Luke 15:11-32 – The Prodigal Son

I preached at my church for the first time today; and by preach I mean give a sermon or talk. It wasn’t anything too serious, it was an evangelistic talk on the prodigal son; which most of us would’ve heard at some point. But just like in year 12 when we were the last grade to do “journeys”, I had to come up with a way to present the prodigal son parable in a different way (that of course was still Biblical).

 

Long story short, my talk will be uploaded below, as well as my powerpoint slides to aid the talk; so feel free to be the judge of what I say yourselves. Writing the talk was a bit difficult at the time because I kind of left it a bit too late, and before I knew it I found that today when the talk was due, was sandwiched between a class test I had on Thursday, and this huge assignment which was set to be due this coming Tuesday. So it wasn’t looking to be a pleasant weekend; and the distractions that kept me from thinking about my talk got to me.

 

Eventually I got quite stressed over last week and I suppose it all nearly overwhelmed me. But it’s strange how God works. Within the span of a few days and by the time Saturday (yesterday) came, several things turned my situation completely around for the better. On Thursday after my exam, the tutor went through the answers and miraculously I think I should get 100% since all my answers matched up (not sure about the working though). And come Saturday I found out that my assignment deadline was pushed back from this coming Tuesday, to the Monday after (6 day extension). And so even though I really only had that final Saturday free; God had somehow changed my circumstances so that I would be completely unburdened the whole day to work on the talk. And though I still struggled on Saturday I managed to get it done by midnight; and well, here I am sitting at home talking about it.

 

It was a really challenging week for me as a Christian but as always God pulled through for me. And as always when I publicly present something from the Bible (at youth group normally), I really felt the power of the Holy Spirit working through me and giving me the words. I know I didn’t really qualify that last sentence well, but it’s hard to describe the effect of the Holy Spirit and I’m more mesmerised by what I was able to accomplish through God. Anyway it’s time to work on the assignment. Thank you all who asked me about my talked, prayed for me, or attended on Sunday to see me speak.

 

One last thing, I didn’t publicize it at the time because I didn’t want people flocking over to my church just to hear me speak, and also to give up their own church service as well. As such I kept quiet about it, it’s not that I didn’t want to tell people about it; it just makes me feel bad if people are skipping their own church’s to hear me speak (not to mention that their leaders would probably get mad at me anyway). So hopefully people understand why all the *hush hush* about it.

 

[SMAC] (2011.10.02) Luke 15 (pdf)

 

Note that a bit of the beginning wasn’t recorded but it wasn’t anything too important.

 

1: One Saviour. One Life. One Night. Don’t Waste It.

Last night, about ten thousand people from all over Sydney (and maybe a bit further) gathered at Sydney Entertainment Centre to hear from John Piper and John Lennox, two renowned speakers from America who have written quite a number of good books. This was a completely new event that has never been run before in Sydney but the reputation of the speakers certainly attracted a lot of people to come; seating capacity was completely maxed out and both speakers preached a very powerful message to a full house, such would be deemed the success of the event.

 

For a few of us, the topic of event seemed quite ambiguous and we didn’t really know what to expect from the speakers. I think we’ve all heard about “not wasting our lives” (particularly in the Christian context) and I also wondered what more could be said about the idea. Last night was a night to re-ignite the spirits of those who attended, that they may burn with a strong passion for Jesus and indeed not waste their lives but live it all to their max, for the glory of God.

 

The night was filled with worship and was MCed by Al Stewart. All in all, the night was quite simple and very heavily focused around the speakers; and they themselves focused heavily around the Bible, it was quite an intense event in terms of the amount of stuff we were hearing. They also gave us very cute little booklets with information and also space to write notes and all (photo above).

