Tag: love

Published July 31, 2023

A Fully-Mature, Fruit-Producing Believer

Throughout the month of July we have been looking at what it’s like to grow up as a Christian! We have used the different stages of our physical development to serve as a template to help us understand how we grow and change as followers of Christ. And I’ll quickly give you a brief summary of what we’ve looked at so far.

To use the Biblical phrase, we were all born ‘dead in our sin’. Even at the moment of our physical birth, we had no spiritual life apart from God. And so the very first step in every believer’s journey is to accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour. At that moment, when we put our trust in Jesus, we become ‘born again’ and become spiritually alive as spiritual infants.

Now spiritual infants have a huge learning curve as they really know very little about following Christ, but through the guidance of older brothers and sisters in the family of God – and of course, with the guidance of the Bible, they begin to grow up. They learn to feed themselves spiritually by cultivating those disciplines such as Bible reading, prayer, and being part of a church family.

And as they do this, before long, they will find themselves moving into the next stage of being spiritual children. Now of course, at this stage, life pretty much revolves around them – Christianity is all about what Jesus can do for me – because they haven’t yet learned to give much thought to anyone else! But before long (hopefully), as they experienced the goodness and faithfulness of God, they begin to follow in His footsteps – serving and loving others just like how Christ served and loved us!

At this stage they begin to become spiritual teenagers or spiritual young adults! They begin taking responsibility for their own spiritual growth – and they also start taking responsibility for others too! They begin serving in the church – building the kingdom of God according to their gifts and abilities.

And while there are many good things done for the kingdom of God during this time, most spiritual young adults struggle to realize that God isn’t primarily concerned about the good things we do for him, but more importantly, God is concerned that we are growing into the person that He created us to be.

The outward actions of our life may be good and right – but God is really more concerned about our inner transformation where our heart and our inner desires aligned with His – where we truly began to take on the character of Jesus!

And unfortunately, for many people, it usually takes some sort of life crisis for them to begin to grasp this and really begin to move into the next stage of spiritual maturity. We really have to come to the end of ourselves to realize who we are in Christ and how much God loves us simply because we are his child – and not because of anything we do or don’t do!

A great example of this from the Bible was Peter – as a disciple of Jesus He was as zealous for the Kingdom of God as anyone – but it took Jesus’ crucifixion and his own bitter denial of Jesus that led him into the final stage of his transformation.

Likewise, for us, moving through this stage of our spiritual growth may be one of the most difficult things we go through in life, but it will also be one of the most rewarding and life-changing!

And so today, I want to describe what this final stage of spiritual growth looks like. This is kinda the end-goal of Christianity. When God says He wants to transform us into in new people by changing the way we think – this is the kind of person that He wants to transform us into!

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Published July 17, 2023

Growing Up

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Romans 12:2

This verse is the foundational principle for our summer series of messages – Transformational Discipleship. As followers of Christ, God wants to totally transform our lives – changing us into the people that He created us to be. But he doesn’t do that instantly in the moment that become a Christian. But rather, it is a slow, life-long process where we learn to know God’s will for us – which is good and pleasing and perfect!

So throughout the summer, we want to look at that process and hopefully discover where we are in that journey personally! And more specifically, we want to know how we can align ourselves with what God is already doing in us so that we can take the next steps in that process of becoming more like Him.

We started last week by looking at a few of the distinguishing marks of being both spiritually dead – as well as being a spiritual infant. And I’ll give you just a quick summary before we move on.

Being born as sinners with a natural desire to rebel against God and to do things our own way, our initial state of existence for every person on the planet is being relationally separated from God. And because we are separated from Him – the Giver and Sustainer of Life – we may be physically alive, but we are absolutely spiritually dead. We have no relationship with Him – and because of that, have no life and no hope for the future.

However, because of God’s great love for us even while we were sinners, He provided a way for us to restore that relationship. Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose again from the grave – paying our penalty so that we could receive forgiveness and life. The only requirement for us is that we simply believe and accept that he did that for us!

