Prayer 31/05/15 - Hallowed be your name

Our father in heaven,

You are God on high, set above us in the heavens, Lord in power and in grace over all of your creation. You are infinite in strength and wisdom, in love and justice. You never sin, you never do wrong.  You are pure and perfect in every way. We honour you for being holy.

You do not hide away on your heavenly throne. You don't separate yourself from us, in fear of being contaminated by our sin. Instead, you come down to us, and you purify us. As Jesus Christ, you walked with us, taught us, mourned and laughed with us, and gave your life for us. You don't turn your back on us, but instead you sanctify us by taking the punishment of our crimes against you upon yourself, even though you are completely innocent of all wrong. Then you raised Christ from the dead, showing that you are not bound by death. We honour you for being holy.

You are close to us, dwelling within us by your Holy Spirit. You transform us into your likeness, so that each and every day we can be more like you. You uphold the humble, you exalt the lowly. You cleanse us of our sinful ways, and give us a new life. You call us your children, and bring us into your family. You heal the sick, you feed the hungry, you minister to the broken, you bring life to the dead. Nothing bad sticks to you; everything good comes from you. You have done everything well. We honour you for being holy.

You came to serve, and you want us to serve. You call us to stand up for the oppressed and the marginalised, to be there for the sick and the sorrowful, to call for justice against the greedy and the wicked, to show grace to the lost and the foolish, to love each other as family. And so we pray now for all of these people: we pray for Rohingya Muslim refugees, fleeing persecution, trapped on boats with nowhere to go, because no-one wants them. But you want them, Father. We pray that you will give them a home. We pray for those suffering from sicknesses that cannot be easily seen: depression, anxiety, attention deficit, post-traumatic stress. We ask you to give them hope and clarity, and give understanding, patience and acceptance to our society, as we seek to be there for them. We pray that you will bring justice to those around the world causing death and destruction; bring justice to those who oppress the poor and the weak, who accept bribes and make shady backroom deals in the name of financial gain. We ask you to please work in the hearts of those who are far from you, who deny you and work against you, so that they might admit their wrong, repent and turn from it, and come to you for forgiveness. And we pray for those who we call brother and sister in Jesus Christ who are sick, who are weak, who are tired, who are struggling, who need help. Please give them strength and comfort, and use us as your hands and feet to minister to their needs. We honour you for being holy. Help us to be holy, because you are holy.

By the authority and power of Jesus we pray these things, Amen

Prayer 3/05/15 1 Peter 3:8-22 "Suffering As Christians"

Heavenly Father,

You are of inestimable worth. How can we even begin to put a value on the one who creates and owns everything? How can we put a value on our own lives, and the lives of all people, who only live by the breath you have breathed into our lungs? What price can we put on our eternal future, that you have secured for us by the blood of your son, Jesus Christ? We are absolutely blown away by your infinite worth, and even though we can only begin to comprehend it, we understand enough to know that you are amazing.

Nothing else can stand as even remotely of the same worth as our lives, our salvation, and our relationship with you. And yet you give us so much more! We have amazing wealth, we live in a rich country, and we are blessed with a whole bunch of material stuff. We have rooves and cars and electronic gizmos, we have abundant food and money left over to spend on entertainment and charity. We have loving family relationships, strong friendships and a wonderful congregation of like-minded brothers and sisters in Christ. And we have a stable and safe country, far from danger, far from threats, and full of freedom, where we can worship you in public, learn about you at state funded Bible colleges, build churches that advertise your son's glory, and teach about you in schools. Help us to be thankful for all that you give us, because we have a lot of opportunity.

And you have commanded us that as we have opportunity, we should do good to everyone, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. And so we pray now for our brothers and sisters who live in places where these opportunities do not exist, and where instead they suffer from all sorts of persecution and injustice. We pray for our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Syria who have lost their homes, their families and their churches as their communities have been decimated by ISIS. We pray for our Christian family in Central Asia, where Christians are regularly imprisoned and fined huge amounts for handing out gospel tracts, having prayer meetings in their homes, or owning a Bible. We pray for your people across Africa who face death at the hands of Al-Qeda, Al-Shabbab and Boko Haram. We pay for Christians in Nepal,  whose churches and homes have been destroyed, and will be difficult to rebuild, and who may not receive aid from their government because they are Christian. We pray for Christians in North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and Myanmar who face tragically unjust punishments for bearing your name. Give all of your people courage and strength in the face of these trials. Assure them on the amazing value there is in sharing in the sufferings of Christ in such ways. Let them know our support, in prayer, in finance, and in public advocacy. And help us to be encouraged by their strong stance for you, and to receive the same courage when we face shame from family, friends and workmates who find our talking about Jesus embarrassing or uncomfortable.

And so we also pray for those closer to home who are suffering in your name. Despite the many blessings you have given us, there is still a lot of pain in our midst. We pray for those who face rejection from their families because of their stance of believing in God. Give them a strong sense of the many brothers and sisters you have given them in Christ. We pray for those whose suffering is silent, and invisible to us, who hide their pain. We pray for those who suffer doubt about you, or aren't sure about their relationship with you, or are plagued with regrets and worries about their lives, and for others. Give us caring hearts and gentle spirits, so that they might inherit the blessing of closeness and comfort from you. Please free us all from fear and apprehension when it comes to suffering for you - help us to be willing and generous in giving all that you have given us to those who you have provided to us to pass on to those who are in need.

For all these things, for opportunities provided and blessings given, we are truly thankful. In Jesus name, Amen.

Prayer 19/04/15 1 Peter 1:13-2:10 New Identity

Heavenly Father,

You are a holy God.  You created this world, but it is set apart from you. You are above and beyond the finite trappings of this reality. You allow your love to radiate into this world, overcoming evil, sin and badness, and we have all been touched by your love at some point in our lives. Thank you for being both powerful and loving, so that we have nothing to fear in you, but instead can find shelter in your strength, apart from all the worries and problems of this world.

We thank you that you have offered us a life beyond the few years we have on this earth, a life that is holy, like you are holy, and that lasts forever, just as you are eternal. What a blessing to share these characteristics with you, our great and glorious God! We were in spiritual poverty, and you saw our need and paid our debts - not in money, but in blood. We are humbly thankful for Jesus Christ - the immortal, who yet died for our sake - that you have raised him from the dead, to show to us that our lives do not end in death, but that we will be raised like him. What great hope we have  in that! 

And so we ask you, Father, that you will help us to keep our eyes fixed on what is really worthwhile - your son Jesus, his death, his resurrection, and his imminent return. Help us to be obedient to you, and to reflect the holy life you have given us, by separating ourselves from the lies and deceit that surround us, and threaten to distract us from you. You have saved us from that way of life that has been handed down to us by our ancestors - a life of greed and selfishness, of valuing money and power and family and health and comfort and security - an empty way of life that leads nowhere. But we don't have to live that way any more, thanks to you! Keep reminding us of that, so every day we can turn our backs on the seductive lies that our society tells us to live for.

But even as we turn from the evils of this world, please help us to keep our hearts full of your divine love for all the people of this world. There is so much suffering, so much sickness, so much poverty, so much distress and hurt. Please help us to overflow with your love for people, so that we can show them through our words and our ways that you are the God of peace, you are the God of healing, you are the God who provides, and you are the God of love. We think now of all those we know who are suffering from the brokenness of this world, and we pray that you will be close to them. Let them feel your love, and let them rely on you. And help us to be your hands and feet, to go and to help those we know who are struggling. Give us ears to listen to their troubles, and equip us to show your love in practical ways that reflect your redemption of us into eternal life.

And keep in us a longing for your son's return, when all of these problems will fade away, and we will be with you forever.

All this we pray, by the authority of your son Jesus, Amen

Being organised and managing your time

Being organised is an efficiency matter. It means you have more time. Time management is about understanding how much time you have, and what you are going to do with it. So time management comes first.

What is time?

Time is both quantitative and qualitative. It's really important to understand this, because you need to manage both how much time you have, and what the best times to do things are. Money is a subset of time. For us working stiffs, we have a hard limit on how much money we will ever get based on how much time we have to work in, and a soft limit based on how much time we use to make money.

There are several elements to managing your time.  You need to understand when your time exists, what your priorities are, and how long things take to do.

Priorities

Before you even look at your own priorities, you need to understand your involuntary time requirements and your duties to others that cannot be minimised.

Involuntary time is time taken to eat, use the bath room, sleep,  travel and all those other things you can't avoid. Sometimes you can try to minimise these things, but it's not a good idea because they will just come back with reinforcements and end up claiming more of your time.

Duties are those things you are relied on for by other people which, if you do not perform them, will lead to their harm. To differentiate, responsibilities are things you take on; duties are things thrust upon you. Responsibilities can turn into duties (when you become the only person capable of doing something), so watch out!

Because duties and involuntary time are the things you control least, they have to be accounted for first. Everything else fits in around them.

Now is a good time to write down a list of your involuntary times and duties. Hopefully there aren't too many of them!