 

John Lennox

John Lennox came up to speak first and he began by addressing the concerns of investing our time, and even our lives, for Jesus. He explained both points of views, that indeed it would be quite a waste of a life if we invested into someone who wasn’t real and the promises of heaven and all were not real. However, if we did not invest into Jesus and he turned out to be real, then we would be in serious trouble. John talked about the transfiguration of Jesus and how that event was a truly remarkable change not only for Jesus but also for those who witnessed it. The eyewitnesses (and apostles) who saw all that Jesus did would be able to invest in Jesus because they actually saw what Jesus had in plan for those who believe. And as eyewitnesses they shared this news with the people around them because the way we live our lives would certainly have an eternal difference at the end. Lennox also talked about how the transfiguration demonstrated Jesus’ power, and it was not a power of this world and while we might not receive this same power,  we are called to trust in the one who does have this power.

 

Lennox moved onto talking about death and leaving the world; because if indeed there is an eternal reward waiting for us at the end of time, how we live our lives up to the point of our death is important. The Bible shows us examples of how some people live their lives and went out with a “bang”: Moses died (but lived a very arduous life), Elijah left the world but did not taste death, Jesus was crucified, and Peter was crucified upside down, in order to not shame what happened to Jesus. If we are indeed convinced of the value of our investment in Christ and of the eternal difference that will show itself at the end of time, then indeed it makes perfect sense to live our lives as best as we can, to reflect the treasure we have in Christ.

 

Lennox’s talk was a good opener to the evening and explaining why it made sense to invest our time and our whole lives into Jesus.

 

John Piper

After a short intermission, John Piper came up to speak. For a 65-year old man, he demonstrated quite a lot of energy in his preaching and I was glad I was able to hear him and the ideas he presented last night. Piper introduced a lot of radical concepts that I hadn’t really thought about before but I was deeply moved by what he said. He started off by reminding us of some of the world events that resulted in various numbers of deaths, namely the famous incidents, starting at 9/11. These, and many more, are incidents where the goodness of God is questioned and a lot of people hear the question: “Where was God in all of this?” Funnily enough Jesus himself was not as sentimental about life and death as we would expect. Piper read out Luke 13:1-5 and showed that amidst suffering, Jesus did not comfort those who lost loved ones but instead called everyone to repent. And of course many people would dare to say that Jesus was unloving because he didn’t show a care for those who died.

 

The radical idea that Piper presented was that we should not presume even one more breath of our life but be somewhat expecting of the bad. For those who suffered accidents, some of which led to death, we should be surprised not that it happened to other people, but that it didn’t happen to us. Too often we play the “where were you God when ‘this’ happened?” card and replace ‘this’ with something bad that happened. But we don’t seem to ask “where were you God when ‘that’ happened?”, replace ‘that’ with something good. The perspective shift Piper asked us to take on was that bad things are the “default” and anything good, even the next second of your life, is a blessing which we must make good use of, clearly because those who are dead do not have such a gift.

 

I didn’t find it too hard to take on this perspective, I imagine people who don’t have their trust in Jesus would find it harder to accept such a view. But adopting such a view really turns your world upside down. While it does make you seem pessimistic (because you’re always anticipating something bad), it makes you much more joyful and motivated when good things happen. Not only does it put our perspective on life right, but it also corrects our perspective on God. God has all the right to end our lives and pour His judgement our on us, but He chooses to have mercy on us instead and when we begin to contrast His blessings against His judgement, we begin to value what He’s given us.

 

Lastly, Piper talked about us learning to give up everything we have in favour of Christ. That is, we don’t literally go around selling everything we own, but in whatever we own or have, we should be prepared to make Jesus more important than that. And I think it works to say that having as much as we want isn’t a bad thing, as long as we are able to value Christ even more, which will end up in a willingness to give us everything else we own (hence you really only become rich to just give it all away out of generosity). How we our lives then should be to magnify Christ in everything that we have and everything that we do. By “magnify” we think of how a telescope magnifies the vast vast universe so that those looking through a telescope can see the magnificence of the universe; same with our lives and God.

