Great, well, let's I'll pray and let's begin.
So Alice is going to going to speak and and she's been taking
us on this journey in her talks for the last right the way
through the year really. And what is the good news?
What's the good news of Jesus? What's the gospel?
How does it speak to us in today's time?
So it's it's crucial now, isn't it, as ever that the world needs
the world needs Jesus. Same Lord, I pray that as Alice
speaks to us this morning, you feed us as it says in the Lord's
Prayer, give us the day Our Daily Bread.
I so often pray that now thinking I need to hear fresh
word from God to sustain me and carry me in the day.
So just as we need physical food and bread, Lord, we also need
your life giving word. So we pray you, you give us a
day, Our Daily Bread. Amen.
I was thinking about this, this idea of what is the good news?
Often when we, when we have something to share that we
literally can't keep in because it's explosive good news, it's
often because there's an overcoming of bad news.
I've, I don't think Becca will mind me saying this.
She's not here. I've done this before.
She ran a marathon and she was just literally like, the only
reason I'm doing this, it's because I never, ever, ever have
to do this again. So she's like mile 20, mile 21,
She's like, if I don't do this now, I have to do it again.
So I'm just going to overcome and overcome.
And of course, and it's really good news.
She's, she's overcome and she's done the marathon.
She never has to do 1 again. Obviously, that's quite a
trivial example. Actual bad news in our life is
devastating. It's the thing we think about
all the time. It's the thing that we orientate
our lives around. It's the pain, it's the
wounding. It becomes a focal point.
And I want this morning for good news to be penetrative to that
bad news. It it was it, it when Jesus came
into the world and was explosively healing people from
their sicknesses and delivering people from their demons, He was
actually turning bad news into good news.
He wasn't an idea or a philosophy or a way of life
that's loving and peaceful. He explosively entered the bad
news and it became such good news that we have testimony
after testimony after testimony of life changing encounters with
Jesus that people in the ancient world did something they never
do. They collect the testimony of
ordinary people and put them into four ancient biographies
because they couldn't stop talking about this person called
Jesus who brought in and broke in to the bad news of their
actual life with incredible good news.
I'm, I sit in the New Testament, I sit in the Gospels, and you
cannot get round that. You cannot say you're a
Christian and actually come into alignment with the fact that
he's explosively turning our bad news into good news.
So the one thing I'm learning, I've been mentored a bit by
Bill. So all the mistakes are still
mine, but I'm hopefully growing in it.
Just I'm just trying to make one point in every talk, the talk,
the point today so we can go away and hopefully remember it
is heaven is not a person. Heaven is a place.
Heaven. I'm just testing you all,
listening. Heaven is not a place.
Heaven is a person. Shall we all just say that
together? Heaven is not a place.
It's it's not the good place we go to when we die.
Jesus is the ticket over here to get us somewhere else.
He is the destination, the tellos, the end game, the
formation, the life, the boldness, the courage, the
healing, the peace, the joy, the holiness.
It's him. It's in the person of Jesus
Christ we go. So no, I should have got a
slide. So I actually went on quite a
personal journey with this because I was developing this
product called Biblios. And actually Zac's here.
Should we say hi to Zac and Serena?
Hi, Zac and Serena. Every month we get out Biblios
in youth and Zac's there because I said there are like 70.
And this is very incredibly poignant, and I don't want to be
trite or glib about it, but there are 70 Israeli and
Palestinian photos in Biblios of actual people who live in Israel
Palestine, who lived at that time in Israel Palestine.
And Zac was one of our photographers.
And so I said, Zac, you can put your own face in it.
And so you're in it, aren't you? Do you remember who you are?
I think you're obscure. I think you're like Jude or
something, like someone who's a bit like, yeah, borderline.
Whereas John Tyrrell put himself as John.
He was like, he's John the other photographer.
Anyway, there you go. If you have a look at it, you
can you can spot the faces. But I anyway, I was coming to
the end of putting this product together, which is no view of
the Bible for all kinds of learners and community.
And I was coming to Revelation and I was like, gosh, if people
are actually going to buy this, I'd better be a bit more
convinced about what I actually believe about heaven and hell.
Because like, I'm really convinced by the reality of God.
I'm really convinced by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I'm really convinced by the gifts in the church.
