Updates... updates...

Due to the busyness of life, I have not been updating my blog with what has been going on at the school CU on a Friday lunch time!

The Headlines are:

Having started the Questions series off with 50 boys, (most of whom were probably there on the promise of free food), we stablized out at around the 25 mark. Before this we had been around 6!

Many good conversations have been had, but no obvious fruit yet. We continue to pray for some.

We covered questions like:
Who came first, Adam and Eve or the dinosaurs?
Why does God remain hidden?
Why is there so much suffering in the world?
What's God's take on suffering?
What do you live for?/What would you die for?
What's Easter all about?

Today we addressed the last one in that list. Romans 4:25 shaped it for me. How both the death and resurrection of Jesus are needed to save sinners like you and me. Let me explain...

Jesus' death, clears away the moral guilt of my rebellion against God, let's call it my -1000000000 debt of sin, but if that is where it ended, then I still have nothing, zero, in my moral account, nothing to offer God when he comes knocking, nothing to commend me to God. To get into Heaven I need to be like Jesus and have +1000000000 moral points to give as it were, which I will never achieve.  If Jesus stayed dead, I would still be damned.

To put it another way, you might find it in your heart to forgive me if I murdered your parents, but there would be nothing in me that would commend me to you that you should love me.

And so this is why the resurrection is so key.  Dead men don't give anything to anyone, but because Jesus is ALIVE he gives his perfection as a gift to all who trust him.  If you are a Christian, you can commend yourself to the Father NOT because you have a perfection of your own but because you have been given the gift of perfection by another - Jesus. And when the Father sees his righteousness over you and in you he is moved with love for you.  To love you as he loves his very own Son.

And this is why we can now not just be shuffled into Heaven as tolerated forgiven sinners, (that category doesn't exist in the mind of God, only in the minds of people bound up in "religion"), but welcomed into the fellowship of God as beloved adopted children and co-inheritors with Christ of the new creation.

And all this, through the Holy Spirit who lives and works it all in us!

One boy was very perceptive, he said: but that's not right, you can't let people off like that! 

Yeah I said, Great isn't it?  He was then sidetracked by something else! Then Pavlov called (the bell went) ...

What and awesome God! :-)

---

My sincere thanks to all the adults and boys that helped to make Christian Union the joy and the success it was this term.

Then I got home from work and chuckled listening to this bit (1:18) from my favourite radio programme - The Now Show. Somewhat ironic, I feel...