 

Response

Well, they asked us to make a response as to how we intend to live our lives from this point on; how we plan to not waste it. There was a small section in our book for us to jot something down. Here was what I felt at the time:

 

I’ve never felt like each day in my life was truly a waste because it always felt like there was something to be learned, and something to be gained, not matter how big or small, and no matter whether it was a good or bad day. But I suppose the call for me is to sharpen my life and be more and more proactive with my time which would be the main challenge since I’ve packed it with so much stuff. But that can’t be right since I should always have time to slot people in when needed.

 

I hope I’ll continue to have time to blog. I have so many pending things to type up that I’ve kind of just left it all to one side. Frankly, it took a while to even finish this post up (probably partly due to my laziness and my wanting to do other things at the same time). But all in all this was a night for us to think about out long term investments for Christ. And while Lennox and Piper didn’t say specifically “how” we should spend our lives, the main focus indeed was to spread the glory of God to all around us, in whatever way we feel comfortable with. For some of us like me, the ministry field seems most applicable; and so I shall try to redouble my efforts at my church.

 

To end on a semi-dim note, sometimes all my years of leading youth group have felt like a waste, perhaps not a complete waste, but there are times where it seemed pointless or not as fruitful as doing something else. And that definitely discourages me when my passion and vision for youth group doesn’t turn out the way I had hoped it would. But through God’s grace I’ve seen more than enough change to conclude that all my efforts have not been in vain and indeed any amount of energy was worth it to see the fruits that were yielded, and the fruits that will be reaped if we persevere in our race. I believe that to be true of any other aspect of life we devote to our Saviour, Jesus Christ. He will see us through to the last day.

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Friday

So for once on the last night of MYC, I managed to rack up 3-4 hours of sleep as opposed to 0 hours. Still, the dawn of the last day pretty much meant that camp was coming to an end, and we would soon no longer have all that time to sit together with other Christians, to have fellowship and to study God’s Word. Which is probably why over the years we’ve managed to see that the time spent at MYC is precious and needs to be used in a manner that reflects how rare the opportunity is. Just like all the speakers say, you really don’t get a daily chance to study God’s Word so in depth outside of MYC.

 

Anyway for this last day I was a bit detached from the activities that we did and so I wasn’t really paying attention too much. So I’ll spend the latter half of this post just reflecting on everything that happened over the five days.

 

Bible Study

The last Bible Study for the week was just going over the passage once more and making sure that we’re able to digest everything we looked at over the week. Every group had members missing here in there (most likely catching up on sleep) and so we disbanded groups and formed new ones. This allowed us to see what other people learnt from the passage over the week since we were pretty much stuck with the same people the whole week and never had a chance to compare “research” with other people. We formed a group of about 5-6 and just shared what we learnt over the week, and sat together to read other relevant passages to “humanity”. We had quite fruitful conversation and it was good for us to pray at the end, showing how indeed we as Christians are united because we can so freely pray with one another.

 

Final Talk

Because we only had the morning on Friday to do stuff, the talk was much shorter than the ones in the night session; and this last talk was just to wrap up everything we’ve learnt about humanity over the week. The last talk was on Acts 17:16-34 and we were reminded that we live in a world where people fail to acknowledge God, and in some cases, refuse to acknowledge God. We were reminded that we will suffer for being Christian because of all these conflicting beliefs that people have. But we are reminded to not worry because we are at peace with and in the day when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead, we will inherit the kingdom of heaven alongside Jesus. Until then, we should be ready to endure any type of suffering and we should also be actively seeking out those who are still “lost in ignorance” and calling them to repentance.

 

 

Journey Back

After taking a bunch of photos during and after lunch, we finally left Merroo Christian Centre and headed home. Transport wasn’t too hard to organise and once we got it all sorted we headed off. Traditionally, the car I’m in always heads back to Hong Kong de Cafe for afternoon tea; and I think we really that meal because we were all so hungry, especially for this last day. Condensing the final hours of MYC into a sentence or two, we simply drove back, had afternoon tea, went home, slept, and today here we are heading into semester 2. Such was the conclusion of our semester break.

