Good morning. In my country, we say Kyota.
Can you say Kyota? Is anyone from New Zealand here?
There's usually a few Kiwis around.
None. Oh, my goodness, we haven't.
We haven't come as far as St. Albans yet.
Oh, my goodness. We'll have to change that.
Hey, it's wonderful to be here. You.
I'm sure you know this, but your pastors are absolute legends.
Long before we met them, we had heard their reputation.
And so we were very privileged to come to Scotland a couple of
years ago and we spent the whole time taking notes.
And I think when they came over to New Zealand to see us, they
said, Oh my goodness, we recognize this place because
you've copied all our ideas. But they're, they're wonderful
leaders and they're, they're legends throughout the whole
movement. Just very quickly, I want to
show you my family that I've left behind in behind in New
Zealand. So we've got 4 kids.
They're a good looking lot aren't they?
That they, they, they've got the good genes from my wife Lizzie.
We've got 4 kids and five grandchildren and they send
their their love. I actually heard that my son Ben
was here a few years ago with a a kids conference, which is
wonderful. He loves travelling around as
well. My goodness, isn't our world in
chaos at the moment? A lot of people coming to this
conference in Portugal couldn't get there because they were
coming through Dubai. And I was just thinking, felt
the Lord saying to me, you know, this is a time where Christians
need to be really strong. You know, we've got to stand up.
We've got to become strong in our faith.
And so I want to talk about being strong in our faith today.
I want to talk about spiritual fitness.
It was interesting when I was coming today, saw a few people
out there jogging. New Zealand is a is a big place
for for physical fitness. I've got a friend who just did a
100 kilometre cross country run just recently.
It makes me exhausted just even thinking about that.
But you know, in the new year in New Zealand, it's probably the
same here. Everybody signs up to the gym,
they go for the month and they bring all these extra machines
in and then after the month, month, everybody sort of forgets
about it and they got on with life.
I didn't realise. Do you realise that you're
Pastor Chuck? He's a physical legend as well.
Did you realise that? I mean, we call him Chuck Norris
around the world because but you know, he came, he came to our
place and he was out running every day and he's the legend.
And I thought, how does a pastor get as fit as this?
And you may not know this, but he's got a secret and I'm going
to reveal it to you today. I didn't ask permission, but I'm
going to reveal it. If you look carefully at his
hands, he has a very special ring.
Have you seen Lord of the Rings? You know, my precious, all that
sort of stuff. Well, if you look on his hands,
he's got a special ring. It's actually black.
In his case, it's called an aura ring.
And I don't know whether it's super powersome or what it does,
but I thought to myself, I said to my wife, I want to look like
Chuck. So I bought a ring as well
because there's a picture of it on the screen.
It hasn't done the same thing for me, unfortunately.
I'm still working on it. But what it does, they're quite
incredible rings because what they do is they encourage you to
keep fit. It tells you what, you know, it
reminds me that my blood's still there, which is good.
It tells me my heart's pumping, which is also very encouraging.
But I over the holidays, we have our summer holidays over
January. And I was doing a lot of, you
know, walking up hills and all that sort of stuff.
Nothing like chalk, my goodness. But you know, I was going for a
couple of hours and it was encouraging me to say, you can
do this. You go, you good thing.
I mean, I'd even just get out of bed and it would say awesome,
you're off to a great staff. I thought, wow, this is great.
I've got my Apple Watch as well. And they both encourage me.
They're like a couple of little fans.
They're saying you go, you are awesome.
You're going to become like Chuck, you know, they're just
really encouraging. And so I, it was exciting to see
myself get a little bit fitter as the time went on because it
would show me that my heart was getting a bit fitter.
I was doing a bit more cardio and stuff like that, encouraging
me to sleep more. And I want to tell you physical
fitness is great, but I want to talk about spiritual fitness
today. You know, Timothy says, sorry,
Paul says to Timothy in one Timothy 4 verse 8.
Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much
better. Promising benefits in this life
and in the life to come. You know, we have a body, a soul
and a spirit. Did you realize that hopefully
all of you have got our bodies here today?
I think most of you have. That's good.
I've got a little diagram coming up and it'll show us that we've
got, we've got the body part of us, we've got the soul part of
us, which is the mind, the will, and the emotions.
But we've also got this part called the spirit as well.
Hopefully that diagram might come up and you'll see it there.
There we go. And so often we think mostly
about our body and we think about our soul.
