Book review - 666 and all that

This really is a very helpful book that guides us through some of the scary and confusing issues that come up when we start thinking about the future and God's plans. John & Greg do a fair bit of 'mythbusting' especially regarding some of those vexed and much argued areas of the rapture, the tribulation, the millenium, the anti-Christ, the end of the world,...and of course that particular number. There's some great stuff on how to be reading apocalyptic literature properly without having to do some theological degree.

I especially appreciated chapter 9 'The fate of those who have never heard the Gospel', which is no doubt an issue we've all struggled with. Also there is some wonderful stuff on the hope we have in Christ, the reality and expectation of heaven and what happens when we die.

This book is a great companion to our current series on Revelation and it covers the breadth of the Bibles teaching on some key issues we perhaps don't always talk about really succinctly...the book is only 200 pages. It will give you great confidence in the future....and probably clear up a whole heap of areas you often 'muse' over, but don't quite know what to do about. Get yourself a copy!

Letting Jesus reign...now!

In Revelation 11:17-18 the 24 elders worship God and say:

  “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, who is and who was,
for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.
The nations raged, but your wrath came,
and the time for the dead to be judged,
and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints,
and those who fear your name, both small and great,
and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”

     I wonder, how often do we really give some time to thinking through how good it is that Jesus reigns on the heavenly throne? 

     How often do we really look forward to fully experiencing the new creation according to Jesus? 

     Can you imagine a world where things work, where true authority is expressed and followed as it should be, where whatever the King says, everybody willingly follows?

     There are so many aspects of heaven in view in Revelation but the good, powerful and just rule of Jesus is one that we really need to come to terms with. In heaven no-one can or would ever want to argue with the perfect will of Jesus. There is no heavenly suggestion box as to how things could be run better. Heaven is relentlessly and joyously good because the forever king rules both for and over his precious people.

     But here’s my thought: if the heavenly reign of the King is enjoyed forever, what are we doing to ensure he reigns right now in our earthly experience? Yeah I know we are not in heaven yet, but do we perhaps fail to appreciate how the reign of the King is to reign in our lives today?
     When Jesus speaks through his word to us today, should we not be as quick to respond in joy and thanks as those in heaven? How so many problems and struggles we face would be avoided if we simply trusted what our King said in the first place.

    So here’s the challenge: are you prepared to really let him reign, to let the gospel set the direction and agenda for your life? Would set your sights and your heart on the glorious end point in heaven, and make decisions in your life that affirm and point to what will be happening for your eternal life?

Have a read of Rev.7:9-17 again, and then read chapter 21 and 22. Be excited by John’s heavenly vision….and let Jesus reign in your life…he’s very good at it.

Full survey results

Well here are the results from our CitC survey conducted on September 21. A total of 191 people took part. I wonder what particularly stands out? What is worrying? What things do we need to be praying and acting upon?

Q1) How long have you been coming along to Crossroads?
1 month    12%
3 months   4%
6 months   9%
9 months   12%
12 months  7%
18 months  9%
2 years      9%
3 years      10%

4 years      10%
5+ years    11%
10+ years   6%

Q2) How did you find out about CitC?
Friend            76%
Website          4%
Yellow Pages <1%

Advertising      3%

Referred         16%

Q3) Have you found CitC to be a friendly and welcoming congregation to be part of?
Strong yes    37%
Yes              54%
No               7%
Strong No     2%

Music
Q4) Do you find the music and singing at CitC encouraging and enjoyable?
Strong yes      53%
Yes                41%
No                 4%
Strong No       2%

Q5) Do you think the style of music at CitC connects and works with most people you know?
Strong Yes      36%
Yes                52%
No                 9%
Strong No       3%

Q6) How much singing should we be doing at CitC?
Much more       3%
Little More       27%
It’s about right 67%
A little Less      3%
Much less         0%

Our service
Q7) Do you think our Sunday night gatherings succeed in helping people genuinely engage with God?
Strong Yes      47%
Yes                48%
No                 3%
Strong No       2%

Q8) Do you think our Sunday night gatherings succeed in helping people genuinely engage with each other?
Strong Yes      15%
Yes                60%
No                 20%
Strong No       5%

Preaching
Q9) Overall the preaching at CitC is encouraging and challenging.
Strong Yes      72%
Yes                25%
No                 2%
Strong No       1%

Q10) Overall the preaching at CitC is easy to follow.
Strong Yes     55%
Yes               40%
No                3%
Strong No      2%

Q11) Overall the preaching at CitC is faithful to the Bible.
Strong Yes    82%
Yes 1           6%
No             <1%

