Greetings to all as another year begins!
The start of every year is often one full of anticipation for many people. It presents a moment of opportunity for a fresh beginning, a chance to start over, and a hope for a better year.
While New Year’s resolutions may not be for everyone, for most of us there lurks in the back of our mind a list of things we would like to do better. Whether we want to ‘turn over a new leaf’ or ‘start from scratch’, looking ahead to the coming year is like a blank canvass stretched out before us. There are 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, or 8,750 hours full of opportunity and promise waiting to be explored.
Sometimes our hopes for the New Year are born of disappointments, grief or pain from the past. Sometimes they 
are born of dreams, visions or the hopes for ourselves or others. Others times they come from the promptings of our heart through the Spirit of God or God’s word to us from the Bible.
Though the Bible doesn’t mention New Year resolutions, it does urge us to examine our lives regularly. The call to “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) reminds us how difficult it can be in the midst of a noisy world to find the space to connect with God. Yet Paul encouraged the Corinthians to “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith” (2 Cor 13:5) and Lamentations suggests we “examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord” (Lam 3:40). And Jesus often withdrew to isolated places to reflect and prayerfully discern the Father’s will (Lk 5:16).
Perhaps you could take some timeout this January to sit quietly, reflect on your life and spend time with God. Here’s some thoughts to help you on your way . . .
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Money, Money, Money – Must be Funny!
Do you ever get up uptight or defensive when there is a conversation about giving and generosity?
In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul reminds them they had promised to collect money for believers in other places. He is asking them to make good on their promise and to do so as cheerful givers (2 Cor 9:7 NIV). Obviously there was the possibility they were not so happy to be reminded.
By encouraging us to be cheerful givers, Paul implies our giving will always be accompanied by some sort of attitude and emotion. We can give cheerfully or reluctantly; we can give in freedom or under compulsion,;we can give with joy or with mourning.
Being cheerful givers is important, because it reflects something of God’s heart. It was he who gave his only Son willingly and with ultimate delight so that we might share in eternal life and enjoy life in all its abundance. God wants us to be like him in his giving so that we might share with him in and enjoy his life.
Giving, in this sense, is not limited to money. It can be our time and our resources. It may be as simple as a smile or giving someone your full attention when they want to talk to you.
How are you going? What is your current attitude to giving? Are you giving cheerfully, or is there some reluctance or grumbling sneaking into it? Are you trusting God for salvation, but struggling to trust him with your time and finances?
For most, if not all of us, cheerful giving does not come naturally. Since sin entered the world, we all have a disposition towards selfishness and fear. It is easy to become protectors of what God has given us rather than . . .
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Leaving the 19th . . . and into the 21st Century
It was many decades after the founding of Hobart that the Hobart Baptist Church building, or Tabernacle as it has often been known, was completed. That was early in 1889 after nearly a decade of feverish activity. When pioneer pastor, Irish born Rev. Robert McCullough arrived in 1883 after a stint in Longford, the church began meeting in the Exhibition Building, where City Hall now stands in Macquarie Street.
After being thrown out of the Exhibition Building in 1884, the church erected a temporary structure of rough timber, ragged tarpaulins and corrugated iron on the spot where our “Tabernacle” stands. Work on a second building, our current hall, began in 1884 behind the temporary structure. Then on 5 October 1887 a foundation stone for the new neo-classical building was laid. The final cost was about $4,500,000 in today’s money.
Situated on the fringe of Hobart’s CBD, the stately “Tabernacle” modelled on a similar building in Stockport, England, has stood the test of time. It has lived through highs and lows and times when the congregation filled it to capacity. Today the ministry and mission of Hobart Baptist Church continues thanks to the courage, foresight, and perseverance of those early pioneers and those who have served over the years.
The building still possesses a certain grandeur and stands proud despite the challenges faced by the church across Australia and in Hobart. Each day many walk or drive past the building without realising it is the hub of a vibrant, diverse church community of over 250 people. It’s hard to imagine that from the outside. The building is in need of an upgrade to enable the church to meet the ministry and mission needs of today’s world.
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Value-able Decisions
It’s been suggested one of the most important things you do in life is decide what’s important in life – who you are and what you do. It is as true for followers of Jesus as it is for anyone. As we choose to embrace the values of the Kingdom of God our lives change forever. In fact, so radical is the resulting transformation that Jesus described it as a re-birth.
Following Jesus is like starting life all over again. It is seeing everything in life from a totally new perspective. It changes our priorities and what’s important in our lives. These new values come from our relationship with Jesus Christ, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and through our reading of the Bible. Although some values develop quickly, others take years, perhaps decades, to develop.
Churches have values too. Along with our beliefs, there are the guiding principles to the way we live life together. No matter the breadth of our diversity, our individual expertise, our backgrounds or our culture, the church operates on a set of values that determine the way we relate to each other and the world around us. Sometimes we are not be aware what our values are, however a good look at the choices we make and the way we live will reveal them.
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How Much is Too Much?
Did you know that over 600 verses in the Bible refer to heaven, more than 500 mention prayer, less than 500 relate to faith, around 50 speak of hell, yet there are more than 2,000 passages which talk about handling money?
So good stewardship is a major theme throughout the Bible.