I'm really convinced by the death and resurrection of Jesus,
the divinity in humanity. There are a lot of things I'm
really convinced by. But what happens after what what
this phrase heaven and hell is? I'm not sure I have enough
conviction to be able to deliver something that someone's then
going to pay for. So anyway, I did what all good
people in the 21st century do slightly before AI where they
asked chat. GBTI didn't do that.
I actually asked Google. I googled it.
Heaven and hell. Don't recommend that really
honestly. But what was absolutely
incredible, God was so gracious, was at the very top of my search
came this four part teaching series by a pastor I'd never
heard of called Tim Mackie in a church I'd never heard of called
Door of Hope, Portland, OR basically in the basement.
So it's slightly crunchy. It was really authentic.
It was like really slightly bad audio and everything.
And you could tell it was a church community, probably like
ours, having a weekend, just literally in this basement kind
of trying to go through the biblical trajectory on, on
heaven and hell. And the very first thing he said
was, by the way, just to make the point that the phrase heaven
and hell is never once used in the Bible.
The repeated phrase is heaven and earth.
And in fact, the trajectory of the whole Bible is the reunion
of heaven and earth. And that was his opening phrase.
And I knew he'd opened a a rabbit hole, which is called
biblical studies, which I'm still curiously following today.
And it helped me think through a bit more how we read the Bible
and how we interpret it. Not going to go into that now.
We absolutely will. We love addressing any elephant
in the room and have no problem with that at all.
But today I want to kind of play this video because I think a few
years later he Co founded the Bible project with John Collins
and put this for like long teaching sessions in a basement
into like a 6 minute really good animated video that explains it
all. So we're going to watch that now
and we're going to try and have a a kind of a transformation of
our mind on what this idea of heaven is that's more in
alignment with a kind of a biblical world view.
So in the Bible, the ideas of heaven and earth are ways of
talking about God's space and our space.
So I understand our space really well.
We live here, there's trees, rivers, mountains.
But my understanding of God's space gets a little fuzzy.
And what we do get in the Bible are images trying to help us
grasp God's space, which is basically inconceivable to us.
So these are. Two very different types of
spaces. Yes, they're they're different
in their nature. But here's what's really
interesting is that in the Bible, these are not always
separate spaces. So think of heaven and earth as
like different dimensions that can overlap in the same exact
space. So we talk a lot about going to
heaven after we die, but this idea of heaven and earth
overlapping, we don't talk a lot about that.
Which is kind of crazy because the union of heaven and earth is
what the story of the Bible is all about, how they were once
fully united and then driven apart, and about how God is
bringing them back together once again.
So. Let's go back to the beginning,
where heaven and earth, they're completely overlapping.
Yeah, this is what the Bible's description of the Garden of
Eden is all about. It's a place where God and
humanity dwelt together perfectly, no separation and and
humans then partner with God and building a flourishing,
beautiful world and so on. But as humans, we wanted to do
things a different way. We wanted got out and we wanted
to create a world apart from. Him.
Yeah. So we have these two spaces now,
and the Bible actually uses lots of different kinds of words and
phrases to refer to these two spaces to make a clear
distinction, so. You said that these spaces can
overlap though, so explain how that works.
Yeah, this is where we have to start talking about temples,
because in the biblical world, you experience God's presence by
going to a temple. That's where heaven and earth
overlap. Now there are two types of
temples described in the Bible. 1 is a Tabernacle, basically a
tent that was built by Moses and the other was this massive
building made by Solomon. And these temples were decorated
with fruit trees and flowers and images of angels and all kinds
of gold and jewels and so on. And these are designed to make
you feel like you're going back to the garden.
And at the centre of the temple was a place called the Holy of
Holies, which was like the hot spot of God's presence.
Now we can go and be with God again.
But not so fast, because the temple also creates a problem.
So God's space is full of his presence and goodness and
justice and beauty. But human space is full of sin
and injustice and the ugliness that resolves.
So how do these spaces overlap if they're so different and
they're in conflict with each? Other This was resolved through
animal sacrifice. Yeah, that's kind of weird.
What do animal sacrifices have to do with this?
Yeah, the the idea is this animal sacrifices, somehow they
absorb the sin when the animal dies in your place and it
creates a clean space, so to speak, where you are now free to
enter into the temple and be in God's present.
OK, so if I'm an Israelite and I live in Jerusalem, I might be
able to be in God's presence. But you said the story of the
Bible is all of heaven and earth reuniting.
