Parents, Children and Cabbage Trees

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SUNDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2018

Ephesians deals with topics at the very core of what it means to be a Christian—both in faith and in practice, it invites us to continue our journey of “Shema” - hearing and responding to the invitation and challenges God is placing on our hearts as individuals, households and as a community.

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Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honour your father and mother’– which is the first commandment with a promise – ‘so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.’ Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. - Ephesians 6:1-4

Today we are talking about parenting. And no one wants to talk about parenting, cause parenting is hard.

Today we will be using the word parent today, and for some people that has pain attached, but instead of holding that to one side, bring it all and may we know the Grace and Peace of Jesus in the midst of it all.

Power in Relationships and Living Counter Culturally

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SUNDAY 21 OCTOBER 2018

Ephesians deals with topics at the very core of what it means to be a Christian—both in faith and in practice, it invites us to continue our journey of “Shema” - hearing and responding to the invitation and challenges God is placing on our hearts as individuals, households and as a community.

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Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. - Ephesians 5:21

Today we step one verse further into our year long journey through the book of Ephesians. James shares with us on the appropriate use of human freedom and power, with reference to the love of Jesus.

The human temptation is to stop trusting God, to take power into our own hands and rule over others as a way to keep ourselves feel safe; and one of the places that that outworks itself - in the most horrible way - is in marriage relationships, parent/child relationships and workplace relationships.

Our challenge is, as the loved and liked children of God, called to be a kingdom of priests called to represent justice and mercy, to live out sacrificial love - then how do we do relationships differently.

Introduction to Ephesians

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SUNDAY 08 APRIL 2018

Ephesians deals with topics at the very core of what it means to be a Christian—both in faith and in practice, it invites us to continue our journey of “Shema” - hearing and responding to the invitation and challenges God is placing on our hearts as individuals, households and as a community.

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What was church life when Jesus was a child? How did his community interact with the word of God? It is through this lense James guides us into the start of our series on the book of Ephesians.

The Day of the Lord

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SUNDAY 10 DECEMBER 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

This talk is called kia whakatomuri te haere whakamua. It means that we walk backwards into our future with our eyes fixed on the past.

As we approach Christmas, it is not only important to tell the story of Jesus’s birth, but its also important to understand the story and context that Jesus was being born into.

Being able to hold Jesus’s birth and everything that Jesus says and does, with the narrative of the old testament in the back of our minds, helps us to remember that Jesus was Jewish and God has always had a dream for our world.

As last talk in our series about the old testament James summarises the entire Old testament to help us all to land Jesus’s birth in the ancient near east in the first century with 4000 years worth of stories, histories, proverbs, poems and prophecies about the relationship between God his people and his creation of which we are a central part.

There are tonnes of themes that run from the start to the end of the bible, temple, trinity, sin, law, salvation, kingdom, holiness, justice, the image of God and thats just to name a few... but in order to summarise the Old Testament, James picks up on a theme that has captured my imagination over the past 6 months which is The Day of the Lord.

There is no Sunday School version of Leviticus

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SUNDAY 29 OCTOBER 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

Leviticus is a book about how Israel are going to be able to live with the presence of God at the centre of their community, but to do this there are lots of laws they need to live by.

To unpack this book and put it into context, James takes us through a a quick recap of the previous book Exodus, which ends with Moses not being able to enter the tent he has just completed. 

The first verse in Leviticus (1:1) says: The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him FROM the tent of meeting. but when we jump forward a book the first verse states: The Lord spoke to Moses IN the tent of meeting in the Desert of Sinaion" (Numbers 1:1)... so something about the book of Leviticus is trying to tell us how we should approach God so that our space and his space can overlap. As well as how we can live in such a way that we can be faithful to how he calls us to live and how we can be in this world but also set apart from it.

The book of Leviticus has a beautiful design and it breaks down into seven key parts:
1. Ritual sacrifice
2. Priest stuff
3. Clean and unclean (ritual purity)
4. Day of atonement
5. Clean and unclean (moral purity)
6. Qualifications for being a priest
7. Ritual festivals

The bible is not a book about us. It is a book about God and his mission of restoration for humanity.
It is not a book about how we get to heaven, it is a book about how God has been at work throughout history to bring heaven to earth.
God has wanted to live with his people since the beginning. Leviticus shows us that, and this is the story that Jesus steps into...

Jonah, the hero that wasn't

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SUNDAY 24 SEPTEMBER 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

The story of Jonah is an upside down story...

It invites us into what is called non-dual thinking. Or more simply, to ask some questions about the ways that we have judged people.

See in the book of Jonah, the categories are all scrambled.
The “Righteous Israelite” is defiant and lazy and angry.
The “Evil heathens” are open to Gods message.

The upside down-ness doesn't stop there, at the end of the story Jonah goes to Nineveh, and he sees this miraculous change of heart, and he's so angry about it that he wants to die.

Even in the mess, God is at work in this

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SUNDAY 13 AUGUST 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

There are lots of Sunday School versions of Ruth, but today we ignore all of those and look at the significance of ending the book with geology of Perez.

At first glance the book of Ruth is about a jaded mother-in-law convincing her daughter-in-law to leave her own mother and father and hook up with Boaz. But if you fly a little higher, you see that the book of Ruth is also about Gods commitment to Abraham and his family.

The Moabites and the Isralites are reunited in Boaz and Ruth. God is commited to the restoration of all things, but sometimes that is played out through a period of pain, suffering and injustice. 

A life without pain, suffering and injustice is not really what we find in the bible.  It's our culture that says that life should be fair, it is advertising that tells us that life should be easy, its social media that tells us that we should always be happy, its NCEA that says everyone should pass. Its our school system that tells us that a successful life is a good education, a good job and a nice house.

Jesus’s death on the cross is not just the gift of forgiveness for your sins, or an invitation into eternal life. Its also an invitation into the pattern of being a living sacrifice, to accept and understand that we are experiencing this period of life so God can use it and us in the future.

Jesus dying on the cross is not just something that he did for us… it is him demonstrating for us how he wants us to live. If we want to be like Jesus, we need to trust that God will ALWAYS bring something good out of pain and suffering.

Technology and Tsaaq (זָעַק)

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SUNDAY 16 JULY 2017

The Old Testament is full of people - real people; whose lives are messy, their families dysfunctional and their obedience not always full or immediate, yet God used them.  Our study of their lives is to bring perspective, hope and instruction to ours - to recognise that at times we are tempted to sanitise or selectively interact with their stories and in that way make them heroes.  The reality is that their stories are powerful because they are human like us and face the same temptations and frailty that we do - yet God used them.

The Bible has a lot to say about technology. It can be so easy to skip over simple lines, without asking some questions. But a great question to ask is, why did the writer include that detail? Because that one sentence is actually alluding to a pretty profound new technology and a significant shift in society at that time...

We have tremendous power and ability as humans. We can invent things and build things and dream things up and then make them. Its extraordinary and it is to be celebrated and enjoyed!

However we also have tremendous capacity to use our energies and minds and power and abilities to further OUR OWN purposes through greed and empire building at the expense of those around us. We can use technology to make the world a better place, but we can also use technology to make the world worse. We can use the power that we have for good, to care for people like Jesus implores us to, or we can use our power in destructives ways that can dehumanise ourselves and others.

• We can become slaves to our technology
• We can develop a technology induced anxiety
• We can forget our true identity
• We can bring heaven to earth, or we can bring hell to earth

Listen to James as he unpacks the impacts of Technology in the Old Testament and in our lives today...