Importance and Urgency

Once you understand what your involuntary time and duties are, you can start to think about all the other things you do. There are two ways to think about priorities in relation to time: their urgency and their importance. These both must be factored in when considering any priority. The key thing to remember is that while importance is subjective (you get to choose what's important) urgency is far more objective (it is a function of how long it takes plus how soon it needs to be done. The closer the time it takes gets to how much time is left to do it, the more urgent it becomes).

Everything you do needs to be evaluated for its importance and urgency. Only then can you adequately allot time to things. If you don't get this balance right, you will just end up stressed all the time. If you think of importance and urgency as a punnet square, you want to live your life in the important non-urgent square.  All the other squares are less ideal: important urgent is what we are using time management to prevent, but is sometimes necessary; non-important urgent is a trap that should be avoided; and non-important non-urgent is stuff you can do to just waste time for no real benefit, so is great for procrastination.

	Important	Non-Important
Urgent	2	4
Non-Urgent	1	3

Importance

Working out importance is absolutely vital to time management. Urgency is pretty much empirical: but importance is something you need to understand for yourself. Think about your spirituality, your family, your friendships, your study, your free time, and your work time. How would you rate them in terms of importance from first to last? This is vital to knowing not just how much time to give these things, but what kind of time to give them. Listing these broad high level titles of the things that claim your time gives you something to refer back to, to remind you of what's most important to you. It can be important to have something like this when non-important urgent things rear their head, because often it is easy for something urgent to look important when actually it's not.

The order of importance at the highest level is not about excluding things. It is about including everything in your life to make sure that it gets the time, both quantitative and qualitative, that it deserves. Sometimes there might be something in our lives that takes up a lot of time, even though it's not the most important thing (eg work). This makes it all the more important to ensure that we have enough quality time to spend doing the things that are even more important to us.

Now is a good time to list the things that broadly take up your time in order of their importance. This is just high level titles: religion, work, study, leisure, relationships etc. Remember that you decide where things go in this list, and there is no wrong answer. We've already taken care of involuntary time and duties, after all. Draw this list up from left to right next to your involuntary time and duties: these are titles after all, and this way we can put stuff under them. Once you've got them all down, you can move them around to put them in an order that you're happy with. You can always change it, but it is worth thinking about what order these big headings go in, because it helps shape your attitude towards those things.

The most important things need to be given the best time to do them. Thankfully the best time to do some things isn't the same for other things. Identifying when the best time is to do something isn't usually that difficult. Some things can only be done at certain times, which is the de facto best time to do them. Others are just best done at certain times, and can give you more wiggle room in when they're done.

Once you have a list of high level titles of what takes up your time, then you can start filling in underneath them all the things that take up your time under those titles. There will be lots of them. They don't need to be in any particular order, just write down whatever comes to mind.  Think through your days, weeks and months and about what you do. Put everything down, under whatever heading it best fits with. It is very helpful to break down your big time titles into individual activities, because you can then give them a more individual importance ranking, but also breaking things down into their component parts makes it easier to manage the time they take up and makes them easier to accomplish. So list them in order of their importance to you.

Best Times

Once you have all those individual activities listed down, we're going to make another list next to them. (If you prefer lists to be long rather than wide - like I do - then now is the time to take all your lists and paste them underneath each other, so you can use less columns overall.) This is a list of the best times (qualitatively) to do all of these things. It doesn't need to be a specific time period, just morning, afternoon, evening (or a specific day, or even "work hours" if that's the only time it can be done).

Adding the best qualitative times for these activities is important, because this is where your time management starts to really take form. One of the best ways of remembering when you need to do things and structuring your time is to give each activity and even high level title it's own specific part of a day, week or month (depending on its repetitiveness). Creating a logical structure that makes sense to you is the best way to ensure that the things important to you get done.

Free Time

It is at this point that you may start to realise you don't have as much time as you'd like. That's totally normal. The people who need time management most are the people who are highly committed to lots of different pursuits. While it's great to do your best to fit things in, one of the reasons we list things in order of importance is to see which of the things we do may have to be sacrificed, or given so little time so infrequently that they become more of a wish than an actual activity.  Time is precious, and sometimes you have to be firm and make hard decisions not to do things you'd like to do, because there are other things more important that you would like to do more.

Urgency

That list gives us a good idea of levels of importance of the things that take up our time,  and the kind of time we should give them. Now we need to determine the amount of time these things should be given. This is done by determining their urgency. Remember urgency is a function of two things: when something needs to be done by, and how long it will take to do.

Hard Deadlines

Determining when things must be done by is usually a mix of hard deadlines (when something objectively must be done by in order to retain its value in being done) and soft deadlines (when it would best suit you to do it). Hard deadlines are fairly easy to determine because they are usually set in stone for a reason external to you. While it's important to know these hard deadlines because they place suitable limits on planning, they are not great on their own. Simply planning to do something just before it is due is a great way to fail to do it because an unforeseen circumstance appears and blows out the expected time it would take. More complex activities are actually impossible to do simply with hard deadlines! For this reason it is much better (not to mention more efficient) to plan using your own soft deadlines. These allow you to complete an activity during the time that best suits you, before it becomes too urgent.

Now it's a good time to look at all the activities on your list and determine their hard deadlines. Always do that first: a soft deadline can never be after a hard deadline. What you should now have is your activities, when the best times are to do them, and their hard deadlines. Looking at their best times to do them should tell you when you should set your soft deadlines for each activity (assuming there is still enough of those best times left to do the activity!).  Of course, the definition of a best time is partly determined by what time you have left. And this brings us to working out how much time something takes to do.

Many activities repeat regularly, and so their deadline appears over and over. That's fine - you can just list it as "Wednesday 9pm (weekly)" or "10pm (daily)" or "30 May 11:59pm".

Estimation

Everything you do takes time. Although it is all measurable, we don't often take the time to do detailed time and motion studies of our lives. So what we're left with is estimating how long something is going to take. Sometimes that's easy and sometimes it's hard, and some people are better at it than others. Short of actually measuring how long something takes to do on average, the best way to estimate how long it will take is to sit down and give it some proper, considered, honest thought. Rushing estimation is great way to rob yourself of time to do something. The less capable you are of estimating how long something will take, the more generous you should be in giving it time. Finishing something faster than you planned is always better than running out of time.

The bigger an activity is, the harder it is to estimate how long it is going to take. Big essays and assignments are a classic for this. This is why it is such a good idea to break down big activities into several smaller activities, as it is often easier to estimate how long it is going to take to do all your research/reading, all your planning, and all your actual writing. Even then, working out a total amount of time can be difficult. Do your best, and be as generous as you think you need to be, especially with more important activities.

Now is the time to fill in the estimated time you think it will take to complete each activity. This can take a while. But it's worth doing, because it will really help you to protect the time that these things take, and gives you a target to aim for in terms of time to set aside for its completion. Some things take a long time, and can't be done in one sitting. That's fine, put the total amount of time for now if you can.

Soft Deadlines

Now that we have all this information, we can get to the meat of time management: setting soft deadlines for all these activities. Soft deadlines are where it's at in time management. In a perfect world, everything would be done to a soft deadline, because soft deadlines are made up of the time that is best to do an activity. With all the information we now have, we can see already the best time to do things in, we can see when it's due (hard deadline), we can see how long it's going to take to complete, and so it's just a matter of dividing the estimated time of completion between the number of best times we have for that activity between now and its due date. 

Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the simple fact is that the best time to do a lot of things is similar - things that take mental effort, for instance, are best done at whenever you have your peak performance in the day. But lots of things compete for your peak performance. That's why we have ranked things in order of importance. But even then, you will find your peak performance hours are at a premium, and will fill up quickly. This is why procrastination is a real killer - it's doing things that aren't important or urgent, but in your peak performance times!

So now you need to work out the next best solutions for the activities that don't get to have their best times. When doing that, you have to realise that doing things outside of their best times makes them take longer. So make sure you give them enough extra time.

When that's done, you are pretty much at the end of your time management. The next thing to do would be to feed in your hard deadlines into a Google calendar with alarms set to remind you at various points that things are due, and start to fill in your time slots with the things you are meant to be doing. Then you have an easy reference to tell you when you should be doing things.

EMERGENCIES

Emergencies happen, and like involuntary time and duties, they are unavoidable. But unlike them, they are also unplannable.  The best thing about having a calendar that tells you exactly what you should be doing and when is that when a real emergency comes up (hospital visit etc) you can actually see what time you lost, and you will know what you need to make up. It allows you to reschedule things and shuffle stuff around with a real idea in mind of how much time you are going to need.

Being Organised

Organisation is really just a method of ensuring that you have more time to do the things you want to do. Here are a few quick things that help you to be organised.

Time management: by planning out your time, you actually end up being more efficient. Yay!

Doubling up: If you can work out how to do two things at the same time (eg memorizing in the shower) then you can make much better use of your time. There are some times that seem dead, like travel times. Try and fill them with things that you can do in those times (listen to lectures, building your relationships, free time reading).