When we make that choice to believe who Jesus is and what He has done for us, we become spiritually alive – born again – as we sometimes phrase it. At that point, we become a spiritual infant.

Now as infants, we really don’t know much of anything! Everything is brand new and there is very much a steep learning curve! In this stage of your spiritual journey, it’s really important to have some mature Christian people in your life who can help you along as you begin to grow and learn what it’s all about. This is what your church family is for. These people will be like your spiritual parents – or at least older brothers and sisters. They can help guide and direct you as you begin to figure things out.

But perhaps the greatest gift that you’ll discover in this stage of your journey is the Bible. God has given us a whole book on who He is and what He has done in the world over the centuries – so that we can learn what it means to live in right relationship with Him. Getting to know what the Bible says and being part of a Bible-believing church in this stage of life is so important.

And of course, just as physical infants need to learn to feed themselves and begin eating solid food, so too as spiritual infants, if we want to grow and mature, it is so important that we begin to read and understand the Bible for ourselves. If our only spiritual nourishment comes from the Sunday morning sermon, we’re probably going to be a bit mal-nourished! We don’t want to be like a grown person still being spoon-fed pablum all their life. That would be ridiculous and unhealthy – both physically and spiritually. At some point, you have to learn to feed yourself! You have to take responsibility for your own spiritual growth and health. This is one of the key ways that we begin moving into the next phase of maturity – growing from being an infant into being a child – which we’re going to talk about today.

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Published April 17, 2023

Paul & the Angry Mob

Well, it’s been a few weeks since we were last looking at the book of Acts, but today we are going to jump back into it! Today, we are just at the end of Acts chapter 21 – and the end of Paul’s third missionary journey. Along the way, Paul has been repeatedly warned by the Holy Spirit that imprisonment and suffering await him in Jerusalem.

And when I say “warned by the Holy Spirit” – that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit was trying to stop him or to get him to change direction, but rather, the Holy Spirit was preparing Paul (and the other believers) for what was about to happen. Paul was about to face some major persecution, and God wasn’t warning Him so that he could avoid that, but God was warning Him so that He would able to endure and be confident in God’s leading through that persecution.

Understandably, Paul’s friends didn’t want to see any harm come to Paul, and so they urged him not to go on to Jerusalem. But Paul knew that Jerusalem was exactly where God wanted him to be – regardless of any suffering that he might endure. By this point in his life, I think Paul knew that sometimes God allows and even leads us through great suffering so that even greater things can be accomplished in our lives and in the lives of others.

And so, Paul faithfully obeyed the leading of the Lord and finally arrived in Jerusalem. Upon his arrival, he was warmly greeted by all the Apostles and the other leaders in the church, but his reception among the other Jews was a little less than welcoming.

You see, as Mike shared with us a few weeks ago, the Jews had heard rumours that Paul had completely abandoned and rejected his Jewish heritage and was teaching others to do likewise – which was a pretty major issue for the Jews!

But those rumours simply were not true. Of course, Paul certainly taught that being Jewish wasn’t required for salvation – God’s free gift was available to anyone simply through faith in Jesus Christ. That meant that gentiles didn’t have to follow all the Jewish laws and traditions to be saved, but at the same time, the Jews weren’t forced to abandon all their Jewish practices to be saved either!

And so, to help alleviate the Jew’s concerns that Paul was now anti-Jewish – the church counselled Paul to take part of a Jewish purification ritual – which would show that, while Paul was not counting on his Jewish-ness for salvation, as a Jew, he could still honour God through some of those Jewish practices!

And so Paul did exactly that – and that’s where we’re going to pick up the story today.

So if you have your Bibles, we’re going to start in Acts chapter 21 – verse 26.

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Published March 13, 2023

Loving Christ’s Church

For the past several weeks, the Apostle Paul has been in Ephesus on his third missionary journey – preaching the Word of God, doing miracles, and as usual, causing riots and uproars!