 

 

 

 

 

Reflections

Thinking over the last five days, I felt like a lot was accomplished. I’ll probably end up repeating some of the things I’ve said over the last four posts. There was no way I’d miss MYC this year and I was glad to have come. In terms of learning about the topic “humanity”, I didn’t feel like I learnt much extra, most of the stuff we learnt this week was stuff we knew most of (as opposed to say last year’s topic of “Holy Spirit” where we probably knew next to nothing about it). However, one thing I wasn’t able to do before was to put all these factors together and weave it into one big picture. It’s somewhat easy to look at the different aspects of the Bible and to treat them separately; but when you manage to put everything together, you really do get a much bigger picture that enlightens you. Of course, we’re not talking about a complete and sudden change in the way we live, but it certainly does change your perspective a bit and allows you to direct your life better based on the knowledge you attained. Humanity was a pretty good topic to go through this year and I found it was quiet relevant to many worldly issues we face today, things within our culture which we don’t think too hard about such as career and relationships because we just treat them the way they are right now as normal, when the Bible might say it’s not a good thing.

 

I won’t nag too much about food, but this year food was a bit of an issue; there just simply wasn’t enough to eat. It’s a bit hard day after day going through each meal knowing you’re not full, and feeling upset because of it (because that’s how your body will feel if you don’t feed it). Of course, there are many factors that attribute to this; the most obvious fact is that there were about 700+ of us at camp, and preparing food for 700 people is no easy task. So our hearts must definitely go out to the camp staff for being able to pull of such a feat. Because food had to be mass produced in a short amount of time, this also means we can’t really expect any sort of gourmet food. Of course, most of us could’ve had seconds (and thirds and fourths) but for our faculty, we kept ending everything very very late; most of time up to 30 mins into a meal, so by the time we got down to the cafeteria most of the food was gone and we would get the chance to have even seconds (let alone thirds and fourths). Again, that’s what you get when you’re in a discussion group with 125 other people, it doesn’t move as fast as other groups with half the number of people. Sad how all these factors were just stacked against us this whole week. But in any case, we must be thankful for the food because everything had an explanation and was within reason, even if our stomachs did not feel the same.

 

Catching up with people was hard because we had the responsibility to look out for the first years or anyone who was coming to MYC for the first time. And when you get heaps of first years coming, that just adds a lot of people in your personal list of people you need to catch up with over the five days at MYC. As such for me it was hard to balance my time between meeting up with new people and catching up with old friends. I can’t say I got to know many of the new people that well, but proportion-wise there was just too many people to go through so it felt like we didn’t talk to many people. I was glad to have been able to catch up with my primary and high school friends, particularly those not in the Commerce faculty. There were many people I hadn’t seen for a long time and so being able to sit down with them at breakfast, lunch or dinner and just chatting to see how our lives had been was a moment I valued a lot. Becoming more and more busy as life goes on really makes you look and see that even the short 30 minutes you get to chat with a friend over a meal is a very precious time indeed. I was able to catch up with most of my friends I hadn’t talked to in a while, there were others I wasn’t able to catch up with as much but I was glad with the time I managed to get. And since MYC is over, it simply means that we need to learn to create time for ourselves to catch up with these friends, outside of our normal weekly routine.