Strong No    1%

Q12) Overall the preaching at CitC connects well with me.
Strong Yes    56%
Yes              37%
No               6%
Strong No     1%

Q13) Would the preaching ‘style’ and content connect well with your friends & family?
Strong Yes    24%
Yes              56%
No               17%
Strong No     3%

Feeling connected and cared for
Q14) CitC is a place where I feel I am connected well with people?
Strong Yes    24%
Yes              47%
No               25%
Strong No     4%

Q15) At CitC I don’t really know how to connect with others and/or I know very few people.
Strong Yes    8%
Yes              31%
No               42%
Strong No     19%

Q16) I consider CitC to be a place where people genuinely care for each other.
Strong Yes    28%
Yes              60%
No               11%
Strong No     1%

Q17) I find it easy to find out what is happening at CitC and that information is communicated well about what is going on.
Strong Yes    49%
Yes              40%
No               9%
Strong No     2%

Being involved in CitC
Q18) I understand the purpose of our Sunday gatherings.
Strong Yes    61%
Yes              34%
No               4%
Strong No    <1%

Q19) I feel I am involved in building Christ’s kingdom at CitC.
Strong Yes    27%
Yes              46%
No               22%
Strong No     4%

Q20) I regularly feel encouraged to get involved in serving at church.
Strong Yes    29%
Yes              44%
No               23%
Strong No     5%

Q21) There are things that I would like to be doing more of at CitC but I’m not sure how to go about it.
Strong Yes    15%
Yes              21%
No               46%
Strong No     18%

This year
Q22) I have grown in my love and understanding of Jesus through my involvement with CitC.
Strong Yes    48%
Yes              36%
No              14%
Strong No    2%

Q23) I have been shown clearly how the gospel applies to my life.
Strong Yes    54%
Yes              35%
No               7%
Strong No     3%

Q24) I financially support Crossroads.
Regularly         31%
Sometimes       18%
Irregularly        22%
Not at all         11%
Yet to organise18%

Thinking of others
Q25) Do you think we generally conduct our meetings and events in such a way so as to make the gospel attractive and compelling for those who don’t yet know Christ?
Strong Yes    30%
Yes              57%
No               11%
Strong No     3%

Q26) Would you be happy to invite your friends or family along to CitC?
Strong Yes    41%
Yes              44%
No               11%
Strong No     3%

Q27) Have you asked any of your friends or family what are not Christian to come along to church with you this year?
Yes    58%
No     42%

Generally
Q28) Do you think CitC is a place where a hunger and love for God is experienced, encouraged and modelled?
Strong Yes    49%
Yes              43%
No               5%
Strong No     3%

Q29) Do you think CitC is a place where a love for others is experienced, encouraged and modelled?
Strong Yes    26%
Yes              61%
No               11%
Strong No     2%

Q30) Do you think the facilities that we use for CitC are suitable?
Strong Yes   44%
Yes             49%
No              6%
Strong No    1%

Q31) Do you find the 6:30-8pm Sunday night timeslot is one that works well for you?
Agree                  71%
Prefer earlier      19%
Prefer later         9%
Earlier & later     1%

Q32) Do you come to pre-church coffee?
Regularly      15%
Sometimes    32%
Hardly ever   24%
Never been   30%

Q33) Do you hang around and talk to people after church?
Regularly     61%
Sometimes   31%
Hardly ever  6%
Never been  2%

Q34) Do you plan to be involved and committed to CitC in 2009?
Yes            73%
No             7%
Unsure       21%

So, what do you think?

A couple of survey thoughts...and results.

I’ve got to admit I’m generally not too crazy about surveys. They’re inevitably restrictive in that my answer never seems to be listed as one of the options. Also they are impersonal…I don’t like becoming a statistic. So trying do an anonymous ‘personal’ survey at church made me rather nervous. And yes the survey was deliberately restrictive. We didn’t want to fall into the ‘me-church’ problem (see previous video post) where we find out what people do or don’t like and then seek to accommodate everyone’s wish list. This would have been a disastrous mistake. Can you image Jesus handing out ‘felt need’ surveys? Can you imagine the apostles running little focus groups to work out how to make their ministry more fun and happy for everyone?

Truth and love and the glory of God are the things that should be driving all that we do in Church and all that we do as Christians. So we wanted to survey how we think we are going as a community in view of the Biblical picture of how church should be. And also survey how ‘you’ think you are going as an individual in our congregation. Now this is hard to do and kind of sets us up for a fall. But I think what we did on Sunday night, combined with our discussion groups was a very helpful exercise.