Using money wisely: Money can sometimes be liquid time. Sometimes you can use it to free up time for things that are more valuable than the money you use to gain it (takeaway food is a great example).

Learn to say no: There is an old saying, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person". This is true, but it also makes busy people dead people. So you have to learn to say no sometimes. The best way to do this is by having a strong understanding of your priorities of importance.

Alarms: Having alarms is just so great. They remind you to do things. If you find one alarm isn't enough, set two, or three, or ten. I have three alarms to get up in the morning. If an alarm goes off and you don't need it, what's the harm?

Structure and repetition: Putting things where they belong, and doing things at the same time regularly, makes you less likely to forget them. You don't forget that MoG is on a Tuesday, or that church is on a Sunday, or that pants go on your legs. It's the same principle.

Distractions: Try and keep distractions to a minimum. They are like little urgent non-important things trying to grab your attention.

Listening to Jesus (Mark 9 Transfiguration) youth talk

(This talk is very much based on my Mark 9 transfiguration talk, but has been shortened to 15 minutes and changed a little for a teenage/young adult audience)

Who do you listen to?

I'm not talking about music, or podcasts or whatever.  I mean who do you trust when they tell you a fact?  Who do you help when they say they need help?  Who do you obey when they tell you to do something?  See, when you listen to someone, you don't just hear what they say. You actually sit up and pay attention.

Tonight I'm here to talk about listening to Jesus. In the gospel of Mark in chapter 9, Jesus is transfigured in glory on a mountain top. Jesus glows dazzling white, Elijah and Moses appear, and a cloud appears and God speaks out of the cloud and says about Jesus, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"  Jesus is visibly showing he is God, and God is audibly saying to listen to Jesus.  The transfiguration is the number 1 time in Jesus' life that we can point to and say with absolutely certainty that Jesus is God.

But only three people ever got to see it. And I know some people struggle with that. Some people don't want to believe that Jesus really is God without seeing it for themselves, without indisputable proof. They want God to prove himself to them in a specific way that makes it undeniable. They don't trust the testimony of witnesses. They want testable results, observable phenomena. That's how science works.

But that's not how history works, it's not how law works, it's not how philosophy works, and it's not how God works. The gospels are really, really trustworthy. You can trust what they say. Yes, what they say will challenge you to rethink what you believe, and what other people say about how the world works. But that shouldn't be a reason to ignore them.

We aren't the only ones who don't get to see Jesus as God for ourselves. Jesus had huge crowds of thousands of followers - none of them got to see it. He had hundreds of disciples. None of them got to see it. He had twelve special apostles, whom he especially selected to be with him. And of those twelve, nine of them were left behind. All they got was the story told by Peter, James and John, and even then not till after Jesus had been resurrected. That's all they got, and that's all we get - the same story retold to us in the Bible. That is what God gives us, and that is enough.

If you think eyewitness testimony is not a strong enough basis to believe in what Jesus said and did, then my advice to you would be to honestly think for yourself whether it's okay for God to reveal himself in a way other than how you want. Also think about what you personally require to believe something that changes how you live your life.

Because you see, even though God says, "This is my Son, whom I love, listen to him!", no-one is going to force you to listen.  God certainly doesn't force people to listen to him.  If he did, I wouldn't have to stand here telling you to listen to him, because we wouldn't have a choice.  God wouldn't even have had to say, "Listen to him!" because there wouldn't be another option.

But there is an option.  God does give you a choice.  And you should choose to listen to him.  If you want to listen to Jesus in your life, because Jesus is God, and because God says to, then there are four things you need to do.  It's a four step plan.  Step one is to hear what Jesus says. Step 2 is to talk to Jesus.  Step 3 is to think like Jesus, and step four is to do what he says.

Let's go through one at a time. So step one is hear what Jesus says. You can't listen to someone if you can't hear what they say. And how do we hear what Jesus has to say? It's in the Bible! In fact, Jesus adopts the whole Bible as being his message, so we can hear him by reading any of it.  Easy, right?

But I think we all know there's reading, and then there's reading.  How many of you have ever installed a piece of software, or signed up for a competition, or installed an app on your phone, and seen the words 'terms and conditions'? How many of you actually read those terms and conditions? How many just click "I have read the terms and conditions" without reading them? Yeah, that's not reading. Don't read the bible like "reading" terms and conditions.  Read it like an email from someone you care about. You don't just skim it to get the big picture - you actually want to know how they feel about it, and what's important to them becomes important to you.

This first step is so important, that the church does a lot to try and make it easier. They provide bible talks for you to listen to, to help explain what the Bible says. They run youth groups and Bible studies. There are even ways to memorise what Jesus says, so that it's sitting in your head all the time and you've always got it with you.  Hearing what Jesus says is really important.

So those are all ways we can hear what Jesus has to say.  Step 2 is what you do after you hear what someone says: you talk.  We need to talk to Jesus. How do we talk to Jesus? You pray. If you know how to talk, then you know how to pray. Choose a time when you can concentrate just on talking to Jesus, and do it. And when you talk to Jesus, talk to him like you talk to other people who are important to you. Talking to Jesus is as important as talking in any other relationship. Talking to Jesus doesn't make you a Christian any more than talking to your parents makes you their children. But you'd have a pretty miserable relationship with your parents if you never talked to them, or you only ever talked to them to ask them for money or to drive you somewhere. So prayer is not just about asking for stuff. Prayer opens our heart, so that we can accept what we've heard Jesus say.

So we're hearing Jesus, we're talking to Jesus.  The next step is to think like Jesus thinks. At first, this means filtering everything you think, and comparing it against what Jesus says we should say and do and think and feel. So you have to think, "Should I kiss my boyfriend/girlfriend? Should I say 'I don't feel well' when I really just don't feel like going out? Should I be deciding about what I want for Christmas when it's not even Easter yet? Should I feel jealous that someone is richer than me?" But filtering your thoughts gets tiring.  It's really hard, because you never stop thinking, and saying, and doing, and feeling. So here's the secret: build your thoughts on what Jesus says.

This makes a huge difference.  It's the thoughts that aren't built on Jesus that you have to filter. If we're honest, that's a lot of thoughts. The thoughts that say getting married is the most important thing, or money is the most important thing, or getting high marks, or being entertained, or feeling good, or being pretty or being popular, or even that family is the most important thing. These thoughts choke what Jesus says to us, shout it down so we can't hear it.

But thoughts built on Jesus, you don't need to filter - because God's ways are always right. Always. Even when the world makes them look wrong, they're still right. That's why it's so important to hear what Jesus says from the Bible, and to open your heart to accept it by praying. That's why I think memorising scripture is so awesome. Because the more of what Jesus says is in your head and heart, the more your thoughts will be built on Jesus, and the less you need to filter them.

The final step to listening is to actually do what Jesus says. We want to live the life Jesus wants us to live.  Not the life that makes us comfortable.  Not the life that makes us feel good.  Not the life that everyone else thinks we should live.  Step 4 is trying to live the life Jesus wants. Doing what Jesus says is not always easy, but it is always right.

It means having to give up on stuff that you know you shouldn't be doing. And that's hard. But it also means getting out there and doing things you aren't doing, and that can sometimes be even harder. Listening to Jesus means doing those things. Cutting out bad behaviour. Standing up for the people who get picked on. Donating money to church and to people who need it more than you. Telling people why you choose to listen to Jesus.  Those things are hard, right? There are so many times in all of our lives when we're too selfish or too scared to take this last step of listening to Jesus and doing what he says. It's really hard! But listening to Jesus means doing it anyway. James 1:22 says, "Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."

Listening to Jesus is a package deal - if you want to do it at all, you need to do it all.  You can't think about what Jesus says if you don't know what he says.  You won't accept what you hear Jesus say if you don't talk to him.  You won't do what he says if your thoughts aren't built on Jesus. If you want to listen to Jesus, then you need to know what he says.  You need to talk to him.  You need to think like him.  And you need to do what he says.

I want to ask you all to take these words of God seriously, because they are God's words: "This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him!"  Don't just ask yourself if what you're doing is enough to cover this list. It's not a test.  Listening to Jesus is a choice you make. So first ask yourself if that's what you actually want to do. Do you really choose to listen to Jesus? If you do, then do it.

Prayer 08/03/15 - Trusting the King (Mark 9:14-32)

Lord of Heaven and Earth,

You are astounding. So many things make us stand in awe of your brilliance. We are surrounded by the beauty of your universe, which speaks to the creative genius of your power. We can wake up early and watch a sunrise turn the sky a myriad of fantastic colours; we can look at pictures from telescopes and see the infinite radiance of a million billion stars that make up our night sky and silently speak of your splendour. We can go for a bushwalk in the Blue Mountains and be surrounded by the beauty of your world in the endless vista of bushland and the majesty of the mountains; we can walk on sandy yellow beaches, with curling waves and crystal waters stretching out to the horizon; we can see the smiles on little children who are overwhelmed with wonder at the simplest joys; we can go to Christian conventions and sing your praises with fantastic songs, and our spirits can be lifted by the rejoicing of hundreds of fellow believers; we can take time in quiet prayer and reflection on your word, and commune with you, our maker and our sovereign.  At these times we feel so close to you, like we could almost reach out and touch you, our Lord and God.

