[SPEAKER_00]: My name's Darren, good morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm one of the pastors here at One Church, and yes, nice to be up here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Had a bit of a break, and I just want to start by saying, Tim, what an amazing job you have done over the questioning Christianity series.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: APPLAUSE When I looked at the preaching restaurants, or Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, I was like, wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: is am I going to get subdued in it some stage?
[SPEAKER_00]: We went to bats, literally in the myself fever all the way through and he's still standing and what an amazing series it's been so thank you so much team for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: One church, what are we on about?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are we here for?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk this morning about one of our values.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a vision document.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of you will have seen it, some of you are into those sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's on our website, on our about page.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in our vision document, we have four values as a church.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to talk about one of them this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the value is that we are a church of disciple makers.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's right up there in our vision document.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what actually reads in our, in that document.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are a church of disciple makers, equipped and sent to make disciples in all of our spheres of influence.
[SPEAKER_00]: In our homes, workplaces, neighbourhoods, schools, online and around the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our passion is to help people discover Jesus, experience his love and grace, and to join us as we follow him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything we do, services this goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything we do, services this goal, to make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single thing that we do as a church, all our ministries, the way we welcome people in the FOIA, our hospitality team, our Alpha Ministry, our youth group, our kids' ministry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything we do, services the goal of making disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we get this vision from?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we get this value from?
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually comes directly from the last words that Jesus said to his disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd been joining with these disciples for three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd been making them his disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his final words for them, we find in Matthew, right at the end of the gospel of Matthew.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when they saw him, they worshipped him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We believe that was still doubting at this time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They still had doubts.
[SPEAKER_00]: They still had questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And surely I am with you always to the very ends of the age.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are Jesus' final words to each disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've made you my disciples and now you go and make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your commission.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go and make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is our goal as a church.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our value as a church.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to be the cycle makers.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what is a disciple?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably useful for us if we're going to make disciples to know what a disciple is.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I make a cake, it doesn't happen that regularly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I generally know what I'm going to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a recipe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I might have a picture of the finished product.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is a disciple?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does a disciple look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of smart people who've written on this topic, as you might expect, the great commission people have written about how to make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the definitions of a disciple that I found really helpful, mainly because it's really simple, and I can remember it, is from a guy called John Mark Koma.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of you would know him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote a book called Practicing the Way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in his book he talks about becoming an apprentice of Jesus or becoming a disciple of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says there's three main movements in the life of a disciple, or in the life of a apprentice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three main things that they need to do, they need to move towards.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first one is that they move towards Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: A disciple bees with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's probably not the best English.
[SPEAKER_00]: But...
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're a disciple of Jesus, you want to be with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: We see this in the life of the very first disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said to Peter and to Simon, to Andrew, come, follow me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the next three years, they spent time with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get all these beautiful pictures in the gospels of the way they spent time with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They walked along roads with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They stood in storms in boats in the middle of a stormy sea together with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went to weddings with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They ate meals together with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They saw him teach.
[SPEAKER_00]: They saw him do amazing miracles.
[SPEAKER_00]: They saw him heal people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they would have had a whole heap of other moments as well that we don't actually have recorded in the gospels.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just moments where they sat with Him quietly, watching a sunset.
[SPEAKER_00]: They spent time with Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were with Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the call of a disciple to be with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after Jesus went after the great commission, they continued to be with Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do we actually find the first disciples doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: The early church doing the first thing that we're devoted to doing, it says in Acts is that they were devoted to prayer and to the apostles teaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they continued to be with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the call of older disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are a disciple of Jesus, this movement in your life to be with Jesus is your calling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus wants to be with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Second thing that John Mark came to says is that the Cycles become like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another movement in their life is that they be with Him and out of that they become like Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: This might happen for a few reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firstly, when you be with someone, generally they rub off on you.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've got a friend that you spend a lot of time with, you begin to see how they talk, you pick up some of their lingo.
[SPEAKER_00]: You begin to see how they look at the world and that robs off on you as well, have they treat other people?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes that inspires you as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these first disciples in being with Jesus, things began to rub off on them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They began to become like Him, just start being with Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also at times Jesus pointed out things in their life as well and challenged things in their life as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: He put his finger on things and said, now that's an area that you need to work on, he taught them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they became more like him through that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they continued to become more like him as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even after he left, and through their prayer, through the apostles teaching, they became more like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is another movement that we are called to as well as disciples of Jesus, to be with him and to become like him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The third movement that John Mark came to say is that they begin to do as Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, we see this in the life of the first disciples in Matthew chapter 10, I think it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus says to the 12 disciples, I want you to go out and I want you to start preaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to start healing people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to start casting out demons.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to go out and to do the things that you have seen me do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Little later on he sends out 72 of his followers to do the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So go out and do the things that he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the great commission, he was no longer physically with him, but they continued to do these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we actually see that they formed this community, there was very much like the community that he'd formed around himself with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they continued to preach and they continued to do miracles.
