MONDAY 30th. NOVEMBER
Malachi 3.1-14
Return to me and I will return to you

This week we are concentrating on the ministry of John the Baptist.  The message is on repentance and the need to have our hearts made ready for the coming of Jesus.  John prepared the people for His first coming.

As people came to him in droves, he baptised them in the River Jordan.  As they repented and were baptised, they were cleansed by God.  As the best soap powders make the washing white, so God purifies the hearts of those who repent.  He makes their hearts ready for the second coming of Jesus when He will come to judge the earth, or for their own death when they will meet the Lord.

One of the things that spoils us and separates us from God is our money.  Money, and people’s love of it, is one of God’s biggest enemies in present-day Australia.  Materialism and consumerism, gambling, etc. all separate the people from God.  As the Bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil (1Timothy 6.10).  Malachi exhorts us to turn away from the love of money and turn back to God. He says the people have been robbing God.  They have been keeping the money to themselves instead of giving Him a tenth of all they receive.  God promises in these wonderful verses of the Bible that if the people stop robbing God by giving Him their tithes every Sunday, then God will richly bless them.  He will open the floodgates of Heaven and pour His blessings into their laps.

One of the best ways we can prepare for Jesus is by showing God we love Him more than our money through our generous offerings to Him through the church.

PRAYER: Father, prepare our hearts for the coming of Jesus.  Take out from each one of us the love for money.  Help us to show you we love you more than our money by being generous in giving you tithes and offerings, through Jesus who gave His whole life for us.  Amen.
 

TUESDAY 1st. DECEMBER
Psalm (Luke 1.68-79)
The Lord has set His people free

When John the Baptist was 8 days old he was circumcised.  At this ceremony his father, Zechariah had his voice given back to him and the first thing he did was to burst into singing the prophetic song we have before us as our reading for today. The Holy Spirit speaks through Zechariah to tell us that God has sent us a Saviour who has come to set His people free.  

As He promised Abraham, God was now setting His people free from the tyranny of the enemy - Satan.  They would now be free to worship God.  They could now enjoy fellowship with God because He had come to make them holy.

Jesus is the promised Saviour.  As we accept Him into our hearts by faith, He makes us holy and sets us free to be able to worship God which means to really enjoy our relationship with Him. After I was born again and set free from my sins by Jesus, I found that worshipping Him became the most enjoyable part of my life.  This is what it means to be set free to worship Him. Non-Christians and non-born-again Christians regard worship as a duty.  It’s often boring for them.  They find other things in life much more enjoyable than worshipping God.

John the Baptist, as Zechariah prophesied, had a special ministry of preparing the people for Jesus.  He went before Him to prepare the way so that when Jesus came into their lives, they would experience forgiveness of sins as God’s compassion let go the cleansing blood of Jesus, like the sun coming up in the morning lighting up everyone’s lives.

As soon as we are born again and the light of Jesus shines in our lives, God calls us to prepare others to receive Jesus, so all of us together may be freed from darkness and the fear of death into the wonderful way of peace with Jesus. 

PRAYER: Father, thank you for sending us Jesus to set us free from sin and make us holy.  Help us to come to the point when worshipping you becomes the most joyful part of our lives and enables us to be like John the Baptist and prepare people’s lives for you to come in as Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

WEDNESDAY 2nd. DECEMBER
Philippians 1.1-11
The power of prayer

One of the ways we can really help each other to be ready for Jesus when He comes is to be constantly praying for each other.  In today’s reading we have a wonderful insight into Paul’s prayers for the people he had shared the good news with in Philippi.  Paul is in prison praying for them.  As Paul prays he is so confident that God is answering his prayers that he prays with joy in his heart.  One of the things he is confident about is that he knows that when God begins a good work in a person’s life, He will carry it on to completion.

When people, who have experienced Christ healing them or saving them, drop back a bit and seem to be losing His help, don’t give up on them.  Keep praying for them, really believing that God will finish in them what He started.  When my wife, Wendy, was filled with the Spirit she was completely healed of all back pain (which had been extremely severe).  

When, a few days later, the pain came back, someone pointed me to the verses before us today.  We believed that God would complete what He had started and within a few months she was totally healed, never to have back pain again. When Paul prayed, he prayed with “all the affections of Christ” and he held the people he was praying for in his heart.  