But then we have to close our Bibles, and our prayers have to end with an Amen. Conventions end, the songs are over, and we return to our home lives and our own church meetings week after week. Smiling children grow up, and become teenagers, and then adults, and need lunches and allowances and textbooks and patience.  We switch from pictures of the universe to the daily news, and read about trouble, tragedy and temptation.  The sun goes on rising, and we have to go to work, to study, to look after our families. And we can so easily lose sight of you in the everyday of our lives. We can think of you only as the God of the good times.

Lord, help us to see you in everything. We thank you that Jesus Christ, your own son, did not only live for the good times, but came as a servant, to live and to die for your glory, and for our salvation. He denied himself, he carried his cross, he suffered mockings, beatings, rejections and pain for us, and he gave up his life for us. He walked, he worked, he faced all the world's troubles and temptations. You know what our lives are like, Father God.  You have lived them beside us, both the good and the bad. Help us to see Jesus in the face of every sick friend, every grieving mother, every suffering sister, every tired and stressed brother, every needy child. Help us to see your splendor all the more clearly in the squalor of sin and shame and suffering of this world. Let us feel close to you as we do what your word says, and carry our crosses alongside Christ, and suffer the scorn and disdain of being your disciple.

And fix our eyes on Christ, who has shown us that your Kingdom is breaking into this world. Give us a constant yearning to see all sicknesses healed, all demons cast out, all hunger fed, and all pain ended forever. Make us yearn for your kingdom to come, and give us hands and feet to help others see its coming as we take your message to the world.

Let your kingdom come, Amen

Prayers 22/02/15 - The king must die (Mark 8:27-9:1)

Heavenly Father,

You are the almighty God. You are the king of kings, and lord of lords. You are the God of unbeatable armies, the God of fire from heaven, the God of lightning and thunder. And you are the God of Jesus Christ, your beloved son, who suffered much, was rejected by his people, and was killed. That alone should tell us how amazingly you love us. We should be living a life of constant fear of a vengeful God who wants to punish those who rebel against him, as we so constantly do. You would be absolutely within your rights to sentence us to death for our rebellion.  But we don't have to live in fear, because you are a loving God, so loving that not only do you forgive us for killing your son, but you use your son's death to cleanse us of our sin. That is amazing.  It is breathtaking.  Please give us  a better and better understanding of that as we seek to live our lives for you, in thankfulness or the great and loving God you are.

Lord, there are so many things in our lives that seek to pull our attention away from you.  We worry about our lives. While many of us don't have to worry about what we will eat or what we will drink or what we will wear, we make up other things to worry about: we worry about our safety and security in this age of uncertainty and terrorism. We worry about what people think of us. We are attracted to money and wealth, because it makes our lives comfortable and easy. We follow our own desires, and we seek to put ourselves first. Please God, transform our minds, so that we might see that there is nothing more valuable than your son Jesus, and his message that your kingdom has come with power.

There are so many people in this world who see Jesus as something else: a teacher, a role model, a tragic hero, a rebel leader, or a mythical storybook character. Help us to proclaim to others the truth - that Jesus is the messiah, Jesus is your son, and that his coming ushered in the coming of your kingdom.  Give us strength and courage so that we won't be ashamed of your good news to all humanity.  Help us to carry that message in every part of our lives - when things are good and we are praising you for them, or when things are bad and we throw ourselves at your feet and trust in your sovereignty. And help us to carry that message in how we relate to others. Give us a love for those who are sick, for those who are struggling financially, for those who are stuck in life situations that they can't get out of. Free them from these terrible problems, and make us your hands and feet in helping them. And we pray for those we can't help - those who languish in prisons and detention centres, those who hide their problems, those who suffer for your name on the other side of the world. We ask that you might stretch our your hand and alleviate their problems.  Give your people across the world faith that you are in control. In the same way that the disciples could not understand that Jesus must die as part of your plan, we can't begin to understand the complexities of your plan in this age. So let us remember that you are almighty loving God, and that yours is the only plan that is guaranteed to succeed, and that it is absolutely built on your love for us.

We praise you in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Sermon: Mark 9 - The Transfiguration

(This sermon took a lot of writing. The transfiguration is a difficult passage to preach on! I have included all of my previous notes to give an idea of the different directions I took throughout.  The actual sermon I have put at the top - the notes will all be underneath it.)

Who do you listen to?

I'm not asking who your favourite musicians are, or what radio programs you prefer.  I'm asking who do you pay attention to?  Who do you believe when they express an idea or an opinion or a fact?  Who do you provide for when they say they need something?  Who do you obey when they ask you or tell you to do something?  Who you listen to is more than just what you hear, it's who impacts on what actions you take.

When your spouse, or your parents, asks you to do something, do you listen? Of course you do. We all want happy homes.  When your children tell you they need something, do you listen?  Of course you do, you love your children.  When your boss at works tells you to do something, do you listen? Of course you do, you want to keep your job. When environmentalists tell us to recycle, we listen. When doctors tell us to take medication, we listen. We listen to friends, we listen to family, we listen to preachers (hopefully), we listen to police, we even listen to politicians.

In our passage today, Jesus is transfigured in glory, Elijah and Moses appear, and God says about Jesus, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"

Over the past eight chapters of the Gospel of Mark, we have seen Jesus driving out demons, healing the sick, forgiving sin, ruling over the Sabbath, calming storms, walking on water, multiplying bread, discarding traditions and teaching in parables about the kingdom of God.  Those are impressive, great, worthy of praise.  They are all signs that point to Jesus being God.  But the transfiguration is not just a sign.  It doesn't point.  It reveals that Jesus is God.  All those miracles before were like those little signs on the side of the road that say, "God: 180kms.  God: 35kms.  God: 16kms."  The transfiguration is the big sign that says, "Welcome to God.  Population: Jesus."


Jesus proves that he is God, but not by doing miracles putting up signs pointing to him being God.  He reveals one of the characteristics of God: he reveals his Glory.  God is not just worthy of glory because of all the things he does, but God IS Glory.  Just like God is Love, and all love comes from God, and God is Goodness and Holiness, and those things come from him, God is also Glory - no glory exists apart from God.  When Jesus shows his friends his glory up on that mountaintop, Jesus is revealing Glory itself - he is revealing God.  It's not just a light show, it is God's power, his holiness, his goodness that make up the light of his glory.

Later in his life, Peter would say that the transfiguration was the key act of Jesus he witnessed that meant his message about Jesus could be trusted. In 2 Peter 1 "16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty."  The transfiguration is the time in Jesus' life that we can point to and say with absolutely certainty that Jesus is God.  That is why he is worth listening to.


"This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him!"  The message is loud and clear.  Jesus is God.  The Kingdom of God has come with power.  That has been the message for eight straight chapters now, getting stronger and stronger, culminating in the transfiguration.  Moses and Elijah, the two men who represent the epitome of God's relationship with his people, are right there with Jesus.  God spoke with his people by the giving of his law through Moses; and God spoke to his people through the prophets, of whom Elijah is a representative. Jesus is the way God speaks to us in these last days.

Listening to Jesus should have a huge effect on how we live our lives.  For the disciples at the time, this required a huge upheaval in their faith.  As Jews, Moses and the Prophets were the foundation upon which they did everything.  They were the way God and his people interacted.  Now God himself had told them, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"  That's a foundational change for them, because 'listen to him' means 'do what he says'.


Take one small example.  In chapter 7:19 it says as an offhand comment in brackets, "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean."  What a huge difference to people who their whole lives followed restrictive food laws!  Imagine if the opposite happened tomorrow - if Jesus told us that we have to follow the food laws to be Christian.  No pork, no ham, no bacon.  No shellfish.  No cheese and meat mixed together.  How does Christmas look without ham and prawns?  How does McDonald's look without cheeseburgers?  One small part of life, one huge upheaval when it changes because we do what Jesus says.


God says "This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him!"  But no-one is going to force you to do it.  God certainly doesn't force people to listen to him.  If he did, I wouldn't have to stand here telling you to listen to him, because we wouldn't have a choice.  God wouldn't have had to say, "Listen to him!" because there wouldn't be another option.


But there is an option.  God gives you a choice.  And you should choose to listen to him.  If you accept that Jesus is God but refuse to listen to him, that is something you need to fix.  Not listening to God is untenable.  Being God's enemy is terrible.  But if we listen to Jesus earlier in Mark 2:10 he said, "I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins."  That is, he can forgive being God's enemy.  We can actually be transformed from being God's enemy to being his friend.  It's not about being forced to listen to Jesus.  It's about wanting to listen to him.  If you want to know how to listen to Jesus in your life, because Jesus is God and because Jesus is your friend, then I see four things that we need to do.


