The past month has seen the internet go crazy with videos of people tipping buckets of icy water over themselves to help raise awareness (and money) for ALS (a.k.a. Motor Neurone Disease).

As a marketing gimmick is very clever. It's short, immediately understandable, it's easy to do and entertaining to watch. As a result, the ALS Association has received more than $70 million so far, compared to only $2.5 million during last year’s campaign.[1] Getting people to tip icy water over themselves might be a great way to raise money, but it's not a great reason to donate our money.

As Christians, we have finite resources to donate and be generous with. God expects us to be good stewards of the wealth he gives us, and with so many charities and worthy causes vying for our charitable dollar, we need to be wise and discerning about how we choose to use and allocate our money.

One article I read this week suggested we should not donate to ALS because it is already well funded relative to the number of people who it affects and there are other more urgent and pressing causes to donate our money to (such as the crisis in Iraq). It suggested we spend our charitable dollars according to the following three factors:

1. Where is the greatest need?
2. Where will my dollars have the greatest influence?
3. What is the most urgent problem?

Personally I found this really helpful because it reminds me of THE greatest need in our world which is to hear the good news of Jesus. The most urgent problem in our world is for people to have their sin forgiven and be reconciled to God. With this being the case, the place my giving can have its greatest influence is helping to support gospel related ministries - that is, ministries that help proclaim the good news of Jesus.

With this in mind there are still many options before us asking us to donate our money. So how should we as Christians allocate (tithe) our money?

First and foremost ought to be our church. This is the place where gospel ministry happens day in day out that we are part of and benefit from (1 Tim 5:17-18). Secondly, we also have an obligation to the household of faith and caring for others in our midst who are in need with our material possessions (Acts 2:44-45; 1 John 3:17-18). Finally, God also expects his people to do justice and mercy where we take care of the refugee, the orphan, the widow and the poor etc (Deut 24:19-21; Luke 10:25-37).

Therefore, we ought to be looking to allocate our giving to support gospel ministries such as church and our link missionaries. Also those charities that provide help to those in need where the gospel remains central (e.g. Compassion and Anglicare)

There are many, many other charities that are doing great work and would love your support (e.g. research into cancer, ALS and diabetes). However, these charities will always get funding from the government and the public. But the government and the general public won't support the work of the gospel because they are fundamentally opposed to it.

That means, if as Christians we are convinced the gospel is the greatest need of our society today, we need to be the ones who support it.

That means, rather than a gimmicky internet video determining our giving, we need to prayerfully and wisely think about how best to allocate our money for the good of God and his kingdom.

"Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." 2 Cor 9:7

Yours in Christ
Stu

[1] http://www.alsa.org/news/media/press-releases/ice-bucket-donations-082414.html

In the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son was lost but was found and returned to the joy and love of his father. The spotlight’s on him for the first part of the story. Despite treating his father in an unforgivable way, his father forgives and welcomes him home. 

But there are two brothers in the story. The older brother does what’s expected of him, but when his lost brother comes home he refuses to come in and share his father’s joy. He's miffed that the father’s lavishing his wealth and love on his younger rebellious brother after he’s wasted his share of the estate doing whatever he wanted, while he (the older brother) didn't get to do anything he wanted with the father’s wealth. 

The two sons both wanted the same thing – they wanted what their father had with no strings attached – no responsibility to him. One brazenly took the money and ran. The other thought he could manipulate the father by his good life. Neither was interested in the father. He was just the means to get what they wanted. And that attitude isolated both of them from the father – they were both lost.

Some of our lives look like the younger brother – thumbing our nose at God and living however we like. Some of us look more like the older brother – we live a good life and do the right thing and expect God to leave us alone. Some of us flip back and forth between the two. But both ways leave us lost – away from God and outside his love.

The good news is that we all have a much better older brother who came to seek out lost people and save us from an eternity away from God. His name is Jesus. He brings the lost children of God from both near and far away back to the Father who loves us and longs to welcome us home. 

