Merredin Uniting Church

I was baptised as an infant in the Anglican Church and was also confirmed there. My father was a lapsed Methodist and my mother a nominal Anglican. I went to a church boarding school and left there with the form conviction that I would never attend church ever again.

Nineteen years ago I was ordained as a minister of the Presbyterian Church in South Africa and now I am a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia. I love the church.

For much of my life I’ve not been a Christian. I really, I think, had three objections to Christianity. First of all, I thought it was boring. I found everything about Christianity, religion, the church, so dull!

At school we were required to attend church fifteen times a week – twice every day and three times on Sundays. And it was the same every single time … even today I could probably recite the Matins, Evensong and Eucharist services off by heart. It was boring!

Secondly, I thought it was untrue. I had some real issues with the Bible, with the death of Jesus and also with His resurrection. I couldn’t understand a God who supposedly loved but brought punishment on a grand scale to His own people, and even, at times instructed them to go to war against their enemies.

So I thought it was untrue.

I also thought it was irrelevant to my life. I couldn’t think how someone who’d lived two thousand years ago, eleven thousand kilometres away, could have any relevance to my life today. At school we used to sing that hymn—Jerusalem: And did those feet (meaning the feet of Jesus) in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? And we all knew the answer was: no, they did not! Jesus never came anywhere near England. And we were in South Africa anyway. It just seemed totally irrelevant to my life.

At the same time, I think I was actually quite ignorant. I didn’t know very much about Christianity at all. And I think increasingly in our secularised society that’s true for many.

Nicky Gumbel, who started the Alpha Course, tells the story of his role as assistant chaplain to the Brompton Hospital. One of the things that he did on a Sunday morning was to go around and we offer Holy Communion to the patients. He got some very odd responses!

One man said, in answer to the question `Would you like Holy Communion?’ he said: `No thanks, I’m Church of England.’

Another said: `No thanks, I asked for cornflakes.’ And a third said: `No thanks, I’ve never been circumcised.’

Like them I was very ignorant about the Christian faith. But I think I can say now—I didn’t feel this at the time—but now I can say, looking back, something was missing.

For much of my life I was always looking forward to the next thing in life rather than living for the present.

I remember in school thinking, `Maybe when I’m a prefect, that will be what life’s all about!’ And eventually I was a prefect, and it was great… for about three weeks. And then I thought, `There must be more to life than this!’

And then I thought, `Well, maybe when I’ve left school, that will be what it’s all about!’ And then I left school, and that was great… but after about three weeks I started to think, `There must be more to life than this.’

And I thought, `Well, maybe if I could get a girlfriend!’ And somehow or other (I don’t know how I managed it) I managed to find a girlfriend! And after about three weeks…!

And I think for many people, they go through life like that. We’re always searching for the next thing—and when we get there, we find it doesn’t satisfy.

 

And Jesus said: I am the bread of life. `I am the one person who can satisfy that kind of spiritual hunger that is in every human heart.’ So that other things, however good they may be—relationships, work, hobbies, whatever, sport—somehow they always leave us with this feeling that something’s missing.

 

In South Africa the Zulu people say, `We’ve got two stomachs: we’ve got one stomach for ordinary food and one stomach for putu (maize porridge). And however much ordinary food—meat, potatoes, fruit, vegetables—we eat, we don’t feel full. We don’t feel satisfied until we eat putu.’

And I think if Jesus had been in South Africa , he’d have said: `I’m the putu of life. I’m the one person who can satisfy this “other stomach”.’

 

Jesus said: I am the bread of life, `I am the one person who can satisfy that hunger.’ Now, why is that? Jesus said: I’m the way and the truth and the life. First of all, this: Jesus brings direction to a lost world. He said: I am the way.

Friends of mine, when their children were younger, had

an au pair girl. And this au pair girl was struggling to learn the English language, and she hadn’t quite mastered all the English idioms. And one time there was an argument going on between the children up in a room upstairs, and this au pair girl rushed upstairs to sort it out. And what she meant to say was, `What on earth are you doing?’ but what she actually said was, `What are you doing on earth?’ Now, the question she asked was a very good question: what are we doing on earth?