Step 1: To listen to Jesus, you need to hear what he says.  Jesus speaks in the New Testament, and he quotes from almost every book of the Old Testament.  So the whole bible is valuable in understanding what Jesus has to say.  I read the Bible almost every morning.  I have a devotional that looks at one verse, sometimes one idea in one verse, and explores it.  It's about a hundred years old, but it's free.  It's actually online.  It's one page, takes about five minutes to read, if that.  Before that, I used to read 10 verses of the Bible every morning, and really focus on what they were saying.  That took about an hour.  Before that, I used to follow a yearly Bible reading plan, where you're reading several chapters a day.  That took about 40 minutes.  They are all good.


Memorize scripture.  I started in September last year, and I have memorized the entire book of Galatians (six chapters), and coincidentally I have memorised the first nine chapters of Mark.  It takes about 45 minutes every morning.  Yes, it takes a long time.  But I cannot praise it highly enough.  It is a phenomenal way of listening to Jesus.  I strongly recommend it to you all.  If you want to do it, come to me afterwards and give me your contact details, and I'll send you the pamphlet I used to learn how to do it (it's free).  It is not hard to do, all it takes is time.  I recommend that you make time to do it.  Give other things up to do it.  That's what I did.  It's better than reading the news.


I started memorising scripture because I was convicted about it by something Bruce said in a sermon on James last year.  Which brings me to the next thing to do to listen to Jesus: Listen to sermons being given here, at Waitara, every Sunday.  Sermons are an amazing resource.  They don't just tell you what Jesus says, but they help us to do it to our lives - the other half of what listening means.  One thing I don't do takes notes during sermons.  I listen to sermons every week, and as sure as I listen to them, I forget most of them the next day.  What a waste!


Every week there's a sermon outline.  I'm going to start using it.  Well, actually I'm probably going to take notes on my tablet because my handwriting is rubbish.  But I'm going to note down the challenge that the preacher gives every week, and if I'm not doing it, figure out one way I can apply it to my life, then actually do it.


Go to a Bible study.  Bible study is a great way of sharing not only what we think Jesus is saying to us, but also challenging and supporting one another to listen to what Jesus says, and to do it.  It turns listening to Jesus from being just a personal act into it a communal activity.


Step 2:  We need to talk to Jesus.  That means pray.  I keep a prayer blog actually.  I write in it every morning.  I pray about my daily devotion.  I pray about whatever is exercising me that morning.  Then I pray about different topics each day of the week.  Prayer is not just about me asking for stuff though.  It's about working with God through why stuff needs to be prayed for at all.  It's a time where I thrash out with God why things are the way they are, and every day come to the same conclusion - I need to have faith that God is in control.


If you go into praying every day expecting everyone around you who is sick to get well, and everything that's wrong to go right, you're going to be disappointed.  That's certainly not my experience.  But if you go into prayer expecting to wrestle with God, and to be put into submission by him - then do it. Prayer is where the desire comes from to want to listen to Jesus.


One thing I struggle with is praying to God throughout the day.  But I find the more I learn to rely on God in one area of life, the more I'm prepared to reach out to him, to put him in control of that. So one step at a time.


Step 3 is to think.  What I mean is, try to think about what you're doing, thinking, and saying, and evaluate it against what Jesus says.  I am thoroughly terrible at this.  I often act or speak without thinking.  Sometimes I do things even after thinking about it and knowing it's probably not what God wants me to do.  Trying to evaluate everything you say and do can be tiring.  But what I find is the more I want to listen to Jesus through prayer, and the more I actually hear Jesus through the Bible, the more my thoughts come from a godly basis.


And that makes a huge difference.  Thoughts that come from an not-godly basis are the ones that you have to firstly identify, and then stop and check, analyse, consider, and think about.  They're the thoughts Jesus describes as the thorns that choke the seed in Mark 4:19 "the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things". They choke Jesus' word, making it unfruitful.


But thoughts that from a godly basis, you don't need to analyse - because God's ways are the right ways, and they will never be defeated.  Instead, they're the thoughts we need courage to act on.  Because they're the thoughts and actions that aren't like what everyone else is doing and thinking.  They're the hard sayings of Jesus that we'd really rather not follow.  They're the scary actions, the ones we pray we don't have to do.


Lastly, step 4, of course, is to do those actions.  With the courage and the strength God gives, trying to live the life he wants us to live.  Not the life that makes us comfortable.  Not the life that makes us feel good.  Not the life that everyone else thinks we should live.  It's trying to live the life God wants.  To me, that generally looks like being confronted by things some other people don't even think about; struggling to work out what Jesus says I should do; not wanting to do it; being too afraid to do it; being too selfish to do it; and then deciding to trust God, and stepping forward to do it anyway.  And I praise God when he gives me the courage to do what he says.  And I thank God that Jesus can forgive my sins, because there are so many times in my life where I am too selfish or too scared to take this last step of listening to Jesus.


But listening to Jesus is a package deal - you have to do it all.  You can't think about what Jesus says if you don't know what he says.  You won't do what he says if you haven't had your mind transformed to think in a godly way.  You won't do any of it if you don't pray.  If you want to listen to Jesus, then you need to know what he says.  You need to talk to God.  You need to have your mind transformed to think the way Christ wants you to think.  And you need to do what Jesus says.  I want to ask you all to take these words of God seriously: "This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him!"  Don't just ask yourself if what you're doing is enough to listen to Jesus.  Ask yourself first if that's what you actually want to do.  Ask yourself honestly, Who do I really listen to?

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Obvious points:

Major
Jesus is God, the son of God, the fulfilment of God's revelation to people.

Minor
John the Baptist was Elijah.

What does this mean for us?

* God's command to the disciples: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"
- It means we must respect the ultimate authority Jesus has over us as God.
* The Law and the Prophets were the primary guides of life for the Jews. It's what makes them a people.
- Jesus is our Law and Prophets.
- He should rule our lives. Our lives should be dominated by the law of Christ.
** Only three of the apostles saw this transfiguration before tasting death. The others had to die first before they saw Jesus glorified. They didn't get to hear about this until after the resurrection.
-- We don't see Jesus glorified till we die, or if we're lucky, when he returns.
-- We shouldn't need to see Jesus for ourselves. We can trust the testimony of the apostles who saw him and who were with him. The disciples, even nine of the 12, did not get to see Jesus transfigured. This should not be a block to our faith.
* Jesus is not just worthy of glory: God is Glory.

glory n. (pl. glories) [mass noun] 1 high renown or honour won by notable achievements: to fight and die for the glory of one's nation. 2 magnificence or great beauty: the train has been restored to all its former glory. - [count noun] (often glories) a thing that is beautiful, impressive, or worthy of praise: the glories of Paris. - the splendour and bliss of heaven: images of Christ in glory. 3 praise, worship, and thanksgiving offered to God. 4 [count noun] a luminous ring or halo, especially as depicted around the head of Christ or a saint. ■ v. [no obj.] (glory in) take great pride or pleasure in: they gloried in their independence. - exult in unpleasantly or boastfully: readers tended to defend their paper or even to glory in its bias.
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You don't often hear the word 'glory' used outside a church. We sing songs about God being the King of Glory, and we say that God is worthy of glory, honour and praise. We pray that God will be glorified.  But outside of church and talking about God, when do we talk about glory? ('Melbourne Victory skipper Mark Milligan hungry for more title glory' [Feb 11]; 'BMX champ Caroline Buchanan uses AIS to give her an edge on the quest for Olympic glory' [Feb 8]; 'Wallpaper returns - in all its vibrant glory' [Feb 6]) It's a compound concept that takes in a few ideas. If we see something beautiful, impressive, worthy of praise, we might say, "We looked over the city of Paris in all its glory." It is often used to mean a high renown and honour that is gained through a notable achievement, so we might say that a soldier or a sportsperson who pushes the limits and tries to accomplish more is, "Going for glory." When something was once good, but has since fallen into ruin, and we rebuild it, we say we are, "Returning it to its former glory." So 'glory' really means something that is the epitome of beauty, of impressiveness, something that is so good that it is worth giving praise and honour and being renowned.

You might think it's little wonder that we talk about God in these terms.  After all, God is the epitome of beauty, of impressiveness, He is so good that he is worth giving honour and praise.

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'Melbourne Victory skipper Mark Milligan hungry for more title glory' [Feb 11]; 'BMX champ Caroline Buchanan uses AIS to give her an edge on the quest for Olympic glory' [Feb 8]; 'Wallpaper returns - in all its vibrant glory' [Feb 6]. When we talk about glory these days, this is usually what we mean - sporting heroes and their accomplishments, or the beauty and impressiveness of something, like a city, or in that case some wallpaper. We even have a football team called Perth Glory. We might occasionally describe something as "glorious": again usually sporting victories, but once upon a time we might have talked about a glorious military victory. We rarely talk about something being "glorified" outside of churches - when we do, we usually mean it's overstated - so the Archibald Prize, the famous portrait competition, has been disparagingly called a "glorified lucky dip".

