Welcome to Hope, everyone particularly welcome if you're
new to Hope or actually we've got some super alumni, Jonathan
and Helen visiting. So for those of you who don't
know Jonathan, Helen were here several years ago and really key
elders in helping to build the church.
So it's really great to have you guys here and and welcome if
you're new to hope. My name is Chris and this is
Alice and we're some of the pastors here and we love this
church. We love this community.
We love the adventure of following Jesus and the
challenge of it. You know, the, the IT feels like
a big challenge and it but it feels like that exciting thing.
I want to I want to keep giving my life to.
And so starting a new year and Alice is going to be speaking to
us on her. I'll let her introduce her new
theme and I'll just pray and let's pray and then we'll well,
we'll hear from Alice. We also just want to say also
just want to have more time at the end of our second-half to to
pray for each other. I'd like to just build that into
being more of a rhythm. So we're aiming to finish a
little bit like around 12:00 so that the finish the teaching by
12:00. So that then there's time in
those last 10 minutes to if you want to pray for each other or
or come to the front and be prayed for.
Want to be want to be making that more intentional in the way
that we are as gathered church like this.
Say, Lord, thank you that we get to be here and we come to
worship you, Jesus, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Creator of
everything, bringer of life. And we pray that as Alice speaks
to us, teaches us this morning that your reality, your truth,
your life becomes more real, more present and powerful in us
to change us for the everyday and for the eternal.
Amen. Welcome, everyone.
It is your favourite 3 words. This is like Marmite, isn't it?
Hands up. Who loves the New Year's
resolution? Probably, actually, by now.
Apparently you don't anymore. No one does.
We're too late. But on January the first.
Who loves it? Dan.
I saw it. Yes, thank you.
Who hates them? Yeah.
There you go. Nothing like a bit of drama.
So what I love about Chris is he's really into saving the
planet. But it wasn't you.
OK. It's very small print.
Extremely small. OK, so I came across this
hilarious article which lists the top 150 most popular New
Year's resolutions. So do we want to try and guess
some of them right now? Just shout out some what was
that one? Drink less, lose weight, stop
smoking, exercise, stop. You should write the article
guys. Who are these people getting
paid for this kind of thing anyway?
I didn't want to bore you with the top 150, which I slightly
did at home every I was on my own.
I was talking to myself by the end of that conversation.
So we will do the top 15 health and fitness.
Should we all just exercise? Drink more than the right stuff,
water you know. Eat veggies and fruit.
Cut down processed foods. Get enough sleep each night.
Practise yoga, meditation, take the stairs, try a new work out,
reduce sugar. It's quite tiring, isn't it?
It's quite tiring being this kind of person.
Learn to cook healthier meals. Join a community fitness class.
Commit to a daily 15 minute walk.
Complete a 12 week beginner strength programme.
Hit a daily step goal of 8000. Track it.
Scheduled annual physical, dental and skin checkup.
Didn't think of that one, did we?
Skin checkup by March and personal development.
Read a new book every month. Start a journaling habit.
Learning new lengths. Sorry for those listening
online, it's quite intense. There are 150 of them.
I'm trying to get 330 in about one minute.
Take up a new hobby. Attend workshops and Seminoles.
Practise public speaking. That'd be good.
Volunteer for recalls. Develop better time management
skills. Practise gratitude daily.
Learn a musical instrument. Build a morning routine that
sets a positive tone for the day.
Take a social media break once a week.
Do a 30 day creativity challenge, run a weekly.
Oh, it's just it's gone. The tech was like, I can't bear
this. This is unbearable.
Hands up. Any of you who kind of resonated
with a few of them actually are thinking, Yeah. 11:50 I had my
last slice of chocolate cake at the Davies and I have not had
chocolate since midnight. It was brilliant.
I'm feeling quite good on it actually, because I actually
haven't. I think by now if you failed,
it's just worse than not even trying anyway.
OK, so let's just move on from that because it is exhausting.
What is going on here? Why is it that every year we all
go through this sort of panic at the at the time of year where we
really need about another month, don't we?
