I am sure that you have been heartbroken over the images and stories coming from Haiti. It is normal for Christians to respond to situations like this by giving of both ourselves and our resources.
I want to encourage RHC to be generous towards Haiti, but to make sure that we do it for the right reasons. We don’t want to give under obligation, guilt or a false sense of duty. Why then should we be generous?
1. We give as a response to the gospel. We have individually and personally been the recipients of God’s lavish grace and mercy in our time of deepest need. Our giving is a joyful response to the abundant goodness we have received from God. “Freely you have received, freely give” said Jesus in Matthew 10.8.
2. We give because, now that we are Christians, our true treasure is in heaven and our earthly wealth has been transformed from an enslaving master to an enabling resource. Christ has displaced every other ‘lord’ in our lives, meaning we serve Him alone and look to no other for our comfort, security or joy. Our money becomes a tool to extend his kingdom, rather than a means of propping up our own.
3. We give because faith without works is dead. James 2.14 – 16 says: What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” We do not just claim to love these people, our love must become flesh, our faith must become a deed.
4. We give because we want to minister to Christ Himself. Jesus said that when we give to others, we give to him (Matthew 25.42)
5. We give because Jesus said we should do unto others as we would have them do to us (Matthew 7.12).
If these reasons resonate with you, then please consider giving to Haiti. We are setting aside some of our church funds to give to the disaster relief in Haiti. We want some of it to go to organizations helping with the disaster relief and to those who are working with the church. We want to encourage you to give as well. You can do so through one of these recommended organizations listed below, or if you want to channel it through RHC you can mark an envelope at one of our weekend services to ‘Haiti’ and we will add it to our gift.
Desiring God has put together a list of recommended charities with links here.
There is a link for a group that is helping churches in Haiti here.
As we start 2010 I would love to encourage pastors to increase the amount of time that they commit to preach through books of the bible. I started the church in November 2008 by preaching a 4 part series through Habakkuk, and ended 2009 with a 9 part series on Philippians. In the first 56 weeks of RHC, we preached Bible book series’ 75% of the time, did another one series which took up another 10% of the year, and the rest (about 15%) was from standalone sermons by either guests or myself. My plan for 2010 is to keep it roughly the same.
Although I grew up in a church that did very little expository preaching, I have found it to be excellent for myself and the church on a number of levels and I highly recommend it for the following reasons:
1. Series are a great way for the church to get onboard and move in one direction over a period of time. Homegroup studies can be easily put out through the series (as we have done on our website), the kids ministry can follow the preaching series as well (at RHC, the Kids Ministry follows the preaching schedule almost exactly).
2. It forces me to study the bible in depth, beyond my devotions. This is something all pastors should be doing (and even if you are preaching through books you should study more in advance). I love that I have to get a few commentaries per book that I am studying, and really dig deep.
3. It gives me a text to preach for the week, and therefore my preparation is far more focused. It doesn’t lighten my load at all, if anything it’s more work to prepare but the work is more focused. I don’t spend time wondering what to preach, but wondering how to preach the text. This means that the quality of preaching is improved.
4. I can deal with difficult subjects without anyone feeling picked on. When we are talking about homosexuality, it’s because the text says so, nor because I discovered someone struggling with it in the church. The same with money, marriage, etc.
5. It forces me to preach the full counsel of God. My pet themes don’t always come out every week in a different form. The text is there and I have no option but to preach it. This forces growth for both myself as the pastor and the church. It’s biblical and wonderful.
6. It keeps me preaching the great themes of the bible in their correct proportion. I have found that ecclesiology isn’t really that big a deal! Christ’s finished work, redemption, the personal outworking of the gospel and scripture in our lives become the major themes that dominate the scriptures.
7. One of the reasons I love preaching through books the most though, is that I have to really wrestle personally with the texts before I preach them. I have found most of my personal spiritual growth has come from wrestling with texts in the week before I preach on them. How can I stand up and say ‘To live is Christ and die is gain’ unless I have come to the point before God? How can I preach on faith unless God is stirring my heart?!
8. You can go away for a weeks study break every 4 months and really thrash out large portions of preparation at this time. Your study has a specific focus and outworking. If your plans change and you don’t end up using all your prep, you have wasted nothing. These times of getting away and getting refreshed become incredibly helpful.