Right, so we have to keep going in the story where we come to
Jesus in the New Testament and in the Gospel of John, we hear
this claim that God became human in Jesus and made his dwelling
among us. Now this word dwelling is really
curious. It literally it means he set up
a Tabernacle among us. And So what John is claiming
right here is that Jesus is a temple.
He is now the place where heaven and earth overlap.
What's interesting about Jesus is that he isn't staying in this
safe, clean space. He's running around, hanging out
with sinners. He's healing people of their
sicknesses and forgiving people of their sins.
He's basically creating little pockets of heaven where people
can be in God's presence, but he's doing it out there in the
middle of the world of sin and death.
And he keeps telling everyone that the Kingdom of heaven.
Is at hand and he even told his followers to pray regularly that
God's Kingdom come and that His will be done.
He here on earth just as it is in heaven.
But a lot of people are threatened by Jesus and they
kill him, which seems to spoil this whole plan to reunite
heaven and earth. But we we have to go back to a
scene earlier on in Jesus's story where John the Baptist saw
Jesus and said, behold, this is the Lamb of God who takes away
the sin of the world. So Jesus isn't just talked about
as being a temple, he's also talked about as being the temple
sacrifice. Yeah, so so the cross is now the
place where Jesus absorbs sin to create a clean space that is not
limited. Like animal sacrifices.
Jesus's sacrifice has the power to keep spreading and spreading
and reuniting more and more of heaven and earth.
And this is all really great, but it leaves one big question
in my mind, which is what happens when I die?
Don't I just fly over to God's space to be with Jesus?
Yeah, so a few times in the New Testament we learn that
Christians will be with Jesus in heaven after they die.
But that is not the focus of the Bible story.
The focus is on how heaven and earth are being reunited through
Jesus and will be completely brought together one day when he
returns. So in the Book of Revelation, we
get this beautiful image of the Garden of Eden, now in the form
of city, coming to end the age of sin and death by redeeming
all of human history in a renewed creation.
And God's space and human space completely overlap once again.
We believe the best way to understand the Bible is to look
at it. So why does this matter?
Well, according to Steve Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People, so funny when people quote that is it, we live with
the end in mind. And I think that's probably
true. We live with what we really be.
Leave is reality about how it's all going to end, how our lives
are going to end and how the the whole thing's going to end.
So if we all think we're going to hell and a handbasket,
whether we're secular people and we think through climate
collapse, World War three, or being taken over by an AO super
intelligence or as Christians through some sort of incredibly
warped and hopeless theology, we will bunker down.
We'll get in supplies and go into self protect mode.
That's what we do. But if we believe something
radically different, something radically good and something
radically hopeful, like actual resurrection from the dead, the
actual reconstitution of a dead body coming back to life, or
actually maybe death couldn't hold him in the 1st place
because he is life. If we actually believe that,
then we will live an incredibly different way because that
prototype of the resurrection of Jesus is the resurrection of all
of creation, the renewed heaven and earth or the new heaven and
earth. So I really want us to think as
a community, what do we actually believe about how it's all going
to end? Not what we say we believe, not
what we think our creed is, not what we think we should believe,
but do we actually believe in resurrection?
So as I said, we've if we've created this kind of false
dichotomy that Jesus is over here and he kind of gets us a
ticket to the good place over here, when we die, we miss the
entire point of the invitation, which is him.
He is life. And we actually have a very
disturbing message. I'm going to use marriage as an
illustration. There are three reasons we could
get married. I'm going to do this from the
female perspective. I think you might understand
that why I'm doing that. We could get married to a person
we don't know very well and don't particularly want to know
very well to get out of an abusive home situation.
Jesus is the ticket to get us out of hell.
That's disturbing. Or we could get married because
that person's pretty rich. We don't know them very well.
We don't really want to know them very well, but they will
offer us a nice, comfortable life if we say the right words,
pray the prayer sign on the dotted line, Jesus will get us
into the good place. He might even give us a good
life now. Or what's a brilliant reason to
get married? Everyone.
Because we love the person we want to be with the person.
Everything's about the person. It's not an institution, it's
not an idea, it's not a ticket out of hell or a ticket into
prosperity. It is the person we are in union
with. Christ, that is the good news.
That is the life. That is the hope.