Just another month before we maybe practise Lent?
Like do you think there was some wisdom in that ancient
tradition? We are sort of saying to
ourselves every single year we could do better, we should be
better, we need to improve ourselves.
There is something too much or too little about each of us and
therefore we need to resolve to change and become better people.
And This is why every year people set New Year's
resolutions, why by about now most people have failed, and
consequently why so many people hate them.
They kind of expose the sense of lack of happiness or contentment
or sense of failure in US or disappointment.
Now, I'm not in any way saying from a Christian perspective,
there isn't a telos, an end, that we are designed to become
like Jesus. So that sense where this is all
the image of God, all of us want, having this sort of
desire, this inherent desire to be better is something that
God's put within us. However, the weight and the
burden and the feeling of failure and self disappointment
and self hatred is not God's design for us, quite the
opposite. And that's what we're going to
get into. But I noticed this isn't just
something within ourselves, but there's sort of something of
this malaise, this sense of we need to do better or be better
in society as well, this sense of unravelling.
And I'm going to use one particular example.
I've pay, I love paying attention to patterns.
And I just began to see this pattern a few years ago.
A friend of mine who works in Tesco's just casually remarks,
there's just quite a lot of petty theft, quite a lot of
people steal stuff. And I kind of clocked that and
what a hassle that is and how you manage that.
But thought, you know, there's always been in every cultural
society kind of, I guess people are maybe more vulnerable or on
the edges or maybe have addictions and so on.
And, and, and this kind of stealing is, is kind of part of
what people do. So I kind of thought, gosh,
that's really challenging to work with, but also, you know,
it's part of life. So this day I started to notice
it and then I noticed just hanging out with young people,
just talking. Just much more of a blurriness
or casualness around who owns what possessions, where the
boundaries are. I guess stealing isn't like a
word that has as much currency as maybe when I was growing up
and we used to go. Is it stealing to record the,
the kind of songs onto your own radio, onto your own cassette?
You can tell who's my age and above because you're like, yeah.
And everyone else is like, no, what are you talking about?
Yeah. And you were like, is it
stealing to do? And we'd think about those
things, you know? And so I kind of thought, why do
I think anything differently to anyone else?
Because I have 3 words, two in the Hebrew do not steal.
That's it. Those 3 words in something
called the 10 commandments in something called the Bible,
which probably most people have never heard of or have no
relationship with. And so I thought that those 3
words have really helped me in a lot of the decisions I've made.
I have a sense of ownership, possession, boundaries.
There's so much to that. So then I thought last year we'd
been looking at what is the good news and Bill's going to carry
on going into Romans, and we're still doing the Trinitarian
faith course. But I wanted to kind of launch a
new series, which will take about two years because I speak
about once every month or six weeks on the 10 commandments.
We're going to go through each one.
I'm introducing it today and looking at all the kind of
aspects of it. Because the thing I noticed,
sorry I forgot to say this actually is this wasn't just me
anecdotally, sorry, there seems to be data to back up this
epidemic. Shoplifters get away with
stealing every minute and theft epidemic.
That was from the Telegraph in December.
The new breed of shoplifting entrepreneurs fuelling EU KS
petty crime problem. 12th of December 2025 and then earlier
in the year in the Guardian. Shoplifting offences in England
and Wales at highest level ever recorded total increase to over
half a million last year, official figures show.
But retail retailers fear data severely underestimates
problems. Sorry.
So the point I'm making it this I wasn't just anecdotally seeing
this suddenly last year, it just became this this kind of pattern
or a different agreement within us as a society as to what
constitutes socially acceptable behaviour.
Because we agree how we're operating, we agree and there's
a different agreement, the agreement of how we operate as a
society and what's acceptable, what isn't is changing.
I had another interesting conversation with our a church.
We're kind of, as you know, growing in friendship with, in
partnership with Fatima. And she is the, the ocean Fatima
lead this church. And we were looking at the, and
it's some event with the late queen and I can't remember what
it was. And I always, it's just so
eccentric, isn't it? We, we have eccentric practises
that we do with our royal family.