Where do we come from? Where are we heading? Who are we? Does our life have any ultimate meaning and purpose? What happens when we die? These, if you like, are the really big questions—they’re the first-order questions of life.

And I guess many people are on a kind of search. They’re trying to find some significance, some meaning, some purpose.

I was fascinated reading a book by Leo Tolstoy called “A Confession”, in which he tells his life story—his search for meaning, for purpose.

He describes how he rejected Christianity as a child. And then, as he went on through life, he became very ambitious. First of all he thought, `Well, maybe pleasure is the answer—just having a great time!’ He entered the social whirl of Moscow and St Petersburg, drinking heavily, sleeping around, gambling—living a wild life. And he found it just didn’t satisfy.

And he thought, `Well, maybe money is the answer.’ He’d inherited a large estate and started to make a lot of money out of his books. But he found however much money he had, it didn’t satisfy.

And he thought, `Well, maybe the answer is success, fame, importance.’ He wrote what the Encyclopaedia Britannica described as `one of the two or three greatest novels in world literature’. But still, he said, it didn’t satisfy.

He thought, `Well, maybe the answer is family life—to give my family the best possible life.’ He’d married in 1862 and had a happy family and thirteen children—which, he says, distracted him from his search for the overall meaning of life!

He said he’d achieved all his ambitions and was surrounded by what is considered to be complete happiness; yet one question drove him to the verge of suicide. And the question was this: `What meaning has my life that the inevitability of death does not destroy?’

And he was trying to search in every field of science and philosophy to try and come up with an answer to this, and the only answer he could come up with from philosophy or science was this to the question `Why do I live?’—In the infinity of space and the infinity of time, infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity.

He didn’t find that very satisfying. So he started to look around at his contemporaries, and he found that many of them were just avoiding the issue—they weren’t really thinking about that. And eventually he found, in the peasant people of Russia, the answer he’d been looking for: in their faith in God through Jesus Christ.

A hundred years later, nothing’s changed.

Freddie Mercury, the lead singer in the rock group Queen, had amassed a huge fortune, attracted thousands, probably millions, of fans. But he admitted in an interview shortly before his death that he was desperately lonely. He said this:

`You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man. And that’s the most bitter type of loneliness. Success has brought me world idolisation and millions of pounds, but it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need: a loving, ongoing relationship.’

And ultimately there is only one relationship that is completely loving and totally ongoing, and that is a relationship with God. And Jesus said: `I’m the way to that relationship. I’m the way to find the purpose for which we’re made.’

Sometimes people say, `Well, what difference does that make in your life?’ I sometimes use this analogy because in a way, before I was a Christian, I was perfectly happy with life as it was. I wasn’t searching for anything.

When Margaret and I were first married, her parents gave us a black-and-white television set – TV had just been introduced in South Africa at the time. We only had two hours of broadcast each night, but we spent hours watching the test pattern. I invited some mates around to watch the Rugby Union Final and it was awful. The television would keep breaking into lines and distortions. Margie and I had got used to it … we found that there were certain things that you could do to improve the quality of the picture. You could put your hand round the back at certain points. There were also certain places in the loungeroom, where, if you stood there, you could get a slightly better picture. And then one of my mates suggested that we get an aerial – we didn’t know that you had to have one!

When we put an aerial in, we got these amazing, clear pictures. But, if you like, that describes the difference: because once we’d experienced those pictures with the aerial, we would never have wanted to go back to how it was before.

And once someone has experienced a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, it’s like the aerial: `This is what life’s all about!’ Jesus said: I’m the way.

 

Secondly, he brings reality to a confused world. He said: I’m the truth. Sometimes people say, `Well, you know, it’s great that he satisfies that hunger, but I don’t have a need. Isn’t it just a kind of crutch for weak people who need that kind of thing? And if you need that kind of thing, then it’s lovely for you. But it’s not for me.’ Logically, that can’t be the case: because if it’s true, it’s true for everyone. And if it’s not true, then it’s not actually `lovely’ for those who believe something that isn’t true, because in a way they’re deluded.

C.S. Lewis put it like this. He said: `Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.’

So that’s the question: is it true? Jesus said: I am the truth.