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Even going over what Jesus has said in the last eight chapters of Mark would be a series of sermons on its own. And guess what? It has been! We've been preaching through Mark since December. I can guarantee that every sermon given between now and then has looked at what Jesus said, and then applied that to our lives today. So let me ask you this: how have the sermons over the last eight or so weeks impacted your life? What changes have you made because of them?

Gosh, that's a hard question, isn't it? Can you remember what Mark's sermon was about last week? Or Emily's the week before? Nick's the week before that? If I were to ask for a show of hands of how many people were here for Penny's sermon on <date>,  I will bet a good number of hands would go up. If I were to ask for people to tell me one thing she said about applying that chapter of Mark to our lives, how many people could give me an answer? Could anyone tell me what chapter of Mark she preached on, or what story it was? But I wonder if we have forgotten the general plot or story of what happened in a regular TV series we watch, or a book we've read back then.

No, I'm not bringing this up to shame you. I'm bringing this up to make a point - every week we have sermons delivered to us here, on a platter. Sermons that people put hours and hours of work into, in order to bring God's word to us and help us apply it to our lives. And we are so used to it that we sit here, lap it up, and then walk out the door and forget it a week later. Maybe the sermons are boring. I'm sure I could do better to grab your attention. And sermons aren't memory tests to see how much you can recall. But my point is that if we're really serious about listening to what Jesus has to say, what steps are we taking to make sure that the point that was made to us on any given week is something we include into our lives? Do you take any active steps at all? Because I don't! I know some people use the sermon outlines to take notes. That's more than I do.

How much do you care about knowing what Jesus said and how to act on it? Do you care enough to go to church, even when you don't feel like it? Do you care enough to listen to sermons? Do you care enough to read the Bible every day, even though you're already pressed for time? Are you prepared to give up other things you do to make that time? Do you care enough to pray every day, not asking God for sunshine or safe travel or a holiday, but for him to reveal to you what he says? I think everyone here would say yes, we all care enough to want to do those things. So why aren't we doing them? What gets in the way? Is it busyness, family, work, life's other distractions? Remember the parable of the sower, Mark 4:18 "Still other people, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; 19 but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and desires for other things choke the word, making it unfruitful."

Because how can you listen to Jesus if you don't even know what he says? How do we find out what Jesus says? It's in the Bible. We read it.When you read what Jesus says directly in the gospels, you'll see he claims the whole Bible as the word of God, Old and New Testament. What do you need to do to make that happen? Every week someone stands up at this podium and gives a talk about God and the Bible, and how to relate it directly to your life. Listen to them!



Summary of the the sermons up to this point

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What is the most amazing thing you've ever seen? Perhaps it was something natural, like the Grand Canyon.  Anyone seen that? Was it amazing? Perhaps the most amazing thing you've ever seen was man made. Has anyone been to the Great Wall of China? Was it amazing? Maybe the most amazing thing you've ever seen was an event, like Cirque du Soleil (which I have on good authority is amazing). Maybe you're a romantic, and the most amazing thing you ever saw was your first child being born, or your spouse at your wedding. Aww. Maybe the most amazing thing you've ever seen was a miracle. Whatever it is, what I'm talking about the most striking, most heartfelt, most impressive thing you have ever seen. It is something that impacts you.

Let me tell you about the most amazing natural thing I've ever seen. I was in Townsville as a teenager, and went to the Great Barrier Reef. If you've never been, the reef is very impressive. Worth going to see. It takes a couple of hours in a boat  to get there.  We went around in glass bottom boats, and saw the pretty coral and fish. It's quite nice. But it's not the most amazing thing I've ever seen. It's all underwater, and you can't see it all from a boat, or by swimming around it. Maybe it's more impressive from the air. But while I was there, I did some snorkelling. When you're snorkelling at the reef, you are pretty much looking down, because your air is coming from a tube that points up that way, and there's colourful coral and stuff beneath you, so you don't really look where you're going.

Well, I was swimming along, looking at all the pretty colours, when all of a sudden I swam too far. The coral very, very suddenly disappeared, and below me was nothing. Just emptiness. Water going down into blackness. I looked up in front of me, and it was the same. I had reached the end of the reef, and in front of me there was just deep, endless water. It was floating all around me, for as far as I could see. And it was so big. I could see nothing but water.  No coral.  No fish. No sharks. No seaweed. But I knew all that stuff was out there, somewhere, in that infinite abyss. I can still picture it now. It still makes a pit in my stomach.  It was hypnotising. It was terrifying. It was amazing. Seeing it made me realise how big and vast the ocean is.

Today, we read about Jesus, standing atop a mountain with three of his closest friends, showing them the most amazing thing they would ever see. Mark doesn't go into great detail about what it was like. Peter, who likely gave Mark this report, probably had trouble describing exactly what it was like. He says that Jesus' clothes became a dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. He says Elijah and Moses appeared. And he says they heard God's voice from a cloud.

And that's it.  That's all we're told.  Just like my amazing experience at the Great Barrier Reef, there are probably only so many ways to describe what the transfiguration was like. There are only so many ways to say, "water, deep, wow".

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Today we are looking at the transfiguration of Jesus.

This transfiguration of Jesus, as we call it, is the turning point of the whole gospel. We might not get a detailed description of what it was like, but its importance is absolutely unquestionable. This is the moment the gospel has been leading up to. Rather than doing something as an object lesson that points to who he is, Jesus shows himself to be God by revealing his glory.

This is different from all the miracles Jesus has performed up to this point. Healing the sick, forgiving sin, calming storms, walking on water, multiplying bread - those are all impressive, they are great, they are worthy of praise. But the transfiguration is not just Jesus doing something. It is revealing that Jesus is God in the same way that being confronted with the vast ocean reveals the vastness of the ocean - the ocean doesn't need to do anything but be seen in a certain way. That is the transfiguration.

We have to realise that God is not just worthy of glory because of all the things he does, but because God IS Glory. Just like God is Love, and all love comes from God, and God is Goodness and Holiness, God is also Glory - no glory exists apart from God. When Jesus shows his friends his glory, Jesus is revealing Glory itself - he is revealing God. It's not just a light show. It is God's power, his holiness, his goodness that make up the light of his glory.

Later in his life, Peter would say that the transfiguration was the key act of Jesus he witnessed that meant his message about Jesus could be trusted, 1 Peter 2 "16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” 18 We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain."  The transfiguration is the point in Jesus' life that we can point to and say with absolutely certainty that Jesus is God.

But only three people ever got to see it. And I acknowledge some people struggle with that. After all, this is the unassailable proof that Jesus really is God. This is the evidence people could see with their own eyes... but only three people actually got to see it. It's not there for us to see. Some people don't want to believe that Jesus really is God without seeing it for themselves, or without indisputable proof. They want God to prove himself to them in a specific way that makes it undeniable. They don't trust the testimony of witnesses. They want testable results, obervable phenomena. That's how science works.

But that's not how history works, it's not how law works, it's not how philosophy works, and it's not how God works. The gospels are highly trustworthy sources. You can trust what they say. Yes, what they say will challenge you to rethink what you believe, what other people say about the world. But that shouldn't be a reason to ignore it.

We aren't the only ones who don't get to see Jesus as God for ourselves. Jesus had huge crowds of thousands of followers - none of them got to see it. He had hundreds of disciples. None of them got to see it. He had twelve special apostles, whom he especially selected to be with him. And of those twelve, nine of them were left behind. All they got was the story told by Peter, James and John, and even then not till after Jesus had been resurrected. That's all they got. And that's all we get - the same story retold to us in the Bible. That is all, but that is enough.

If you think witness testimony is not a strong enough basis to believe in what Jesus said and did, then this is where you disembark the Jesus train. This is your station. Jesus did not share this experience with most of the people closest to him, his most faithful apostles. My advice to you would be to honestly consider for yourself whether it's okay for God to choose to reveal himself in a way other than what you want, and think about what you personally require to believe the things that change how you live your life.

Because that's what the transfiguration is all about. It's not just about believing some errant fact of history, like Julius Caesar's birthday. We're told that Jesus is God, and the truth of that should impact the very core of how we live our lives. We don't get to see it, but we are told it. God himself told the three on that mountain: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" I counsel everyone who hears me now to accept this as the truth, and to do what God says - listen to Jesus. And if you can't, or you won't, then you should work out exactly why you can't or won't. Are your problems with God only intellectual? Christian faith is a fundamentally intelligent position, and is highly defensible. I challenge you to approach me or Emily or Nick with your intellectual problems with God - there are answers, they can be worked out!

Are your problems with God personal - maybe you don't want to give up certain parts of your life, or you disagree with God on some things? That's also common. If you accept Jesus is God but refuse to listen to him, this is something you need to deal with. You need to come to terms with the fact that God is God, and not listening to him is untenable. Being God's enemy is terrible. But if we listen, Jesus said in Mark 2:10, "I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins."  We can actually be transformed from being God's enemy to his friend if we listen to Jesus.  Perhaps you have both intellectual and personal problems with God. That's perhaps most common. Then you need to do both - come and talk to someone, and we'll work out the intellectual problems. Then we can sort out the personal issues, and by listening to Jesus, learn to become God's friend.