And I was like, what do you think of that?
And she immediately said, talking about some sort of big
event where there's a parade and everything.
She immediately said that gold was stolen.
I thought the gold in the carriage was stolen.
So I've been paying attention to this word stealing and thinking
about it. And she had her take enlarged my
understanding of what that phrase do not steal means, which
is something else I'll address in that talk in about 18 months
time. Because for her, she said there
aren't gold mines in this country.
Now, I don't know the history of gold trade.
I don't know whether fair prices are paid for gold.
I imagine she's right. I imagine there's exploitation
and the fact that the gold from wherever the gold mines are,
which aren't in this country, ended up on her carriage.
I haven't investigated that. But her instinctive emotional
response to an event that I thought was just cringy and
eccentric was that was stolen. So we are going to look at every
level for, for those on the right, personal responsibility,
those on the left, systemic responsibility to offend and
hopefully mobilise this all. So there we go.
So I called this a happy, fulfilled and flourishing life
in 10 steps, introducing the 10 commandments.
And when I say that I don't at all mean a superficial, I
thought about this word happy a lot.
I don't mean a superficial kind of self focused how to be happy
in a like a self help kind of way.
I meant actually to be happy, actually to live life on this
earth with a degree of peace and contentment and joy and
well-being. And it just like life aligns the
incongruence and dissonance we all feel just is restored to a
sense of congruence. So I don't at all mean that
people don't suffer deeply and terribly.
They do, absolutely. And the Bible is full of ways of
stories of people who suffer deeply and terribly and ways to
lament that and to go through that, that place of unbelievable
pain with God. I also don't mean that this is a
quick fix. If you do 10 things, you will
get happy. This is a way of life.
This is an orientation to a way of life that eventually produces
the kind of person that lives in congruence in this world.
Just things work, relationships, work, finance, just things work
the way they're supposed to do. In the context of being an evil
age and at war in the unseen realm.
We don't have any control over a lot of things in our lives.
We think we do. We've been told we do.
But we do have agency. And this is going to engage with
that part of us that actually has agency within the context of
a world where we didn't choose, where we were born, who we were
born to, where we live with lots of things we didn't choose.
But within the confines of those limitations, we have genuinely
been given agency. We've genuinely been given a way
to live that I can either lead as I we will look at in a bit
life or death, happiness, fulfilment and and a sort of
sense of flourishing or a, a, a sense of deep sense of a kind of
bitterness, regret, pain and cynicism.
There are there are two ways to live within the agency we've all
been given, given the limitations of our context.
And so in in order to access this life, as Jesus says, there
will be, it is a way of self denial.
It is called we. We are designed to take up the
cross of the old nature which cannot live into this every day
face difficult choices, uncomfortable feelings, the
necessity of self denial. In another word, short term, we
will face short term pain in order to get to this long term
pay gain of actually being a happy, fulfilled and flourishing
individual and society. And when we hit that moment,
remember society's unravelling. Just remember why this isn't a
game or a drill. I've given you the most
innocuous example I can. Petty thieving.
I could give you a lot worse examples on all of the tango
moments. Society's unravelling.
That means me, I am, I'm part of society.
We aren't individuals having our individual self fulfilled life.
We are an integrated individuated within a community
of people who are seeking to live a happy, fulfilled,
congruent and prosperous life. The 10 Commandments wasn't given
to an individual, it was given to a community.
It's and we will discover why. Happiness, My happiness very
much depends on how I live well with other people.
In fact, it's it's probably totally dependent on how I
manage my relationships with God and other people.
So this isn't about quick fix and it's not about saying sad,
mad or bad things don't happen to good people.
They do and they do regularly. But it is saying within the
agency we have, we can choose to live a life marked by
flourishing or marked by destruction and regret.
So you might think, why the 10 commandments?
We've already just literally had our tech shut down at the 115
years resolutions. Why another 10 things to do to
to, you know, overwhelmingly burden of us.