He loved the people so much that he couldn’t stop praying for them.  He prayed that their love would get deeper and deeper, bringing them closer and closer to Jesus, giving them depth in their spiritual lives and new insights which would give them power to live really holy lives and be blameless, always ready for Jesus.

PRAYER: Jesus, help us to prepare each other for the coming of Jesus by praying for each other.  Give us joy when we pray because we believe you complete what you start.  Give us such a strong love for each other that we may all be filled with so much love that we will always be ready for you.  Amen.

THURSDAY 3rd. DECEMBER
Isaiah 63.15-64.4
You, O Lord, are our Father

God is our Father.  He is the most wonderful father we could ever imagine.  If only we could see the magnitude of God’s love for His children, our faith in Him would become so much stronger.  God is so loving towards us that His will is that we are always set free from all the things that lead us astray and destroy us.  His love is so great, however, that He does not force us. He gives us the freedom to wander from His ways.  He lets our hearts grow hard when we turn away from Him.  When we have turned away that God doesn’t love us any more and that He has forsaken us.  This is far from the truth.  He has to let us suffer the consequences of our turning away.  He hates seeing us suffer and He lets us suffer for our own sake.

To get us back on the way, His Spirit gently reminds us of His enormous love and that He’s a father who really cares for us more than we think.  The Spirit reminds us of the great things God has done for us in the past and this restores our faith in Him and causes us to repent and come back to Him.  God always acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.  He is so wonderful, no eye has seen, no ear has heard a god so great and wonderful as our God.

PRAYER: Father God, thank you for being such a fantastic Father who loves us so much.  When we go astray and our hearts get hard, gently remind us of your fatherly love and assure us that you will always act on behalf of those who wait for you because you love us so much, through Jesus our Saviour.  Amen.

FRIDAY 4TH. DECEMBER
2 Peter 3.1-9
The Lord will keep His promises

It’s very easy to get impatient with the Lord.  We can pray and pray and pray and nothing seems to be happening.  Then, to make matters worse, other people can see us praying and they can see that our prayers don’t seem to be answered so they begin to mock us and make fun of our religion and do all they can to ridicule us.  When this happens, God wants to stimulate us to wholesome thinking.  He wants us to see the big picture, not just the tiny bit we are involved in at the moment.  He wants us to see Him as being absolutely in control of the whole universe.  God has a plan and that plan will be fulfilled. One thing we mustn’t forget is that God is outside Time as we know it.  For Him a day is like 1,000 years and 1,000 years like a day. God is not slow in keeping His promises.  On the contrary He is very patient with us.  He’s such a good Father.  What seems slow for us isn’t really.  God loves us all so much that He doesn’t want anyone of us to perish.  He longs with an enormous longing for every one of us to repent and be His for ever.

PRAYER: Father, help us to understand that what seems a long time for us is only a few seconds for you.  Keep us believing you will always keep your promises and help us to be as patient with you as you are patient with us, through Jesus Christ our Patient Saviour.

SATURDAY 5TH. DECEMBER
Luke 3.1-16
John preparing the way

A very important part of our ministry (for we all have a ministry in the church) is preparing people’s hearts to receive Jesus as Saviour and Lord.  When Jesus does come, He does fantastic miracles.  He baptises us with the Holy Spirit, thoroughly cleansing us with His Spirit’s power and filling us all with the power of His love.  The change is so enormous when Jesus comes in that we say we have made a completely new beginning in life - we are born again.

As the bulldozers go in to make a new road, so we have to show people what to push out of their lives so that Jesus can come in.  This is what John the Baptist was doing on the banks of the Jordan as he baptised thousands of people.  The main thing he told them was that they had to be fair dinkum.  It was no use pretending to be religious and being one thing on the outside and something else within.  He told them it wasn’t good enough to think they were okay just because they were Jews - God’s chosen people.  They had to show fruits that they were of God.  For us it’s not good enough to think we are okay just because we’ve been born into a Christian family and been baptised and confirmed.  We have to be ready to really and truly get rid of all that’s blocking Jesus and let Him come in to take complete control of our lives, baptising us with His Spirit.

PRAYER: Father, thank you for sending John the Baptist to prepare the people for Jesus.  Enable us to prepare others by showing them gently what they need to repent of and what a huge difference Jesus will make to their lives.  Amen.