We can exercise our body to become like Chuck our soul.
You know, we get counselling and we do mindfulness and all those
sorts of things, but our spirit is the part of us that relates
to God. And in one Thessalonians 523,
Paul says, now may the God of peace make you holy in every way
and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless
until the Lord Jesus Christ comes again.
You know, I know people who are incredibly physically fit, but
spiritually they are malnourished.
They don't focus on their spirits at all.
And God actually does want us to be physically fit.
He wants us to have healthy minds as well, but he wants our
spirit to grow. And a spiritually physical,
sorry, a spiritually fit person is a person that is incredibly
close to Jesus. That's what a a spiritually fit
person looks like. I've got a diagram coming up
here and I want to talk about what our lives are like.
This diagram here, you'll see it has Jesus in the centre.
You know, there are lots of things that we can have as
passions in life. Some of us might really love our
work. That's a bit strange.
Maybe we have passions like sport and running and you know,
you'll have English football teams and different things that
you absolutely love. We love the All Blacks in New
Zealand. Family is obviously very
important, but what have you got in the centre of your passions,
in the centre of your life? You know, the goal of our lives
as Christians should be to have Jesus in the centre because the
definition of a God is the thing that you love the most, the
thing that you're most passionate about.
And I want to ask you today, what is at the centre of your
life? What is the absolute passion of
your life? Because as Christians, the
journey of our lives should be that we try to bring Jesus into
the real centre. Now don't panic.
Today if you look at all those other things and you think, oh,
maybe it's my family, maybe it's, you know, my technology,
maybe it's music or whatever The thing is, over our lives, God
wants us to get spiritually fit by bringing Jesus into the
centre. You know, we often hear the
saying Jesus is Lord. What does that actually mean?
Well, it means that Jesus is the boss.
It means that he is in charge, it means he is the greatest joy
of our lives. And we can sing about Jesus
being Lord, but if he's not in that centre circle then he
actually isn't Lord of your life.
The famous missionary to China, Hudson Taylor said Jesus is
either Lord of all or he's not Lord at all.
So my challenge today is what is the centre of your life?
What is in the inner circle? Because whatever that is, is
your God. You know, when people become
Christians, there are some people that totally change.
They become radical in so many ways and sometimes they almost
seem a little bit too radical. When my day, they went out and
smashed all their CDs and you know, they got rid of a whole
bunch of stuff and they were telling everybody about Jesus.
They were excited and everything seemed to change.
Rather like one of the songs we sang.
Your talk is different, your walk is different.
That's what it looks like to be a Christian.
But I've noticed in recent years there are people that become
Christians and nothing much seems to change.
Their language is the same, their integrity is the same.
They still pretty much do what they used to do.
Not not much seems to change other than they just start
coming to church. Number of years ago Liz and I
were counselling a lady who was have having marriage problems
and she said to us my husband likes going dancing at
nightclubs. We said Oh yes she said he
actually takes his wedding ring off before I he goes.
Do you think that's a problem? And we said yes, I think that's
actually rather a serious problem that that, that that
you've got there. And you see what he was doing is
when he was at home, he had his ring on saying, I'm a faithful,
wonderful husband. But then he would take the ring
off and who knows what would happen.
It was sort of like conditional faithfulness.
And I want to ask the question today, when you go to work, are
you still faithful to Jesus? When you're with your mates in
the pub, are you faithful to Jesus?
Are you a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday Christian? Or are you different when you
come along to church than you are during the rest of the week?
You know, some people are just Sunday Christians and they say
they've become a Christian, but really all they've done is
they've added something onto their lives.
In my country we have a thing called sleep outs or granny
flats. I think you call it an annex.
And so I want to just show you what a what a house looks like.
There it is. That's my life.
Imagine your life looks like that.
Imagine you're just an ordinary life.
And then you become a Christian and you add an annex on the
side. It'll come up.
There we go. You add Jesus onto the side,
he's just attached. So your house looks exactly the
same. Your life looks the same, but
you've just got this little attachment that you sort of
visit once a week. You go in there and just have a
wee look around and think, oh, this is a nice wee annex, isn't
it? But God does not want to be your
annex. He does not want to be your
granny flat. I'll show you the next slide
which shows exactly what he wants to be.
He wants to be the whole house. He wants to come and he wants to
take over the whole thing. He wants to totally redecorate.
