MONDAY 30th.AUGUST
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Choose Life
Today we think about the most important decision everyone has to make in his or her life. It is the decision to choose life. We make this decision by choosing to give our lives to Jesus and accept Him as the boss and Saviour of our lives. If we choose Jesus we choose life and prosperity. If we choose to turn away from Him we choose death and destruction. This is what the Bible says!
The decision to become a Christian is indeed a life or death decision! If only everyone would realize this. Let's open our Bibles and look at 1John 5:11-12, "God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have life" - Wow! This is not a one-off decision - it's a decision we have to make and remake every day of our lives. Every day the Grim Reaper - the devil, is doing all he can to make us loose this wonderful life.
Let's begin every day by telling God how much we love Him and then go on to live out the day showing God how much we love Him. We show our love for Him by obeying His commands, especially His command to love everyone as He loves us!
Let's promise to turn away from other gods. Anything or anybody we love more than God becomes for us another god. It could be our possessions or self importance, our ambitions. It could be other people. We worship these other gods when we spend all our time thinking about them and giving them all our attention.
When we truly love God and are thankful for all these things and people God has given us, then we actually enjoy them all more and we get everything in a right balance! This is true prosperity.
PRAYER: Father, we see this great decision we have to make every day. Draw each of us by the mighty power of your love to choose life and choose to accept Jesus your Son as our Saviour. Thank you so much for giving us life and prosperity through Jesus the Life Giver. Amen.
TUESDAY 31st. AUGUST
Psalm 1
The Bible - The Book of Life
"Read your Bible, pray everyday and you'll grow, grow, grow. Neglect your Bible forget to pray and you'll shrink, shrink, shrink ..."
I love this very simple children's song because what it is saying is so true. The Bible is the book of life. If we read it every day, think about all that it says and apply it to our lives then God's life flows into our hearts and we grow. We grow not taller or fatter but more and more holy, more and more to be like Jesus!
The Psalmist uses this great illustration that we are like trees that are planted alongside a river. When the drought comes and all the other trees die for lack of moisture we stay alive because we have our roots growing into the river of life. We bear much fruit and are always full of life.
Those who neglect their Bibles are like the wilted tree. They become cut off from God the source of life so they end up withering and dying. They are like chaff that is blown away by the wind. Sometimes we try to read the Bible and it doesn't seem to do anything for us. It seems dull and uninteresting. If you have this experience, you need the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to come into your heart. He was behind every author of the Bible inspiring them to write what they did. He will help you to not only understand what you read but will make the Bible really come alive for you and make you really love it!
PRAYER: Lord God, help me to read your own word in the Bible every day. Send your Holy Spirit to help me understand it and to make this book really come alive for me, through Jesus. Amen.
WEDNESDAY 1st. SEPTEMBER
Philemon 1-25
The huge difference Jesus makes
Jesus is in the business of transforming people's lives. When people surrender their lives to Him and put their faith and trust in His power, the power He released when He died on the cross, then they become completely new people.
When Paul was in prison, sent there because of His faith, He made friends with Onesimus who was a run away slave. Paul witnessed to Him and He became a most wonderful Christian. He looked after Paul and became like a brother to Him.
When Paul found out that Onesimus was a slave of another Christian, Philemon, Paul sent a letter to him asking Philemon to accept Onesimus back again pointing out that he was a transformed man and urging him to accept him as a brother Christian rather than a slave. Here is a true story of someone whose life was transformed by Jesus. It's about Alan.
Years ago Alan's mother came to see me and said "Is there an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) in Emerald? I have an alcoholic son who needs help? I said to her, "No, but send him to me, I know that Jesus can help him.”
When Alan came to me I told him all that Jesus could do for Him. He repented of his sins and surrendered his life to Jesus! After that I prayed for Jesus to fill him with the Holy Spirit. He came and prayed with me every day and was growing in the Lord with a new outlook on life. However, when he went to the gemfields his mates lured him into taking a drink and he ended up getting drunk. He needed more help. He came to me very sorrowful. I gave him the address of Teen Challenge in Brisbane and he went there. I was thrilled to read his testimony that strong drink was a problem no longer. His whole life had been transformed by Jesus!
PRAYER: Father, thank you for transforming so many lives. Please change me to be more like you. I pray for all those whose lives are in a mess. Help me to witness to others how much You can transform their lives through Jesus our Saviour. Amen.
THURSDAY 2nd. SEPTEMBER
Jeremiah 18:1-11 (15:15-21)
Clay in the Hands of a Potter
I'm not much of an artist but once I discovered that there was one art which I could do reasonably well. It was pottery. I joined my wife at Adult Education pottery classes and found myself in a hobby I enjoyed very much. I could take a blob of clay and transform it into something quite beautiful.