Isn't the whole point of Jesus and Paul and the New Testament
that we don't have to kind of look at that anymore?
Well, there's a man called Marcian who was a church father.
There were many people who contributed to what we now
identify as orthodoxy, and he was someone who actually said we
should get rid of the whole Old Testament.
But actually that was that People said, no, that's not
true. That's actually heresy.
We need the complete testimony of God, the Old and the New
Testament, in order to really understand what God is saying to
us. So there's something in this
that still speaks to us today and we will see that neither
Jesus nor Paul nor any of the New Testament writers declared
these obsolete. In fact, they told us we now
have the Spirit and the heart condition and the change in
order to fulfil not just the letter of these commands, but
actually have a heart of change. One little example is Paul says
do not steal. Do you remember?
He's echoing, He's echoing in one of his letters, this
commandment. But so stealing is this way of
life that leads us to destruction.
But work hard so that you with your hands so that you may give
generously to those in need. That's the spirit of do not
steal. So much better than limiting our
sense of what we can and can't do and where our boundaries, our
possessions are to literally releasing spirit of generosity
in the world. So every single one we will look
at with these questions, what each commandment meant to the
original ancient Israelite audience, how Jesus interpreted
each commandment in his teachings, how Paul understood
them in his letters, how we can apply them today.
That's just really good practise for anything in the Bible in the
1st 2/3 in the Old Testament before Jesus comes.
It's just to think how Jesus understood them, how one of his
his followers who who really changed took on what he said
Paul and really changed the direction of our understanding
of what it is to be a follower of Jesus.
Paul, how he understood them in his letters and any others who
speak into that and then how we can apply them today.
So this is the image in a 19th century old painting.
I once heard that recently heard they think the amount of
Israelites might have been the size of a small town, which is
10s of thousands of people. But people think because of the
way numbers are written down that it's millions of people at
this mountain. And then God gives these
commandments. So I'm actually going to ask you
to because it's this isn't too, this isn't a test to catch
anyone out or see what you know or don't know, but in your
tables to get a pad of paper and write down to tablets because
they all ten were repeated on 2 tablets for emphasis.
They weren't split into two fives.
So they get 2 pieces of paper of the tablet each and try together
in your group to see if you can write them down just quick.
FYI I couldn't. I can't off by heart so I'm not
expecting anyone to. Then I'll give you the scripture
and we can see if we can do so. It's 10 commandments on two
different tablets. Right.
If you feel like you've you've kind of vaguely, this isn't
again, about right or wrong. Don't worry, we're not post post
postmodern. There is actually a right
answer, but it's not about finding your value and whether
it's right or wrong. Can you just put your hands up
in your table if you feel you've kind of done a rough sketch of
the 10 brilliant pizza's table? Any other?
Yeah, it doesn't matter if you haven't got all 10, just what
you can do. So I just, I'm just trying to
basically if someone's just chatting about what they did at
the weekend, that's what I'm trying to ascertain who's
actually working on this. You are, I mean, you are
focused. So if I bring it all into land
now, should we try and say between us what we think we they
are? In my day, you got a red tick in
a cross or whatever, but now it's green or purple, isn't it?
It's just everyone's a winner. OK, so does anyone want to say
what they think? Shout out a few and we'll
literally put the slide up because this is about everyone
working together, not about knowledge puffing up.
Sorry, do not steal. Whoo.
Can you imagine at this point if I said actually, that was just
my opinion? No, do not.
Still is in there. Brilliant.
Any other ones Love. Oh, do you want to expand a bit
on that love? God.
Yeah. Any.
OK, That's good.
That's fine. That's fine.
That's good. Yeah.
Any. No other gods.
Brilliant. Don't Cove it.
Brilliant. Yeah.
On the Father and Mother Sabbath.
This is great, guys. Oh, Sabbath, don't use the
Lord's name in vain. Very good.
Has anyone counting? I never count on these things.
Do not murder. Thank you.
That's that's good. Adultery.
