Letters
2 Cor 8:1-15 - A Reality Check on Generosity
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- Written by: Chris Appleby
I was talking to some friends last week about their church. It’s in a fairly wealthy part of Sydney and they need to do some work on their buildings. So they need to raise funds to pay for what will be a reasonably large project. But they said they can’t ask people for money because whenever they mention money people are offended. It’s one of the taboo subjects, even though they’re people with lots of money who could easily afford to give to a building fund.
But of course that’s a pretty common attitude isn’t it? We get uneasy when the conversation gets around to money. Well, money itself isn’t a taboo. We’re all happy to talk about money as a general concept, usually related to how little we have or how much more we need. But try asking someone how much they earn, or how much they have in the bank, or invested for their retirement or how much their next overseas holiday will cost and you’re likely to find them a bit embarrassed or even indignant. ‘It’s none of your business what I earn’, seems to be the attitude. ‘That’s my business and no-one else’s.’
Well that may be so, but God is good. He doesn’t let us get away with such idolatry. He’s put 2 chapters in Paul’s 2nd letter to the Corinthians just for our benefit; to shake us out of the misapprehension that what we earn is our business and only ours. He wants us to see that our personal finances are the result of God’s blessing of us, so they’re not ours alone. No, they’re first and foremost the Lord’s.
2 Cor 1:1-11 - Christ Our Comforter
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- Written by: Chris Appleby
Christ Our Comforter audio
You may have heard of Arch Hart, Professor of Psychology at Fuller Seminary in the US. He visited Australia several times in the 90s to lecture about stress and depression. One of the interesting things he said was a piece of advice he gives to ministers. He said never take your day off on a Monday if you can possibly help it. Why? Because that’s the day you’re most likely to be depressed and instead of being revived by a day off you’ll just waste it. And I can understand what he means. Imagine you’re the pastor of a church that’s wracked by divisions; where people are arguing over theology and how to apply it to their daily lives; where some of the congregation are involved in immoral behaviour and are even boasting about how sophisticated they are and the rest of the congregation just turn a blind eye; where every time you preach someone will complain that it was too long, or too simplistic or too complicated; where they point out that the other preachers are obviously far more gifted than you are; where they object to anything new. Monday would be a pretty depressing time wouldn’t it?
Now, I hope you realise I’m not talking about Steve here. I’m actually thinking about Paul’s experience at Corinth; because that’s the sort of Church he had to deal with there. If you read his first letter to the Corinthians, you’ll get an idea of the issues they faced. They were a very gifted Church but they’d allowed all sorts of problems to emerge.
Phil 4:10-23 - Generosity and Joy
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- Written by: Chris Appleby
Generosity and Joy Audio
I wonder whether you read the weekend travel lift-outs in the Age each week. I confess I do, just looking for the perfect holiday destination. What I’ve noticed, though, is the number of cruises on offer. Just imagine getting on a cruise ship in the south of Turkey and cruising around the Greek islands, along the coast of Turkey across to the Corinth canal and through to the Baltic Sea then on to Italy. Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Of course what I’ve described is something like the trip Paul’s just been on, though not with the level of comfort I’d be looking for. Paul’s journey certainly wasn’t a dream holiday.
But it did have something in common with what we might experience. Even if Paul’s travels were much more basic than ours might be, he still had to pay for them and the money he started out with would have been used up just as fast as ours would if we were going on that sort of trip. Just like us he had to pay for his transport and his food and accommodation.
We don’t read all that much about these sorts of details in the pages of the New Testament, do we? If we didn’t know better we could easily think that Paul’s missionary journeys just happened and he didn’t need to worry about money. But of course that isn’t how the world works. Even in the first century money made the world go round. If you had money you could travel. If you didn’t, you couldn’t. So the sort of ministry that Paul was called to do required funding from somewhere. As much as he may have depended on hospitality from people like Lydia in Philippi, he still needed cash to get to the places he was going (at least up until the stage where the Roman governor sent him on an all-expenses paid trip to Rome - in chains). So how did Paul fund his work? We know that on at least one occasion he worked as a tentmaker, but what about the rest of the time?
Phil 1:12-3 - Priorities & Purpose
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- Written by: Chris Appleby
Priorities & Purpose audio
Suffering
I guess we all know that there are two types of people in the world: pessimists and optimists. One sees the glass as half empty and the other sees it as half full. Actually there’s a third type –engineers and economists realise that the glass is twice as large as it needs to be, but we’ll forget them. Some people look on the things that go wrong in their life and feel defeated by them, while others look for the good things that have happened alongside the disaster.
Paul is one of the latter. Lots of bad things have happened to him but he remains positive, optimistic about the future. But perhaps some of us may need some background. Paul has been preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ for several years now, all the way from Jerusalem to Corinth and back, several times, and he’s faced significant opposition all the way – including in Philippi. On his last missionary journey he returned to Jerusalem knowing that the Jews there were plotting to kill him. When he was arrested he knew he wouldn’t get a fair hearing and in fact would probably be killed by the Jews, so he appealed to Caesar. That meant being sent in chains to Rome. On the way he’s experienced various hardships, including a violent storm at sea, culminating in a shipwreck during which he was almost put to death by his guard. And now he’s under house arrest in Rome, guarded night and day by members of the palace guard, awaiting trial and possible execution. But his circumstances haven’t worn him down.
2 Tim 3:14 - 4:5 - Why Read The Bible
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- Written by: Chris Appleby
I wonder how many of you are old enough to remember a TV show called the Greatest American Hero. It was about an ordinary guy who encounters aliens, who’ve decided that earth’s in such a bad way it needs saving. So they give him a belt that gives him super powers. They also give him a set of instructions for using the belt but somehow he manages to lose them; and so he blunders from one adventure to another, never really working out how to control these new super powers. I mention that because it’s something of a parable of many Christians who’ve received the gift of the Holy Spirit, have been brought into the people of God, but they don’t really know how to live from then on, because they’ve forgotten to read the instruction manual. It’s not that they’ve lost the instructions but they’ve never stopped to read the details. In some cases they’ve never had their own copy of the instructions or the one they have isn’t readable because it’s in such old fashioned language. So, let me ask you,
Does it matter if I read my Bible regularly?
