A CHURCH THAT KNOWS HOW TO WIN

A CHURCH THAT KNOWS HOW TO WIN

A couple of months ago, a young man was invited to our church. He was not a church goer. But the day that he turned up in our weekly Sunday morning worship service something happened to him. Although English was not his first language, and despite coming from a culture that is famously opposed to Christianity, he heard and understood clearly enough that day – and despite what he had been told all his life – that there was a God in Heaven who loved him and had been directing him throughout his life to this moment. In response to this work of the Holy Spirit he declared his surrender to Christ and was subsequently baptised in our June water baptism service. From that point, each time someone asked him how he had come to Christ, his eyes would water and he would get emotional just at the thought of how Christ had saved him. But all of this could have been derailed if it hadn’t been for the warm welcome, love, and acceptance he found in our church when he first came. It’s the stories like these that make me proud to be the pastor of our church!

Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
Romans 15:7

 We live in apple orchard country which is why most of us understand what’s involved in harvesting them. Each mature apple tree has low hanging fruit which is the easiest to harvest. The rest of the tree involves a bit more work to harvest – especially the high hanging fruit. In some respects, the above story is an example of harvesting ‘low hanging fruit‘. The idea of harvesting an apple true is a great way to illustrate how our church can become a church that wins.

W – WELCOME

 This, and many other stories like it, show how we can win as a church. This particular story is an example of what happens when we pray for God to bring people in, and then He does. But like any prayer we pray, our partnership with God doesn’t end with the “Amen” of our prayer. When Abraham prayed for a son, God came to him and promised him that ‘this time next year, Sarah will give birth to a son’ (Genesis 18:4). I’m pretty sure and Abraham and Sarah didn’t just keep praying that this promise from God would be fulfilled! We too must take the next steps of faith in order to receive from God the answers He has for us. When we pray for God to bring people into our church, and He does, our next step is to welcome them. 

 Welcoming people to church involves acknowledging them with a greeting (such as, “Hello”, “Hi”, “Welcome”) and doing it with eye contact. We don’t need to give them 20 questions – we just need to let them know they are welcome, and that we accept them. When God answers our prayers to bring people to church, and all we have to do is welcome them, we are, as they say, picking the low hanging fruit – an expression which means this kind of outreach is relatively easy. I think everyone in our church can be a part of this. 

For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed Me
Matthew 25:35

I – INVITE

He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where He was staying, and they stayed with Him that day, for it was about the tenth hour…(46) Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
John 1:39, 46

 Metaphorically (using words as pictures) the fruit that is notlow hanging and involves a bit more effort to reach and is little harder to pick. We continue to pray for God to help us to reach these people and again the answer to those prayers will involve us inviting people to church. This may come after we’ve shared our story with them, or after they’ve shared with us about some of the challenges they’ve been facing in life. While I would love for everyone in our church to be an inviter, I understand that this is not always easy for everyone to do. But there are some (and perhaps you’re one of them) who find inviting people to church, or an event our church puts on, to be an easy thing to do. According to one study I saw, around 70% of people would say yes to an invitation to attend church if they were invited. I would love to see our invite rate improve. Perhaps for those of who feel more comfortable welcoming people to church than inviting people to church, it might be nice to pray for our inviters to be bold, attractive, winsome, and effective as they invite their friends, family, and work colleagues to church.

And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.
Luke 14:23

N – NUDGE

 There are some people who seem to be so hardened to Christianity, that it seems they could never turn to Christ. These are the people who are unlikely to just turn up at church – even in answer to prayer – or ever accept an invitation to come to church. Their unwillingness to even discuss the matter might even arouse a hostile response from them, “Don’t you dare ever talk to be about religion!” Maybe they were hurt (or worse) by some ‘Christian’ or perhaps they had a negative experience with a church, or maybe they are defiantly living a life so opposed to Biblical standards that they resent the God of the Bible. Possibly the best way to reach such a person as this is to nudge them.

He answered them, “I also will ask you a question. Now tell me…
Jesus (Luke 20:3)

 There are several ways to nudge a person who is this resistant to the Gospel. The first way is to put ‘a stone’ in their shoe, so to speak. This can be done with an appropriate question that gets them thinking and even questioning their views about life, the world, and the existence of God. The second way is to provide them with an inexplicable act of kindness. The third way is to let them observe your life over a longer period of time as you deal with life’s highs and lows – and even tragedies – so that your faithful, consistent witness, throughout it all bears a clear testimony to the presence of God in your life. Nudging someone toward Christ can take years. Many years.