It's Him. It's in Him.
Not what He can do for us or not what He gets us out of, but in
Him He is the life. So we see in in the gospels,
essentially they're all saying the same thing.
The first three called synoptic same view similar view Matthew,
Mark, Luke talk about either the Kingdom of heaven because
Matthew's very respectful of of the the name of the word God.
And so he calls it the Kingdom of heaven.
And then Luke, Mark and Luke, the Kingdom of God and, and then
John uses the word life, which we actually celebrated this
morning with Rebecca and Andrew Standry's daughter Zoe means
life in Greek and actually 33 times in John, exponentially
more in John than the other gospels.
But essentially you can see from that video as well, they're kind
of saying the same thing that where there's a rule of Jesus
the King, there is explosive everlasting resurrection life.
There are two kinds of life and, and Bill's talked about this and
another talk, there's BIOS life, which is biological life.
We all have it. Our hearts beats our, our lungs
breathe, our brains work sometimes and so on.
And then there's Zoe life, which is spiritual life, which is the
life we need to live that full resurrection union life forever.
And the life we lost, that's when death came in.
We lost Zoe, we lost spiritual life.
And that's what Jesus came to bring.
So the the absolute momentum, the movement, the trajectory,
the climax of the Gospels is that he's absorbed all death
into himself and and death couldn't hold him.
And he rose again and inaugurated a new creation of
that Zoe life for all of us too. And you see right at the end of
the vision of Revelation, they touch on that in the video, this
marriage between Christ and the church, the reunion of heaven
and earth is made possible by Jesus.
But if you notice the bride doesn't go up to heaven in
Revelation 21, it says very specifically the bride.
It is almost revealed. The humanity, the new humanity
is revealed from the heaven space because heaven isn't up
there. It's an unseen realm space right
here. And heaven is revealed, the
bride is revealed, and heaven and earth come back together.
So we are already in Christ in the heavenly realms, and we will
be fully reunited in the new creation with the renewed earth.
But the union is with Christ, not with an idea or a concept or
a ticket or a get out of gaol free card.
It's with a person who we love, we worship, we're consumed by,
we're devoted to who deals with all our addictions, who is the
reason behind because of our absence of him.
We have our addictions and he heals us and he delivers us and
gives us the thing we're all craving, which is Zoe life,
which is him. And so we see this again and
again and again in the yeah, yeah, go back to that one in
that if you look at the original Garden of Eden and then you look
at the the new Eden at the end in Revelation, so the bookends
of the Bible, you see this tree called the Tree of Life, and
that is the one you ingest and you live forever.
And it turns out in the Bible, often trees are a way of showing
us what humans are like humans and trees are are are kind of
sorry. Trees are helpful ways to
understand the human condition. They're often used a lot in in
analogies or metaphors. And here we see that Jesus is
the tree of life. And what's stunning about the
new creation right at the end in Revelation, they try and
illustrate it. Here is it's one tree of life on
each side of the river. So the two Christ and the church
have become one in the new creation, fulfilling what Adam
and Eve were pointing to in the 1st creation.
But Jesus is the tree of life. And we see this again and again
and again. I'm just going to actually focus
on the word Zoe in life and John, but you can see it.
He is, you know, he is the Kingdom of God.
He is the presence of God. He is all that we are looking
for and need and, and are craving.
And so I'm just going to read some verses from the Gospel of
John about Jesus being life. And that means that heaven is
not a heaven is a thank you in him in Jesus was life.
This is in John 14. We will end up on that verse.
So meditate on that. And I'm just going to read over
a few of the verses in John to get you there.
In him was life and that life was the light of all humanity.
Everyone who believes which is actually trust.
It isn't like a creed. I believe in the in in the
gospel or the nice in creed. It's like I actually trust in
God. It's a better understanding.
I think of the life of faith. I trust him with my heart.
I trust him with my relationships.
I trust in my future. Everyone who trusts him has life
in him. For God so loved the world that
he gave his one and only Son, that whoever puts trust in him
will not perish, but have so eternal, everlasting life.
Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.
Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of
water welling up to eternal life.
This is an image that we are, we feel, God's given us.
Specifically, I hope that we are a place that that water flows up
the life of of Jesus himself flows out of.
Very truly, I tell you, whoever hears my word and trusts me, who
trusts the one who sent Me, has its very eternal life and will
not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life.