 

The last thing I would want to reflect over is of course the issue concerning Mandy; it wouldn’t be a complete reflection unless I actually addressed this last issue. I’ll be sparing with my words in case I say anything offensive. Most of you who went to MYC would know (though it was never spoken) that one of my primary duties was to “look after” Mandy (I’m not quite sure what the appropriate verb clause should be). Anyway, we know that’s it’s always a hard issue to get the message across to everyone that when Mandy seizes everything is actually completely okay, that she isn’t in any danger. It was a pretty rough week as people saw or heard and there really isn’t explanation that either one of us can give, that’s just how camps occur. But I was quite encouraged by the number of people who did flock by to ask if she was okay, and in many cases, to assist in keeping her physically safe from hurting herself (again she is never in any danger at all). One memory comes to mind, where in Wednesday night, we all banded together and formulated a strategy to get Mandy back to her room, which was an impossibly long walk for her to pull off in her state. And so we all formed a crowd control/escort unit; we managed to border her off from other people, to keep them from staring and making her feel nervous, and then we had a driver bring their car to the entrance of the hall and a few of us carried and transported her back to her room. That was an image of not only simple cooperation but an also an image of Christian love; where people who didn’t really know Mandy well all came to help as much as they could. Having said that, most people just stood at a distance, stared and pointed, which at first I thought was quite rude and unloving; but I see that they probably have never witnessed anything of the sort and so they wouldn’t know how to react to it, that’s completely fine. For everyone else who was brave enough to check up on her, you have my many thanks as well; it was encouraging to see everyone’s love and support for her.

 

Well I think that wraps up MYC for yet another year. There were many experiences to be had over the week; and as we continue to grow year by year in the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ, I hope that we’ll be able to continue looking out for one another and keeping each other accountable to their godliness since it seems clear that as things get busier, it becomes harder to keep track of our own Christian lives, which is why it is a good thing to have others helping us through that. I look forward to chatting with people over this year’s MYC as well as to seeing everyone again for next year’s one.

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Thursday

It’s funny how by the fourth day, you seem to not think about the rest of camp that lies ahead, but start to reflect on how much has gone by in the last three days. And to put things into perspective, the start of Thursday makes me think about how there’s only one more night left to enjoy the fellowship with everyone, one more night that have fun and to catch up people we weren’t able to chat with since the last three days; because Friday would pretty much be the end of MYC (and everyone goes *sadface* over that of course).

 

I’m running out of relevant photos so I’m just going to slap random ones for this post, which might not have been taken on Thursday.

 

Bible Study

Today we just looked through the Old Testament references that are in our passage and seeing if they help create meaning in Peter’s letter. Of course, without the passage actually being listed in our booklets, and without using a Bible for cross-referencing, we would’ve been completely useless at figuring out where to get the references from; yes, we’re not all Bible freaks who can memorize huge chunks of the Bible. We were all pretty tired today so I’m glad we had lighter work today. The passage has pretty much come together, I guess we’re all just trying to digest the whole passage and put it all together in our minds, and that takes time, hopefully one day.

 

 

Seminar

Today we spent the morning looking at the idea of “rest” which seems closely related to the “Sabbath”. Again the idea of “rest” originates from Genesis where God rests on the seventh day. And when it comes to thinking about how this “rest” applies to us, I just want to skip ahead to say that indeed the idea of “rest” is not on parallel with the tradition of the “Sabbath” where we actually rest from doing work. Resting one day a week to not do any work is not a command in the Bible that’s relevant to us today; it was a tradition earlier on in the history of the Israelites and some churches today still follow it. However, we saw that “rest” was more a state that we enter into through having peace with God.

 

In the Old Testament we looked through several examples where the king of Israel would tear down idols and turn the nation of Israel back into godly people, and the “land” enters a state of “rest”. It’s clear now that “rest” doesn’t actually mean physical rest, but it’s like being at peace with God, such that all hostility between God and His people are put to rest. In a state of rest, Israel was blessed by God and they were prosperous (it’s wrong here to think that following God leads to prosperity; this is what we call the “prosperity gospel” which is false). However, we see that the idea of being at rest with God is a good thing, because being at war with God can only mean us being crushed by Him.