Jesus’ death and resurrection is the way home into the eternal love and joy of the father. He’s seeking you to save you. Will you let him find you?

In Christ’s love,

Paul

Nearly three years ago I bought a bike from the Two Monkeys Bike shop in Penshurst. It was a flat bar road bike that I thought would be a good hybrid bike to commute to the office on and go on weekend rides. When I was invited to go out riding with the boys on Saturday morning I turned up on my hybrid, wearing tennis shorts and a tee-shirt to be met by a bunch of guys on carbon fibre road bikes, wearing lycra and all looking very serious. I was duly dropped on the very first hill and watched the group rapidly ride off into the distance!

Since then, I’ve traded the hybrid for a road bike, ride 2 or 3 times a week, have swapped the tennis shorts for lycra and have become somewhat of a cycling fanatic. Not only is the Tour de France compulsory late night viewing, but also the Giro d’Italia, Vuelta Espana and various one day classics.

My growing fascination with the Tour de France (TDF) and other professional bike races has led me to appreciate the intricacies of road racing – especially the different tactics, team selections and roles of different riders in the peloton.

Not only are there different ‘races’ happening within the race itself, there are different race strategies being implemented depending on the type of riders in the team. One type of rider is the sprinter. He is normally a strong rider with explosive speed who is able to launch his sprint out of the bunch for a stage win on flatter courses (e.g. Andre Griepel, Marcel Kittel and Mark Cavendish)

Then there is the climber. These guys are lightweight mountain goats who have huge stamina levels that mean they can go up long steep climbs real at real pace. Alberto Contador, Nairo Quinatana, Chris Froome are the best climbers around and are normally the guys who take the overall win in the grand tours, like the TDF.

Puncheur’s are more alrounders who can punch up short steep climbs with a short explosive burst and sprint to victory from a reduced bunch (e.g. Philippe Gilbert, Simon Gerrans, or Alejandro Valverde).

It’s all well and good to have climbers, sprinters and puncheur’s going for the victory, but every team needs a number of riders who can help their #1 guy get the victory – and these riders are called domestiques.

The role of the domestique is to work for their lead rider. They ride in front of their leader to protect him from the wind, helping him to save energy. They go back to the team car to get any drinks, gels, and clothing he needs. They will give him their wheel or even their whole bike if he has a mechanical problem. They will chase down breaks by opposition riders. In short they will sacrifice themselves all for the sake of their lead rider. Some domestiques are good enough to be the #1 rider but they sacrifice their own ambition to ride in the service of another; these guys are called ‘super domestiques’. Riders like Michael Rogers, Richie Porte and Luke Durbridge are domestiques for their teams.

As I was watching all this play out in the recent TDF, it got me wondering, if Jesus was a cyclist, then what would he be?

Many people might think Jesus would be a sprinter. After all, he was a carpenter’s son, so he would have been strong. But the nature of Jesus mission was not fast and furious. He came to run a race that that goes for eternity.

Maybe he would he have been a climber? After all these guys are the winners of the grand tours. As God the Son, he would certainly deserve to be the teams #1 rider and designated leader to go for glory.

But as I thought about it was obvious that rather than being a sprinter or climber or puncheur, Jesus would most definitely have been a domestique. Here’s why ...

• Like a domestique, Jesus sacrifices himself for others. He puts his ambitions and desires to the side and serves the needs of others. While domestiques will do it riding into the wind or chasing down a breakaway, Jesus sacrifices himself on a cross.
  
• Domestiques serve their team leader at great cost – they smash themselves for him; they sacrifice their own chances of victory to enable victory of their leader; they get no glory for themselves because it goes all to their #1 guy. This is what Jesus did. He saved people for eternal life and it cost him his life, and he did it so those who trust in him can have the victory of eternal life.
  