[SPEAKER_00]: They continued to do the things that Jesus did and Christians for centuries have continued to do as Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is our call.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know about you, but when I look at these three things,
[SPEAKER_00]: If I fully threw myself into these three things, I would be very different after a period of time in doing these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: These three things mean that as a disciple, we don't change.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't stay the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: We change.
[SPEAKER_00]: The disciples don't stay the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: The disciples are always growing in these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So where's a church?
[SPEAKER_00]: a passionate about making disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in the church, our passionate about inviting people to be with Jesus, to become like Jesus, and to do the things Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: We, as a church, are passionate about changing people's lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a part of our church, we don't want you to be the same today as you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: in three months' time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or we don't want to be the same in three months' time as you are today.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are a church of people who aren't stagnant.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want you to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want you to grow in these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you willing to change?
[SPEAKER_00]: Changes are hard sometimes, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think we all need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm excited by this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I know in my life change is something I need.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I'm honest with myself,
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that there are areas of my life that are broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need change.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are areas of my life where I need healing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need change.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you the same?
[SPEAKER_00]: Other things in your life that need to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're a church where that change is possible, because we want to make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to come to Jesus and be with Him, become like Him, and to do the things that He did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now as I look around the room today, there's all kinds of disciples of Jesus here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just looking around before.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got people in our church who have been disciples with Jesus for, I don't know, is anyone been a disciple of Jesus for 60 years?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, 70 years?
[SPEAKER_00]: couple, eight years, maybe, maybe not quite.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got people who are at the deep end.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I follow as kind of, I heard someone talk about their church being like a pool once.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a shallow end in a deep end.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've got people here who've been following Jesus for eight years or they are, 70 years of their life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Decades of being with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: decades of becoming like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Decades of doing the things Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the other end of the poor, we've got people who are right at the beginning of their journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just dipping their toes in the water.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just starting to be with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just starting to become like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just starting to do the things that Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got people all along the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at times, we go to the deep end, and then sometimes we come back a bit and we feel Jesus calling us back into those deeper places as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing about this pool is that it's not actually like this pool.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually an infinity pool, because there's always a call to go to deeper waters when you're with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two weeks ago,
[SPEAKER_00]: Tomorrow, in this room, my family had a Thanksgiving service for my dad.
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad passed away just a few weeks ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my brother and sister and I sat up here and we shared a ulogy.
[SPEAKER_00]: We shared the story of my dad's life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went for about 45 minutes, 50 minutes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a bit long, but it was actually the short version.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is a very organized man.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we'd read his story, it would have gone for about seven hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Put it into chat to EBT and it said, you might not want to cut it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The amazing thing about Dad's story is that right from the very beginning to the end, it was about him and Jesus all the way through.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dad kind of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: as a child in the 40s.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a little church in Warigol, Methodist church in Warigol, kind of faith there, went to Sunday at school there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote about how he heard stories of missionaries and was inspired by those stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved to Melbourne when he was about 17 to do a cadet ship at Maya to sell fridges.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was his goal in life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was to sell white goods.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while he was there, his faith kind of drifted a little bit as he started to interact with the things in the big city, in the big smoke, until he got a ladder, and he got a ladder from his brother who was a missionary in New Guinea.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his brother Ian wrote to dad and said, Jeff, you've got to get your life back on track.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to get serious about your faith, you are drifting.
[SPEAKER_00]: He confronted dad.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Dad felt convicted by this letter and he wrote in his story that I've decided to throw myself at Jesus, what a great term, and he said, I threw myself into prayer, I threw myself into reading the Bible, and I threw myself into my local church, and
[SPEAKER_00]: He describes what happened as a result of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I began to have healing in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: I began to have a change in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was going on here?
[SPEAKER_00]: He was being with Jesus, and he was beginning to become like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a result of those changes in his life, he felt God was starting to talk to him about what he should do with his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he started to feel like God was saying, I want you to start doing some different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he volunteered at his church to teach Sunday school.
[SPEAKER_00]: He volunteered to go into the Broadmados Housing Commission to do youth work.