So when people come into your life as they think, wow, this
place has changed. This, this place is a whole
different place. I mean, I can sort of vaguely
recognize what it was, but something is radically different
there. And I want to challenge you.
When Jesus came into your life, is that what happened to you?
A man came up to Jesus once and he said, what is the most
important thing that I could possibly do with my life?
If I was just going to have one focus, if I was just going to
follow one commandment, what would that be?
And Jesus said to him in Matthew 2237, Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.
This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is
like it. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Friends, when we become Christians, God wants us to love
Jesus with every single thing that's in US.
He encourages us to bring Him to be the greatest passion and to
come to the absolute middle of our circle.
You know, it's not enough just to be part of the Christian
culture, not enough to just come along to church and raise their
hands when our hearts are in different places.
You know, I want to read to you the scariest verse in the Bible
as far as I'm concerned. Ever listen to this in Matthew
721. This is Jesus speaking, He says,
not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the
Kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father
who was in heaven. Many will say to me on that day,
that's judgement day. Lord, Lord, did we not prophecy
in your name and in your name drive out demons and before many
miracles? Then I'll tell them, I never
knew you away from me, you evil doers.
Isn't that a scary verse? This is people who turn up to
Jesus on Judgement Day and they're expecting to get in And
they, they say, Jesus, you recognize us.
You know, we were not just average Christians.
We were, we went to Verso Church and St.
Albans. Impressive.
You know, we were on the worship team and we, we, we did usher
and we did all sorts of things. And they're expected to get in.
I mean, not even only that they were on the ministry team, they
were doing miracles and casting out demons.
And Jesus says, I don't even recognize who you are.
What a scary thing that is. And he says, I never knew you.
When you look at that Greek word, the Greek word gonosco to
know, talks about intimacy, talks about being very close.
It's the type of word both in Greek and in Hebrew.
They have a similar word that talks about the intimacy between
a husband and a wife. And Jesus is saying he wants
intimate relationship with us. He wants to be close to us.
I want to show you another diagram of circles.
And this is how we know God. You know, how well do you know
Him? You know, there could be people
here in every part of these circles and that's OK because
we're on a journey. There are some people in our
society that are completely unaware of Jesus, don't even
know anything about him, and they're on the journey.
Hopefully there are some people that know about Jesus, so
they're a wee bit closer. There are others that would be
like an acquaintance. I know him just a little bit.
I've encountered him. I, I want to get to know him
more. There are people that would say
I'm a friend, I'm a friend of Jesus.
But you know, Jesus wants something even more than that.
He wants intimacy. He wants incredible closeness.
What does it look like to have incredible closeness with Jesus?
Well, I know lots of old people. I'm becoming one myself
actually. But I know lots of old people
who have walked with Jesus for many years.
And you can tell a person that is very close to Jesus, we've
got a friend who's passed away and has photos going to come up
on the screen. His name is Bruce.
He's the granddad of one of our pastors.
And Bruce walked with Jesus for decades.
And you'd go and talk to Bruce and anytime you just said the
word Jesus, he would burst into tears.
Tears would just stream down his face.
I remember once, probably the last time we saw him, Liz said,
oh, Bruce, you just love Jesus, don't you?
When he just burst into tears and he said, oh, yes, I do.
And all these tears would would come down his face.
And I remember thinking to myself, that's the way I want to
end up. I want to become so close and so
intimate with Jesus that just the thought of him would bring
tears to my eyes. You know, I know a few elderly
people who are like Bruce, been very close to Jesus all their
lives. And it's wonderful because as
they get older, they get excited about seeing him.
You know, most people fight death.
I don't want to die. Give me any pill you can to keep
me alive. And these people are saying, oh,
I just can't wait to die. I can't wait to be with Jesus.
And I was with one lady that was, you know, in the process of
passing away. And she said to me, tell me what
it's like to be with Jesus. And I told her, you'll open up
your eyes and Jesus will be there.
And she said, oh, I can't wait. And I came and saw her a couple
of days later and she said, oh, I'm still here.
She said, I, I go to sleep and I think I'm going to wake up and
see Jesus just like you said. And then I, I open my eyes and I
think, oh, I'm back here on earth.
And she said, I just wake up so disappointed because all I want
to do is just be with Jesus. Don't you want to end up like
that? Don't you want to be in that
intimate place? What I want to tell you quickly
how you can head along that path, how you can become
spiritually fit. There's five things just very
quickly. Number one, make a decision that
Jesus is going to be the passion of your life.