• Even though domestiques don’t win the stages, they still have to climb all the mountains to ensure they can stay in the race and they often do it carrying extra drink bottles and energy gels for their leader. Jesus also had to climb a mountain. Not a mountain in the French Alps, but a mountain outside Jerusalem. He wasn’t carrying drink bottles and energy gels but a wooden cross on which he would be crucified.
  

When you look at the life of Jesus, his whole mission in life was to sacrifice himself for others. As Jesus says about himself in Mark 10:45
     “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

He didn’t come for his own glory, he came for his Father’s glory. He glorified him by dying for sinners to take the judgment they deserved. He came not so he could have the victory, he came so those who trust in him could have the victory. And even though he is God the Son who deserves all our honour and praise, he gave up that right and came not to be served, but to serve us.

It made me realise that if life was a bike race, Jesus came so that weekend warriors like you and me who plod along on Saturday mornings in our lycra, could win the ‘TDF of life’. In doing so we will stand on the victory dias – not in Paris, but in heaven. When we trust in our ‘super domestique’, then our victory is guaranteed. Not because we worked and trained and earned our eternal victory, but because Jesus sacrificed himself on a mountain to set up the victory for us.

So if Jesus was a cyclist, I’m convinced he’d be a ‘super domestique’. Just like every team needs a super domestique if they’re ever going to win the TDF, so you and I desperately need Jesus if we’re ever going to win the prize of eternal life.

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Over the past few weeks we’ve begun looking at the letter of 1 Peter. This letter gives Christians a new perspective on life – a new perspective on who we are and on where our lives are headed. This week as we look at chapter 2 of the letter we’ll see what a present privilege it is to be who we are – the community of God’s people, saved by him and precious to him. Wherever there are little communities of God’s chosen exiles around the world, God is there with them, building them together into something worthy of great honour – his dwelling place.

But let me take you back to that first mark of the Christian’s identity – chosen by God to be his exiles in the world. This world is not our home. It’s easy to become comfortable in this world, especially here in Australia. But as we look at the world news of the last week, it should give us more reason to long for our eternal home, and to want to see everyone else longing for it too. As we look at a world where fights over small tracts of land claim the lives of families who live in constant fear… as we see efforts to retrieve the remains of family members from an aircraft shot down in cold blood hampered by ongoing conflict, while those responsible remain unidentified… as we see a child ‘acquired’ under a surrogacy arrangement rejected because of Down syndrome.

The words of 1 Peter are a comfort to Christians that a world like this is not our eternal home. We should need no more convincing of this than to look at our Christian brothers and sisters who have been driven out of the city of Mosul in Iraq for no other reason than that they are Christians. They were given the option to renounce their Christian faith and convert to Islam, but they refused to disown the true God who they know has their eternal future safe and will keep them safe to inherit it. They have stood firm as God’s chosen exiles. They have lost just about everything of earthly value, yet they have lost nothing of eternal value. 

As we stand firm, neither will we. This world is not our home. Let’s keep our eyes fixed on our real home and seek to bring as many people with us as we can.

In Christ’s love,

Paul

Jesus taught his disciples that we are to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). As Christians genuinely love one another, the observing world will know that we are truly Christ’s disciples – that we are Christians.

In 1 Peter 1:22 it says that Christians are to love one another “deeply, from the heart”. In our romanticised thinking about love, we can lose some of the impact of what it means to love ‘deeply’. The word for ‘deeply’ here means something like ‘at full stretch’. We might say ‘love each other with the pedal to the metal’, or ‘with the power turned all the way up to full’. It’s a practical word. It’s not just talking about having deep feelings towards the other members of our congregation. It’s about how we actually show that love to each other. It’s about diving to the depths of our ability to practically love one another and giving it all we've got.

I take it that this is something that we need to keep working at – otherwise Peter wouldn't feel the need to tell us to do it. Loving each other at full stretch needs attention, effort and determination. Loving each other at full stretch means sacrifice. That means that loving the other members of our congregation will cost us – it will cost us time, emotional and physical energy, money, whatever it takes. To love each other at full stretch means wanting to invest ourselves in the lives of the other people at church. At the very least that means getting to know each other. 