[SPEAKER_00]: He volunteered to go to St.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kilder and start sharing his faith on the streets.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of those things took him way out of his comfort zone, but he felt God was calling him to do these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, what's going on here was being with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was becoming like Jesus, and he started to do the things that Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the next 50 years of his life, he was doing ministry.
[SPEAKER_00]: He became a pastor.
[SPEAKER_00]: He got really passionate about mission, started raising money for missions, started taking trips with people from his churches to Thailand and Cambodia.
[SPEAKER_00]: He right to the end of his life, he continued to do mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the last year of his life, he joined the local stamp club.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he was interested in stamps really, but because he was interested in people who collected stamps.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to get to know them so he could share his faith with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad was a giant of a disciple.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would never have said he was, but he was incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had decades of this discipleing himself with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a giant of a disciple, but do you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Never once in his story, did he say, and I arrived.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never once in his story, did he say, I'm done.
[SPEAKER_00]: All through his story was him saying that he felt Jesus was taking him to deeper water.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right into the end of his life he filled notebooks with his prayers and his scribbled on his Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: He spent time with Jesus right to the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: He continued to become more and more like Jesus and he continued to do the things that Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's swimming right at the deep end now, he's with Jesus, which is an amazing thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he inspires me to continually go to deeper water.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, in our church also, we don't just have followers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure there are people in the room here today, particularly after our questioning at Christianity series.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of people who say, well, I'm not really a follower of Jesus, but I'm standing on the edge of the pool.
[SPEAKER_00]: And wondering whether it may be you should jump in the pool, wondering why we're all swimming in the pool, and what's going on there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know some of you have been joining with us, and we've had quite a few people come along to our church over the last couple of months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to say to you as an explorer, we'd love having you here.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a church which is open and welcoming to explore us and we want you to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want you to have the questions that you have to express them.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a place where you can do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But our goal as a church is for you to move as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we want to see you actually move towards the person of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whether you end up in the pool or not, we want to draw you to Jesus and introduce you to Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can make a decision about whether you want to be a follower or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this is the goal of our church to make disciples, to draw people to Jesus, and to go to deep new depths in that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to talk a little bit this morning about the explorer end of the pool.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we actually move people along?
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I love about our church is that we're constantly
[SPEAKER_00]: wanting to grow in these things, and our eldership and our ministry team are really united in this, and one of the things that we've started to think about is what is the pathway look like from Explorer through the deep depth of following Jesus, and we're working on some new things to help us with that in the coming year.
[SPEAKER_00]: We
[SPEAKER_00]: No, there are some gaps in our pathway.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we want to fill some of those gaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we actually want to announce some of those things in their coming months.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we have all kinds of things going on in our church already, which are leading people to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our Sunday services are a place where we do all three of these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to have time with Jesus to be with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: In our worship, in our prayer, we want to have teaching that inspires us to become like Jesus and inspires us to do the things that Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our Sunday services are for explorers and followers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to try and hold those things in tensions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some weeks we do more for the explorers like we have over the last 8 weeks and other weeks we do more for the followers.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we want to be on a Sunday a place where both can come.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got other ministries in our church like our children's and youth ministry in our on-call ministry for retirees which are again open for explorers and followers.
[SPEAKER_00]: but then we also have some ministries in our church, which are just for followers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're not really the best place for an explorer.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, our leadership institute.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a ministry of our church for young adults, who are Christians, who want to go deeper in their faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a place for explorers.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not relevant for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got other ministries like that in our church as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we've got other ministries in our church which are just for explorers like Alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't let too many Christians come to Alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's other places for you to grow in your faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mainly the Christians who come to El Far are there to host and give hospitality or we have some table leaders as well, but it's a place for explorers to come, or those who are just right at the shallow end of the pool to go deeper in their faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the things we want to do over the next year is to have some new things that will come to help both followers and explorers to go deeper in their relationship with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to return to the great commission for a moment just to finish up this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first thing that really stands out to me in the great commission is this statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wonder how it makes you feel.
[SPEAKER_00]: this statement, go, make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: Particularly those of you who are followers, how does it make you feel to hear the great commission?
[SPEAKER_00]: No doubt if you've been in church for a while, you've heard this quite a few times.
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, I have two simultaneous feelings.
