'm holding four Men's Breakfast type things on the Saturdays in November.

We began last Saturday determining to begin our thinking again with Jesus.

Handout below.

The audio isn't crystal clear but it has an unplanned detour into Acts 17 that provoked good discussion afterwards...

...continue reading "Bacon, Bible and the Boys 1 – Jesus Shaped in Everything"

Published on Leave a comment on More examples of faith seeking understanding

John Richardson alerts us to this this article on mathematics:

[...] For more than 100 years, mathematicians have known that there are different kinds, and sizes, of infinity. This was first shown by the 19th-century genius Georg Cantor. Cantor's discovery was that it makes sense to say that one infinite collection can be bigger than another. Infinity resembles a ladder, with the lowest rung corresponding to the most familiar level of infinity, that of the ordinary whole numbers: 1,2,3… On the next rung lives the collection of all possible infinite decimal strings, a larger uncountably infinite collection, and so on, forever.

This astonishing breakthrough raised new questions. For instance, are there even higher levels which can never be reached this way? Such enigmatic entities are known as "large cardinals". The trouble is that whether or not they exist is a question beyond the principles of mathematics. It is equally consistent that large cardinals exist and that they do not.

At least, so we thought. But, like gods descending to earth to walk among mortals, we now realise their effect can be felt among the ordinary finite numbers. In particular, the existence of large cardinals is the condition needed to tame Friedman's unprovable theorems. If their existence is assumed as an additional axiom, then it can indeed be proven that his numerical patterns must always appear when they should. But without large cardinals, no such proof is possible. Mathematicians of earlier eras would have been amazed by this invasion of arithmetic by infinite giants. Read more

And Paul Blackham in recent comments, speaks of the mode of enquiry that drove Galileo and Francis Bacon:

Galileo’s notebooks... are not full of the rigorous, hard-nosed observational data that the mythology depicts. In fact, he can’t see the things that he is convinced he could see if he had better telescopes. Some of the drawings of what he sees through his telescope do not support his arguments. He marvels that Copernicus persisted with his argument even when his observations were so inaccurate. When we compare Galileo’s drawings of the moon with photographs of the moon, it is hard to find similar features. The point is that Galileo was FIRST convinced of the heliocentric view and then began to develop telescopes that would enable him to observe what he was convinced was there. Kepler who wanted one of these new telescopes was disappointed by the results. He found them to be accurate for earthly observations but misleading for heavenly. Yet, the quality of the observations was not the critical factor here. It was the development of a new paradigm for viewing the cosmos, one whose benefits were only unfolded as time went on.

In Galileo’s letter to Leopold of Toscana of 1640, he specifically says “I am unwilling to compress philosophical doctrines into the most narrow kind of space and to adopt that stiff, concise and graceless manner, that manner bare of any adornment which pure geometricians call their own, not uttering a single word that has not been given to them by strict necessity…”.

In other words, Galileo knows full well that his argument is not a matter of pure observation [whatever that may mean] but a philosophical perspective first. Francis Bacon, whose scientific arguments were so vital to the foundation of the entire tradition, argues that we need to view the world with “unbiased senses” – by which he means that our senses need to be rebuilt with a new way of perceiving that mirrors the world rather than ourselves – “For man’s sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and of the mind bear reference to man and not to the universe, and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.” [Novum Organum, Aphorism 41]. He speaks of a need to demolish the way we think and perceive so that a new way of seeing/thinking can be built. In the preface to the Novum he says “Our only hope of salvation is to begin the whole labour of the mind again… after having cleansed, polished and levelled its surface.” Preconceived notions, opinions and even common words all need to be “renounced with firm resolution… so that access to the kingdom of man, which is founded on the sciences, may resemble that to the kingdom of heaven, where no admission is conceded except to children.”

Copernicus wrote in the preface to ‘De Revolutionibus’ that the astronomical tradition of Aristotle could only solve the classic problems with great complexity and that a new paradigm was needed.

The point of all this is to simply note that our philosophical/theological convictions do not only shape and colour our observations, but they also determine what and how we observe. There is no escape into geometry or any other simple observation/calculation that is free from the theological and philosophical arguments.

 

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