Just decide it. Today I'm going to make him in
that inner circle #2 ask the Holy Spirit to help you because
the Holy Spirit is your coach. He's like your aura ring.
He says, come on, you can do this.
You can become more like Jesus. You know, you're off to a good
start. You know #3 prioritize spending
time with Jesus everyday. And I'll come back to that in a
minute #4 find others who will go on the journey with you.
Do you know, we're designed to be a team to do this together
and #5 commit to a number of weekly habits that will get you
close to Jesus? Now, do you know that just as
you go to the physical gym, you can see I don't go there
particularly often, but I want to tell you something.
I probably shouldn't say this, but their son Kaya, who's
probably here somewhere, he's a legend, man.
He is a legend. I mean, he's, he's at the gym
the whole time, this guy. And it's incredible.
And, and I haven't been to the gym all that many times, but but
when I do go, I know there are lots of different exercises that
you do. They exercise different parts of
your body. And do you know, all throughout
history people have actually gone into the spiritual gym and
they do spiritual exercises or spiritual habits practices they
call them, or disciplines that actually help you become closer
and closer to Jesus. And very quickly, in the time we
have left, I want to go through six of those things, six key
disciplines that we can do, the 6th exercises that will help us
come close to Jesus. The first one is worship.
The second one is prayer. The third one is the Bible.
The 4th 1 is fellowship. The fifth one is giving.
And the 6th 1 is mission. And let's very quickly look at
those exercises and then we're done.
So let's look at the first one, worship.
You know, when we worship, it exercises our spirit.
It opens us up towards God. You know, when I want to get
close to God, the first thing I do is to start to worship.
I put on a, you know, some music for some worship music.
I might sing myself, I might play my guitar or something like
I, I want to do something that's going to open my spirit towards
God. Romans 12 verse one says.
And so dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to
give your bodies to God because of all he's done for you.
Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind that he will
find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship
him. Just giving your whole self to
God and say Lord, everything I do, I want to be a worship to
you. I looked up the Internet
definition of worship. I think it was on AI so you
can't completely trust it, but this was a good one.
It called worship. It calls for complete, undivided
devotion, utilizing 1's entire being, emotion, spirit, and
physical effort to serve and honour God.
Isn't that cool? The Westminster Shorter
Catechism is not light reading, I want to tell you.
But the first part says what our purpose is in life.
Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
That's the purpose we're on Earth.
To to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
Let's whip on to the next one, which is prayer.
So the first one's worship, second one is prayer.
And I want to tell you, prayer is a two way conversation.
It's not you just giving a shopping list to God, telling
him what to do for the day. Prayer is where we not only talk
to God, but we listen to him as well.
And I want to suggest the best part of prayer, the part where
you'll really grow, is where you start to listen to God.
John 10, verse 27, Jesus said, my sheep listen to my voice.
I know them. There's that word again,
gonosco. I become intimate with them and
they follow me. When you spend time each day
listening to God, you will come close to him.
And prayer is incredibly powerful.
James 516. The earnest prayer of a
righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.
So prayer every day is a tremendous spiritual exercise #3
the Bible. Did you know that the Bible is
spiritual food? Now we need physical food to be
able to stay alive. But Jesus said in Matthew 4
verse four, people do not live by bread alone, but by every
word that comes from the mouth of God.
Do you realize that when you read the Bible, even if you're
reading it and it seems a bit boring and what you don't
understand it spiritually, you are taking in spiritual food
which is making you grow stronger.
Something is happening whether you know it or not.
I love this. In Hebrews 4 verse 12, when it
talks about the Bible, it says the word of God is alive and
powerful. Isn't that cool?
The Word of God, which is the Bible, it's alive.
Imagine that there is no other book on the planet that actually
has spiritual life on it. There's no other book.
You can't get Shakespeare, you can't get TSL, you can't get
anybody else that writes. No matter how brilliantly they
write, none of them have spiritual life like the Bible.
When you read the Word, life comes into your being, for the
Word of God is alive and powerful.
And that word powerful in the Greek is inner gaze, which means
energy, power, activity. When you read the word of God,
spiritual energy. You know, when you go to the
gym, I was saying to Kaya about going to the gym.
I say, why don't you go to the gym?
You know, what do you love it? He says, I come out and I feel
full of energy. I must try that sometime.