[SPEAKER_00]: On one end of the feelings I'm really inspired, I love seeing people become disciples of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love seeing people, particularly at the start of their journey, like Michael this morning, talk about coming to faith and how God has changed their life.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love hearing those stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love when opportunities have come for me to participate in those moments as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But alongside that inspiration, I have to admit that I also have some other feelings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Particularly when people start using the E word, evangelism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Makes me feel a bit uncomfortable if I'm really honest.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have some fear associated with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, goes back to some previous experiences that I've had with evangelism, both being on the receiving end of it, some pushy evangelism, but also some times where I've tried to do evangelism that haven't really gone so well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've told the story before, of where my youth pastor, as a 1415 year old, had a surprise youth event of going door knocking.
[SPEAKER_00]: That didn't go so well.
[SPEAKER_00]: not so many people showed up to church the next week either, I have to say, but that wasn't a positive experience for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I've got some kind of hangups with evangelism and some doubts, I guess, in the back of my mind, as to whether maybe I'm gifted enough, or whether I know enough, to share with someone, to lead them to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I have some hangups with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure some of you have similar sorts of experiences of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a church over history, I think we have outsourced evangelism a lot to the missionaries, to the evangelists, to the extraverts.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus didn't segment off his 11 disciples and say, I want you three to go and make disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I want you all to go and make the Cypals.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think we need to grapple with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm really excited that we're in a church which wants to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We actually did a survey earlier in the year of our church and about 200 of you filled in the survey.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the big themes in this survey was that people wanted to learn how to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had numerous people ask for us to do some teaching on apologetics.
[SPEAKER_00]: teaching on how to answer the questions that people have about faith, that changed our whole sermon series for the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our questioning Christianity came out of your feedback.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are numerous people ask us to do some training on how to have faith conversations with friends and family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Next year we want to do some training on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that we're in a church that wants to grow in this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though we might feel a bit uncomfortable with it as well, and so we want to be a church that actually does this and have some plans for doing that in the coming year.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the morning, I want to just go back to Scripture and just look at one story of someone doing evangelism, someone actually bringing someone else to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've done a few of these recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did Linda did a one just nine or so weeks ago on the Samaritan woman in how she
[SPEAKER_00]: and I talked about Simon and Andrew and where Jesus called them to become fishes of men.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we've done a few of these recently, but I want us this morning look at just a really short passage in John chapter 1.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where Philip and Nathaniel become followers of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me read it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, next day, Jesus decided to leave for Galilee.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it seems Philip did, because Philip was always listed as one of the twelve.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip, like Andrew and Peter, were from a town called Bethsideer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip found the Thannyung and told him, we have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, about whom the prophets also wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nazareth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can anything good come from there, Nathaniel asked, seems to have some prejudices about Nazareth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's like a Melbourne person going, Sidney, we don't really know what the hang-up is, but Nazareth is kind of a bit of a backwater perhaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has some doubts that anything good can come from then.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Jesus saw in the manual approaching him, he said to him, of him, here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you know me, Nathaniel asked?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus answered, I saw you while you were still under the fig tree, before Philip called you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the manual declared, Rabbi, you are the son of God, you are the king of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I love this little story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a few things I think that we can pull out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to speak to both followers and to explore as this morning about this little passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first thing I love about this passage is how spontaneous evangelism is.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we build evangelism up to be something when we're training for, we need to pray about, we need to be gifted in, we need a strategy for, but for Philip, it's just a,
[SPEAKER_00]: gut-impulsive reaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: He finds Jesus, something he's been searching for, and he immediately goes and shares it with a friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Evangelism in this passage is simply inviting a friend to explore Jesus for themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do evangelism all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I found this great show on Netflix.
[SPEAKER_00]: You should watch it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, this book changed my life, you should read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This financial plan, I know exactly what he's talking about, is save me all this money, you should go to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: This car is fantastic, you should buy one.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do it all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We find something, we share it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a natural reaction, particularly in our age of social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: I experience this, here's a photo of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We share things constantly, and people react generally fairly positive to our recommendations.
[SPEAKER_00]: They like us, and they want to know what we like as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fill up simply shares what he's found with Nathaniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Second thing that I love about this story is the enthusiasm that Philip has and the confidence that he has that what he's sharing with Nathaniel is actually going to be good news for Nathaniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip and Nathaniel seem to have had a backstory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip knows what Nathaniel's looking for.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've talked about this in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip knows that Nathaniel is longing for something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip knows that Nathaniel is after some change, that he's restless.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when he finds the thing he knows and Nathaniel is looking for, he shares it knowing that Nathaniel is actually going to find this to be good news.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this can speak to us in a number of ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firstly, I think it should inform the way that we share because we should be sharing with confidence that what we have is actually good news.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing I think I've learnt from this is that we need to know what people around us are searching for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have those kind of conversations with people where you know what they're longing for?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what they're searching for.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know that they're restless.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you in proximity with people that you are travelling with them that closely that you know what they're longing for?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know what someone's longing for, you know how to share the good news with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I actually think we need to be working on our relationships and hearing what's going on in people's lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then sharing with confidence that what we have is actually the answer to those longings.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we have in Jesus is actually the answer to that restlessness.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have something that is good news.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last thing I love about this little story is that Philip doesn't get too caught up in Nathaniel's doubts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nathaniel says, Nazareth, can anything good come from there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you notice what Philip did?
