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“You were created for Discipleship" |
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“You were created for Discipleship" |
Sermon
four in the 40 Days of Purpose programme Rev.
Dr Robert Iles
at Golden Grove Uniting Church, S Australia.
7.11.04
(This sermon was not actually delivered as Dr Iles was taken ill just before the
service, he is now in good health)
Well what an interesting week it has been. It began with the discovery of a new species of human in Indonesia.
Dwarf like people threw confusion into anthropologists and evolutionists
Who thought they had things pretty much worked out.
Then there was a fellow who died undertaking a purification programme in the desert.
We could have saved him a lot of trouble. We could have said, “Come to worship, confess your sins, be filled with the Holy Spirit and get on with life”.
Then we had a forgettable batting crash by Australia cricketers in India.
Leaving it up to Glen McGrath to get the winning runs was never going
To be a great idea.
Locally we received a shock in the mail. Elden was advised that we have received a $14000 gift-funding grant from Uniting Church insurance to help with our renovations on site here,
Whether we stay on this site or not in the long run. And there may be some more good news in a couple of weeks.
And then on top of that we have had some 100 people of all ages meeting in small groups around the area, to discuss The Purpose of Life
And how to get better at memorizing tricky Bible verses like today’s.
This is a great time for our congregation.
Again locally I was shocked when someone mentioned a word I had consigned to history almost 12 months ago –Christmas! There is only one word in the heads of most of us at the moment, and it is a number -40!
The biggest international news was the US elections.
The shrill and fallacious cries of people like Michael Moore and John Kerry were
Drowned by the voices of voters who supported President Bush.
The election was given to Bush by evangelical Christians. Values and moral issues were the top voter concerns. Bush won among frequent church-goers, and pulled even with Kerry among people who attend once a month or less. Bush drew 60 percent of weekly attendees, compared to Kerry's 39 percent, while Kerry led Bush among non-church-goers, 64 percent to 34 percent.
Bush and Kerry made it very clear what role faith has in their politics and values.
"Kerry said, `I will have a secular government, I will not allow my Catholic values to interfere with my public policy,"' "The president said, `I'm a man of faith and my faith will impact my public policy' and … the American people took Bush's vision over Kerry's." Proposals by 11 states to ban homosexual marriage were
All supported.
The voting trend there, and perhaps here also,
Suggests that all the talk about post-modernism has been over-Stated.
There has been a strong swing back to the values
That post-modernism said had been swallowed up by individualism
And the rejection of absolutes.
The fact is that there is a strong and necessary link between faith and moral values. Values have no substantial or lasting basis if they are not grounded in faith and a world-view that sees values as an expression of faith in the Lord.
I found it absorbing that in the present debate within the Liberal party about abortion one of the women speakers said, “Lets all agree that the abortion issue has nothing to do with religion” . It amazes me that we have such
Historical and philosophical ignorance in modern politicians
Who try to be pragmatists without foundations and
Ethicists without beliefs. In history every time that a society has tried to sustain itself and its inherited values without a faith foundation, it has disintegrated. Whether we are talking about the French revolution, or our own modern secular state. If you do not have a basis for your morality and values
In faith, those values will eventually be replaced by their opposites.
Virtue by vandalism, a work ethic by a welfarist ethic, an honesty ethic by a cheating ethic, community by individualism, commitment by self-interest,
Compassion by crime, pastors by police and so on.
Our 40 Days programme links faith with ethics, belief with
Behaviour, love with Lordship, faith with faithfulness,
Hope with the Hope giver, values, private and public,
With faith in Christ.
So far we have seen that God has created us for himself and we have no peace until we find it in him (Augustine paraphrase). He has created us for his pleasure: worship; he has created us to belong to a church as well as believing
He has given and given and now the ship starts to change direction a bit
And we move more towards our responses to all this in Christ.
You were made to be like Christ: discipleship to produce as Hebrews 12:11 says, a harvest of righteousness and peace,
to live in peace with all people And to be holy as v.14 says.
In this connection we are called to grow.
If we do not grow we will shrink and die, in our souls and in our church. God seldom interested in preserving the status quo.
He is a God who pushes and stretches; he is a tough God who drives Moses and the Israelites out into a desert, then across a sea-bed and before armies that he will defeat.
Jesus does the same with his disciples. He pushes them, to grow as disciples, in faith, in trust, in understanding, in preparation for his cross and resurrection and even his return.
Then when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost people grow rapidly. A fisherman becomes a preacher and evangelist and disciples become conversion counsellors.
Becoming a Christian is the greatest growth step any of us will take.
The foundation for growth is firstly faith in Christ. Through penitence and need, or through emptiness and longing, or through meaningless or failure
God brings us to himself in Jesus. Or again, William Willimon has written a book called:
The Gospel for the Person who has everything. He talks of people coming to Christ not with a sense of failure but a sense of success, competence, strength. But seeing that success is empty and is not deep enough
To satisfy the soul or give hope for eternity. Only Christ is.
So the first step in growth is becoming a Christian, having faith in Christ.
We are made for growth. You may recognize this in your own life sometimes. Sometimes we plateau spiritually. Sometimes when people drop out of church life it is because they come to a spiritual plateau, they are dissatisfied
With their spiritual life as it is. It can grow deeper or die.
God says to us all, however long we have believed, I have something more for you that will lift you from Christian mediocrity or a spiritual plateau.
Seek my Holy Spirit, dwell in my Word, be part of a small group, serve others, witness to the faith you have, learn to enjoy prayer, discover and use the gifts I have given you and you will grow.
One of the reasons we grow so slowly spiritually is because life is too comfortable.
The most rapid times of growth come in the context of threat, struggle and pain. The church grew dramatically until the Emperor Constantine became a Christian on the eve of a battle in 312AD.
He later decreed the Roman Empire to be Christian. But then Rome before its collapse reverted to paganism again and disintegrated morally, ripe for the barbarian’s invasions to conquer. The Dark Ages arose.
Only the monastic movement kept the lamp of faith alight until the renaissance revival began in the C12 AD.
Think of the 800,000 Iraqi Christians. Think of how much they must depend on the Lord and seek him in prayer.
Their ancestors were among the
First peoples outside of Palestine to embrace Christianity.
The coming of Islam turned them into an often-persecuted minority.
The Baathist Party destroyed more than 200 Christian villages between 1960 and 1988.As a result of the discrimination more than half of Iraq’s Christians have left in the past 40 years.
FORSALEThe interim law in post-Saddam Iraq includes a provision, Article 53D, creating a
Safe haven for Iraq’s Christians. And they’ll need one. On 12 October Islamic extremists
Killed a 10-year-old Christian boy while shouting,” We’ve
Come to exterminate you. This is the end for you
Christians!” Christian homes have been targeted by mortar
Attacks that killed and injured children sleeping in their
Beds. Churches are being bombed, not by ordinary Muslims who have lived with
Christians peaceably for centuries, but by people who turn Islam into an ideology of violence. Without a “sizeable non-Muslim
Minority” Iraqis who oppose an Islamic state will find
Their task all the more difficult. However the Christians grow
In these difficult times of transition.
Kath, Jeanette, Mark and Rob. Have all taken huge steps in growth today as they
Made a public commitment to Christ and his church here at Golden Grove.
Others are moving in that direction too. Discipleship leads us to take new steps, or as Peter puts it in 1 Peter 2:2 “to grow up in our salvation, because we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.”.