Sometimes the pot got out of shape and we had to remake it. The exciting time was taking the pieces out of the kiln, after the final glazing, to see how they had turned out!
Jeremiah says that we are like clay in the hands of the potter. God is the potter. If we find our lives are out of shape we can surrender them back into the potter's hands and ask Him to reshape them and He always will.
One of the pieces of pottery I made in 1974 was a wall plaque with the words "Let Go, Let God" inscribed on it. If we try to reshape our own lives they go all out of shape again. We have to let go and let God have control so that He is free to remake us the way He planned for us to be!
On New Year's Eve 1974 my wife Wendy found herself witnessing to a young man on the beach at Pialba; we were with a group of Spirit-filled Christians on a camp at the time. He was quite drunk with a stubby in his hands. He told her how he was a back-slider, a Minister's son. Wendy challenged him to repent and he did. She asked me to pray for him with another Pastor. We could see God reshaping him before our eyes.
He threw the stubby away and sobered up instantly. He was so happy he said, “I am going back to my Dad to tell him I have come back to Jesus!”
PRAYER: Jesus you are the potter, we are the clay. Please take our lives and reshape them, make them into what you want us to be. Amen.
FRIDAY 3rd. SEPTEMBER
Colossians 3:22 - 4:9
Watch In Prayer with & Thanksgiving
We saw yesterday that we are clay in the hands of the Divine potter and as long as we let ourselves be in the potter's hands He will shape us to be what He wants us to be. Today, we see how in a practical way we can make sure we stay in the potter's hands.
The servant is to pray constantly and be watchful in prayer and be thankful. Prayer is communication with God. Like being on the internet communicating with a friend somewhere else, so we need to be linked up to God all the time.
Set aside a time to be alone with God each day. Praise and worship Him. Repent of your sins. Talk to Him about your life. Surrender your life afresh to Him and ask Him to bring about the changes you know He wants to make eg. if you are full of fear ask Him to take away your fear. If you are sick ask Him to heal you. If you are worried ask Him to take away your anxieties. After asking, believe that you have received what you ask for. For Jesus promises, "If we ask, and believe that we have received answers to our prayers they will be answered" (See Luke 11:24).
All during the day keep thinking about what you have prayed. Watch for the answers and when you see even a slight sign that your prayer has been answered, praise the Lord and be ever so thankful.
Because God is with you He will help you to think and speak to others in a positive, faithful way. Your conversations will always be full of grace as long as you pray constantly and watch in prayer with thanksgiving. You will certainly become the person God wants you to be.
PRAYER: Father, help me to set a time to be alone with you every day. As I surrender to you in my prayer time and as I trust in you, take over my whole life and change me into what you want me to be. Help me to watch for answers to prayers and be ever so thankful for all you do for me, through Jesus our wonderful Saviour. Amen.
SATURDAY 4TH SEPTEMBER
Luke 14:25-35
The cost of being a Disciple
Jesus said at the end of this Gospel reading for today. "Anyone who does not give up everything he has cannot be my Disciples." Let us try to see as simply as we can what He really meant by this".
In a church in South America members of a congregation took this teaching rather literally. They gave their houses etc to the Church. The church had so many houses it didn't know what to do with them! They decided to give the houses back to the people. The people still lived in them but recognized that they were not their own because they had given them to God.
What we have to do is, in a very spiritual way, hand everything we own to God. We have to truly let God have it. Then we have to be open to God and say, "I've given all this money and property to you God. How do you want me to use it? He will always say share it. He will show us how to share it.
Dietrich Bonhoffer, just before the Second World War, wrote a book ("The Cost of Discipleship"). He was concerned that the church was giving out too much cheap grace (grace that does not cost us anything).
Jesus paid the price for our sins fully. This does not mean we can go on being selfish and sinning, knowing that we will be forgiven. The moment we know we are forgiven by Jesus we have an obligation to live the way Jesus wants us to live because we are no longer our own persons - we have been bought at a price! (1 Corinthians 6:20).
This makes it very costly to follow Jesus. We just cannot go on living the way we used to before we received His grace. We have an obligation to live like Jesus. Grace gives us the power to love. This is the ability to be generous to give and give and give and to share everything we own. Bonhoffer practiced what he preached and gave his life as a martyr. The Nazis killed him in 1945 because He preached the pure word of Jesus.
PRAYER: Jesus, as we contemplate the price of following you and being your disciples, help us to count the cost and then make the decision to give our all to you. When you give it all back to us show us how to use it and give us the power to give and share it. Amen.