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, come and see.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't buy into answering that question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't respond to people's doubts or questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've literally just done eight weeks of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a church where you can ask questions and we want to answer them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately, Philip knows that
[SPEAKER_00]: Now what's going to convince in the manual isn't his clever answer, it's meeting Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: We invite people to encounter Jesus and Jesus takes over from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lesley New Begin says, we do not bring people to Christ by clever arguments but by bearing witness to what we have found and inviting others into that same discovery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at what happens after Philip talks to Nathaniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip has made Nathaniel curious about Jesus, but Jesus convinced Jesus actually encounters him.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Jesus saw Nathaniel approaching, he said of him, here truly is an Israelite whom they're in whom there is no deceit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nathaniel's taken back by this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This shocks him a little.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, um, how do you know who I am?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus has encountered him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has shown him that he knows him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus goes further.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I saw you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw you when you are under the fig tree before Philip called you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus reveals something else to fill it, but we don't really know what this is about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Theologians have tried to explain what Nathaniel was doing under the fig tree, maybe he was doing something shameful, or maybe he was praying, we don't know what was going on there, but Jesus saying this to Nathaniel is a profound moment, and it rocks Nathaniel's world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It converts him of something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rabbi, you're the son of God, you're the king of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus encountered Nathaniel, in a way that we don't completely understand, Philip made Nathaniel curious, Nathaniel, Jesus made Nathaniel convicted, Jesus encountered him on a deep level.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this morning, I want to just give two invitations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firstly, for those of you who are followers of Jesus, if you're an explorer, I'm not talking to you right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just talking to the followers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you willing to not just be a disciple of Jesus, but to become a disciple, maker?
[SPEAKER_00]: This week, I was out walking in the neighborhood here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't live far from here, I was out walking with my dog, had worship music playing in my ears.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started praying, I quite often do these prayer walks.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was walking around the neighborhood and I was seeing people and I was praying for those people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, God, will you touch that person?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was walking through the neighborhood and I was praying for the businesses and I started praying for revival for Blackburn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll go right into it and I was like, oh, we bring revival to Blackburn.
[SPEAKER_00]: We help people to come to know you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I was walking along, I had this really strange sensation that God wanna be the stop praying, which is the first time that's ever happened to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't hear from God a lot, but I just had this strong sense that I had to stop praying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, what is this about?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I walked home and I opened up my Bible and I opened up to Matthew 9.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what I read there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus went through all the towns and villages teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he saw the crowds he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he said to his disciples, the harvest is 24, but the workers are few.
[SPEAKER_00]: Asked the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out the workers into his harvest field.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was reading that, I was like, oh, maybe God was saying, don't pray for a revival, pray for harvesters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pray for the workers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I almost shut my Bible at that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before I did, I thought, what's after this?
[SPEAKER_00]: After this is chapter 10.
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally the next verses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know what happens in literally the next verses?
[SPEAKER_00]: After Jesus says to his disciples, pray for workers to be sent out.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus calls He's 12 disciples to Him and gives them authority to drive out in pure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three verses later, these 12 Jesus sent out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So He says, pray that God was sent out workers and then He sends out the 12 disciples immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sends him out with the following instructions, don't go amongst the Gentiles or enter any town of the Americans, rather go to the lost sheep of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you go, proclaim this message, the kingdom of heaven has come near.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'll mistake, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons, freely, you have received, freely, give.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus says, pray for workers, pray for harvesters,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I felt like God was saying to me, you can pray for revival, but don't pray unless you're willing to take up the tools of the harvester and to go and bring revival.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can pray that God would bring in the harvest, but unless we're willing to actually join in that process, those prayers are kind of empty.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's pray for revival, but let's pray that God would equip us and move us, and the opportunities that would be before us we would have the courage to step into.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you willing disciples of Jesus to be disciple makers?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you willing to say, come and see, when the times are right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Nine weeks ago we had communion.