For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the
Son also to have life in himself.
You study the Scriptures diligently because you think
that in them you have life. These are the very scriptures
that testify about me. And Jesus says, yet you refuse
to come to me to have life. And then he's, he gets very
specific. I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes
in me will never be thirsty. I am the bread of life.
He says again, I am the living bread unless you eat the flesh
of the Son of man and drink his blood.
That's entering into the very brokenness of, of, of God who
broke for the human condition. Unless that's the way you live
and feed and eat and consume, you have no Zoey life in you
because that's the root to the resurrection.
The spirit gives life. The flesh counts for nothing.
The words I've spoken to, they are full of spirit and life.
Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of life. He raises Lazarus from the dead
and declares I am the resurrection and the life, the
one who trusts in me or live even though they die.
I am the way, the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
So in that text he's basically saying I am life, I am Zoe life
and then finally now this is life that they know.
And whenever you read the word no, it means experience.
It doesn't mean just a factual understanding of something, but
an experience of someone in a way that is intimate.
They know they experience you, the only true God and Jesus
Christ whom you have sent. That is life.
That's that's what the good news is.
That's the aim. The tell us.
That's the the trajectory. Everything is about being in
God, in the Father, in the Son, in the Spirit, in union with the
Son, in intimacy with a Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
That is life. There isn't a life outside that.
And that's the thing we have to wrestle through to breakthrough.
Because if that isn't life for us, we haven't really tasted it.
Because that's where the life is.
It isn't anywhere else. It isn't Jesus is over there to
get me to the good place over there, or Jesus is over there to
get me to a good life over here. He is the good life over here.
So we we know this, I know, but what I what we're kind of going
to land on is so we can experience life from today,
resurrection, eternal Zoe life. Do you remember those pockets of
counter revolutionary Kingdom that have invaded this earth?
That is the role of the church today, to host places of heaven
on earth today because we are in union with Christ who is in the
Father. So we are already able to host,
experience ourself and host for other people life, true
spiritual life marked by love and joy and peace.
That's why the corruption in the church is the worst form of
corruption you will ever come across, because everywhere else
should be deaf, but we, we should be hosting life.
That's why judgement begins with the House of God, because we not
just should know better, but we've tasted Him and it's a holy
thing to taste him and represent him well.
This is where life is in our communities, in the way we treat
each other, in our love and our joy and our forgiveness, in our
kindness and in in the welcome we then give to people wherever
they are on their spiritual journey or self identification.
This is that we are now the wells of life of of everlasting
life for people. But that is nothing if we
haven't tasted it ourselves. And that's partly why we're
going again and again and again. What is the good news?
Do we actually know it? Has it penetrated us enough for
us to go? This is the most extraordinary
thing or truth or reality I could ever come across.
And I'm bursting to tell people because that seems to be what
happens in the 1st century. And it seems to be what happens
when the Spirit comes in power on communities ever since.
There isn't. Oh gosh, you got to tell someone
about Jesus. There is this explosive.
This was bad news and now I'm telling you good news.
It was a beautiful moment last night.
We were celebrating Christie's 20 years clean and sober and
there were two people he he was sharing and then also someone
else who is now 7 years clean was also sharing.
And they knew each other before. And Christie wanted people to
know the hell he used to live in, didn't he, Jane?
He particularly said that that he was 6 stone, I think just
just, and just in a hell house. And he met this other guy and
there was just, it was just absolute.
It was just death, guns, drugs. It was just horrific and he he
said it's no use celebrating who I am now if you do not
understand the hell I came from. That's the good news.
And so that's what I want us as AI want us to authentically
including myself. We all want to authentically
have such an incredible fresh taste encounter, touching of the
reality of the Son of God in the Trinity that we cannot but keep
it in. We we want to express it.
We want to share it because that to me feels the most authentic
kind of witness, the kind of witness that says, I don't care
who hears, I don't care who's offended.
I don't care who wants to kill me.
I, I cannot keep this in. And so it starts with us.
It starts with us saying is, is he really the life?
Is it him? That's the life.
Or is he ticking the box for some other good things that I
might see life in? I don't want us to waste another
second waiting for circumstances to change before we can start
living. Waiting for something in our job
to change, our relationship to change, our money to change, our
health to change. Because none of them are Zoey
Life. They not, they aren't.