Some may have various reasons in mind why they shouldn’t do this. Here are some of the common reasons, and what I would say to them:
1. “We want to be Holy Spirit led”. I have often found that this reason is not really that people want to be Holy Spirit led but that they want to leave their prep / planning to the last minute. If God can tell you what to preach on the Thursday before the weekend why can’t He tell you 2 months in advance? I find that having a text beforehand makes me come to it in prayer asking the Holy Spirit to guide me in terms of what to say and emphasize in the passage.
2. “We want to do something relevant”. I would say your job as a pastor is not to give people life lessons with a few scriptures. That is not able to make disciples. Teach them to work through passages of scripture, especially the tough ones. There is nothing more relevant.
3. “What if there are many people sharing the pulpit?” I have found this only helps with training preachers and keeping the church on one track even when many others are preaching.
4. “I feel I want to preach on something different every week”. This is probably the best objection actually, and I have no real way to counter this except to say that you will likely find that when you preach this way, you don’t end up covering the full counsel of God, and most likely just cycle through your favorite subjects in one form or another.
I would greatly encourage you to explore preaching through books of the bible in 2010. My encouagement is that even if you start small, make that start and allow God to grow you in this area of preaching.
This post is taken in entirety from here.
Over at Enjoying God Ministries, Sam Storms, gives some helpful instruction on preaching.
In the second of three articles in his series An Appeal to All Pastors: Why and How Should We Preach, Sam gives us eight reasons why pastors should be committed to biblical preaching.
- We must preach because of the power of the Word of God to change human lives and to transform the experience of the church.
- We must preach because preaching is God’s ordained means for making himself known to us.
- We must preach because preaching not only communicates truth about God, it also mediates the very person and power of God.
- We must preach because preaching (aside from reading) is the most effective means for transmitting the truths of Holy Scripture.
- We must preach because preaching is the fuel for worship. Preaching fans the flames of passion for Jesus.
- We must preach because preaching is not simply the fuel for worship, preaching is worship.
- We must preach because preaching is the catalyst for church growth, renewal, and revival.
- We must preach because preaching is the means by which the glory of God is revealed and imparted to those who listen with faith.
Last week I sat down with someone in the church who humbly wanted to talk about preaching and being more effective. As an encouraging, supportive brother I was more than willing to listen to him. One of the points he raised was that I typically try to cover too much material in my preaching, with the result that I am often saying so much that the one clear message gets lost in the blur.
As we spoke about it, we came to the conclusion that this is not a biblical issue. No where does scripture say that you must only have one main point, or that there should be one unifying theme, however we realized that this is a point of great wisdom for improving the clarity of your message.
As we spoke, I realized that often I come to the task of preaching with a ‘teachers’ hat on, rather than a preachers. They are not very different, but if I could attempt to distinguish them I would say that a teacher teaches truth that could be delivered to any people anywhere at any time. It stands alone apart from it’s audience. Preaching seems to be to take the truth that teachers bring and apply it in a specific context, to a specific people at a specific time, with a far clearer sense of action required. In short, preaching is far more prophetic in nature.
I realized that in my prep I have been trying to cover everything that the text says (for fear of leaving something else and not preaching it in context), instead of trying by the Holy Spirit to find the one main thing that God is speaking to this people about through this passage. This feedback and the subsequent discussion has lightened my load. I still need to study the passage as thoroughly to see what it is saying, but then I can zero in on the one unifying theme, not feeling a sense of compulsion to deal with everything else.
3. Christ died for our sins. Phil 2.8: ‘And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’. The gospel story is humbling on a number of counts:
Firstly, the wonder of it all: To think that Jesus (who enjoyed equality with God and the glory of heaven) would empty Himself and take on the nature of a servant is beyond comprehension. That He would do it for the sake of wicked men who hated Him is incredible. But that He would allow himself to be murdered at the hands of those same wicked men? That’s another thing altogether. The clincher comes in when we realize that we are those men. How undeserving we are! How great He is!
Secondly, it’s gravity of it all: Think of how serious a matter our sin is, that the only penalty payable is the life of the Son of God. How great the debt must be! How vast the sum of it. How this would make us humble. My sin is utterly unsolvable outside from Him, I am utterly lost apart from Him, utterly helpless without Him, and therefore utterly indebted to Him.
All I am I owe to Him! He is my life, my confidence, my salvation, my all in all.
The site
Today we launched our ‘askanything.sg’ campaign and website, which is an endeavor to engage the community by allowing them to ask any questions they have regarding faith and Christianity. For the first few weeks we will just receive questions, and then list all questions asked. Voting will then take place and the top questions will be answered in our ‘Askanything’ series in March.
