The Cape Town philarmonia choir bringing some Christmas joy to the old and forgotten. Some of our members have been part of blessing these folk at the Presbytery Project for the aged at Mowbray , many of whom have no longer got family with whom to share the season.
What have you done to bring hope to hopeless this season? May you bring Jesus hope to those who have little hope left.
'whatever you did for the least of these my brothers, you did for me' - Jesus
Our worship team pulling out all the stops to bring Jesus glory.
Well done team you are awesome!
May Jesus name be known across all the world!
Discipleship conversation three is all about worship.
Humans have been made for worship, it is one of teh wonderful things about being created in the image of God. We all worship and so the question is not whether we will or not, but only whom or what will we worship. Some will worship money, sex, power and some will worship family. There is no end to the idols we will place in Jesus' rightful position. Christians worship Jesus because He is holy and has saved us from Satan, sin, and death. All of life is worship and that means our lives become totally immersed in him and his work in the world - this does not mean we must become a missionary to outer Mongolia - your office and home need missionaries too!
This is why Paul says "So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."(1 Corinthians 10:31)
But worshipping God is not just what we do to rightly walk with Him; it is also how we are transformed to be more like Jesus.
"And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is Spirit." (2 Corinthians 3:18)
Read these verses together to discuss
Read Romans 1:20-28
Read Jeremiah 2:11-13
Read Romans 12:1-2
Some questions to ask:
- How does the idea that we never stop worshipping change the way you view your life?
- What does idolatry look like in your life?
- How do you deal with your sin / idolatry?
We are really privileged to have a team of worship leaders who give if their time effort and energy to lead us into the presence of God each week.
Here is our team giving it stick in preparation for the Christmas event.
Give God thanks for faithful servants who bless his church week after week. All for Jesus glory!
Sunday morning I came to worship with a song in my heart. As we started, I was interceding for various people attending that morning. The Holy Spirit burdened me with an incredible sadness for the church, or for so many people there that morning. The tears were literally streaming down my face as I continued to pray and worship. Then the Lord showed me arms in ancient shackles and the gates of ancient jails and I could hear Him say “the gates of hell will not prevail against My church” and He showed me how the shackles broke open and fell to the ground and how the jail gate just fell forward to the ground, setting free those who were jailed or captured. Yet the sadness remained throughout the service. I was intensely aware of Jesus’ heart for His people and His sadness over so many that claim to be part of His church, but who do not grasp how MUCH, how incredibly much He loves them and that He is right by their side serving them, waiting for them to look up and see Him and be changed.
Worth reading as it raises some really serious questions about training our minds... Are We Theological Bots?
Brad House recently wrote an excellent book on community that we will be getting for our home group leaders soon. Here is an article by him that will help you give your group some gas.
Don’t Run Out of Gas: Building a Plan for Your Community Group
That is very important blank. How you fill it in will have a profound effect on the health of your group ministry. You can do a lot of things right and still be torpedoed by that question.
If you are not convinced the question of why is that important, tell your wife that you're planning a date night because Mark Driscollsays it’s a good idea. While she may appreciate the insight of Pastor Mark I would venture that she would be more moved if your motivation were her beauty and your desire for her company.
The answers to the why in community are similarly not all equal.
Growth, retention, belonging, and health are important byproducts of community, but they are just that: byproducts. We cannot take good fruit of healthy, gospel-saturated community and make it the purpose.
“Apart from Jesus’ death and resurrection, community is not possible.
”
Our foundational reason for why we have groups in our church is to image God and proclaim the good news of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross.
We have been reconciled to God and one another for the purpose of making an appeal to the world to be likewise reconciled. As image bearers of God we were created for community. What sin has broken, Jesus has reconciled. Apart from Jesus’ death and resurrection, community is not possible. The existence of a loving, gospel-saturated community is a testimony to the truth of the gospel.
In a broken world that intrinsically longs for authentic community, this is a profoundly different motivation. People aren’t interested in church growth. They are desperate for hope. They can find belonging in a pub, but they need a community transformed by the love of Jesus. We have exactly what they need when we root our groups in what Jesus has accomplished.
“Our foundational reason for why we have groups in our church is to image God and proclaim the good news of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross.
”
If you want to inspire people to be a part of community help them see the bigger purpose. Show your church how to image God in community and help your leaders understand that they are an integral part of the advancement of the gospel.
As for those byproducts, when we get the foundation of groups rooted in Christ, we can trust there will be fruit that is good and glorifying to God.
So before you ask how to do healthy community groups, make sure you know why.
We bring God glory when we fight against injustice, when we stand up for the truth, when we love the broken and care for the hurting. We bring God glory when we act with grace, show compassion, fight for love and live with integrity. We bring God glory when we witness about his grace, speak his gospel, and live by his power. We bring God glory, when we lead our families, love our children, honour our spouses. We bring God glory when we spend money with wisdom, show generosity and care for the environment.
Our entire life is to be built around that singular focus: bringing glory to God.
Is yours?
Tullian writes a great article reminding us that the call of God is to do the will of God wherever you are. We damage the idea of the priesthood of all believers when we forget that God will use us in every place we go, if we remain yielded to his will.
Corrie Ten Boom on Forgiving
“It was in a church in Munich that I saw him—a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear. It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.
“It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. ‘When we confess our sins,’ I said, ‘God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. …’
“The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.
“And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!
[Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp where we were sent.]
“Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: ‘A fine message, Fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!’
“And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course—how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?
“But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.
“ ‘You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,’ he was saying, ‘I was a guard there.’ No, he did not remember me.
“ ‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein,’ again the hand came out—’will you forgive me?’
“And I stood there—I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven—and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?
“It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.
“For I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.’
“I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.
“And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. ‘… Help!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’
“And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
“ ‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart!’
“For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely, as I did then”
(from “I’m Still Learning to Forgive” by Corrie ten Boom)
Psalm 78:4 We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.
What is faith? It is believing in what is unseen Hebrews reminds us. But what does believing mean? Intellectual agreement to doctrinal truth is not enough! The Devil also believes in Jesus, but he does not have faith in Jesus. The Biblical idea of faith is to trust upon Jesus, to lean on him in our times of need, to trust him not only for our eternal destiny but for our lives here and now.
When we have faith in Jesus he gives us all his righteousness and he takes from us all our sin. Paul writes it like this in 2 Corinthians 5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. There is no action required of us so that God would make us right. Faith is us believing that Jesus has made us right with the father. We are justified (made legally right) by faith. The reformers where reacting to abuses in the Catholic church where people where able to purchase indulgences, basically pardons for sin, or people were told to venerate long dead saints and receive pardon for sin. That is justification by works - you must do something to be made right with God.
Justification by faith is to have trust that everything needed to make us right with God has been done by Jesus. Faith is absolutely central to reformed thinking and for that matter biblical thinking!
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. Without faith in Jesus we have no way to please God. In faith everything we do can become pleasing to God. Whether you work in faith, parent in faith, play in faith, relax in faith, discipline in faith, eat in faith, spend in faith, laugh in faith, cry in faith - anything done in faith becomes a pleasing and good thing in the eyes of God.
The Reformers had it right: faith alone!
Wow, that does not bode well for us does it? And perhaps the greatest challenge is that in this age of self-confidence those kinds of texts are really jarring. People don't like to hear they are not worthy of God's love or that they can bring nothing to God that is of any worth.
The point of these texts is that we cannot save ourselves. We simply don't have it in us. We may desire to be saved and we may even desire to be good, but anyone who has tried to hold fast to a simple New Year's resolution knows that it is almost impossible to even get that right!
And so the gospel is the good news that God the Father achieved everything necessary through Jesus death, burial and resurrection to get us in good standing with him and to free us from everything that holds us in slavery including our default desire for sin.
God has done it all. God is the actor in human salvation and we only respond. It's called grace.
Hebrews 10:14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
Did you hear that? He has perfected...Jesus does the work in making us perfect before God in heaven!
Colossians 1:20 ...and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Jesus death is powerful enough to reconcile all things to God the father, that means he will save you too.
Romans 5:10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
Grace is the life changing truth that God does the work required in saving us and that there is nothing inherently good in us that merits us being saved. And for those of us who through the work of the Holy Spirit recognize our severe shortcomings in the sight of a holy God, this is good news indeed!
It is this truth that we must continue to apply to people's lives in every way that we can. For God does not love good people, but because of his perfect Son, he loves bad bad people, of whom we are of the worst, and that is good news and all world need to hear it!
It reminds me of the words of a song: 'Only by grace can we enter, only by grace can we stand, not by hour human endeavour, but by the blood of the lamb!'
We are a reformed church and when the Reformation happened the Reformers came up with the 5 solas, sola being Latin for 'alone'.
I thought it would be helpful to blog through these over the next weeks to remind you of the great truths to which we adhere.
Sola Christos - Christ alone
In this day and age we have an obsession with ‘lite’ things that look like the real deal but have half the calories. ‘lite’ beer, ‘lite’ chips there is an obsession with low calorie foods that don’t have real substance so that we can still fit into last year’s jeans and look good on the beach for summer!
Sadly the church has often become Jesus-lite. It may still look like the real thing, but the one person who should be the centre of everything is often conspicuously absent. In fact at a recent service in a mainline church that I attended, I heard Jesus spoken of just twice: once in a scripture reading the other at the end of a prayer. A church without Jesus is NOT a church at all.
Scripture teaches that Jesus is the centre of all things and the fullness of God as Paul reminds the Colossian church Colossians 1:15–17 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
This means that everything we do revolves around Christ. Whether it is preaching up front, teaching children, spending time in rest or working a 9 to 5 job. Jesus is the centre of the life of a disciple.
Jesus is the head of the church and anything that does not point to the head, Christ, needs to be cut out or reshaped into something that is Jesus-full! Too often the church clouds Jesus in all sorts of other things to the point where he is often almost completely hidden. When Jesus is hidden we've lost everything. The Reformation was a reaction against the church taking Jesus out of his role as the only mediator between God and humanity and placing other things or people alongside or sometimes even above Jesus.
We have nothing else to proclaim and nor do we need anything else to proclaim other than Jesus crucified for sin: 1 Corinthians 1:23–24 We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Those looking for truth need us to preach and teach about Jesus. This narcissistic world needs Jesus, not self-serving religion. The hurting need Jesus power and healing, not self-help. The sinner needs Jesus and not do-good moralism. The lost need the Truth and not feel good story telling. Those who are despondent need the work of the Spirit of Christ and not a pep-talk.
Everything we do needs to point people to Jesus and so the writer of Hebrews reminds us Hebrews 12:2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Our job as Jesus leaders, full of the Holy Spirit is to point people to Jesus as John the baptizer did, and we must become less that He might become more. Jesus is everything. He is a treasure of greater worth than anything and when we’re all for Jesus everything else pales into insignificance! Perhaps we might also get to the point that Paul did when wrote Philippians 3:8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ
Jesus leaders should have that kind of passion and priority so that they might lead people to Him!
