“Jesus is _____.”  What goes in the blank?

This is a really good question for any time of the year, but especially at Christmas.

Christmas is a time when Jesus is spoken of more than normal in our society, but the answers people give are often far from the truth.

That’s one of the reasons we’re running a special campaign next March when we’re teaming up with Anglican churches from Ulladulla up to Sutherland, and from the Southern Highlands and Campbelltown across to the Illawarra.

We’ll be helping people consider the most important question facing the world: who is Jesus?

The churches of our wider region will be joined by all the students of Moore College, as well as receiving support from Anglicare.

Jesus himself once asked those around, “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29), and so we want to help people with their answers to Jesus’ identity.

In our own, immediate area, we’re going to be running three days’ of public meetings at the new Shellharbour Civic Centre, at both 11am and 7pm on the 20th, 21st and 22nd of March 2018.

Our special speaker will be Ben Pfahlert, and over those three days he will be challenging the people from Dapto down to Gerringong and out to Albion Park and Jamberoo about who Jesus really is.

We’re also going to have three special training and prayer nights in the lead up, on Tuesday nights at 7pm in the Civic Centre, on the 30th January, the 13th of February and the 13th March, and we’d really love you be there to join with Anglicans from our region to pray that we’d be fired up to talk about Jesus.

So, put the dates in your diary, and start praying for great conversations with people who need to know Jesus.

And as we join together for this campaign, we pray that we’ll help many people know how to finish the sentence, “Jesus is _____.”

Jodie McNeill

Do you take the time to say “thank you” to God?

At times of relief from danger, we thank God a lot.

But what about at the normal times of life when things can be fairly mundane?

If we are not thankful to God for what he has done, then perhaps it is because we don’t fully appreciate how much he has done for us?

In the letter to the Colossians, Paul outlines what the life ‘worthy of the Lord’ looks like.

He uses four phrases, which say that Christians should be bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, and giving joyful thanks (Colossians 1:10-12)

Thankfulness is at the heart of being a Christian.

But what should our thankfulness be like?

Verse 12 says that it should be “joyful”.

Show me a person who lives a life worthy of the Lord, and I’ll show you a person who joyfully gives thanks to the Father.

Do you say thanks to God at dinner time?

Well, the well-known poet G. K. Chesterton thinks we shouldn’t stop there.

You say grace before meals.

All right.

But I say grace before the play and the opera,

And grace before the concert and pantomime,

And grace before I open a book,

And grace before sketching, painting,

Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;

And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

How will you thank God, this week?

Jodie McNeill

If I asked you to create a picture of freedom, then what would you draw?

Maybe you might paint a prison door opening, or the shackles of a slave being released?

Or perhaps you might draw a picture of a person running down an endless beach, or someone standing at the edge of a giant canyon with arms raised high?

Some businesses try to use the idea of freedom to convince us to book a holiday, or apply for a loan, or purchase a car, or gamble in a lottery… even though these things often end up enslaving us.

The Bible tells us how we can become truly free… and the method is surprising.

It’s summed up beautifully in the words of our Anglican Prayer Book, which say to God that his “service is perfect freedom.”

It’s really quite odd to say that we can gain freedom from becoming servants, and yet, the New Testament writers kept telling us that they were servants (or more literally ‘slaves’) of Christ.

In fact, we read this phrase from the hand of Paul, James, Peter and Jude, who regarded this concept as being at the very core of the Christian identity.

But this should come as no surprise to us: Jesus said of himself in Mark 10:45 that “even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

So as we serve each other, let us enjoy the freedom that comes from being a slave of Christ.

After all, when Jesus is our slave master, we experience a love that came at the very expense of his life.

And so, as we gather to serve each other, let us do so as people who joyfully consider God’s service as perfect freedom.

Jodie McNeill.

(CREDIT: woodleywonderworks via Flickr)

Healthy small groups have always been an important part of a healthy church.

These groups have typically been called lots of different names: bible study groups, connect groups, life groups, growth groups, and so on.

But now we’re going to introduce a new name for our groups that will help us clarify why they exist.

We’re going to call them ‘serve teams.’

The reason why they’re called ‘teams’ is that they are a group of people who are connected, even when they don’t meet. 

So, in the same way that a person is a part of a cricket team, even when they’re not playing cricket, we will all be part of a serve team, even when the group isn’t meeting.

And the reason we’re calling them ‘serve’ teams is that they are teams that are dedicated to doing what Christians do: serve. 

Jesus said that he came not to be served but to serve, and we, too, follow his lead.

In fact, in Ephesians chapter 4, we read that God has given people to his church in order to speak his word, so that all Christians will be equipped for service.

And, so, the reason these teams exist is to serve: to serve each other in the team, as members love and build each other up.

And they exist to serve our church as we get involved in what happens in the life of our church.

And they exist to serve our community, as together the members think of ways to bring the gospel of Jesus to our world.

What’s more, as we serve, together, as a team, it will bring us closer together, as a team.

And in order to serve, we’ll keep doing what our small groups have always done: prayerfully studying God’s word, so we’re equipped to serve, to God’s glory.

Jodie McNeill.

(CREDIT: Artondra Hall via Flickr)

I’ve been reading a number of detective books recently. So when someone handed me a book about Jesus written by a detective I was curious. The book is called ‘Cold Case Christianity‘ by J. Wallace. He’s a seasoned homicide detective and he applies what he has learnt to the witness accounts of Jesus, especially from ‘cold cases’.

At first I was quite captivated by all the real life stories he threw in, but as I read on he introduced more and more sophisticated analysis.

He made some very persuasive arguments in favour of the reliability of the witness accounts about Jesus.

We’ve probably all heard the argument that witness accounts often tell things from different perspectives. But he gave a much more detailed explanation of this point, using forensic analysis. Specifically he wrote about the phenomenon of ‘inadvertent support.’

No eyewitness ever gives a full account of a scene. So often their description raises a particular question. When Jesus calls Peter and Andrew in Matthew, the account at first seems odd. These men drop everything and immediately follow Jesus on their first meeting. Why would they do that?

If Matthew was the only account of Jesus this would remain unanswered. But Luke ‘inadvertently’ answers this question.

In his account we get a prior story of the fisherman encountering Jesus. Jesus used their boats to teach the crowds by the lake. He then instructed them to take him out and fish. They’d had an unsuccessful night of fishing but now they take an exceedingly impressive catch. This certainly gave them something to think about when he later asked them to follow him.

There are many of these incidental questions & answers in the Gospels.

Now these things by themselves don’t prove Christianity, but it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect if the witnesses are real and telling the truth.

Simon Chaplin