Every one of us can identify someone else in our own congregation who we either don’t know at all or know very little about. Out of habit we gravitate to the people we know already. Show someone else you love them by breaking that habit and investing yourself in loving them just by starting to get to know them this weekend.

The kind of love we should love each other with doesn't hold back. We don’t love each other at ‘minimum’ or even ‘medium’. We need to keep working at loving each other at full stretch. The model of that kind of love is the way that Jesus has loved us. Reflect this week on what level you’re loving the others in your congregation at.

In Christ’s love,


Paul

One of the first things that strikes you as you begin reading 1 Peter is that it doesn't try to disguise the hardships that come as part and parcel of being a Christian, as if the Christian life should be all ‘beer and skittles’ and we mustn't be doing it right if it isn't. 

Instead Peter writes to encourage us that while we live in this world, suffering, trials and rejection by the world for being a Christian is all part of God’s grace to those he has chosen and called to be his forever. When we suffer grief in all kinds of trials because we are Christians, it isn't because God isn't in control – it’s because he is in control, and is preparing us for the perfect eternal future that we will certainly inherit when this world is no more. 

It’s no wonder that we read that we are strangers to this world – we are in it but not of it. This world – the world that doesn't know the true God – should not feel like home to a Christian. People won’t understand why we won’t fall in with what the world thinks is okay. We’ll feel on the outer – like a stranger. That’s okay! That’s God’s grace to us. This world is not our home. It shouldn't feel like it is. 

Let’s encourage one another as we share our lives to be bold in standing firm in this grace of God, and not caving in to the world so that we fit in.

In Christ’s love,

Paul

The subject of wealth and money is one of those subjects that we want to leave at home when we come to church. One reason might be that we think that being a Christian doesn’t have anything to say to me about my own wealth. Another might be that we think of wealth as being something that we shouldn’t be concerned about if we’re Christians. Or we can think of wealth as something that is evil or bad.

But when we turn to the Bible we see that the subject of wealth is there. God has things to teach us about wealth – about how we go about earning money, how to use it, our attitude to it, generosity, etc. So it’s not a subject that we should never expect to hear about at church. Secondly, wealth itself, and being wealthy are not condemned. Wealth is not bad and to be avoided. Christians through the centuries have tried to portray poverty as being better than wealth – as if material poverty is what the Christian should aim for. I don’t think that is the Bible’s message on wealth either.

What the Bible does do is to teach us that loving money and wealth, and putting them in the place of God will be our downfall. When wealth becomes the thing that I trust in for security now and for the future, then it has become my god – my master. Jesus warns us that we can’t serve two masters. If we trust in our wealth, we will serve our wealth (working to gain more and keeping as much as we can as our highest priority), rather than trusting God for our security and serving Him. Proverbs 11:4 says that our wealth is worthless on the day we stand before God. What will matter on that day is how we have sought to honour and serve him – including with our wealth, as much or as little as that might be.

Whether we treat wealth as our god, or rightly as a good provision of the true God, will affect the way we accumulate, invest and give our wealth away. And so we come back to the overriding theme of the wise life that we’re discovering in Proverbs. That life begins and continues with the fear of the Lord. Our lives are in his hands – not in the hands of wealth.

In Christ’s love,

Paul

One of the most popular TV series of the last 20 years was 'Friends'. Its popularity says a lot about the way we value friendship, even in a world where we continue to become more and more individualistic. Friendships are important to us.

Friendship is an important aspect of the way God has made us. We are social beings, created for deep relationships. Our friends play an influential role in determining who we are and what we’re like. And so, according to the wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord, wisdom will mean taking care both in who we choose to be friends with and how we conduct ourselves in our friendships. In this Facebook generation we can have more friends than we could have imagined a generation ago, simply by linking up with people over the internet. In some ways, online forums like Facebook can redefine our concept of friendship. But is such a concept able to bear the weight of what a real-life friendship can?

