I have a few posts in the pipe line at the moment…. about my holiday to Mollymook, reflections on Corinthians, and some thoughts on books I’ve been reading on my break from college… but for now –
Something happened tonight that has made me wonder….. why are other people’s sins such a disappointment to us?? And why are they more of a disappointment to us than our own sins??
Sometimes I feel like that rose – not just because of a sexual past but for all the other sin in my life that withers me.
What a great comfort that Jesus wants me! And today I remember that he died for me!
It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. Luke 23:44 – 46
I’m 3 days in ‘lecture free weeks’. I’m recovering well from mission (kinda wishing I was still there) and have spent the last 3 days relaxing and catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while.
Some of these people are my family. It feels like forever since I have spent any quality time with them, especially my nephews. Its always when I’m on holidays from college and back at home that I realise how much I miss them when I am at college.
Ricky
Mathew
They are a lot of fun! Mathew told me yesterday I’m his best mate – how adorable is that!!!
I’m going to continue to spend a lot of time with them over the next few weeks which will be awesome – but it does make it hard to want to go back to college.
Well we have come to the last day of mission – and it has been quite a week!
Friday was all about Barker College. We went and hung out at year 10 chapel – Steve Blyth preached up a storm and Andrew gave a great testimony. We they hit up their lunch time group where Gus – the MT-er at St Andrews Wahroonga – challenged the kids on being workers for the harvest, and I gave a testimony. (Want to read it? Check out my about page.)
After that we tag along to some Christian studies classes. I went to a Year 7 boys class where the teacher gave the kids 30 minutes to grill me and my team mate on any questions they had about the bible, God etc. That was a tough 30 minutes!
Friday night I left my mission team to tackle the youth at All Saints Waitara while I headed back to my church (St Augustines Neutral Bay) to speak to 30+ primary school girls about what is better than chocolate. They were a tough crowd but I know at least one girl left understanding the gospel so praise God for that!
Saturday was the Family Festival at All Saints. Despite not the best weather a heap of people from the community turned up and seemed to have a great time – many stayed for a few hours. I have a blast walking around giving people ‘The Essential Jesus’ (Luke’s gospel) and free Colin DVD’s for their kids. It was a great day and the church raised $4000! It was a great day and the church did an awesome job!
This morning I hit up 8:30 church (after a much appreicated extra hours sleep) and 10am church. Pretty soon I’ll be heading off to get ready for 5pm cafe church and then pizza and trivia night. After that a brief team meeting and then i’ll hit the road for Newtown and I much anticipated LONG nights sleep in my own bed.
Read more about earlier in the week here and here.
What to hear about other missions? Mike has a stack here.
It has been an amazing week! Praise God for his work through us and the 2 churches we have been serving. Pray that many seeds will have been sown onto ground of deep soil that will produce a crop.
I had many hesitations before mission but it has been an awesome week and God has given me many opportunities to serve that have help me think hard about my future after college. It has been a week that has started to cement my thinking about what I will do. Please pray for wisdom as I think through what to do over the next few years while I’m at college to best equip myself for the future.
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So here we are at day 6. What a great week it has been!!
Wednesday was about the best day of my life (slight exaggeration but it was a good day). Chapel at Abbotsleigh seemed to go well. I had fun, girls seemed to be listening, lots of good feedback was given.
Following this a group of 6 of us went to Hornsby Girls High to do a Q&A withe the Christian lunchtime group. This group of girls was amazing! They usually have anywhere between 30 – 60 girls (50 showed up on wed) and it is run by a group of year 11 girls. I was so encouraged by the work that these girls put into running this group and they do a great job! We had some amazing questions to answer and didn’t get through anywhere near as many as we would have liked. It was a great time of interaction between the team and the girls. Thanks for having us ladies :)
I then had the afternoon to chillax which is always nice.
At night we had a ladies coffee and dessert at All Saints Waitara. It was a lovely privilege to be able to hear my wonderful friend Megan preached on the greatest makeover ever. On of the greatest things about mission is to be able to serve alongside your college friends and its always great to hear them preach. Megs did a great job!