SUNDAY 5th. SEPTEMBER
THIS WEEK’S MESSAGE
Most of us enjoy watching the Olympic Games. We look forward to seeing proud Australians winning gold medals. It looks so easy when we see them win but do we realize the tremendous cost they and their teams will pay to enable them to go for gold? The hours and hours of training over a long period of time!
The Christian life is like a race. Jesus tells us there is a huge price to pay if we want to be in it. Let’s find out a bit about this huge price by looking at today’s readings. We get a bit of a shock when we read these words from Jesus: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple” This seems to contradict Jesus’ other commandments when He tells us to love EVERYONE. What could Jesus possibly mean when He said this? Eugene Peterson answers this question for us in his translation of the Bible in ‘The Message’. He puts it like this: “Anyone who comes to me and refuses to LET GO OF Father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, sisters—yes even his own self!--can’t be my disciple.” We tend to want to really cling to the people we love and cling onto our own lives. We tend to want to control them or be controlled by them and we certainly want to be in control of our own lives.
Jesus commands us to completely let go and let Him have COMPLETE CONTROL. We can therefore say that the cost of being a disciple of Jesus is to totally surrender our lives to Jesus and let Him have complete control. That means we have read God’s Word in the Bible and come regularly to Church to hear His Word proclaimed. We must be doers of His Word and not hearers only (See James 1:22) that means we must always strive to obey God’s Word. The Old Testament reading and the Psalm both tell us that if we obey God we will have a full prosperous life but if we choose to disobey God we will end up shrivelling up and dying.
Sometimes obeying God’s word means that we have to endure pain and suffering for Him. That’s what it means to take up your cross and follow him. It also means we must be willing to die for Him. Its worth paying the price all the time because there is something so much better than a gold medal awaiting all those who surrender all to follow Him. The Bible calls it a crown for we will reign with Jesus in eternal life! (Revelations 2:10 & 22:5)
PRAYER : Father, help us to let go of everything and let you have complete control of our lives. Help us to let go of ourselves, our money and possessions and all our relationships. Thank you for giving us the power to let go when Jesus died on the cross. Help us to use this power and love You more than anything and to love everyone else in the same way that Jesus loved us by giving his whole life for us. Amen
MONDAY 30th.AUGUST
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Choose Life
Today we think about the most important decision everyone has to make in his or her life. It is the decision to choose life. We make this decision by choosing to give our lives to Jesus and accept Him as the boss and Saviour of our lives. If we choose Jesus we choose life and prosperity. If we choose to turn away from Him we choose death and destruction. This is what the Bible says!
The decision to become a Christian is indeed a life or death decision! If only everyone would realize this. Let's open our Bibles and look at 1John 5:11-12, "God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have life" - Wow! This is not a one-off decision - it's a decision we have to make and remake every day of our lives. Every day the Grim Reaper - the devil, is doing all he can to make us loose this wonderful life.
Let's begin every day by telling God how much we love Him and then go on to live out the day showing God how much we love Him. We show our love for Him by obeying His commands, especially His command to love everyone as He loves us!
Let's promise to turn away from other gods. Anything or anybody we love more than God becomes for us another god. It could be our possessions or self importance, our ambitions. It could be other people. We worship these other gods when we spend all our time thinking about them and giving them all our attention.
When we truly love God and are thankful for all these things and people God has given us, then we actually enjoy them all more and we get everything in a right balance! This is true prosperity.
PRAYER: Father, we see this great decision we have to make every day. Draw each of us by the mighty power of your love to choose life and choose to accept Jesus your Son as our Saviour. Thank you so much for giving us life and prosperity through Jesus the Life Giver. Amen.
TUESDAY 31st. AUGUST
Psalm 1
The Bible - The Book of Life
"Read your Bible, pray everyday and you'll grow, grow, grow. Neglect your Bible forget to pray and you'll shrink, shrink, shrink ..."
I love this very simple children's song because what it is saying is so true. The Bible is the book of life. If we read it every day, think about all that it says and apply it to our lives then God's life flows into our hearts and we grow. We grow not taller or fatter but more and more holy, more and more to be like Jesus!
The Psalmist uses this great illustration that we are like trees that are planted alongside a river. When the drought comes and all the other trees die for lack of moisture we stay alive because we have our roots growing into the river of life. We bear much fruit and are always full of life.