 

Today, we are also at peace with God through Jesus Christ and so we too are in “rest”. Yet at the same time we are still waiting to enter that “rest” because today we obviously are still in a hostile world and things don’t obviously look like they’re in a state of rest. So, much like salvation, we count ourselves “saved” today even though physically speaking we have not been “saved” yet; but because we are assured of it, we are confident enough to call ourselves “saved” because we know it will one day happen. The same path of thinking applies to being at “rest” as well. As such, being at “rest” has absolutely nothing to do with the Sabbath today.

 

 

Free Time

Here are a couple of pictures that describe what happened in most of our free time this week:

 

 

 

I think I already explained before how this year us third years have left the culture of wanting to plays card games like Mafia, or Jungle Speed, but to use our free time to sit down and chat and catch up with people. I think it became more of a need within our faculty because we had such a large group that we all probably never got round to catching up with each other, but rather to meet new people. So we used free time to catch with one another and to chat and encourage one another, which was cool.

 

I spent this last afternoon sleeping because I was dead tired. To be honest I ended up skipping the briefing for second semester mission. I know that I won’t have time this semester to help out with that anyway so I used the opportunity to sleep; probably not the best thing I could’ve done but it really was a tiring week this week.

 

 

Evening Session

The final night’s talk was from Colossians 3:1-17 and the main takeaway point was that we as humans have been freed from slavery to sin to become slaves to righteousness. Carl talked about the idea of freedom and he briefly showed how some forms of freedom are actually not good because it allows us to go and do whatever we want, usually resulting in something that harms us. And so it was good to not be completely free, and in the context of being a Christian, we don’t actually have “freedom” in the sense of what we usually think that word means.

 

By being stuck in sin, we are described to be slaves to sin, meaning we are trapped in an endless cycle of sinning and we are stuck under the penalty of sin which is death. But Jesus frees us from sin, not to become free, but in fact to become slaves again, but to righteousness. I found it interesting that Carl picked up the Exodus and showed how the Israelites were freed from the slavery to Egypt, not to be free and roam the desert as they wished; but freed from the Egyptians so that they may become slaves to God. That’s a weird concept to grasp but because Carl explained why freedom isn’t exactly a good thing (for instance, it allows our society to allow gay marriages for which I am against), we ask ourselves whether slavery is a good thing. The only condition we would require for being slaves, is that we have a loving and caring master (usually not in harmony with the feeling that the word “slave” gives off). Because God is loving and caring, because his slave and servant isn’t a bad thing; we just need to be rid of the bad connotations that we normally associate “slavery” with.

 

This final talk managed to tie in everything we’ve looked at over the last four days. Because of what Jesus has accomplished, for himself, for the human race, and for us, we now find our identity in Him and we now belong to Him and are his servants. Who we are as humans then, is that we’re servants of Jesus Christ, and this is a good thing because by having peace with our master, we are not facing eternal judgement but await an inheritance of eternal life. This does put the perspective back into life; it might not directly give us guidance on how we should live in our daily lives, but it does help us work out our direction in life and help us to realign it with what God wants it to be.

 

 

Final Night

All my ideas will be going over the place from this point on. Traditionally, we have the most fun on the final night because that’s what people would naturally do on the last night of camp. So I guess it’s not really a traditional thing, but more of a natural thing. The harsh thing about it all was that the staff closed off all the meeting areas early in the night (1am is considered early if we’re talking about the final night). They closed these rooms up because everyone was being too noisy and all, and that indeed is a shameful thing to hear; we as a uni got scolded during announcements in one of the evening sessions this week and it’s sad to hear that the final night would be uneventful. Nevertheless I stayed up till 3am playing cards with some of the graduates, who, for them, it would’ve been their final night for their final MYC. This was probably how the last night of MYC should’ve been spent: just calmly relaxing and having light leisure fun with the people who won’t be back next year, and then actually sleeping because it would be a wise thing to get rest before the final day at MYC.

 

So this year, the final night was uneventful as in past years, but that’s okay; wouldn’t have wanted to face blacking out again here and there on Friday. It was a pleasant way to end the night.