One of the best examples of this that I am aware of relates to someone no one ever thought would ever turn to God. In the middle of the twentieth century, Professor Antony Flew, along with some other secular humanists (atheists) produced The Humanist Manifesto in which they argued against the existence of God and the need for all humans to behave ethically despite this. Many years later, Prof. Flew toured America promoting atheism in public lectures and denouncing Christianity in particular. He and his fellow collaborators, including Prof. Bertrand Russell, thought that all Christians were fools and morons for believing in God. As part of his USA lecture tour he agreed to a series of public debates about the existence of God with a Christian. His debating opponent was Professor Gary Habermas. As the debates got underway, Flew realised that Habermas was more than his equal intellectually. In fact, Dr. Habermas challenged Prof. Flew’s atheism in ways that Antony Flew had never considered. This was a significant stone in Professor Antony Flew’s shoe! After each of these debates Gary Habermas would take the aged British academic out for dinner. Prof. Flew was surprised by the kindness of Dr. Habermas. As they talked over their dinners, Antony Flew got to know Gary Habermas and discovered that for several years he had had to care for his very ill wife (this was something the sceptical atheist Chicago Tribune journalist, Lee Strobel, also encountered when he interviewed Gary Habermas for a story he was writing and ended up featuring Habermas’s story in the movie about Lee’s conversion, The Case For Faith). These very personal exchanges between Flew and Habermas revealed that Habermas’s faith in the God of the Bible was not some cold, formal, religious duty, but a personal relationship with this God that enabled him to be sustained throughout life’s tragedies. Dr. Gary Habermas and nudged Prof. Antony Flew! 

 The result of these little stones in Flew’s shoes was dramatic but not immediate. The last book that Antony Flew wrote before he died was a book in which he renounced atheism as wrong and extolled the God of the Bible!  

 While I think everybody in our church can make visitors/new attenders to our church feel welcome, I realise that not everybody can invite someone to church. Let’s pray for our inviters! And, I acknowledge that only a few in our church can be good nudgers. Let’s pray for our nudgers! By welcoming, inviting, and nudging, we are learning to become a church that wins.

Pastor Andrew Corbett

BEFORE YOU LEAVE - How To Best Use Your Last 3 Seconds!

LIFE HAS ONE CERTAINTY

We used to say that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. But life has only one certainty – we will all die. The death-rate is still 100%! Yet faced with this absolute certainty, too few people think about it and even fewer people take steps to prepare for it and what lies beyond it. And, as it turns out, not even many people who have become Christians have given much thought either! But I have something to say to those who think religion – and Christianity in particular – is (at best) irrelevant. Please give me just three minutes now – and just three seconds later!

WHY DO PEOPLE CONVERT TO CHRISTIANITY? 

Christians have sometimes been accused of promoting a pie-in-the-sky message. But the social research reveals a pretty clear message about why people convert to Christianity. Here are the top three reasons why people become Christians-

1. I was raised in a Christian home.

2. I had a religious experience (answered prayer, dream/vision, etc.)

3.  I had a need that converting to Christianity met (drug/alcohol deliverance, marriage repair, loneliness, poverty relief, etc.)

Conversely, the top three reasons why people reject Christianity are – 

1. Science has now disproven Christianity.
2. Too many doubts about the Bible’s claims.
3. Too many Christians are hypocrites.

WHY AN HOMICIDE DETECTIVE WAS AN ATHEIST!

With all this in mind, why then would a highly successful Homicide Detective who was a comfortable atheist convert to Christianity? He tells people that he didn’t convert to Christianity because he raised in a Christian home – because he wasn’t! He didn’t convert because his friends were Christian. He didn’t convert because he wanted to know God. He didn’t convert because he wanted to go to heaven. He didn’t convert because he needed to change his life – in fact, he writes-

At the age of thirty-five, it seemed like I had everything I could possibly want. I’d graduated at the top of my class in my undergraduate and graduate programs, earned the honor recruit award at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Academy and was in an incredible job assignment, working as a member of a five man career-criminal surveillance team. I had been with my wife for eighteen years and we had a great family. We just purchased our second home in a community I had admired since childhood. Nothing could have been better. This was the status and condition of my life when I walked into a Christian church for the first time.

I wasn’t looking for answers; I thought I already had all the answers. In fact, most of my friends came to me for advice. I was the guy you came to if you wanted to ask a question about how to work an investigation, how to maintain a good marriage, how to raise your kids. I was happy, content, and full of myself. I definitely wasn’t the kind of person who thought he needed help or needed fixing. My self-confidence had grown into arrogance. I was opinionated, sure of myself and difficult to reason with. I was sure I was right, and my life seemed to confirm this at every turn. I was in control and my decisions seemed to be producing the life I wanted.