I don’t think I had realised how much evidence there is. One of the things that we do on Alpha is to look at the historical evidence for the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection is the lynchpin of Christianity.

It’s fascinating to me how many people who are kind of used to looking at evidence who’ve come to the conclusion it’s true.

Frank Morrison was a Professor of History at Oxford and he set out to disprove Christianity. He said that if he could disprove the Resurrection then everything in Christianity fell flat. His findings were published in a book called “Who moved the stone?” He came to the conclusion that the Resurrection is the “best attested fact in history.”

I hadn’t realised how many of the pioneers of modern science were believers: Descartes, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Locke, Copernicus, Faraday, Boyle, Mendel, Kelvin, Pasteur, Lister, Maxwell, Simpson.

Professor James Simpson, the brilliant scientist whose discoveries paved the way for safe, painless surgery. Someone once asked him, `Professor Simpson, of all these discoveries you’ve made, which of them was the greatest?’ He said, `Well, actually, the greatest discovery I ever made was the day I discovered Jesus Christ.’

But when Jesus said, I am the truth he was talking about more than just a kind of intellectual truth. The Hebrew understanding of truth was `truth as experienced’. And there’s a big difference between a kind of intellectual knowledge and a personal knowledge—between the head and the heart, if you like.

Again, forgive me for using an analogy, but I’ve been married to my wife Margie now for nearly 40 years. But supposing, before we were married, before I’d even met her, I went into a bookshop and there was a book about her called Margie: The Amazing Woman! And I thought, `Hmm, that looks interesting. I’ll pick it up and have a look.’

Chapter One: Her Sparkling Personality.

Chapter Two: Her Extraordinary Intelligence.

Chapter Three: Her Infinite Patience.

Chapter Four: Her Potential to be a Long-Suffering Wife.

Chapter Five: Her Cordon Bleu Cooking Skills. And so on…

And if I’d looked at this book and thought, `Wow, she sounds an amazing person,’ that is intellectual knowledge—head knowledge. Now I can tell you she’s an amazing person—that’s personal knowledge, that’s the experience of twenty-five years of marriage.

And when someone says, `I know Jesus is the truth,’ they’re talking not just about being convinced of the evidence; they’re talking about experiencing a relationship with the risen Jesus Christ. Jesus said: I am the truth.

 

Thirdly, he brings life in a dark world. He said: I’m the way, I’m the truth, and I’m the life.

Jesus came to set us free from the things that spoil our lives, the things that are wrong in our lives. There’s a big difference from the things that we do that are wrong and the mistakes that we make. We all make lots of mistakes, and our mistakes can be relatively harmless or even amusing.

Sometimes they publish the mistakes that students have made in their exams. Here are some of them:

—One person wrote this: `In the first book of the Bible, Guinnesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple-tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, “Am I my brother’s son?”’

—Another wrote this: `Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients at all. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.’

—Another wrote this: `The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.’

—Another wrote: `Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.’

—Another wrote this: `Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: “Tee-hee, Brutus!”’

And finally this: `Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between, he practised on an old spinster, which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present.

`Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half-German and half-Italian and half-English. He was very large.’

So the mistakes that we make can be relatively harmless. But the things that we do wrong really matter. There is such a thing, certainly in my case, as true guilt.

The great Russian novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn said this: `The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties; but right through every human heart and through all human hearts.’

 

The message, the Christian message, is good news. That’s what the word `gospel’ means. And the good news is this: God loves you. And he loves you and me so much that he came, in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, to live and to die for us. And on the cross, Jesus took everything you and I have ever done wrong, said wrong, thought wrong. He died in our place; he died for you and he died for me. In fact, if you had been the only person, he would have done it for you or for me. He loves us that much.

And because of that, it’s possible for our guilt to be taken away—he came to set us free from guilt. He came to set us free from addiction—the things in our lives that we hate that get a grip of us. He came to set us free from fear—the fear of death and all the fears that go with it. Because Jesus not only died for us; he rose again from the dead. He conquered death.

He set us free to know God, to have a relationship with God. He set us free to change—to be the kind of person that deep down we’re longing to be.