So, but that's what happens spiritually when you read the
word of God. The 4th 1 is fellowship.
Do you know a real deception that is around these days that
is that we are designed to do church all by ourselves, that
we're it's just Jesus and me. It's my personal relationship
with Jesus. That's an incredible deception.
I mean, we do have a personal relationship with Jesus, but
we're designed to be in teams X 244 to 46.
All the believers met together in one place and shared
everything they had. They worshipped together at the
temple every day. They met in homes for the Lord's
Supper, so that in the early church they were just meeting
all the time because they realized that they were designed
to be in teams. And this is a good word for the
church today in Hebrews 10, verse 25.
Let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but
encourage one another, especially now that the day of
His return is drawing near. God has designed us to grow
spiritually when we work in teams.
Christianity, the Christian life, is a team sport #5 giving.
Now I wasn't asked to speak about this one, but it's
actually the truth. Do you realize that when you
give, it grows you spiritually? And I've seen that time and time
again. One of the last bastions of
faith is that one of the last bastions, one of the last holds
the enemy has over us is our money.
And when we start to give and when we start to be generous, it
actually explodes our spiritual life.
Matthew 6 verse 19 Jesus said don't store up treasures here on
earth where moths eat them and rust destroys them and where
thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven
where moths and rust cannot destroy and thieves do not break
in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there
your heart will be also. See when we give, we're actually
making God the treasure of our lives.
Do you want Jesus to be in the centre of your life?
Whatever you do with your money shows exactly where your
treasure is. You know, Paul said in one
Corinthians 16, verse 2, on the first day of the week, each one
of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his
income. And so this is another pattern
that we get into, the pattern of tithing where it can be really
hard and really difficult to do. But there is a spiritual growth
aspect that happens when we look at our income and we say I'm
going to be generous towards God and I'm going to do it
regularly. It's one of those spiritual
things that brings about tremendous growth.
And the very last one is mission.
Do you realize that you can sit in church all your lives and you
can be so full of knowledge that you become spiritually obese
because you don't exercise your faith?
And so there's a certain point where you can learn it so, so
much, but if you don't actually go out and do the stuff that
God's called you to do, you actually go backwards.
That's why people say, oh, church is so boring.
Oh, I've heard it all before. Oh, I want to get into the deep
stuff. Do you know what the deep stuff
of God is? It's actually doing the stuff of
the word. It's doing the stuff.
Oh, I've heard people talk about healing and evangelism so much.
Great. Do you do it?
Because that's never boring when you lead somebody to Jesus,
never boring when you reach out in faith and pray for somebody
to get healed. You know, there are two types of
mission that we do 1 is ministry.
That's where we serve God within the church and mission where we
serve God in the world. And all of us should be involved
in those two things. Ministry where we take some role
within the church to help our Christian brothers and sisters
and mission either locally or overseas.
We were saying God, we're going to out work our faith.
The very last thing that I'll say before I go is that we are
in the spiritual race. Do you realize that we're
running this race? And Paul talks about it in
Hebrews 12, verses 1 to 3. He says, Therefore, since we're
surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off
everything that hinders in the sin that so easily entangles,
and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our
faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross,
scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne
of God. You know, we're on this race to
become close to Jesus and there's all these people have
gone before that are cheering us on.
So you can do it. You can get there.
You can you can become spiritually fit.
And I love this thought of the fact that when we appear before
Jesus, He's going to be so excited to welcome us into his
arms. Two or three weeks ago I went
along to see a race where my little 5 year old granddaughter,
Honey May was doing a Jew Ethelon.
So did she had a bike ride and a running race.
And I can proudly say today that she won.
And it was great because us grandparents and others were
going go, honey, go. And we were saying run that
direction. She didn't really know which
direction she was supposed to go.
And she got on the bike and they just said pedal and go this way.
And her dad was running along beside her and go round this
side here. And she fell off once.
And I said, get back up. And there was all these
instructions being shouted out. And then she came.
And when she went through that thing, we just cheered.
And you know, that's what it's going to be like when we come
before Jesus. He's going to be there and he's
going to welcome us and he's going to say, wow, you did it.
You obeyed, you kept on going on the course, and now you've won
the race. Friends, I can't wait for when
we appear before Jesus and we recognize them and we say, wow,
this race was worth it. Can you stand with me today?
And we're just going to invite the Holy Spirit to come and
we're going to allow him to move today.