They don't deliver. There's just something else to
worry about. There's something else to get up
and stay awake all night over. There's something else to be
stressed over. There's one thing that's worth
pursuing one life, and it's Jesus.
His name is Jesus. He is the life that will
literally deliver. All these other things are
saying they'll deliver to us. He is the healer, He is the
peace, He is the joy, He is the grace, He is the forgiveness and
and it's a media and it's today. That's why Paul can say in
Corinthians in the time of my favour, I heard you and in the
day of my salvation, Yeshua, Yeshua.
It's the same Hebrew root word. I tell you.
Now is the time of God's favour. Now today is the day of
salvation, of restoration, of intimacy, because Jesus is right
here and we can access Him whenever we like.
He is not far off, He is close, and we can approach the throne
of grace to access that grace and mercy whenever we like.
Day or night, He's the life. All these other things may or
may not be part of His blessings in the world, but none of them
is Zoey life. They're all subject to death and
will not be raised from the dead.
There is one thing that is raised from the dead and that's
Jesus. And in Him is the one life that
we're actually all craving. So our response is to repent, to
have a change of mindset about how we actually value Jesus, who
we actually think he is, What how how how we love him, how we
devote ourselves, how we orientate ourselves around him.
Because it's either all true or it's not true.
It's either really is there's a fundamental devote, a kind of
devotion, a centrality of the Christ who holds the cosmos
together, or none of it's true. There is no space for any kind
of nuance on that either that we are literally BIOS life and
we're just a bunch of accidental chemicals that try and get try
and just manage our hormones so they're as buzzy as they can be
until we die, which is basically Western secularism.
How to have the good life, Just manage the hormones until you
die. Or there is Zoe life, there's
resurrection life. Christ holds the cosmos together
and he's worth orientating everything around because He is
life and there is no life outside him.
He is the good life. He's the good place.
He's the reunion of heaven and earth.
And So what I want us to do is have a change is we can't get
that revelation. Jesus says the Father gives the
revelation of the Son to PT. He said you didn't get that from
human thinking. You got that because the Father
revealed to you the Messiah. But what we can do is say we
want that revelation. We're postured to that
revelation. We know it will blow us apart.
We know we'll have to, everything will have to go to be
surrendered. We know that you cannot touch
life without being completely discombobulated and disrupted
and disturbed. We know that we can see that.
But at some point we have to be ready and desperate enough to
say we're willing for that because the world is going to
hell in a handbasket because the solution's with us.
And if we're not stepping up and bringing a solution, we are
going down with it. The Titanic, it's hit, it's hit
the it's hit the iceberg. And we are available if we to be
hosts of life, to be those lifeboats.
We are available in the irony with the Titanic, as they could
have saved everyone if they'd managed it properly and known
properly. We are those lifeboats.
We are able to host the presence and the life of God.
We have more than we need, but we need to, we need to believe,
we actually need to believe in him ourselves, not just be nice
people. That isn't, that doesn't cut it.
It doesn't cut it with the rise of the far right.
It doesn't cut it with climate change.
It doesn't cut it with the volatility in the world at the
moment. It doesn't cut it being nice
people. We have to have people who
actually believe that Jesus is life and literally orientate
ourselves around that around him and living in that Zoe life.
So it's a repentance is literally it's kindness leads it
to it's just a change of mindset about reality.
What we actually think reality is.
If we want to tell people about Jesus, we're really not that
convinced ourselves is that a compelling witness.
And this is no disrespect. It's no disrespect, but the
Jehovah's Witnesses have to get a certain amount of people to
become Jehovah's Witnesses, to be one of the chosen 144,000
that will actually be elected in their theology.
That is not loving. I want to tell someone about
Jesus because I'm so obsessed with him myself.
I cannot imagine them having to live another day without him.
That is alignment. Now of course, Paul says where
Christ is preached out of selfish ambition, we celebrate
it like great God. God will work through anyone,
any, anywhere, anytime. But I want us to be in the
people who authentically have so encountered Jesus that we cannot
but tell other people about him and want other people to taste
him and his goodness. And the way that happens, and
this is where we want to end, is we except ourself experience a
healing or a deliverance in our body or in our in a friend,
because that's the testimony of the Gospels.
It's story after story after story of eyewitnesses who
personally experienced God healing.
They had blind eyes and and they saw they were tormented by the
demonic and they were given peace.