This Homicide detective who spent his life gathering evidence and became a Cold-Case specialist who had a perfect prosecution record throughout his entire career (!) states that there was only one reason why he became a Christian  – after having used his detective skills to investigate Christianity’s claims. This hard-nose Cold-Case detective used the same criteria that he had used to investigate an unsolved murder to investigate Christianity: what is the truth?

WHY AN ATHEIST HOMICIDE DETECTIVE BECAME A CHRISTIAN!

James (Jim) Warner Wallace (known as J. Warner Wallace) investigated the claims of Christianity and became convinced that it was true. This is despite the popular opinion that you could never tell which religion was true or not – or even the nonsensical notion that all religions are equally true! 

Religious claims are just like any other truth claims. They can be tested. Since every religion makes claims which are contradictory to each other, they cannot all be true. To determine which one is true may not be important to you now, but, I guarantee you, in your final seconds of life it will matter a lot to you (because dying has a powerful way of rearranging a person’s priorities!)!

	1. CAN THE TRUTH CLAIM BE VERIFIED? All truth claims can be verified in some way – but not necessarily in the same way. For example, historic claims can be verified by eye-witness accounts or even by those who have interrogated eye-witnesses.
	2. DOES THE CLAIM CORRESPOND TO REALITY? Truth claims can be tested as to whether they correspond to what we know intuitively, by experience, or by observation.
	3. CAN THE CLAIM BE TESTED? Truth claims, particularly experiential claims, can be put to the test. For example, when you doctor says, “Take this pill, it will make you feel better!” You can test this claim by taking the pill.

Therefore, when your body suddenly gets cold, your breathing becomes increasingly difficult, you lose your hearing because YOUR HEART IS POUNDING SO HARD, please REMEMBER THESE TWO THINGS:

1.  No matter what wrong you’ve done wrong, GOD offers you forgiveness for it all (because Jesus Christ took your penalty on the Cross).

2.  You can have all of your wrong forgiven forever by asking God to forgive you (because Jesus Christ took your penalty on the Cross).

This is based on what we know of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity. In the Gospel of Luke, we have the account of Christ’s execution along with two capital-crime criminals.  

And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.
Luke 23:33

And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!”
Luke 23:35

But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
Luke 23:40

And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Luke 23:42

The central claim of Christianity is that every human being is a natural rebel against our Creator, God. Yet God offers us terms of peace if we will surrender to Him and accept the forgiveness He offers because Jesus the Christ, the eternal Son of God, came to earth and was born of a virgin girl some 2,000 years ago, and bore the penalty of our rebellion in His execution at the hands of the Romans. Even if this seems too incredible to you now, in your final few seconds of life on this earth, I guarantee you, your perspective on these things will change! And when it does, and you experience a hyper-awareness of your own rebellion against God, the above story tells us that even then – God can meet people at their death-beds and offer them His forgiveness! 

 

And in that moment, if you have never settled accounts with God, and you find that seconds seem like hours (which I believe is God’s grace toward every human being), I beg of you, receive His forgiveness by praying one simple prayer – “God, please forgive me!” Because how you respond to God in this life determines your standing before Him for eternity in the next!

Pastor Andrew

I DOUBT The Nature of Doubt

By Andrew Corbett

I DOUBT. (Part 1) The Nature of Doubt

The fact that we all doubt to some extent suggests that each of us shares in the universal human craving to not be deceived and that we all intuitively want to know the truth. Even when it comes to Biblical spirituality, rather than seeing doubt as spiritually negative, it can actually be a positive. After all, appropriate doubt can protect us from injury and even galvanise our worthy convictions.

Doubt is not incompatible with Christianity. Scripture encourages us to doubt, especially dubious claims. We are not to be nîave 'children' in our thinking (1Cor. 14:20). Neither are to simply accept any claim blindly - rather we are test all things.

but test everything; hold fast what is good.
First Thessalonians 5:21

¶ My dear friends, don't believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.
First John 4:1

The main reason that doubt is compatible with Christianity is that it is grounded in reasons for believing. Thus, sceptics doubt because they won't believe an unverified claim. In this sense, all Christians should be genuine sceptics! All too often Christians believe things too easily. The best reason to believe any claim is because it is true! Naturally, the opposite is equally true - any claim that is demonstrably false should not be believed. This then might lead to the question: How can we test whether a claim is true or not?