[SPEAKER_00]: and I invited you to write on a card the name of someone you wanted to see alongside you at community Monday.
[SPEAKER_00]: You write 730 groups of people, family, sporting clubs, you have a heart for people outside of this room.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's just half of the equation.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to be praying for those people, but we need to also be willing to step in when the time is right, to say, come and see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come and see maybe, come and see Alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the person's out a point where that is the right thing, but it might simply be, come and have coffee.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it may be you sharing what you did on Sunday and what you heard on Sunday.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may be you sharing what God has been helping you through in some way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may simply be listening to someone and understanding what they're searching for and then responding to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you willing to be a disciple, Maker?
[SPEAKER_00]: The second invitation I want to give you this morning is for those of you who are explorers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's something else in this passage that we've just looked at that I really love, and I want to encourage you to do as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is to approach Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I was reading through this story, I just felt myself coming back to those two words on the screen.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Jesus saw him, the manual approaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: Phillips had come and see.
[SPEAKER_00]: The manual was curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: He still had doubts.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doubted that Jesus could really be the one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He probably had questions, but he walked towards him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He approached Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to encourage you this morning if you're not an explorer to continue to walk towards him, to approach him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that may be by coming to Alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, we've got 25 people signed up already to Alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: You wouldn't be the only one.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not the only explorer in our church.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's 25 others.
[SPEAKER_00]: wanting courage to come to Alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just come on Tuesday to the first one and see if it's good for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can sign up on our website or we'd love to know you're coming so we can cater for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alpha's just nine weeks of conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we do here on church is good for explorers on some level but you don't get to ask questions so much but Alpha's a place for conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a place for you to share what you're going through, and to hear from other people on that journey as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Elfamite, good for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another thing that you can do is just simply to talk to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's simply talking to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a prayer that you might ask, say to Jesus, might go something like this, Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you're real, but if you are,
[SPEAKER_00]: We review, reveal yourself to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the first prayer you might say.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe that when we pray, something happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Change happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: God moves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to invite you this morning if you're an explorer, simply to begin to talk to Jesus in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: in a prayer something that you want to grow in and you're an explorer I've got these little books that called Triprang and these are perfect for anyone who hasn't prayed before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a seven day guide of your first seven days of praying.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're an explorer, I'd love to give you one of these this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might be doing alpha, at least might go well with alpha.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just come up after the service.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got a hundred of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you really, if there's a hundred of you here, they're free.
[SPEAKER_00]: While I'm willing for you to have them this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if you've got an explorer in your life, who you think might be wanting to start praying, come and grab one for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to give them all out.
[SPEAKER_00]: But approach Jesus, approach Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the fan you'll approach Jesus, Jesus encountered the fan you'll.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus approached him.
[SPEAKER_00]: revealed Himself to Him, and I believe the same will be true for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: This morning we're going to take communion, and really communion is a time where we approach Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a time which we do fairly regularly here at church and it means different things are different times for different people, but it started with Jesus sharing a meal with his disciples, the night before he was betrayed and during the meal he took a loaf of bread and broke it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he gave it to his disciples, he says, eat this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my body broken for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't really know what that was on about yet, because they didn't know what was gonna happen the next day.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, do this and remember it's with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Continue to gather together and take bread and break it and remember me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember my broken body.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he took a cup, which had wine in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he passed that around and he said, this is my blood shed for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you gather together, I want you to drink it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you do, remember me.
[SPEAKER_00]: This morning, we're gonna take Wafers, which are the bread and some juice, which is the wine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're gonna approach Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna remember Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna take a moment to be with Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe in this moment of being with Jesus, he might want to do some business with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He might want to encourage you to be a little more like him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this moment of being with him maybe, he might even move you to leave this place a little different to do something that he would do.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a moment, this is a practice that draws us into this disciple-making process.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's morning I encourage you to come to the table, to approach him, to allow him to shape you and move you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether you're an explorer or a follower, take this as a moment to go into deeper waters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heavenly Father, we thank you for inviting us to this table, a way of approaching you, a way of making room for you as we sang earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you that this table is open to all, and that it symbolises you drawing us into a deeper water, into relationship with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We thank you also for the sacrifice for the bread, the broken body, for the juice, the shed blood, the reminders of your incredible grace and sacrifice for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to pray that you would meet us in this moment and keep growing us.
[SPEAKER_00]: our ashes are going to invite you to come to the table on either side and in the center, just follow what they say and then go back to your seats when you're ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: But just take this moment to approach Jesus and to be with him.