Coveting adultery. Did someone say only your father
and mother keep the Sabbath? Don't lie.
I think that's it, isn't it? Anyone got any other ones?
Because you never know. This could be a moment of
increasing 11 commandments. Just doesn't sound as good
though, does it? 10 is 10 is good.
OK, let's see how we've done. Do you want to do a drum roll?
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out to land of
slavery. 1 You shall have no other gods than me.
So we'll come to Duncan's thing in a minute because he picks up
on how Jesus interpreted it. Very good two very similar.
There's a repetition for emphasis.
Do you remember I said there's two lots of 10s on the tablets?
Can we all just say repetition for emphasis?
The literally I was like, why do they keep repeating stuff for
emphasis? Because are we listening?
Are we listening? He God repeats himself a lot for
emphasis. You shall not make for
yourselves. This is number 2, an image in
the form of anything in heaven above or in the earth belief or
in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them
or worship them. This is brilliant 'cause this
takes us right into another cultural context.
I've only ever met one person in my kind of the community here
who genuinely believed and bowed down to physically are the gods.
That's not something that's generally in our practise here
within walking distance of this community.
There are either secular people, Muslim people who do not, who
hold two kind of variants of that.
And this was actually a Hindu friend and I could tell.
I think that is part of our actual practise.
It's very rare. So we have to remember this is a
cross cultural journey we're taking.
This isn't normal to hear these words.
We don't hear the word gods in our culture, although in some
ways we do in, in kind of fiction and, and movies and
stuff. But we don't, we definitely
don't have this idea of bowing down and worshipping an image.
So that's really good for us because it reminds us we're
going on a bridge to another culture and we need to have the
humility and curiosity to listen well what it meant for them.
Then come back, back over the bridge to apply what it means
for us. Now, you shall not misuse the
misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold
anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
Some people have called that the blasphemy laws.
We will explain why that's maybe not quite what it means, or it's
a much fuller command. Remember the Sabbath day.
Honour your father and mother so that you may live long in the
land the Lord your God has given you.
You shall not murder, you shall not convince adultery, you shall
not steal. You shall not give false
testimony against your neighbour.
You shall not covet your neighbour's housewife, male or
female servant, ox, donkey, anything else that belongs to
your neighbour. So those are the 10.
Give ourselves a round of applause because we actually got
them. Between us, we got them and
we're working in community, so we're all we all got them.
So when Moses gives these 10 commandments, how it would have
been understood is a basically a marriage covenant.
He was initiating a marriage ceremony.
Sorry. God was through Moses with the
Israelites. They'd just been birthed as a
new nation. They'd had a dramatic freedom
from slavery in Egypt. They'd they'd been literally
gone through the waters, the parting of the Red Sea,
representing the waters of death and come out as a new free
nation and and they meet God in the at the mount of Sinai and
Moses mediates between them gives them about 600 people
think that's 613 laws of which these 10 actually a better way
to understand them is words because commandments has a bit
of a connotation for us that doesn't quite express it.
So 10 words that you can basically hang every single one
of the ethical commands of the 600 on.
So there were two kinds of commands in the.
Anyone remember the geeky number I just gave you?
Just checking 613, There are two kinds of commands, ritual and
ethical of the ethical commands, basically how we treat God and
each other. All of them can hang on the 10
commandments. So that's why we look at these
because they basically, Oh yeah, so God gave the Israelites
people, Jewish people think when they're adding up the number of
commands that there were 613. Don't get caught up on that.
So the 10 commandments begins and then they give a lot, then
they give a lot more, and then they give a lot again.
In fact, they give the 10 commandments twice with slight
variations. We'll come to that.
So it's complex, but you can still hang all the 10 ethical
commands, sorry, all of the hundreds of commands that are
ethical, not ceremonial, but ethical on the 10 commandments.
And a covenant in the ancient world was essentially where two
parties could become one in the way they got, they had each
other's backs. So an empire could make a
covenant with a small country, and it basically said to that
small country, we'll protect you, we will provide for you, we
give you weapons, we'll give you food, We'll give you anything in
the event of hostility or threat or famine.