Those who neglect their Bibles are like the wilted tree. They become cut off from God the source of life so they end up withering and dying. They are like chaff that is blown away by the wind. Sometimes we try to read the Bible and it doesn't seem to do anything for us. It seems dull and uninteresting. If you have this experience, you need the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to come into your heart. He was behind every author of the Bible inspiring them to write what they did. He will help you to not only understand what you read but will make the Bible really come alive for you and make you really love it!
PRAYER: Lord God, help me to read your own word in the Bible every day. Send your Holy Spirit to help me understand it and to make this book really come alive for me, through Jesus. Amen.
WEDNESDAY 1st. SEPTEMBER
Philemon 1-25
The huge difference Jesus makes
Jesus is in the business of transforming people's lives. When people surrender their lives to Him and put their faith and trust in His power, the power He released when He died on the cross, then they become completely new people.
When Paul was in prison, sent there because of His faith, He made friends with Onesimus who was a run away slave. Paul witnessed to Him and He became a most wonderful Christian. He looked after Paul and became like a brother to Him.
When Paul found out that Onesimus was a slave of another Christian, Philemon, Paul sent a letter to him asking Philemon to accept Onesimus back again pointing out that he was a transformed man and urging him to accept him as a brother Christian rather than a slave. Here is a true story of someone whose life was transformed by Jesus. It's about Alan.
Years ago Alan's mother came to see me and said "Is there an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) in Emerald? I have an alcoholic son who needs help? I said to her, "No, but send him to me, I know that Jesus can help him.”
When Alan came to me I told him all that Jesus could do for Him. He repented of his sins and surrendered his life to Jesus! After that I prayed for Jesus to fill him with the Holy Spirit. He came and prayed with me every day and was growing in the Lord with a new outlook on life. However, when he went to the gemfields his mates lured him into taking a drink and he ended up getting drunk. He needed more help. He came to me very sorrowful. I gave him the address of Teen Challenge in Brisbane and he went there. I was thrilled to read his testimony that strong drink was a problem no longer. His whole life had been transformed by Jesus!
PRAYER: Father, thank you for transforming so many lives. Please change me to be more like you. I pray for all those whose lives are in a mess. Help me to witness to others how much You can transform their lives through Jesus our Saviour. Amen.
THURSDAY 2nd. SEPTEMBER
Jeremiah 18:1-11 (15:15-21)
Clay in the Hands of a Potter
I'm not much of an artist but once I discovered that there was one art which I could do reasonably well. It was pottery. I joined my wife at Adult Education pottery classes and found myself in a hobby I enjoyed very much. I could take a blob of clay and transform it into something quite beautiful.
Sometimes the pot got out of shape and we had to remake it. The exciting time was taking the pieces out of the kiln, after the final glazing, to see how they had turned out!
Jeremiah says that we are like clay in the hands of the potter. God is the potter. If we find our lives are out of shape we can surrender them back into the potter's hands and ask Him to reshape them and He always will.
One of the pieces of pottery I made in 1974 was a wall plaque with the words "Let Go, Let God" inscribed on it. If we try to reshape our own lives they go all out of shape again. We have to let go and let God have control so that He is free to remake us the way He planned for us to be!
On New Year's Eve 1974 my wife Wendy found herself witnessing to a young man on the beach at Pialba; we were with a group of Spirit-filled Christians on a camp at the time. He was quite drunk with a stubby in his hands. He told her how he was a back-slider, a Minister's son. Wendy challenged him to repent and he did. She asked me to pray for him with another Pastor. We could see God reshaping him before our eyes.
He threw the stubby away and sobered up instantly. He was so happy he said, “I am going back to my Dad to tell him I have come back to Jesus!”
PRAYER: Jesus you are the potter, we are the clay. Please take our lives and reshape them, make them into what you want us to be. Amen.
FRIDAY 3rd. SEPTEMBER
Colossians 3:22 - 4:9
Watch In Prayer with & Thanksgiving
We saw yesterday that we are clay in the hands of the Divine potter and as long as we let ourselves be in the potter's hands He will shape us to be what He wants us to be. Today, we see how in a practical way we can make sure we stay in the potter's hands.
The servant is to pray constantly and be watchful in prayer and be thankful. Prayer is communication with God. Like being on the internet communicating with a friend somewhere else, so we need to be linked up to God all the time.
Set aside a time to be alone with God each day. Praise and worship Him. Repent of your sins. Talk to Him about your life. Surrender your life afresh to Him and ask Him to bring about the changes you know He wants to make eg. if you are full of fear ask Him to take away your fear. If you are sick ask Him to heal you. If you are worried ask Him to take away your anxieties. After asking, believe that you have received what you ask for. For Jesus promises, "If we ask, and believe that we have received answers to our prayers they will be answered" (See Luke 11:24).