Down through the ages, philosophers have studied the nature of truth (this branch of Philosophy is calledEpistemology).  Certain tests were progressively developed to discern the difference between the truth from the false. For any claim to be reasonably considered as true, it needs to pass these tests-

• Does it comport (agree) with reality?
  For example, the claim, "There was a time when lions and tigers were herbivores." This claim does not comport with reality because the digestive system of lions and tigers can not sufficiently process a vegetation-only diet.
• Is it testable?
  For example, the claim, "There was a time when lions and tigers were herbivores." This claim can be tested by seeing whether the fossil remains of lions and tigers from this particular era provide any evidence for them being herbivores.
• Is there consistent evidence supporting it?
  For example, the claim, "Anyone could win a Gold Medal in the Olympic 100 metres Men's sprint if they work hard enough." The consistent evidence demonstrates that there is usually only one winner of the Olympic Gold in the Men's 100 metres sprint (with often as many 7 other finalists and thousands who tried to qualify for it - despite their incredible hard work.
• Could this claim be proven false? ("Falsifiability")
  For example, the claim, "There is a pink porcelain tea-cup and saucer orbiting Mars which disappears every time someone looks at it." This claim can not be tested and therefore cannot be proven false. With no supporting evidence for the claim, and no way to test it to prove it to be either true or false, a claim like this deserves our doubt.

There is a difference between a sceptic who exercises doubt until there is sufficient evidence to believe, and a cynic who refuses to believe despite reasonable evidence to adequately appease their doubts.

When it comes to beliefs, most people have not really taken the time to consider precisely what they believe or more importantly why they believe what they believe. The art of thinking is probably more scientific than most people realise. It's a shame that Philosophy is not generally taught in Primary/Elementary Schools so that students are helped to gain basic thinking skills. Instead, we have the vast majority of the population holding a belief because -

• It's a popular view to hold (truth, however is not subject to a vote or democratic testing)
• Some high-profile / intelligent person holds it (This is known as the "Professor's Ploy")
• It is morally convenient for them (Moral truth is usually unpalatable to those who live immorally!)
• They harbour some hurt which has shaped how they believe (Perhaps a priest sexually abused them and therefore they are now an atheist.)
• They had a very subjective experience (such as a dream

None of these 'reasons' are particularly good reasons for believing a claim. Often what most people consider to be a 'reason' for their belief is little more than an opinion, or even, an assertion. Other beliefs fall into the category of a priori beliefs. These are beliefs which are assumed to be true before any evidence has been considered. Arguably, Darwinian Evolution falls into this category (Darwinian Evolution may be true, or it may be false, but it is fair to say that many people believe it to be true for some of the reasons given above and especially in an a priori fashion).

The Bible welcomes the investigation of its claims. He is famously known as "Doubting" Thomas. He wasn't present when the resurrected Christ appeared to several of His apostolic colleagues. And when told about the post-crucifixion/resurrection appearance of Christ, he refused to believe it unless his demands for appropriate evidence were satisfied. Eight days later, Christ appeared to His disciples again - including Thomas. Jesus invited Thomas to fulfil his demands for evidence. Thomas's doubts were then allayed. Jesus never condemned Thomas for requiring evidence. Neither did the author penning the sacred inspired account.

Some well-meaning Christians claim that faith in God is not a matter of having sufficient evidence to do so. It seems that they have accepted the false notion that a belief is based on either faith orreason. Biblical faith is not unreasonable faith - on the contrary, it is faith which results from trustworthy evidence. Jesus' rebuke of Thomas was not brought about because of his demand for evidence, but that he actually did have sufficient evidence (the eye-witness testimony of at least seven reliable, credible, and trustworthy men). The prominent atheist of the first half of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, once famously said in response to a question about dying and discovering that he was wrong about there being no God, and then what would say to God- "You didn't give me enough evidence!" But, it will be shown over this series, no one can right state this. The Apostle John winds up his Gospel by saying the accounts that he recorded as an eye-witness, were written as evidence so that people would believe and thereby willingly receive the forgiveness and eternal life which God offers.

There are many examples of modern "Thomas's". Like him, they doubted. Like him, they required adequate evidence before they would believe in God, the Bible, and Christianity.  People like, Josh McDowell who was an aggressive atheist. He was then challenged to rebut the central claim of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He initially believed that this would be an easy conquest. But as he investigated the evidence for the resurrection of Christ he eventually conceded that it was indeed true. He became a Christian and wrote several books giving hundreds of reasons to believe in the God of the Bible.

If you are struggling with doubt - put your doubts to the test! Even a simple prayer, "God, if you are real, please reveal Yourself to me. Amen."

Next: "I DOUBT." (Part 2), I Doubt God.

© January 5th 2014, Andrew Corbett, Legana, Tasmania, Australia