Do we have a model for friendship to measure things like Facebook against? The book of Proverbs speaks about friendship in terms of love and faithfulness that goes even deeper than the love of blood brothers, and of genuine personal care for those we call our friends. But we all know that friends let us down, and that we let them down all to frequently.

But there is a faithful friend who loves us more than any blood relative can. He is faithful even when we fail him. He frankly confronts us to do us good by calling us out of sin and into life with him. And he showed us true friendship beyond anything we will see in this life when he laid down his life for us, who he now calls friends.

As the hymn goes, “What a friend we have in Jesus!”

In Christ’s love,

Paul

Work is one of the first topics in conversation when we meet another person. Almost as soon as we know a person’s name, we find ourselves asking them what they ‘do’. We use the answer to decide how we relate to that person. It’s as if their occupation determines their value as a person. But the wisdom of the world encourages us to see even our own value as people as a factor of what we work at.

People who, for reasons of social or economic disadvantage, are not in the workforce can tend to be stigmatized and even considered worthless. While our society highly values people who work hard and are successful in their careers. In the past couple of decades we have seen the average hours spent at work each week expand, with employers expecting more work for the wages they pay. At the same time, unpaid work is often thought to be second-rate, and something that no one should be expected to put up with in the long term.

When we look at the Bible, work is part of human life as God created it, and is therefore good. In the fallen world, work has become hard, but has not ceased to be part of what it means to be human. As Christians, we want to have a right understanding of the place and value of work in our lives. Worldly wisdom will lead us to want to find our value in what we do, whereas the gospel shows us that our value is in who we are as people made in the image of God. On the flipside, our sinfulness will lead us to laziness and self-indulgence instead of sharing in the work that is needed for the maintenance and good order of human life.

The wise person who fears the Lord is the one who recognises that work is good and is part of life for people who want to live rightly in the world that God has redeemed and is redeeming through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He or she will not pursue work as their source of satisfaction and value, nor be lazy like the sluggard of Proverbs, but will work joyfully knowing that we are working for the One whose work was to do the will of his Father to save us and give us eternal rest.

In Christ’s love,

Recently I caught a bit of the movie ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ on TV which we saw at the movies a few years ago. It’s based on a true story and stars Will Smith and his real-life son playing a father and son who go through some very troubled times in which Smith’s character is often in tears, as he loses his money, his wife and his home during the economic downturn of the early 1980s, while struggling to take care of his young son. 

His aim is to find happiness (misspelt ‘happyness’ on the wall outside his son’s day care centre). At the end of the movie his happiness is restored as he gets a job with a stockbroking firm. The closing sequence shows father and son happy again as we read on screen that he subsequently started and then sold his stake in his own firm for a multi-million dollar sum. Apparently, there were no more tears in his story.

We might not experience the same depths of despair that this man did. Yet there will be tears for each of us at various times in our lives – whether it be through financial difficulties, relationship problems, illness or the loss of people we love. Amongst the joy of life there are tears that we don’t want to shed. For most people, the answer to the tears is the pursuit of happiness. If it’s not through money, we look for happiness in relationships, or in possessions, or whatever else helps mask the pain of our tears. However, nothing we try can actually take away the pain that eventually spoils everyone’s enjoyment of this life.

But there is something better than the pursuit of happiness – it’s to know the joy of life that Jesus brings. While believing in Jesus won’t mask the pain of life in this fallen world, it delivers something better. It delivers what our souls are telling us we really want but are looking in the wrong places for.

Jesus brings the joy of knowing a life free from all the tears and pain of life as we know it. And though we won’t fully experience that tear-free life now, we can rest in the deep-seated joy of knowing that tear-free life is what we’re heading for as we persevere in trusting ourselves to Jesus. The pursuit of happiness in anything in this life will ultimately disappoint us. The pursuit of true joy in a restored relationship with God through Jesus Christ never will.  

Paul