Read more about my team’s mission here.
About to hit the road for chapel and lunchtime group at Barker. Pray it goes well
Thanks for all your prayers for my talk at Abbotsleigh.
For anyone who is interested here is my talk. This was for high school girls, most of whom are not Christians, but who hear the gospel in chapel every week. If you have feedback you would like to give feel free to email rather than post it here. Thanks
If you could be anywhere right now where would you be?
If I were you I‘d want to be almost anywhere but in chapel.
I would especially not want to listen to who ever was doing what I’m doing right now.
My mind would probably be wandering, thinking about all the better ways I could be using my time.
I could be hanging out with my friends, lying on the grass in the sun sleeping or getting a tan, I could be planning my weekend; I could probably even find some school work to do that would be better than this. Perhaps I’d even be wondering would any one notice if I fell asleep right here.
So if your thinking that – first let me say – I’m onto you!
Now the reason I can say all this is that if I had chapel when I was at school, that’s exactly what I’d have be thinking. I didn’t have chapel at my school, but my parents took me along to church every week – which I think was worse cause it went for twice as long! And I have to get up early on Sunday mornings!
Every week I went and heard the same story – Jesus died blah blah blah
And I would think – I know this, I hear it all the time. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand, I’m not stupid, I got it – I just didn’t care, I wasn’t excited by it!
So you can imagine how happy I was when I turned 18, had a car and a licence and some independence – it wasn’t long before I stopped going to church – after all I knew all the answers.
So no church meant I felt free to go do what I want – so that’s exactly what I did.
I went out and partied as much as I could, got drunk all the time and basically didn’t care about anything.
But gradually I would hear a little voice in the back of my head saying – what are you doing? This is the ‘sin’ stuff you have been hearing about all your life. And I slowly realised that I was completely ignoring God and this was hurtful to God. And it was hurtful to me as well. It was not a good way to live.
And more and more I realised that this was what sin was and it was putting a barrier between me and God – a big one!
Then I started to worry about this. I thought that God would never be able to forgive everything that I had done, and remove that barrier.
I knew that Jesus had died so that God could forgive me – but I didn’t think it was enough to forgive everything.
But one day someone read something to me – it said
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
I was amazed that this didn’t say he will forgive us our sins to a certain point, or he will forgive some of our sins. But it didn’t say that – it said he will forgive us our sins and purify us from ALL unrighteousness.
Why does he do this though? Its so beyond what I would thought God would do – I had ignored God, so why would he forgive me for everything?
It tells us why – because he is faithful and just.
God showed his faithfulness to us by sending Jesus to die on the cross.
Jesus died to take the punishment for ours sins and this is what enables God to forgive us for everything.
Jesus says that if we believe in him we won’t be punished but instead will have eternal life.
God is faithful to that promise – so when you hear that he forgives ALL your sins you can trust that he can and will do that, no matter how bad you might think your sins are.
And this sentence also tells us what needs to happen for him to forgive us – it starts by saying ‘if we confess our sins’.
So God is faithful and will forgive EVERYTHING but we need to be prepared to admit and confess those things to him.
There may be some of you thinking that this has no meaning for you and that you don’t need to confess anything to God.
Let me read the sentence before this one to you.
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
If you think you don’t have sin that is a barrier between you and God, you’re kidding yourself.
If that’s you – I want to say two things to you.
First is that God is faithful. He loves you and you have no reason to be afraid that he won’t or can’t forgive you. He has told us that through Jesus he will forgive us and he is faithful to that promise – and that is great exciting news!
The second thing I want to tell you is that you’re not alone. Your Christian friends and Christian studies teachers have all been through this too. If you want to confess your sins to God I’m going to give you a chance to do that in a moment and then your friends would love to celebrate your forgiveness with you.
Forgiveness is a great thing! But God doesn’t just forgive us – he also promises to purify us from all unrighteousness. God cleans us from the stain of sin and guilt, so that we are acceptable to him. Because he shows his goodness to us we need to stop ignoring him, and instead start following him.