We are still distilling all the info but let me share with you a couple of the results.

We asked two questions relating to our Sunday night gatherings and genuine engagement.

Do you think our Sunday night gatherings succeed in helping people genuinely engage with God?
Strong Yes 47%
Yes 48%
No 3%
Strong No 2%

Do you think our Sunday night gatherings succeed in helping people genuinely engage with each other?
Strong Yes 15%
Yes 60%
No 20%
Strong No 5%

Now in some ways you could sum up what church is all about under these themes. If we are genuinely engaging with God and each other then we’re likely to be ‘growing followers of Jesus’. So what do these results show?
Well clearly most people think we do a good job of the first, and significantly less feel we succeed in the second, and perhaps succeed as well.
It shows us there is difference of opinion amongst us about these issues. One in twenty don’t think people are being helped to genuinely engaging with God at church. One in four don’t think we are good at helping people engage well with each other.

Now of course what these results don’t show us is why people think like this…and there’s the problem with surveys.
Further info will follow as we go through all the results. But overall people seemed very pleased we spent some time doing our Spring review. 

Thanks guys for putting your thoughts into all this. 

Feel free to add your comments about how you found the whole process.

Me Church

Here's the video we played at church last Sunday night...for your enjoyment, and perhaps a little more.

Augustine's confession

For those of you interested, here's the full prayer from Augustine I mentioned last Sunday night. It may be 1600 years old, but how powerful still?   

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved you! And behold, you were within, and I abroad, and there I searched for you; I was deformed, plunging amid those fair forms, which you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you. Things held me far from you—things which, if they were not in you, were not at all. You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness. You flashed and shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors and I drew in breath—and I pant for you. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace” (St. Augustine, Confessions).

The Scandal of Repentance

To be called to repent is surely one of the severest and sweetest things to come from Jesus lips. Severe in that it involves a fundamental acknowledgment of our worthlessness and need and sin. Sweet in that the one who repents experiences great joy and confidence because Christ and all his blessings are now freely theirs to enjoy. So repentance it is both scandalously hard, and scandalously good at the same time.
Last Sunday’s talk: Outraged by the Scandal (Luke 13:1-17) was one of the more difficult for me. It is hard to be faithful to the text and to bring out the severity and the sweetness at the same time. But it is even harder knowing there are people in our midst and in our lives who have not yet yielded to the call of Jesus and so God’s judgement hangs over them. To those unwilling to submit to the wonder and authority of Jesus the news from passages like this is not good. Yes it is doom and gloom…forever. But to the one willing to trust the unfailing and merciful gift of Christ for us, there is perfect joy and comfort….forever.
Please pray that more and more people would both feel the gravity of Jesus warnings and the wonder of his work for us. It will mean being brought to our knees in great sorrow. But it will also mean we will stay happily on our knees in awe and praise.

The Parable of the rich fool

Anthony writes the following for this week's blog:

The parable of the rich fool cuts to the heart of the sin of our age, living without a deep reference to God. The rich fool makes no account of the fact that it is God who makes the land produce bountifully, he finds security in wealth rather than knowing God and he operates with a godless perspective limiting time to the here and now rather than eternity. But like the rich fool we are fools if we live without a deep reference to God in all we do and all we have. Jesus will not arbitrate between two fools both of whom are living without deep reference to God, because Jesus' kingdom is not of this world, and it isn't concerned with the things of this world. It is in Jesus' kingdom that we find true security that lasts for eternity. So the scandal of wealth as Jesus portrays it is that wealth can lead a person who treasures it away from God as surely as I can lead a thirsty dog to water. The scandal of wealth is that rich people who trust Jesus can and do enter his kingdom. The scandal of wealth is that in our society and our culture there are countless millions of rich fools. Don't make the rich fool's mistake.

Further thoughts on the disaster of religion

     Luke's Gospel really does have one of the sharpest critiques of religion. The amount of meals, confrontations and explicit teaching from Jesus that undermines our natural approach to God is staggering. Chief tax collectors and criminals find there way into the Kingdom of God - religious experts find themselves excluded. It is a confronting read. 

     In reflecting further on Jesus rather confrontational dinner tactics in Luke 11:37-53, (remember those woes?) I can't help but think ahead into Luke 15 and how Jesus nails the religious yet again. But do we miss it?  This chapter contains the much loved Prodigal Son story, but I think calling it this can lead us into the very religious trap Jesus is seeking to demolish! Really it should be called the "Prodigal God" for the one who is excessive (prodigal means excessive) in the story is not the younger squandering Son, but the gracious forgiving Father. I think this title may help us sit up and take more note of the strong warning about 'older brotherness' that is highly likely to be alive and resident in our "churchy" hearts.