A week ago at our quarterly church meeting, we made some important decisions that will affect the future mission and ministries of Hobart Baptist Church. One of them concerned the formation of a project team to explore how we can make our church more accessible to new people. This initiative came from a special assignment I gave a new family when they joined us earlier this year.
I asked them to document what it was like for a young family to enter into the life of Hobart Baptist Church for the first time.
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Prayer Needed! The World Has Changed
In a series of messages on revival the great Welsh preacher-teacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones turned to the end of Mark 9.
Here Jesus comes off the mountain to find the disciples unsuccessfully trying to free a boy from a demon. After a quick rebuke, Jesus heals the boy and the disciples ask why they couldn’t do it. Jesus explains how this kind is only expelled by prayer. Lloyd-Jones suggested Jesus used this incident to teach his disciples a lesson: the ordinary, business-as-usual way of doing things, no longer worked. Different times calls for different measures.
Using the story as an allegory, Lloyd-Jones suggested the boy represents contemporary Western culture; the demon is its underlying assumptions, and the disciples are the church. His conclusion was that our past methods of evangelism, while perfectly good for their time, no longer worked in today’s world. The world had changed. The old methods no longer applied. We are dealing with a different, difficult ‘spirit’.
Although the Lloyd-Jones’ message was given in 1959, it is still relevant today.
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Your Obituary – How Will it Read?
One morning Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, read his own obituary in the local newspaper. It said, “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before. He died a very rich man.”
Nobel, obviously, was surprised and deeply affected. But, it wasn’t because he was presumed dead. The reporter had made a mistake as it was his older brother who had died. He was deeply affected because of what it said. He wanted to be remembered differently than the person who had invented an efficient way to kill people and amass a fortune. In response the Nobel Peace Prize was born.
Today Alfred Nobel is remembered more for his prize than for inventing dynamite.
Sometimes we are given the opportunity to reflect deeply on life and make a change. You hear bad news from your doctor; you have a near miss with a truck on the road; or you catch up with old friends at a school reunion – and it causes you to reflect. Am I heading in the right direction? Have I just drifted along? How would I like to be remembered?
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The Presence of God
Pastor and author A. W. Tozer once wrote, “the Presence of God is the central fact of Christianity. At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push into conscious awareness of His Presence.” Tozer wasn’t referring to our Christian gatherings on Sundays and through the week, but to every moment in our lives.
For many years Christians around the world have been inspired by the book The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence (c. 1614 – 1691), a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery who did just as Tozer suggests.
Lawrence spent most of his life in a priory working in the kitchen and towards the end of his life repairing sandals. It was in these routine and ordinary tasks that he sought to connect with God. Each day and every hour was a new beginning and a fresh opportunity to love God. He endeavoured to do everything to the glory of God, including washing pots and pans. His life was one giant prayer, talking to God all day long as he worked. When he died in 1691 he had practiced living moment-by-moment in God’s presence for over forty years.
In our fast paced, consumer-orientated world we can easily go for hours, maybe days without giving God a thought, and many have found Brother Lawrence’s approach refreshing and helpful. The reality is that God is always at work in the world and doing thousands of things in our lives, but we are often unaware of them. And if we are aware, it is most likely that only two or three of them will be in our focus.
God is very much at work in the world, but it takes discipline and grace for us to move past the immediate, and the busy, to see it.
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Finding the Australian Way
It is relatively only recently that the Australian church has seriously begun to look at what it means to present the gospel to Australians in an Australian way.
For many years our approach was decidedly British given our colonial roots. Then after WWII in an era when Australians were infatuated with everything American, our evangelism was heavily influenced by American revivalism and the visits of Billy Graham.
Today we are still influenced by American church leaders, American programs and American materials yet there are signs the tide is turning.
Work over the past decade or so by the likes of Michael Frost (Morling College), Alan Hirsch (Forge), Philip Hughes (Christian Research Association) and more recently books from the likes of Tim Foster (Ridley College), Simon Holt (Collins Street Baptist), and Darren Cronshaw (Baptist Union of Victoria), reflect the growing awareness of the need to develop a more Aussie approach.
God has given us a job to do, to find a way to convey the gospel with meaning and sense to everyday Australians.
In his open letter to Tasmanian Baptists back in July 2009 Ivan James asked, “why is it that Australian Baptists in foreign mission are intentional, relational, adaptive and creative in their expressions of evangelism – but at home we seem to be ad hoc, constrained by our existing socio-economic circles, and rigid in our expressions of worship and witness?” I’m not sure he was ever given an answer.
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Great [Christmas] Expectations
Even though Christmas is still a way off the retail season is in full swing. Whether we are ready or not, decorations are in our shops, parades are in our streets, and carols ring out in our shopping malls.![MP900440280[1]](https://stephenlbaxter.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/mp9004402801.jpg)
Expectations are perhaps one of the biggest challenges in our lives. We all live with them every day whether they are realistic or idealistic, positive or negative. These unspoken yet personal assumptions of how things will, or could, work out are projected upon events, people, ourselves and God as well. In a myriad of ways, in every facet of life, they dictate how we approach the future ranging from exhilarating delight, debilitating fear and everything in between.
Christmas too is full of expectations. Read More >>>