Tuesday 14 February 2017

Some Notes and Questions from Sam Alberry’s Sermon 12 February 2017

You can find Sam’s sermon along with some of the Q and A, here.

Mark 1:15 “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

Jesus is the person in whom all of God’s promises to humanity are fulfilled. Repentance is a total turn around in direction – like a car going the wrong way down the motorway will eventually hit a wall of other vehicles unless it turns round, we must repent before we are hit by the juggernaut of God’s kingdom purpose.

Question: What does repentance look like in a life?  In your life?

Matthew 15:19-20 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”

Our culture tells us we are lost and that we need to look inside our hearts to find the real authentic us and that once found, we must celebrate and express that. Jesus says the opposite; that looking at our hearts will only confuse and delude us because our hearts are corrupted.

Question: How much time do you spend listening to other voices (including your own) defining you? How much do you listen to what Jesus says about you? Is there anything that needs to change?

Matthew 19:3-6 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
19:10-12 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Jesus avoids being trapped by the Pharisees by not answering their question directly, but by looking at God’s original intention for marriage – that it be one man and one woman in an exclusive lifelong union. This is a high calling, one that leaves the disciples gobsmacked. All of us are skewed (not straight) in our sexuality, all of us are broken. No one has sexual desires that are 100% godly all the time. All of us need Christ’s love and power to reconcile and restore us. If we cannot embrace Christ’s teaching on marriage, then the only legitimate pathway is celibacy – which is also a high calling. There can be many and varied reasons why people might be eunuchs (live celibately). In marriage we see the shape of the gospel (Christ and his Church). In celibacy, we see the sufficiency of the gospel (Christ and his family of the church are enough for me).

Question: What does this teaching provoke in you? Why is Jesus so black and white about this? What does he want us to see? What implications does it have for you and your relationships? How can we support each other in this?

Mark 8:34-35 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.

The only time Jesus uses “self” before any word is in “self-denial.” The world says hold on to all you have for as long as you can. Jesus says lose your life to me – the one you were made for - and you will become more you than you ever realised you could be.

Question: Why is self-denial so hard? Does it feel like God is “crucifying you” over anything in your life at the moment as you learn to follow him wholeheartedly? If not, why not? Are you really counting the cost of being a disciple? Do you believe that in losing yourself to Jesus, you become the real you?

Mark 10:28-30 Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.

The hardest ties to leave behind are relational, but Jesus makes the a promise that he expects his people to deliver on his behalf, namely that those who renounce their old life and its relational ties to follow him will be richly rewarded on a relational level by being welcomed into a family that is so good, it far outweighs both the good you thought you had in your old life and the persecution you now get for following Jesus. Our culture confuses sex and intimacy. You can live without sex, but you cannot live without intimacy (deep friendship or kinship). If the church is not a place of deep intimacy / fellowship then it cannot be surprised when people fall into bad relationships of all kinds, but especially sexual ones.

Question: Have you experienced the depth of relationship in church life that Jesus promises here since you became a Christian? If not, why not? (Be honest, not accusatory.) How can you be obedient to Jesus and fulfil his promise to others of deep, intimate friendship / kinship?

John 6:35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

This is a weird metaphor in a culture that has lots of different staples – potato, rice etc, but Jesus wants to be our daily bread, our sustenance for the journey of life. In our culture of romantic love – we often put expectations on others to complete us in ways they were never meant to fulfil. That is idolatry – only Jesus can truly satisfy and sustain us.

Question: Do you look to Jesus as your soul/sole source of strength, or do you unfairly put a burden of expectation on others they were never designed to fulfil?

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