The message is loud and clear. Jesus is God. The Kingdom of God has come with power. That has been the message for eight straight chapters now, it's been getting stronger and stronger, culminating in the transfiguration. Moses and Elijah, the two men who represent the epitome of God's relationship with his people, are right there with Jesus, because just as God spoke with his people by the giving of his law through Moses; and just as God spoke to his people through the prophets, of whom Elijah is a sort of first among equals; so Jesus is the way God speaks to us in these last days.

Realising the amazing truth that Jesus is God, and that God speaks to us through him, should have a huge effect on how we live our lives. For Peter, James and John at the time, this required a huge upheaval in their faith. As Jews, Moses and the Prophets were the foundation upon which they did everything. They were the way God and his people interacted. Now God himself had told them, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" That's a foundational change for them, because 'listen to him' means 'do what he says'. For just one small example, in chapter 7:19 it says as an offhand comment in brackets, "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean." What a huge difference to people who their whole lives followed restrictive food laws! Imagine if the opposite happened tomorrow - if Jesus told us that we have to follow the food laws to be Christian. No pork, no ham, no bacon. No shellfish. No cheese and meat mixed together. No leavened bread at passover. How does Christmas look without ham and prawns? How does McDonald's look without cheeseburgers? How does pizza look without cheese? One small part of life, one huge upheaval when it changes because we do what Jesus says.

God speaks to us through Jesus. We need to take that seriously. We need to do what he says. Think about the voices that currently speak into your lives, and that make you spring into action. When your spouse, or boyfriend or girlfriend, ask you to do something, do you listen? Of course you do. We all want happy homes. When your children tell you they need something, do you listen? Of course you do, you love your children. When your boss at works tells you to do something, do you listen? Of course you do, you want to keep your job. When people tell us to recycle, we listen. When doctors tell us to take medication, we listen. We listen to friends, we listen to family, we listen to police, we even listen to politicians. And God help us, despite ourselves we listen to advertising, if for no other reason than it is repeated constantly. These voices don't just speak to us, we listen to them, and we do what they ask.

Well God is more important than all of those voices! He's more important than all of them put together! I'm sure you would all agree with me on that. But how much time do you give to listening to God? How much time do you spend praying - that is talking and listening to God? How much time do you spend reading the Bible - that is, what God has to say? How much time do you spend thinking about God, thanking him for what you've got, or doing what he says because he says it?

That's what I want us to all take away from the transfiguration today. I now want us to focus on how we can 'listen to Jesus' in our lives. But there is a big temptation to just give a long list of things you should listen to Jesus about. That could go on forever. The truth is, I don't know what you're already doing to focus on listening to Jesus in your life. So I'm going to tell you what I do. Not to boast - definitely not to do that, trust me. But I want to show that there are things we can be done to help us seriously listen to Jesus, the way the transfiguration demands that we do.

Starting from the basics here: to listen to Jesus, I need to know what he says. Jesus speaks in the New Testament, and he quotes from almost every book of the Old Testament. He adopts it as saying what he has to say. So the whole bible is valuable in knowing what Jesus has to say. I read the Bible almost every morning. I have a devotional called My Utmost For His Highest that looks at one verse, sometimes one idea in one verse, and explores it. It's about a hundred years old. But it's free. It's actually online, but I use a book someone bought for me when I was first baptised, what, 16 years ago now. I only started using it last year. It's one page, takes about five minutes to read, if that. I find I often don't agree what what Oswald Chambers has to say about a verse. But then I pray about it, and on reflection I see that he's usually got a point. Oswald is all about putting faith in God, and it's amazing how often I disagree with him just because he says the Bible demands I put more faith in God than I do.

I also memorise the Bible. I also started memorizing just last year, around September. Since then, I've memorised the whole book of Galatians, and up to chapter 9 of Mark. This takes about 45 minutes of every morning. Yes, it takes a long time. But I cannot tell you how thankful I am for it. There are bits of Galatians I have come to mind that I would never have thought about. I see how the gospel of Mark fits together in ways that just didn't come to me before I had repeated them a hundred times, or however many times it is (it's a lot). I started doing it because I got convicted about it by something Bruce said in a sermon on James - he said we should focus on what the Bible says, even just one thing, and really try to apply it. One thing at a time is enough. I cannot speak highly enough of memorizing scripture. It is a phenomenal way of listening to Jesus. I recommend it to you all. Anyone who wants to do it, come to me afterwards and give me your contact details, and I'll send you the pamphlet I used to learn how to do it (it's free). And anyone who says they can't do it, or they don't have time, I want to ask you this:

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Who do you listen to?


I'm not asking who your favourite musicians or bands or singers are.  I'm not asking you what radio programs you prefer.  I'm asking you who do you pay attention to?  When they express an idea or an opinion or a fact, who do you believe?  When they say they need something, who do you provide for?  When they ask you or tell you to do something, who do you obey?  Who you listen to is obviously more than just what you hear, it's who impacts on what you do with your life.


When your spouse, or boyfriend or girlfriend, ask you to do something, do you listen? Of course you do. We all want happy homes.  When your children tell you they need something, do you listen?  Of course you do, you love your children.  When your boss at works tells you to do something, do you listen? Of course you do, you want to keep your job. When environmentalists tell us to recycle, we listen. When doctors tell us to take medication, we listen. We listen to friends, we listen to family, we listen to preachers (hopefully), we listen to police, we even listen to politicians.


Now, no doubt you listen to different people about different things.  So for example, if your boss tells you how to do your job, you listen.  But if your boss tells you child vaccinations cause autism, you don't listen.  People are important to different parts of our lives, and the more authority they have on a subject that is important to us, the more we listen to them, and actually act on what they have to say in that area.


In our passage today, God says about Jesus, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"


God is the creator of all things on earth, including you and me.  He is the arbiter of all justice, and decides all right and wrong.  He is the giver of all love, all money, all health, and all thought.  Without God, there is nothing.  He the only person who you must listen to about everything you do, about every part of your life.  Friends, family, children, employers, police, politicians, doctors, preachers, environmentalists - you can listen to them all.  But if any of them says something that goes against what God says about how you must live your life, then no matter what it is, God wins.  God is more important than all those other voices you listen to put together.  And that includes your own voice.


In our passage today, Jesus is transfigured in glory, Elijah and Moses appear, and God says about Jesus, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"


Over the past eight chapters of the Gospel of Mark, we have seen Jesus driving out demons, healing the sick, forgiving sin, ruling over the Sabbath, calming storms, walking on water, multiplying bread, discarding traditions and teaching in parables about the kingdom of God.  Those are impressive, great, worthy of praise.  They are all signs that point to Jesus being God.  But the transfiguration is not just a sign.  It doesn't point.  It is revealing that Jesus is God.  All those miracles before were like those little signs on the side of the road that say, "God: 180kms.  God: 95kms.  God: 40kms."  The transfiguration is the big sign that says, "Welcome to God.  Population: Jesus."


Jesus proves that he is God not by doing miracles and putting up signs pointing to him being God.  He reveals one of the very things that makes God God: he reveals his Glory.  We have to realise that God is not just worthy of glory because of all the things he does, but God IS Glory.  Just like God is Love, and all love comes from God, and God is Goodness and Holiness, and those things come from him, God is also Glory - no glory exists apart from God.  When Jesus shows his friends his glory up on that mountaintop, Jesus is revealing Glory itself - he is revealing God.  It's not just a light show.  It is God's power, his holiness, his goodness that make up the light of his glory.


Later in his life, Peter would say that the transfiguration was the key act of Jesus he witnessed that meant his message about Jesus could be trusted. In 1 Peter 2 "16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” 18 We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain."  The transfiguration is the time in Jesus' life that we can point to and say with absolutely certainty that Jesus is God.


I know some people don't think they can believe in God without some sort of absolute proof that he exists.  They want to see the transfiguration for themselves.  I think we're a spoilt and greedy generation.  We have voice recorders, cameras, even video cameras, on our phones that we carry everywhere we go.  We are so used to having everything recorded, everything on video, everything photographed, that if we can't see it for ourselves, we choose not to accept it.  "Pics or it didn't happen" as the kids say, or at least they used to in 2011.


But the transfiguration shows that this attitude is entirely against how God works.  Here Jesus reveals the Glory of God, indisputable evidence that he and God are one - and only three people get to see it.  And they're sworn to secrecy until after Jesus dies and is raised from the dead.  Jesus had huge crowds of thousands of followers - none of them got to see it.  He had hundreds of disciples.  None of them got to see it.  He had twelve special apostles, whom he especially selected to be with him.  And of those twelve, nine of them were left behind.  All they got was the story told by Peter, James and John, and even then not till after Jesus had been resurrected.  That's all they got.  And that's all we get - the same story retold to us in the Bible.  God says that is enough.