My desire is for many to draw into thinking more about Christ and that His Holy Spirit would open their eyes to see ‘the glory of God in face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor 4).
We don’t see this as a short term project either. The first phase will be the sermon series in March, but our aim is to answer every question asked online by posting either sermons, videos or written responses to the questions so that the website becomes a resource for those wanting to engage with questions regarding Christianity. If we get an overwhelming response to the site, we may consider answering the next few questions in a similar series later on in the year.
We hope you enjoy it, and that it bears much gospel fruit!
Well the first weekend of the year has come and gone and it was a good one for us. We began the year by starting our third service at Redemption Hill, and doing it on a Saturday night. This is because we are presently meeting in a venue that can’t hold a lot of chairs, and we haven’t been able to find a new venue yet.
Our other two service happen on Sunday mornings, at 9.30 and 11.30. Our options for a third service were either Saturday evening 5pm, Sunday afternoon 1.30 pm (after the 11.30 service) or Sunday evening 5pm. We chose Saturday night because it was the time that most people were likely a) bring their unsaved friends too, and b) come to instead of one of the Sunday morning options (hence freeing up more space then). Sunday nights in Asia aren’t a good idea as that’s when most families do their family dinners.
We had just under 50 people at the Saturday service, which I thought was great for our first one, and considering a huge percentage of the church was away over the long weekend. The setup went smoothly, and Tarryn led worship well. It also made the Sunday morning setup very relaxed, as 90% of the work has already been done.
I personally enjoyed preaching the same message three times, and it certainly got better every time I did it. As is normally the case, the guys at the 11.30 got the best version. No wonder that’s the fullest service we have! We recieved about 6 visitors cards from the weekend, with two of the visitors saying they wanted to find out more about Jesus. We will gladly oblige!
2. God calls us to salvation. 2 Cor 4.6: ‘For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’.
The truth that God calls us to salvation, rather than us choosing Him is immensely humbling. If we believed God’s work in salvation was 99% and ours was 1%, how we would glory in our 1%! It would give us some ground of boasting. We would believe that we had chosen rightly, while others had not made the right choice. But Jesus says, “you did not choose me, but I chose you”!
Scripture says that we are dead in our sins and transgressions before Christ makes us alive. We are not a drowning man looking for a life buoy. We are not looking for a helping hand. We are dead. A life buoy will not help. A helping hand will be too late. What we need is new life! We need to be resurrected! This is something no man can do for himself, only God. This scripture uses the imagery of God speaking light into being when He created the world. It is the same miraculous act of creation by which God speaks life into us and ‘makes us alive’ Eph 2.5.
2 Cor 4 says that God has shone His truth into our hearts. He has called us, he has opened our eyes, he has made us his own. As Luther says, the only thing we add to our salvation is the sin we must be forgiven of. God has saved us, not because we are good or worthy, but because he is good, and full of mercy and compassion.
May this truth become a conviction in us, leading us to live with wonder, awe and delight in the abundant goodness of God towards us. We don’t want our humility to stem from our weakness, but from God’s goodness and mercy.
1. Growth Comes From God. 1 Cor 3.7: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.. each will receive his wages according to his labor”
We all have our favorite scriptures. And this often isn’t one of them. This one is often quoted as a qualifier when people are giving practical advice on church growth. 20 minutes are taken up explaining what you should do, shouldn’t do, things to avoid, ways to attract people, etc. Then right at the end of the advice, almost as an admission of it’s man centeredness, comes this caveat: ‘Of course we all know that ultimately growth only comes from God’.
This verse tells us that our job is the labor of planting or watering. We get rewarded for our labors, not for the growth. Our duty is to labor and we should be faithful. His prerogative is the growth and He should get the glory. According to Paul, the size of your ministry doesn’t make you anything. Only God.. who gives the growth. It’s His Sovereign will.
If we really believed this, it would result in a few things: Firstly, we would endeavour to be faithful, not to look good. Secondly, it would take a lot of pressure off of us. Thirdly, we would seek Him more, rather than attempt techniques and methods for success. Our desire would be to hear His voice and have Him lead us. Fourthly, it would prevent us from elevating ourselves above others. Finally, it would make us worship and honor Him, giving Him all honor and credit for any life in our ministry. May we believe this truth, that neither he who plants nor waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.