    We easily see the rebellion of the younger son who represents an open defiance to God expressed in immoral excess. However we don't often consider that the older brother is just as sinful. He needs salvation too - from his 'damnable good works' done is self righteousness.

     It means there are two ways you can rebel against God. You can either be really, really bad...or you can be really, really good! How can a legalistic really good religious life be a way of rebelling against God? Well it's a way of effectively shutting who God is out of our lives. The older brother syndrome believes that God owes us something. We force God's hand of favour...and we get cranky when God doesn't pay up. God becomes a means to an end. Indeed what happens is the legalist will end up railing against the God he/she says they serve.

     How the Pharisees and scribes hated Jesus....to death. How Jesus shattered their world. 

The  question Luke would ask us is this: Is the real Jesus shattering ours...for the better? Are we allowing the scandalous Jesus to be  reprogramming our natural religious default setting so we relate to God in humbleness, confidence and joy. This is something religion promises, but can never deliver.

    

Some thoughts on blasphemy against the Holy Spirit

Have I done it?
    I suspect just about every Christian has worried at least a little about Jesus words in Luke.12:10 “…everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.”(see also Matthew 12:32 & Mark 3:29). This is so full-on, so final, so scary. And some people are brought to the point of thinking, “Have I committed this sin and so am I not a real Christian”, “Am I disqualified from heaven”, “Am I not really chosen by God”.
    Of course these questions arise because we’re unsure of what Jesus means and in particular how can Jesus distinguish between blasphemy against the Son of Man (himself), as being forgivable; but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as being unforgivable?
    Well, as I hinted at on Sunday night, if you worry about this issue, I suspect it’s a clear indication that you haven’t done it. Indeed to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit will lead to you having no authentic interest in Jesus at all.

What’s the context?
    When Jesus mentions this issue it is always closely tied to his dealing with his religious opponents. In Matthew 12 and Mark 3 Jesus is being accused of sourcing his powers from Satan. That is, the religious leaders, in defiance and desperation at Jesus wonderful powers to heal and restore, attribute it to the devil. It is a terrible evil to deliberately call something that is so good to be bad; or to accuse the innocent and pure of being in collusion with the devil.
    In Luke, Jesus warns the religious leaders that they stand condemned for their failure to hear the prophets and for their hypocrisy. They of course retaliate and Jesus once again brings up this issue of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit.

Blaspheming Jesus Vs Blaspheming the Holy Spirit – what’s the go?
    Jesus makes a clear and deliberate distinction between blaspheming against him and blaspheming the Holy Spirit. And I think he does this because instant rejection of Jesus is not as significant as we might first think. Have not we all rejected Jesus in our past? Does not Peter reject Jesus and deny him three times? (Luke 22:65) Did not Paul reject Jesus to the point of killing Christians?
    The more important issue I believe Jesus is pointing to is continued rejection of him in defiance of what the Holy Spirit is revealing. And if we go into Acts we see examples of this very thing where rejection of Christ is solidified and unyielding. Acts 7:51,13:40-49 & 28:23-28 are all examples of hard-hearted Jews who have refused to listen to the Spirit’s teaching and revelation in the Scriptures about Jesus. They just will not soften their hearts to the Spirit’s Word of truth. This ongoing refusal means the door to forgiveness is closed because they have categorically denied the Spirit’s testimony to the one who brings forgiveness.

The vast extent of forgiveness
    What I find remarkable as I think about this issue is that even those who were involved in Jesus murder at the end of Luke’s gospel, are able to receive forgiveness and indeed do! It’s harder to find a more blasphemous event to have been involved in than the crucifixion of God’s own Son. And yet at Pentecost these men are forgiven and blessed with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:36- 41).
    How amazing that those who killed Jesus are brought to eternal life by Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit? They are moved and respond in trust to Jesus. Which means even the worst of sinners can be forgiven.
However, if you continue to discount any need for forgiveness, or so ridicule what the Scriptures are pointing to when the speak of Christ – what possibility is there of being forgiven? You have ruled out the one you need, and offended the one who reveals him.

The bottom line: Don’t continue to refuse the Spirit’s call for you to trust Jesus. Come and seek life and forgiveness in him…no-matter what you may have done in the past, (even if you have rejected Jesus) God will forgive all who come to Christ.