If you disagree, then my advice to you would be to honestly consider for yourself whether it's okay for God to choose to reveal himself in a way other than what you want, and think about what you personally require to believe the things that change how you live your life.  The Christian faith is a fundamentally intelligent position, and is highly defensible.  The proof is there in history.  God doesn't need to prove it to you at your convenience.  God is who he claims to be, and Jesus is God.  Which brings us back to my original question:  Who do you listen to?


"This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him!"  The message is loud and clear.  Jesus is God.  The Kingdom of God has come with power.  That has been the message for eight straight chapters now, it's been getting stronger and stronger, culminating in the transfiguration.  Moses and Elijah, the two men who represent the epitome of God's relationship with his people, are right there with Jesus.  Just as God spoke with his people by the giving of his law through Moses; and just as God spoke to his people through the prophets, of whom Elijah is a sort of first among equals; so Jesus is the way God speaks to us in these last days.


We need to listen to Jesus, and that should have a huge effect on how we live our lives.  For the disciples at the time, this required a huge upheaval in their faith.  As Jews, Moses and the Prophets were the foundation upon which they did everything.  They were the way God and his people interacted.  Now God himself had told them, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"  That's a foundational change for them, because 'listen to him' means 'do what he says'.


Take just one small example.  In chapter 7:19 it says as an offhand comment in brackets, "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean."  What a huge difference to people who their whole lives followed restrictive food laws!  Imagine if the opposite happened tomorrow - if Jesus told us that we have to follow the food laws to be Christian.  No pork, no ham, no bacon.  No shellfish.  No cheese and meat mixed together.  No leavened bread at passover.  How does Christmas look without ham and prawns?  How does McDonald's look without cheeseburgers?  How does pizza look without cheese?  One small part of life, one huge upheaval when it changes because we do what Jesus says.


I said earlier that we must listen to God.  I said he the only person who you must listen to about everything you do, about every part of your life, and that God is more important than all those other voices you listen to put together.  But no-one is going to force you to do it.  God certainly doesn't force people to listen to him.  If he did, I wouldn't have to stand here telling you to listen to him, because we wouldn't have a choice.  God wouldn't have had to say, "This is my Son, whom I love.  Listen to him!" because there wouldn't be another option.


But there is an option.  God gives you a choice.  And you should choose to listen to him.  If you accept that Jesus is God but refuse to listen to him, this is something you need to deal with.  You need to come to terms with the fact that God is God, and not listening to him is untenable.  Being God's enemy is terrible.  But if we listen, Jesus said earlier in Mark 2:10, "I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins."  That is, he can forgive being God's enemy.  In Mark 3:28 he says, "Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins."  We can actually be transformed from being God's enemy to his friend.  It's not about being forced to listen to Jesus.  It's about wanting to listen to him.  Do you want to know how to listen to Jesus in your life, because Jesus is God and because Jesus is your friend?  Let me tell you how I do it now, and how I think I could do it better.


Step 1: to listen to Jesus, you need to hear what he says.  Jesus speaks in the New Testament, and he quotes from almost every book of the Old Testament.  He adopts it as saying what he has to say.  So the whole bible is valuable in knowing what Jesus has to say.  I read the Bible almost every morning.  I have a devotional called My Utmost For His Highest that looks at one verse, sometimes one idea in one verse, and explores it.  It's about a hundred years old, but it's free.  It's actually online, but I use a book someone bought for me when I was first baptised, what, 16 years ago now.  I only started using it last year.  It's one page, takes about five minutes to read, if that.  Before that, I used to read 10 verses of the Bible every morning, and really focus on what they were saying.  That took about an hour.  Before that, I used to follow a yearly Bible reading plan, where you're reading several chapters a day.  That took about 40 minutes.  They are all good.


The other thing I do these days is memorize scripture.  I started in September last year, and I have memorized the entire book of Galatians (six chapters), and coincidentally I have memorised the first nine chapters of Mark.  This takes about 45 minutes every morning.  Yes, it takes a long time.  But I cannot praise it highly enough.  There are bits of Galatians I have come to mind that I would never have thought about. I see how the gospel of Mark fits together in ways that just didn't come to me before I had repeated them a hundred times, or however many times it is (it's a lot).  These bits of scripture come to mind when I am stressed, or worried about something, or even just thinking about a particular thing.  It is a phenomenal way of listening to Jesus.  I highly recommend it to you all.  Anyone who wants to do it, come to me afterwards and give me your contact details, and I'll send you the pamphlet I used to learn how to do it (it's free).  It is not hard, it just takes time.


I'm not telling you to read the Bible, or to memorise the Bible.  It's your choice.  But if you want to listen to Jesus, these are amazing ways to do it.  I will help anyone who needs help doing these things.  I haven't asked, but I bet Nick and Emily would also volunteer themselves.  It is so valuable, I will make time to help.  I suggest you make time to do them too.


I started memorising scripture because I got convicted about it by something Bruce said in a sermon on James last year. He said we should focus on what the Bible says, even just one thing, and really try to apply it. One thing at a time is enough.  And that brings me to the next thing I do to listen to Jesus: I listen to sermons being given here, at Waitara, every Sunday.  Sermons are an amazing resource.  They don't just tell you what Jesus says, but they help us to do it to our lives - the other half of what listening means.  Our preachers spend hours and hours on their sermons, and they are good stuff.  One thing I don't do - but after preparing this sermon, I have started doing as of last week - is to become one of those people who takes notes during sermons.  Because I listen to sermons every week, yes, and as sure as I listen to them I forget most of them the next day.  What a waste!


Every week there's a sermon outline.  I'm going to start using it.  Well, actually I'm probably going to take notes on my tablet because my handwriting is rubbish.  But what better way to make sure that I listen to what Jesus says than to write down the challenge that the preacher gives every week, and figure out one way I can apply it to my life.


I also go to a Bible study every week.  Bible study is a great way of sharing not only what we think Jesus is saying to us, but also challenging and supporting one another to listen to what Jesus says, and to do it.  I tend to talk too much, and argue too much.


The next thing I do is pray.  I keep a prayer blog actually.  I write in it every morning.  I pray about my daily devotion.  I pray about whatever is exercising me that morning.  Then I pray about different things each day.  I pray about my marriage.  I pray about Ministry of Game.  I pray about Bible study.  I pray about church.  I pray for missionaries.  I pray for persecuted Christians.  Prayer is not just about me asking for stuff though.  It's about working with God through why stuff needs to be prayed for at all.  It's a time where I thrash out with God why things are the way they are, and every day coming to the same conclusion - I have to have faith that God is in control.


If you go into praying every day expecting everyone around you who is sick to get well, and everything that's wrong to go right, you're going to be disappointed.  That's not my experience anyway.  But if you go into prayer expecting to be able to wrestle with God, and to be put into submission by him - then do it.


One thing I don't do, even though I keep a prayer blog, is go back and read through it.  People ask me about that all the time, but I've never done it.


Another thing I struggle with is praying to God throughout the day.  But I'm getting better at that.  I find the more I learn to rely on God, the more I'm prepared to reach out to him, to put him in control.  To listen to him.  I also find myself confessing my sins more when I do that too.


The last thing I do is think.  What I mean is, I try to think about what I'm doing, thinking, and saying, and evaluate it against what Jesus says.  Now, I am thoroughly terrible at this.  I often act or speak without thinking.  Sometimes I do things even after thinking about it and knowing it's probably not what God wants me to do.  It can be tiring, trying to evaluate everything you say and do.  But what I have found is the more I want to trust God, the more I want to listen to Jesus, the more I read the Bible not just so that I've read it, but really to get to grips with what it says so that I can act on it, the more my thoughts come from a godly base.


And that makes a huge difference.  Because thoughts that come from an ungodly base are the ones that you have to stop, analyse, check, wonder about, consider, debate, and think about.  But ones that come out of a godly base, you do't need to analyse - you know they're from God.  Instead, you need courage to act on them.  Because they're the thoughts and actions that don't look like what everyone else is doing.  They're the hard sayings of Jesus that we'd really rather not follow.  They're the scary actions, the ones we pray we don't have to do.


Lastly, of course, I try my best to do those actions.  With the courage God gives me, and the strength, I try to live the life he wants me to live.  Not the life that makes me comfortable.  Not the life that makes me feel good.  Not the life that everyone else wants me to live.  I try to live the life God wants.  To me, that looks like being confronted by things some other people don't even think about, and struggling to work out what I should do, not wanting to do it, being too afraid to do it, being too selfish to do it, and then deciding to trust God, and just stepping forward to do it anyway.  I thank God that Jesus can forgive my sins, because there are so many gaps in my life where I am too selfish or too scared to take that step of listening to Jesus.  And I thank him when he gives me the courage to do what he says.


You don't have to do any of those things.  They are just examples that might be helpful to anyone who wants to do what God says, and listen to Jesus.  What you have to do, what is important to do, is to think about that one big question:  Who do you listen to?  If it's God you want to listen to, then you need to know what Jesus says.  You need to pray.  You need to have your mind transformed to think the way God wants you to think.  And you need to do what Jesus says.


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