But you've got to be unconditionally loyal to us.
You know, we have those kinds of trade agreements now.
We can kind of resonate with them.
But they would call down the gods to curse.
The violation of that covenant so often would be a penalty
would be death. Then you had other covenants
which were mutual parties, say between 2 tribes, where they
would come as one and again cover each other's backs.
But they were mutual and equal. There wasn't a power dynamic
between them and they would cover each other's backs in the
again in the event of hostility or threat.
And then you basically have an individual king who would have a
covenant would say a very loyal servant or an individual.
And again, that same dynamic would happen, but again, that
servant would have to give all his loyalty to the king.
So this is a normal language for the ancient world.
And there already have been some covenants by this point in the
story of of Israel and the story of the Hebrew Bible.
So this is a a covenant, but this is kind of the big
covenant. This is like the covenant that
kind of. I just find it difficult to use
this word anymore. Trump's just Trump's other
covenants, just hard. I need a better word anyway.
I think Abraham's covenant's extremely profound, but this is
this is big and it takes virtually 4 books and it's
basically God saying I'm going into a marriage covenant with
you, Israel. I will give you provision,
protection, identity. You will flourish, you will
prosper in every way. You will show the world what
true humanity is. You will, we will recover Eden
if you live by these commandments and regulations
I've given you. And people talk about this not
as a way to get to God. This is already an act of grace.
People think grace is in the New Testament.
It wasn't. It was in the old.
It was freely given to them, their salvation and their
rescue. Already freely given to them
when they couldn't do anything about it.
They were enslaved in Egypt. They couldn't overcome their
slavery. Yahweh, God intervenes.
He breaks, sets them free from slavery, brings them through the
waters and births them as a new nation.
So this is a gift. These commandments are a gift
and instruction. Now that you've been set free,
this is how you are to live and you're to show the world what
it's like to embody human flourishing.
And so we will look at what that means that the, the, the kind of
the extent and the depth of what that means to be for these
ancient Israelite people to be in this kind of covenant with
God. Now, these are normal practises.
Everything that is being kind of called out or critiqued or
exposed were normal practises in ancient Egypt and our normal
practises in the world beyond in terms of we'd have to culturally
interpret them. And he's essentially saying I
don't want you to live like that anymore.
So all of them would have an understanding or a history or
maybe even practises around them and they were called out of it
into a new way of life. And when we get to the New
Testament, neither, none of them, Jesus, James, Paul, none
of them say these are obsolete. In fact, all of them say they
call this like the royal command.
They say it's summed up in the royal command to love God and
love your neighbours yourself, which is what Duncan's referring
to. And we often think when we think
of the 10 commandments, we think of that because God, Jesus sort
of sums them up. And then James and Paul and John
and Peter, when you see it, you see it everywhere you see it.
And some of their teachings, their parables, they'll quote
different ones of them and they, they are really showing up.
These are still ways to live ethically in the world.
And we're going and, and they're going to help us understand what
that means for us now spirit filled people.
But the essentially, if you look at them, you'll see the first
four or five are upward, depends how you interpret the fifth one.
But the first four certainly are upward and the last five or six,
depending on the on your father and mother's bit of a hinge are
are horizontal. And essentially it's seen as one
command, love God and love your neighbours yourself in that what
the the understanding is the extent to which we love God is
actually really shown by how we love our neighbour and how we
love our neighbour is revealed in how we treat them according
to this framework as new spirit filled people as people who who
work hard with our hands and give generously to those in
need. That marks us as people who show
the world what true humanity is. So that's why Jesus says Paul
says James says they can say these are summed up in that
royal command. Can we just say that together?
See if we've got that? Love the Lord, your gold with
all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your
neighbour as yourself. He takes two different verses
from the Torah. The law puts them together and
says that sums up everything, and it particularly sums up the
10 commandments. In another words, What word does
do Jesus and Paul and John insert into this list that
actually isn't in this list, but it is in the Torah?
