Generosity
- Details
- Written by: John Altmann
audio (5MB)
2 Cor 9:6-15
Yesterday on the front of the business section of The Age was this article: “Ramsay billions willed to charity”
Paul Ramsay who founded a private hospital company died last Thursday of a heart attack at 78. And his entire fortune of $3.4 billion is to be transferred to a charitable foundation that he set up.
Are we as generous as that?
Are we rich in giving to others ?
Are we surrounded by people from our own culture who are joyful in giving money and time to other people?
Are you part of a generous family?
Finally after you soak up all these influences around us, are you generous as an individual?
Or do we tend to hoard things up for ourselves and our own security and status?
I ask this question because the NT commands us to be generous.
Wedding – Ian & Claudia Mak
- Details
- Written by: Chris Appleby
Wedding – Ian & Claudia Mak audio (2.6MB)
Gen 2:18-25
Ian and Claudia asked me to preach on this passage for a particular reason which I’ll mention in a moment, but first let me just remind you of the flow of the narrative in Gen 2. God has made a man. He’s put him in the Garden of Eden, a wonderful place filled with good things. But God sees Adam, on his own, and he says this isn’t good. Human beings are made in God’s image. They’re made for relationships, for community. So God decides to make a helper who can be Adam’s partner. God first makes all the other animals and brings them to Adam to see what he’ll call them and to see if any of them are suitable.
Mission 4 - Build Community
- Details
- Written by: Chris Appleby
Build Community that reflects God’s love audio (5MB)
What better occasion to be talking about community than at a confirmation and baptism service. The teenagers have just spent 4 weeks following a study called the People of God where they’ve thought about why God calls us to be members of his Church. You could ask them later what they found out.
But it’s also a good time to be thinking about the third element of our Mission statement because confirmation services are the occasions when young people say publicly that they’ve decided to join in the mission of their church. But let me warn you guys, this third mission directive is not the easiest thing to achieve. How do you build community when we’re all so different: different ages; different cultural backgrounds; different languages; different educational levels; different income levels; even different footy teams; not to mention people who don’t like footy! And of course we’ve just made it worse by expanding our ministry to include a third cultural group!
Mission 3 - Teach The Bible
- Details
- Written by: Chris Appleby
Teach the Bible audio (5MB)
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 is in such a bad way it needs saving. So they send 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. Well I think that’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 read the details. In some cases they’ve never had their own copy of the instructions or the one they have isn’t readable. I visited an older parishioner a few years ago and was discussing some theological question they had but when I asked if they had a Bible we could look at, the only one in the house was the King James Version. Now I know the language is beautiful, or so they say, but when you’re trying to understand what something means it’s very hard to do when the language is so foreign to you, when words have changed so much in 400 years. But at least they had a Bible and read it regularly.
Well, let me ask you,
Does it matter if I read my Bible regularly?
Mission 2 - Speak the Gospel
- Details
- Written by: George Hemmings
Speak the Gospel audio (5MB)
On Tuesday the 11th of June, at 8:50pm, about six hours after Jacob was born, I started sending out text messages to tell people the good news. Of course we’d phoned family and a few close friends before that. Yet somehow, I was already three hours behind Chris, who must’ve sent out an email as soon as he got off the phone! We love sharing good news like this don’t we? Passing it on to others, letting them hear what’s happened. We race to tell people about new babies, new jobs, new homes, share all sorts of good news.
