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The Shepherds Ch. 2 – Pastor of congregation complaints
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The Shepherds Ch. 1 – Sunday morning rehearsal
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Why Did Jesus Perform Miracles? – Mark 7:34-35
Mark 7:34-35
He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”). At this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.
Jesus came to earth as a baby; fully God and fully man. He grew up with a human family; a mother, father and multiple brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55-56). He performed dozens of extraordinary miracles that are recorded in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. John 21:25 hints that there were many more miracles that weren’t recorded. Why did Jesus do miracles? Was it to prove to everyone he wasn’t just a human? Was it to solve issues for people that they couldn’t solve themselves? Was Jesus just impatient, and using miracles was the quickest way to get things done?
I think it comes back to the main characteristic of Jesus, which is love. Jesus is all about love. If someone came across him with a problem, he did the loving thing which was to help them with their problem. One would also assume that Jesus did his miracles to show other people that he had supernatural power, but Mark 7:36 says:
Mark 7:36
Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it.
It was apparently Jesus ultimate hope that those around him would see him for who he was, and all glory would be reflected up to God, rather than to himself. Jesus was sent to earth to love humanity through the ultimate act of love; dying in our place for our sins so that we can have an uninhibited relationship with God. So Jesus came to earth and did all he did to love other people. What are we, as Christians; ‘little Christs’ going to do when the bible commands us to ‘think and act like Christ Jesus’?(Philippians 2:5-11)
ASK YOURSELF: Do you fully understand what being a Christian means, and what has needed to take place to allow you to be in a relationship with God? How are you going to reflect that knowledge in the next person you talk to?
How to be successful and influential – Proverbs 16:3
Proverbs 16:3
Commit your deeds to the Lord and your plans shall succeed.
The titles of self-help books are always eye catching; ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. The books are aiming to help the reader become something that the reader feels they’re not, for example ‘influential’ or ‘effective’. We learn in the bible, there’s no ‘self’ involved in being successful or influential. Yes, working really hard for yourself can make you successful or influential to the world’s standards, but that is fleeting and certainly the path to going further away from God, rather than towards (Matthew 19:23-24).
The Bible is a God-help book. The Bible offers up sound advice for how one can be successful and influential, and they all involve searching for help and support from God, not ourselves. Why would the bible not contain the phrase ‘God helps those who helps themselves’? That’s not what grace is all about. Grace is about God loving us because he knows we can’t help ourselves. Surely the fact that there are plethora of self-help books released every year shows that no one has truly worked out how to help them-self with every aspect of their life, or really what ‘success’ actually is. The whole point of the gospel is faith and trust alone in Jesus is all we need to be saved, and that is the success everyone is searching for. God doesn’t need our good works. He certainly requests that we work hard towards the furthering of his Love and the gospel (1 Corinthians 10:31), and doing so is evidence of a strong faith and trust and understanding .
I have plans to succeed. I have plans to live comfortably, provide for my family, have a good job in a good workplace and let others know about God. Which of those deeds should I commit to the Lord? All of them, certainly, but I feel that providing for my family and letting others know about God, the two plans that align with God’s desire for spreading his Love and the gospel, are going to do better at succeeding. Why? Because if I’m focused on providing for my family and letting others know about God, it might mean myself not living comfortably, and not having a good job in a good workplace. All four plans might succeed, by God’s grace, but there is no reason I should expect all four to, and God could take away my living comfortably so that I focus more on spreading the gospel. Being successful means choosing what you want to be successful in; we can’t be successful in everything. For me, I feel being successful in loving others holds so much more worth than being successful for myself.
ASK YOURSELF: What are your plans? Are your plans for comfort or the furthering of God’s Love to this broken world? Have you committed your deeds to the Lord?
How to see God – 1 John 4:12
1 John 4:12
No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
I will admit I am a skeptic when people, in the modern age, say they have seen angels, or been to heaven and back. I very much believe in the supernatural world, and I also believe it is within God’s power to take someone to heaven and back, or send angels to earth. All of that is to say we learn in the bible that we don’t need to see supernatural things to see supernatural things. And more importantly we don’t need to be a supernatural being to live supernaturally. When we are born again (that is accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour), we are endowed with the Holy Spirit (see the rest of 1 John 4). As verse 12 says, if we want to see a glimpse of God, we need to only look at Christians loving one another. We, as Christians, need to love non-Christians so that they have the opportunity to see only a morsel of God’s infinitely larger Love waiting for them.
At the end of verse 12, John writes that ‘his love is made complete in us’. Surely God’s love doesn’t end with us? Well in verse 17, John explains this point:
1 John 4:17
This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.
We are not like Jesus, as in Jesus is part of the holy trinity and the Son of God. We are like Jesus in that we are going to suffer in this world. People are going to criticize and possibly even crucify us for what we do and preach in throughput of God’s love. But like Jesus, our earthly goal is to spread God’s love. That is how his love is made complete in us; the whole point of God’s love is to reach non-Christians and Christians alike, and a method in which he does that is through us fulfilling the command to love one another.
Isn’t it amazing that we can be the ones that show God to others? We can enable others to see God through our actions. If that doesn’t prove that our lives are not our own, I don’t know what does.
Salt? – Matthew 5:13
Matthew 5:13
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
This isn’t a bible passage that I’ve heard preached on recently. I don’t know if that is because it was preached on regularly in the 90’s, or coincidence (there is a lot of bible verses for sermons to be based on; 31,102 to be exact). But I saw this verse pop up this morning, and it actually caught me by surprise that I couldn’t, from the top of my head, translate what the bible verse is talking about. Time for some digging.