What words I've repeated twice. Love.
So what God does when Jesus comes, he reveals the agape love
of God. He just reveals the beauty of
God, the ways of God. He reveals what God's like and
and he he reveals the triune nature of God that we are to go
in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit.
And in that interrelationship we bear the image of God and we
live as God's designed us to live.
So that's why in some ways we even have a fuller understanding
and a richer understanding and a deeper understanding that maybe
the ancient Israelites would have had as they first received
it, because we have a fuller revelation of the Godhead in the
revelation that God is love. Now, as I said, the commandments
are given twice and this the first group of people say,
woohoo, we're in, we love this, yes, but tragically, immediately
worship, immediately violate at least one of the commands, if
not quite a few in worshipping a kind of idol statute just after,
in fact, during the receiving of the 10 commandments, they're
doing it. It's a bit like having sex with
someone else on your wedding night.
Unbelievable violation of faithfulness and covenant
loyalty to God at that moment. And so they say, yes, we want
to, we're up for it. But actually, tragically, they
don't live into it. They wander in the desert until
they die. Their generation of the children
who experienced going through the promised land rise up and
they are adults and they're mature and, and there's a moment
when they then go into this land that God has promised them to
show them what it looks like to inhabit, to be part of human
flourishing. And this is not a comment on the
modern political discussion around Israel and Gaza.
This is an ancient Israelite context.
We will get to that. But I think it's really
important you understand the language of promise for the
ancient Israelites was about a language of covenant of, of
recovering Eden that had been lost and showing the world how
it was to live into human flourishing at that time, 3000
years ago. So they get to the brink of the
promised land. They're given the 10
commandments again, which are there are some variations and
we'll look at that where it's relevant to the particular
commandment, notably Sabbath. But at the end of this,
Deuteronomy is like a whole covenant document.
It's the, it's the stronger partner is God saying to the
weaker partner, ancient Israelite, I want to be one with
you. If you obey my commands that
I've repeated and set before you, you will flourish.
And if you don't, you won't. And so we would just look at
this and how this kind of is what God's still inviting us
into, this way that is marked by life or a way of life that that
is marked by death. Now what I'm commanding you
today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.
It is not up in the heavens so that you have to ask who will
ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey
it. Nor is it beyond the sea, so
that you have to ask who will cross the sea to get it and
proclaim it to us so we may obey it.
No, the word is very near you. It's in your mouth and in your
heart, so you may obey it. See, I set before you today life
and prosperity, death and destruction.
For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in
obedience to Him, and to keep His commands, decrees and laws.
Then you will live an increase and the Lord your God will bless
you in the land you are entering to possess that.
If your heart turns away and you're not obedient, and if
you're drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I
declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.
You will not live long in the land you're crossing the Jordan
to enter and possess this day. I call the heavens and the earth
as witnesses against you that I've set before you life and
death, blessings and curses. Now choose life so that you and
your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God.
Listen to his voice and hold fast to Him, to the Lord is your
life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to
give to your father's Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
So essentially we can be Oh sorry, that's in Deuteronomy.
Google the offer of life and death 3030.
I would actually read from about 27 onwards to the end.
The whole thing is stunning to meditate on that choice that he
keeps saying and the consequences of our actions or
their actions. So basically it's humans versus
zombies. We never need to watch a zombie
movie again. Not that some of us might ever
want to in the 1st place. Because actually what this is
saying is we are the living dead.
If we don't live into the the the life that God's designed us
to live, we're all just living this shadowed existence.
We're all just living this incongruent lives that we just
know doesn't quite add up or work or fit.
And he he's sort of, he's inviting us into a way of life
that is just marked by health and flourishing in, in our, you
know, in our spirit. So this is very popular book
that some of you might have heard of called Atomic Habits.
And what's really interesting about what we think, why we
think this book's so successful and returning back to New Year's
resolutions and this idea of how we land this and how we put this
into practise in our lives, is he actually says that we need to
change our identity in order to live out the life we want to
live. If our habits are congruent with
our conviction about our identity, then we will grow into
the person we want to be. So a New Year's resolution
saying I want to quit the alcohol, but the identity we
have is I really struggle with drink.