All during the day keep thinking about what you have prayed. Watch for the answers and when you see even a slight sign that your prayer has been answered, praise the Lord and be ever so thankful.
Because God is with you He will help you to think and speak to others in a positive, faithful way. Your conversations will always be full of grace as long as you pray constantly and watch in prayer with thanksgiving. You will certainly become the person God wants you to be.
PRAYER: Father, help me to set a time to be alone with you every day. As I surrender to you in my prayer time and as I trust in you, take over my whole life and change me into what you want me to be. Help me to watch for answers to prayers and be ever so thankful for all you do for me, through Jesus our wonderful Saviour. Amen.
SATURDAY 4TH SEPTEMBER
Luke 14:25-35
The cost of being a Disciple
Jesus said at the end of this Gospel reading for today. "Anyone who does not give up everything he has cannot be my Disciples." Let us try to see as simply as we can what He really meant by this".
In a church in South America members of a congregation took this teaching rather literally. They gave their houses etc to the Church. The church had so many houses it didn't know what to do with them! They decided to give the houses back to the people. The people still lived in them but recognized that they were not their own because they had given them to God.
What we have to do is, in a very spiritual way, hand everything we own to God. We have to truly let God have it. Then we have to be open to God and say, "I've given all this money and property to you God. How do you want me to use it? He will always say share it. He will show us how to share it.
Dietrich Bonhoffer, just before the Second World War, wrote a book ("The Cost of Discipleship"). He was concerned that the church was giving out too much cheap grace (grace that does not cost us anything).
Jesus paid the price for our sins fully. This does not mean we can go on being selfish and sinning, knowing that we will be forgiven. The moment we know we are forgiven by Jesus we have an obligation to live the way Jesus wants us to live because we are no longer our own persons - we have been bought at a price! (1 Corinthians 6:20).
This makes it very costly to follow Jesus. We just cannot go on living the way we used to before we received His grace. We have an obligation to live like Jesus. Grace gives us the power to love. This is the ability to be generous to give and give and give and to share everything we own. Bonhoffer practiced what he preached and gave his life as a martyr. The Nazis killed him in 1945 because He preached the pure word of Jesus.
PRAYER: Jesus, as we contemplate the price of following you and being your disciples, help us to count the cost and then make the decision to give our all to you. When you give it all back to us show us how to use it and give us the power to give and share it. Amen.
SUNDAY 5th. SEPTEMBER
THIS WEEK’S MESSAGE
Most of us enjoy watching the Olympic Games. We look forward to seeing proud Australians winning gold medals. It looks so easy when we see them win but do we realize the tremendous cost they and their teams will pay to enable them to go for gold? The hours and hours of training over a long period of time!
The Christian life is like a race. Jesus tells us there is a huge price to pay if we want to be in it. Let’s find out a bit about this huge price by looking at today’s readings. We get a bit of a shock when we read these words from Jesus: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple” This seems to contradict Jesus’ other commandments when He tells us to love EVERYONE. What could Jesus possibly mean when He said this? Eugene Peterson answers this question for us in his translation of the Bible in ‘The Message’. He puts it like this: “Anyone who comes to me and refuses to LET GO OF Father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, sisters—yes even his own self!--can’t be my disciple.” We tend to want to really cling to the people we love and cling onto our own lives. We tend to want to control them or be controlled by them and we certainly want to be in control of our own lives.
Jesus commands us to completely let go and let Him have COMPLETE CONTROL. We can therefore say that the cost of being a disciple of Jesus is to totally surrender our lives to Jesus and let Him have complete control. That means we have read God’s Word in the Bible and come regularly to Church to hear His Word proclaimed. We must be doers of His Word and not hearers only (See James 1:22) that means we must always strive to obey God’s Word. The Old Testament reading and the Psalm both tell us that if we obey God we will have a full prosperous life but if we choose to disobey God we will end up shrivelling up and dying.
Sometimes obeying God’s word means that we have to endure pain and suffering for Him. That’s what it means to take up your cross and follow him. It also means we must be willing to die for Him. Its worth paying the price all the time because there is something so much better than a gold medal awaiting all those who surrender all to follow Him. The Bible calls it a crown for we will reign with Jesus in eternal life! (Revelations 2:10 & 22:5)
PRAYER : Father, help us to let go of everything and let you have complete control of our lives. Help us to let go of ourselves, our money and possessions and all our relationships. Thank you for giving us the power to let go when Jesus died on the cross. Help us to use this power and love You more than anything and to love everyone else in the same way that Jesus loved us by giving his whole life for us. Amen