As we’ve been following Paul on his journeys through the book of Acts, it seems every city he visits ends up absolutely divided in their opinion of him! Either the people love and accept Him as a brother – or they reject and hate him as public enemy #1.

And the city of Ephesus is no exception to that rule. Last week the entire city was in an uproar against Paul – stirred to action by the silversmith Demetrius (who accused Paul of destroying his lucrative idol-making business and undermining the worship and the credibility of their goddess Artemis.)

Thankfully, the mayor of Ephesus didn’t see things quite the same way. He didn’t see Paul or Christianity as a threat to their city and he was able to disperse the mob before things got out of hand.

But now today, in contrast to that angry mob, we’re going to see the opposite side of that spectrum. Today we’re going to see just how dearly loved Paul was to the many who had been transformed by the power of the Gospel! It seems that Paul never had a neutral effect – you either loved him or you hated him!

Paul actually wrote about this in 2 Corinthians 2:15…

15 Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those who are being saved and by those who are perishing. 16 To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume.

2 Corinthians 2:15-16a

I really like Paul’s metaphor here of being a fragrance – and it certainly fits his experience!

Now to be sure, Paul was certainly a strong scent. He was kinda like smell of garlic… You either love it or you hate it! There was no middle ground! But one way or another, Paul’s life made an impact on the people around him.

To those who wanted nothing to do with God – Paul’s life was a stench and everything about him was repulsive to them.
But for those who were seeking a real, authentic relationship with the God of heaven – Paul’s life was a breath of fresh air – like the smell of freshly-baked bread or the country air after a spring rain! For those who would come to Christ, Paul’s life and his message was absolutely refreshing!

And I think that’s really what we are called to be like as well. Jesus describes us as salt and as light – two things that should made a tremendous impact on the environment in which we find ourselves. As salt, we should be packed with flavour – and as light we should be like a million-candle-power flashlight! What a tragedy it would be if our lives were like a 1 watt bulb – or just a single grain salt in a big batch of french fries! NO! We need to be like Paul – packed with flavour – lighting up the darkness like a floodlight! Or to use Paul’s analogy, people should be able to smell us a mile away!

Perhaps that’s not the most attractive analogy, but do you get my point? God didn’t leave us on this planet to be neutral, to be unnoticed, to be inconsequential to the world around us. Like Paul, God has us on this planet to make an impact – one way or the other – for Him.

And today, as we read through Acts chapter 20, Paul is going to tell us exactly how He did that – and how we can do that as well.

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Published June 6, 2022

For the last month we’ve been taking a look at the book of Acts. The full title of the book, as listed in your Bibles, is likely “The Acts of the Apostles” – but as we’ve noted previously, it might be more accurate to call it “The Continued Acts of Jesus” or even “The Acts of the Holy Spirit”. While the different Apostles certainly play a key role in the various parts of this book, it’s clear right from chapter 1 that this book is all about the incredible activity of God in people’s lives.

And that’s exactly what we saw last week. Last week, we saw how the Apostle Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit – and he was enabled, not only to speak in languages that he had never learned, but perhaps even more miraculous, the Holy Spirit enabled Peter to boldly share the Gospel with a huge crowd of people and 3,000 of them accepted Christ as their Saviour and were baptized that day!

Now remember, this was the same Peter who had denied even knowing Jesus when a little girl asked him if he was one of Jesus’ disciples! In fact, Peter denied knowing Jesus three times that night – but now here he is, an absolutely changed man, boldly proclaiming the resurrection of Christ to the very crowds who had put Jesus to death 7 weeks earlier!

What a change! Now that the Holy Spirit was living within Peter, Peter was being absolutely transformed from the inside out.

And not only Peter, but all of the Apostles too, as well as the other 120 disciples, as well as the other 3,000 people who had just accepted Christ as their Saviour after hearing Peter’s message!