That's what the good news is according to the Gospels, that
there was such a personal encounter and experience of Zoe
life that they couldn't pass it down in oral tradition until it
was organised into four biographies, which we call
Matthew, Martley and John. So I would love this morning to
start, you know, to start to steward.
We already are through living free like these pockets of
resistance where Zoe life penetrates into our death and
our sadness and our pain and brings through to resurrection.
We absolutely believe in the discipline of lament, in
bringing our bitterness to God. I love the beginning of Ruth
where Naomi just says don't call me, don't call me Naomi, call me
Mara because I'm bitter. Chapter 1 of Ruth, what's
beautiful about it, though, it's by the end of chapter 1, it says
the barley harvest had had begun and she started to go home.
It's actually the moment when we declare our lament and our
bitterness before God, that God's already setting up the
fruit of our restoration and our resurrection.
But he wants us to become that intimate, that authentic, that
vulnerable with him, that we can bring our lament of bitterness
to him because he's already turning the famine into a feast
for us. So I we are all about honouring
lament. We think it's a discipline in
Scripture, it's a discipline in the Psalms.
And Paul says very clearly, we mourn with those who mourn and
we rejoice with those who rejoice.
To be a healthy body, we have to be aware of our pain.
And at the same time we believe in the Jesus of the Gospels who
healed everyone and delivered everyone.
He, he just did. And we have to wrestle and
reckon with that universality of life overcoming death.
So what I want us to do now is if there's something in our life
that we would like God to breakthrough on, that would
produce the kind of testimony that says I've encountered Zoe
life, Then we can either gather with people we know and trust
and stand and pray for that, or we can come to the front.
Any of us could be available here to pray for it.
Or if you prefer to find a stranger because it's easier
sometimes to talk to someone you don't know, find someone.
Or it may be that stay at this moment, now isn't the time to do
it, but you know, you need to find certain people to pray with
something to see that breakthrough.
I would encourage us to do this because why else are we here if
we're not seeing good news, penetrate.
If we're not seeing life overcome death, if if we're not
seeing and tasting the thing that we think is good news, we
might as well do what everyone else is doing.
They're either gaming, Netflix in mouths somewhere else in a
yoga studio. We believe in penetrative
resurrection life here. And so that's what I want us to
encounter. So I'm going to pray now and I'm
going to ask the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is so gentle and
respectful and kind, just so loving and joyful, the Holy
Spirit. Only goes where the Holy
Spirit's invited. There is no coercion in the
Kingdom of God. There is full love and love is
always about full consent and permission.
So I'm going to invite the Holy Spirit now to ask us to show us
what does God want for us now from this?
What's the Zoe life he wants us to encounter?
And then I would ask us to have the courage to act on that
prompting of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, God, that you, you
have, you have inaugurated the Kingdom of light.
If the Kingdom of light is always overcoming darkness
because you just turn the light on and the darkness has to go
and all, we know that you've come, you've come, you said
you've come and you're anointed to do a lot of things.
You're anointed to bind up broken hearts.
So we just say if there's any broken heartedness here today on
any subject, that's specific because the surgeon, the great
surgeon, is incredibly precise in how he wants to minister to
us. If there is any specific area of
broken heartedness today that you want to heal, I pray you
speak to us about that. You, you command us to heal the
sick and you command us to deliver people from their
demons. So I pray if there's anyone
who's who just there's actually something physiological or
something neurological or something that you just know.
Do you know what I want, Zoe life in that area.
And again, it's very specific. And if, if there's any area of
captivity to addiction, you say you come, you set captives and
prisoners free. That isn't a nice saying or a
trite saying or oh gosh, isn't, isn't this good?
You actually do want us to walk out of our cages to addiction
and be free. And so I bless if the, if the
Holy Spirit wants to put his finger on that, we're just going
to wait. We're just going to wait for a
minute in silence and just see where the Holy Spirit wants to
minister. And then we can pray for each
other. OK, so I think if you find
someone near you to pray with or come to the front, but if you
feel like this is God wants to just bring that penetrative,
that resurrection, that Zoe life into an area, there's faith in
the room. There's faith in the room for
for that to happen. We get the tempos.
Anyone who needs to collect their children, they'll be
coming back now, but we're going to be here and available for
prayer and ministry for as long as we need to be.