He sends his Spirit to live within us, to begin to change us. The fruit of the Spirit beginning to grow—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness.

He set us free to love with a new dimension. Because when we’ve experienced God’s love for us, being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, that gives us a totally new love for everybody else—for God and for the world around us.

So it’s not just about having some `great feeling’; it’s about going out and making a difference in a world that so desperately needs transformation.

 

Now, it’s not easy to be a Christian today, certainly living in this part of the world, I think it’s much harder to be a true Christian than not to be a Christian.

I was fascinated to see an interview with Alice Cooper, the rock musician. What it said is this: that `Alice Cooper has a dark secret: the 53-year-old rocker is a Christian.’ And in this interview Alice Cooper describes his conversion to Christianity:

`But it hasn’t been easy combining religion and rock.’ This is what he says: `It’s the most rebellious thing I’ve ever done. Drinking beer is easy; trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that’s a tough call. That’s real rebellion.’

 

It’s not easy. But nor is it boring. It’s not untrue. It’s not irrelevant to our lives. It’s exciting, it’s true, it’s relevant: because Jesus said: I’m the way and the truth and the life.

Now, I don’t know how you respond to what we’ve been looking at today. I guess there are a number of different possible reactions.

Some of you may say, `Absolutely. I’ve never been in this place before, never heard of the Alpha course, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and it’s the most wonderful thing.’ That’s fantastic.

And it doesn’t matter—maybe you come from a Catholic church or Uniting Church, Church of Christ or Anglican—it could be any part of the church. I don’t think which part of the church is the most important thing. The most important thing is that you have that relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

 

Others might say, `Well, I’m not so sure that I do have that relationship.’ When Paul went to Athens and spoke about the good news about Jesus and the Resurrection, there were three different reactions. Some sneered. And if you’re here tonight sneering, please don’t think I’m standing here judging you, because I went to talks about the Christian faith and I sneered at them. So it may be not the right moment for you.

 

Other people when they heard him said, `Hmm, not convinced. But I’d like to hear more, I’d like to investigate further.’ And if you’re in that category, I would really encourage you to investigate further. There are lots of ways you can do that. You could do it totally on your own. Just get hold of a New Testament, and read it for yourself.

You might say, `Well, I need a bit of help.’ Well, you could go along to any church in the country—Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, Church of Christ—and say, `Could you help me? How can I learn more? Is there a course that I could go on?’

Alpha is one course, which is a practical introduction to the Christian faith. But it’s not the only one. We’re not saying that it’s the best one; it’s just one way of doing it. It’s running now in thousands of churches around the place, and you can probably find one, wherever you might find yourself. Or if you’d like to come here, we’d love to have you here.

But that’s not the point. The point is that, if it’s true, it’s of infinite importance and it must be worth spending, say, ten Sunday morning investigating, to find out whether you think it is true.

 

A Third category when Paul went to Athens is that some believed. They only heard once, and they said, `I’d love that!’ And there may just be one person here today who says, `I’d love that! I would really love to have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.’ The good news is you can experience that right now. It’s a very simple thing:

Turning away from the things that we know are wrong, saying sorry. Thanking Jesus for dying for us; putting our faith in him. And then saying please: `Please come and fill me with your Spirit.’ Sorry, thank you, please.

And I want to make it possible for anyone who’s here who’d like to pray that prayer to do so. And I’m going to ask you to be very kind—I’m not going to ask anyone to pray it out loud, but in the silence of your hearts. God can hear the prayers in our hearts. Jesus is here—he’s risen from the dead.

But to make it possible for someone who would like to pray, to pray, would you be kind and just maybe for a moment just close your eyes or bow your head for a moment, just to give that person who would like to pray the opportunity to do so in a dignified way.

Jesus is here, he’s alive; you can speak to him tonight. Just echo this silently in your heart:

 

Lord Jesus Christ, I’m sorry for the things in my life that have been wrong.  And if anything comes to mind, ask his forgiveness.

I now turn away from everything that I know is wrong.

Thank you that you died for me on the Cross. I now receive your forgiveness. I trust you with my life.

And I ask you please to come and to fill me with your Spirit, to be with me forever. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

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