This verse comes from Jesus’ very famous ‘Sermon on the Mount’, where he taught a rapid-fire, wide-scoping sermon to crowds of followers on a mountain side. This sermon, which you can read more about in Matthew 5, contained topics such as murder, adultery, the beatitudes, and v.13-16; the teaching of salt and light.
Matthew 5:13-16
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Jesus explains the light metaphor very clearly in v.16 , but the salt metaphor is still in question. It would appear the explanation to this metaphor can go a number of ways, depending on what you use salt for, but they can all be summed up with ‘salt makes food better’. Some of the uses of salt are preserving foods and giving foods flavor. Christians, the church, and very specifically in the sermon, disciples, are the salt of the earth because they preserve God’s mission. Does this mean that if no Christian’s existed on earth that God’s mission would be stopped cold and ‘rot’ like unsalted food? I don’t think so. I think God’s power goes beyond that, and evidence for him can be seen around us in nature. But what if us, as Christians, begin to lose our saltiness? What if we, as Christians, begin to lose our keenness to actually be useful in God’s mission like salt is for food? What good use are we for then? Well, as Jesus said ‘You’re no longer good for anything, but to be trampled underfoot.” That’s a pretty brutal assessment if we fail to be useful.
The last question that v.13 asks is ‘But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?’ Salt doesn’t often lose its flavor, there are explanations for how salt from around Jesus’ area did lose its saltiness, but this metaphor wouldn’t really be applicable to the true Christian losing their Christianity, but could be applied, loosely, to the idea of the dilution of salt. Sea water is 3.5% salt. If you take sea water and add fresh water, the salt content decreases and becomes less prevalent. To continue the metaphor, if Christians are salt in a sea of fresh water, we’re hardly noticeable. Christians need to support other Christians. Christians need to work together to further God’s mission. It’s impossible to be on God’s mission without God. Us Christians need to work together to preserve this goodness in this rotting world; show non-Christians that their rottenness is not all there is, and there is amazing joy waiting for them, for which we can only get a hint of here on earth.
We are salt, we are light. Let’s shine for all to see and show them the goodness of God in everything we do.
Eternity; a really, really, really long time – Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Eternity is said to be a really, really, really long time. I am quite secure in my faith in God, and I believe that after I die, I will spend eternity with him, in heaven, and with my brothers and sisters in Christ. And for me, that is scary; eternity doesn’t end. After a hundred years of praise and worship, then a thousand years of praise and worship, and then a million years of praise and worship, and then a billion years of praise and worship… for my human mind, that just seems crazy to me. Surely at some point us Christians will get tired of singing ‘Amazing Grace’ for the trillionth time?
We can’t understand eternity. Not even the smartest mathematicians can fathom eternity. We can aim for really, really big numbers in equations, and printing out the numbers in pi, but eternity is not calculable. Therefore we must conclude that when Jesus talks about ‘eternal’ life, he is talking about the closest equivalent of time in heaven, in that it doesn’t exist. Time in heaven, I believe, and without any sources because no one has gone to heaven and come back with any information about it, does not work like how time here on earth works. Seconds and hours and days, constructs made originally by humans based on the earth’s rotation around the sun, probably won’t be how we look at time.
Why? Because our bodies will be different and perfect. We won’t have boredom that comes with time because the glory of God will be so captivating. Time on earth is counting down towards the day we die; it’s a morbid perspective but one that everyone is aware of. It’s a finite, measurable time and really, really, really short. You have to wonder what God is thinking as he looks upon what we do with this really, really, really short time, when he knows we will have a really, really, really long time very soon to satisfy all of our desires we could ever have.
Why do Denominations exist? – 1 Corinthians 12:14-20
1 Corinthians 1:10
I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.
I have been a ‘baptist’ all my life. I put baptist in quotation marks because, although I have always gone to a ‘baptist’ church, I know the baptist churches here in Australia are quite different from the baptist churches in America. Whereas there are different religions that believe different things about God (or Gods) and some groups have distinct theological and doctrinal aspects to them, there are denominations of Protestant Christianity in which everyone believes that a faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God is all you need to come into a relationship with God. And yet all these people house themselves under different denominations such as ‘Baptist’, ‘Lutheran’, ‘Anabaptist’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Methodist’, ‘Presbyterianism’, ‘Adventists’, ‘Pentecostal’, ‘Uniting Church’, and many, many, many more.
The big reason for the different denominations are the difference in opinions over theological matters. A lot of these differences are grey areas that don’t change the gospel-oriented purpose of the churches. Some are significant differences, and could be debated as whether they are grey matters at all, but those debates in the first place often distract from the gospel-orientated purpose of the church.
I have no problem with there being different denominations, to an extent. The aspect I think is great is denominations means that everyone is kept on their toes, finding out why they believe what they believe – occasionally challenges each other (hopefully in love), so that the church as a whole can fulfill its mission to the best of its ability. From reading the bible, however, I’d say there are big problems with there being so many denominations. In 1 Corinthians, Paul pleaded with the Christians in Corinth to be of the same mind and the same judgement; to get rid of the divisions between them.
1 Corinthians 12:14-20
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
I think the biggest problem is not when a denominations feels they are better than the rest of the denominations, but when they don’t feel a need to work together with the other denominations for God’s glory. Denominations, through culture and history, often come out with strengths. Ministry, outreach, worship and bible study strengths are all great on their own, but just imagine the power of the Christian church if all the denominations were to work together, with their strengths, to further God’s kingdom.
Next time you meet someone from a different denomination, don’t start comparing differences of theology, start comparing differences of strengths, and how you can use the different strengths together in pursuing the unsaved for God. In our Godless culture, now is not the time for Christians to divide. It’s time to unite.
Not My Life 