I just really struggle with it. That does not is not conducive
to the kind of person who is it has a habit of health around
alcohol. His point is in the book just
from a psychological point of view.
But if if he read that person, say, redefines themselves as I'm
a fit, healthy, energetic person, they are more likely to
have habits around their lives that are conducive to being the
kind of person that it has a healthy habit with alcohol,
which is exactly resonates with what we know is true
theologically. What we believe really, really
believe is how we live. What we believe is exactly how
our life choices are informed about what we think about
ourselves is how we live. And that's why the biblical term
repeatedly is repentance, because that's a change of
mindset about what's actually real.
Now what? What James Clear can't offer is
the cross I I say that with great sadness.
He can't offer the means by which we can actually change our
identity. But we've been given that, the
world's been given that, the world's been given an atonement
by which we can say, like Paul said, don't get drunk on wine,
but be continually filled with the Spirit singing and praising
songs to God. He can bring a replacement where
even this incredibly successful book can't.
It's still managing the chaos of the human condition, still
managing the zombie state. But we have been given a new
identity in Christ. Therefore we can live into these
things. So I just want us as we're
responding now to think of 1 area and we were going, we're
going to ditch New Year's resolutions, New Year's
reorientation. We're going to reorientate
towards reality in the way we think about ourselves.
So we're not going to say I'm trying to lose weight.
We're going to, we're going to say we are so deeply loved by
God that we, we just want to steward ourselves and, and
honestly think more about other people.
Or I'm going to try and reduce my screen time, but I just feel
terrible about it all the time now.
I am a self controlled, thoughtful, patient person.
This isn't manifesting. This isn't self actualization.
This is reality. This is the new creation.
This is the good news. We've actually been given a
nature that's congruent with reality and we just need to have
a change of mindset and move in agreement with that or move out
of agreement with that. So what I'd love us to think
about, and I think this kind of fits in what it, since the
spirit was doing this morning with Meredith's, which I didn't
know she's going to do, cast your cares upon God because he
cares for us is to kind of think of 1 area.
And this is obviously extremely tender and vulnerable, but one
area where we're like, actually, this is, this isn't flippant.
This isn't I'm trying to learn a new hobby or start a musical
instrument to find myself as a musician when I Can't Sing in
tune like that's this is actually really hard.
This is a hard area of my life or a hard relationship or just
something that is is painful. But here it feels like there's a
promise of restoration in this age.
There's a promise of new creation now that the Kingdom of
God is available to us now. When Jesus healed people, he
really healed them when they couldn't see, they really could
see when they were delivered from torment, they really were
delivered from torment. Now it isn't something that we
we basically operate and unbelief.
I'm just going to ignore that now because maybe hopefully
it'll happen then. It's actually, it's actually
complex that isn't it, because that's true to a certain extent
in the full resurrection, but also it's partly it's a way of
protecting ourselves from the disappointment that we won't get
healed now. And So what I want us to think
about is maybe an area where we're believing a lie about
ourselves to reorientate what is God?
What does God say about us in that area?
What how does he actually define us?
And then our repentance is I come into agreement with who I
really am. That's what I want us to do now
in this ministry time. So I'll just finished with this
sentence. Yeah.
If we really believe that God is good, God is love, and God has
our best interests at heart, if we really believe that we really
believe that God is good, God is love, and God has our best
interests at heart, then we will identify happily as his people,
His precious children, His beloved, and we will trust him.
We will want to live out his ways.
Thank you, Alice. So let's just have we got 5
minutes or so to respond to that.
And you might like to do it in just quietly on your own, you
and God, or you might like to share some of that with someone
near you or you might like to come to the front.
Alice and I happy to pray if you'd like that.
Let's take a little bit of time to respond.
So howdy, spirit, please prompt us, and not just with what Alice
has been teaching, and show us what you're saying to us
individually. Amen.