The truth is that everyone in this room has sin between them and God.
If you have admitted your sin to God, you have been forgiven…. Completely and for everything.
Everyone else is deceiving herself.
If you want to be in that first group of people I am about to pray a prayer that you could pray with me.
First I tell you what I’m going to say and then I will pray one line at a time so you can repeat it in your hearts and minds after me.
Here’s what I will pray.
Dear God,
I am sorry that I have sinned. I know that this puts a barrier between you and me.
Please forgive me.
Thank you for sending Jesus so that I can be forgiven.
Amen
If you would like to pray that then you can do that with me now. If you don’t want to pray that’s ok but I’m going to ask you to bow your head and close your eyes anyway.
Lets pray.
If you didn’t pray that with me but you have questions then your Christian studies teachers would love to hear your questions and help answer them, or I will be here for a while and would also love to talk to you.
If you prayed that prayer that’s great and I know that your friends and teachers would love to hear that, and I would like to encourage you now by reading again what was once read to me –
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
So mission started yesterday. Here is what I have done so far:
Sunday – Church @ All Saints Waitara 8:30 am followed by morning tea 10am church followed by morning tea (again) and lunch for the team and whole church 2pm – door knocking in the surrounding streets 6:30pm – borders chapel at Abbotsleigh Monday – cooked breakfast at my lovely billets house hanging out at Mark & Emily Carpenter’s house, prep-ing a talk for Abbotsleigh chapel on wednesday lunch with some of the team – Yum cha rocks! more hanging out – watching movies, twittering, facebook, blogging And that brings you up to date! Today was a lovely relaxing day but I still don’t feel ready for the onslaught that is to come. I saw the chapel at Abbotsleigh yesterday – it is huge!
On Wednesday it will be full on teenage girls (including the upstairs section) and my job is to try and hold their attention for 10 minutes… a thought that is terrifying and exciting all at once!
Plans for tomorrow are –
Team meeting at 8:30am
Ladies craft group @ 10am
Lunch with the team @ church – 12pm
Handing out leaflets and Luke’s gospel at Hornsby Mall – 2pm till 6pm
Read about more college mission goers days here, here and here
What a great passage to read the week before MTC mission.
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. (vs 4)
A great reminder of the state of our world – so many people are blinded to the good news of Jesus, by his enemy, Satan. (For interesting discussions on demons read this or this)
Paul also remind us about what we are doing when we go on mission.
For we are not proclaiming ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves because of Jesus. For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness” – He has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Now we have this treasure in jars of clay, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us. (vs 5-7)
We go to proclaim Christ as Lord!
To be reminded that I am a jar of clay is humbling and exilarating. Humbling because I realise anything good that I do is not of my own ability, but God’s powerfully work. Exhilarating because I know I am not doing this work – the glory is God’s because the work is his.
Mission will be a long, tiring, fun and maybe at time disappointing week. But
we do not give up; even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolute incomparable eternal weight of glory. (vs 16-17)
Amen!
Six things I know to be true…
‘You are worthy, our Lord and God! You are worthy to receive glory and honour and power. You are worthy because you created all things. They were created and they exist. That is the way you planned it.’ Revelation chapter 4, verse 11
‘No-one is right with God, no-one at all. No-one understands. No-one trusts in God. All of them have turned away.’ Romans chapter 3, verses 10-12
‘People have to die once. After that, God will judge them.’ Hebrews chapter 9, verse 27
‘Christ died for sins once and for all time. The one who did what is right died for those who don’t do right. He died to bring you to God.’ 1 Peter chapter 3, verse 18
‘Give praise to the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his great mercy he has given us a new birth and a hope that is alive. It is alive because Jesus Christ rose from the dead.’ 1 Peter chapter 1, verse 3
‘Anyone who believes in the Son has eternal life. Anyone who says no to the Son will not have eternal life. God’s anger remains on him.’ John chapter 3, verse 36
a girl who speaks 