And of course, that made for a really interesting scenario! Here we have the very first church – and it’s a big one – over 3,000 people. But every one of them were brand new Christians! Even the Apostles had only just recently come to understand who Jesus really was, what He had done for them, and what the Kingdom of God was really all about!

This was all brand new for everyone! There wasn’t even any other other churches in history that they could look at and learn from! They just had to make it up as they went along – trusting that the Holy Spirit would guide and direct them as they learned what it meant to be followers of Christ.

And so today, we’re going to look at the final six verses of Acts chapter 2 that describe what that very first church did as they attempted to figure out what it looked like to be a church.

Now many people would point to this passage in Acts 2 as the description of the ideal church – in fact, I think I’ve probably preached on this passage before with similar intent. But as I’ve grown in my understanding of the Bible over the years, I’m not so sure that we should read this as God’s blueprints for the perfect church.

These people that we’re going to read about were still imperfect people who made mistakes and still struggled with sin (just like you and I). In fact, as we read on through the book of Acts, we see that made quite clear to us with stories like Ananias and Sapphira lying about their donations to church or the racial discrimination that happened at the church food bank, or even (as Paul later mentions in Galatians) how Peter refused to eat with Gentile Christians.

This was not a perfect church, nor did they have perfect leaders – and so what we read here is not necessarily the prescription for what God intended church to look like. However, it is a description of what these first believers did to carry out their mandate to make disciples, to learn to love each other and to love God, and to grow in the knowledge and understanding of who Jesus is. And that’s what makes this passage so helpful for us.

While not everything they did was perfect, there was a lot of good stuff happening in that church, so I think there is a lot that we can learn from them.

So as I said, we’re looking at the last verses of Acts chapter 2 this morning, so let’s begin at verse 41, and then read through until the end. It reads like this:

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Published April 11, 2022

Washed Clean

Last Sunday we read through the story of Jesus’ Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem. This was the day when Jesus rode on a donkey into Jerusalem much like a King arriving at his coronation day. Crowds of people welcomed him with shouts of praise and celebration – waving palm branches and laying their coats on the ground before him. They were overjoyed to finally welcome their long awaited Messiah – the King of Israel.

And as the streets of Jerusalem were filled with celebration and praises to God, Jesus affirmed that their praises were absolutely appropriate for the arrival of the Messiah, even if the crowds did have a terribly mis-shapen understanding of what the Messiah had come to do!

You see, most Isrealites were expecting the Messiah to come in as a political and military leader – much like King David or one of the judges of old – and they expect that he would liberate Israel from the oppression of the Romans. But as we talked about last week, they had no idea that God had much bigger plans than just defeating the Romans. God had plans to defeat sin and death once and for all. He had come to rescue all of mankind! Overthrowing the Romans wasn’t even on his radar!

The Kingdom of God – that Jesus was about to usher in – was going to look entirely different from what everyone was expecting. Even the disciples had completely missed the point of what Jesus had come to do.

For example, Luke 22 tells us that at the Last Supper – on the night before Jesus was crucified – the disciples were still arguing about which one of them would be the greatest in the Kingdom! Even at that point, they still didn’t get it!

But of course, Jesus patiently endured their blindness – explaining to them time and time again that the kingdom of God was going be unlike any kingdom they’ve ever seen or experienced.

And we’re certainly going to see that our passage today.

Today we’re going to look at the events of the Last Supper – but not so much the elements that we’re most familiar with – that is, the breaking the bread and the sharing of the wine in remembrance of Jesus – signifying his broken body and spilled blood on the cross. Now of course, that will be a part of our message today, but for the bulk of the message this morning, I want to focus on what happens before that.

While Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the sharing of the wine and the bread – John’s Gospel doesn’t include those details at all (probably because his Gospel was written quite a bit later than the others and he didn’t feel the need to include information that was already well established by the other Gospels.) Instead, John begins by telling us what happened before that part of the meal.

And what Jesus does there is completely unexpected and it completely flips the disciples understanding of the kingdom of God on it head.

We’re reading this morning from John chapter 13 – starting at verse 1.

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