SUNDAY 6th. DECEMBER
THIS WEEK,S MESSAGE

Jesus could come again at any time or even if He doesn’t we don’t know when our own lives will come to an end.  For this reason it’s very important that we all make sure that we are ready NOW.  We should also do all we can to help all the people we come in contact with to be ready.

How can we be ready?  The answer is easy.  All we have to do is to return to the Lord, surrender our lives to him and He will make us ready. He will purify our hearts and make them ready.    Long before Jesus came the prophet Malachi predicted that He would cleanse us.  He would be like the refiner’s fire and the launderer’s soap.  He would make us all acceptable to the Lord.   His predictions came true. When Jesus died on the cross for us He took all our sins away and purified our hearts.

John the Baptist prepared many people for the coming of Jesus by urging them to repent. The true meaning of repentance is to turn away from all your sins and turn to Jesus and put all your faith and trust in Him.  By faith we accept that His sacrificial death on the cross has taken every sin away. By faith in all that Jesus has done for us our hearts are made ready for Him. We often call this the finished work of Christ.   Jesus goes much further than just forgiving our wrong doings.   When we totally surrender our lives to him, He transforms our whole personalities; He causes us to become new people, born again as God’s sons and daughters. He goes on to baptise us with His Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit gives us power to love and power to share our faith with others. (See Romans 5:5 & Acts I: 8)

How can we help others to be ready for Jesus?   There are three important things we have to do.    We begin by praying for them. As we pray for them we show lots of love for them. We then go on to share our faith with them and lead them into a relationship with Jesus.  The best way to share our faith is to invite them to come to church with us.

Praying is a very important part of winning people for Jesus.  In 1954 Billy Graham, the famous American Evangelist, led thousands of people to Christ in a crusade he held in London. Before the crusade started over three thousand prayer groups in India prayed for the people of England. As well as that many all night prayer meetings were held across London and other parts of England.   All over the world Christians were praying for the British people. No wonder so many people were converted and made ready for Jesus Coming! Come On, lets pray, love and witness!!!!

MONDAY 30th. NOVEMBER
Malachi 3.1-14
Return to me and I will return to you

This week we are concentrating on the ministry of John the Baptist.  The message is on repentance and the need to have our hearts made ready for the coming of Jesus.  John prepared the people for His first coming.

As people came to him in droves, he baptised them in the River Jordan.  As they repented and were baptised, they were cleansed by God.  As the best soap powders make the washing white, so God purifies the hearts of those who repent.  He makes their hearts ready for the second coming of Jesus when He will come to judge the earth, or for their own death when they will meet the Lord.

One of the things that spoils us and separates us from God is our money.  Money, and people’s love of it, is one of God’s biggest enemies in present-day Australia.  Materialism and consumerism, gambling, etc. all separate the people from God.  As the Bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil (1Timothy 6.10).  Malachi exhorts us to turn away from the love of money and turn back to God. He says the people have been robbing God.  They have been keeping the money to themselves instead of giving Him a tenth of all they receive.  God promises in these wonderful verses of the Bible that if the people stop robbing God by giving Him their tithes every Sunday, then God will richly bless them.  He will open the floodgates of Heaven and pour His blessings into their laps.

One of the best ways we can prepare for Jesus is by showing God we love Him more than our money through our generous offerings to Him through the church.

PRAYER: Father, prepare our hearts for the coming of Jesus.  Take out from each one of us the love for money.  Help us to show you we love you more than our money by being generous in giving you tithes and offerings, through Jesus who gave His whole life for us.  Amen.
 

TUESDAY 1st. DECEMBER
Psalm (Luke 1.68-79)
The Lord has set His people free

When John the Baptist was 8 days old he was circumcised.  At this ceremony his father, Zechariah had his voice given back to him and the first thing he did was to burst into singing the prophetic song we have before us as our reading for today. The Holy Spirit speaks through Zechariah to tell us that God has sent us a Saviour who has come to set His people free.  

As He promised Abraham, God was now setting His people free from the tyranny of the enemy - Satan.  They would now be free to worship God.  They could now enjoy fellowship with God because He had come to make them holy.

Jesus is the promised Saviour.  As we accept Him into our hearts by faith, He makes us holy and sets us free to be able to worship God which means to really enjoy our relationship with Him. After I was born again and set free from my sins by Jesus, I found that worshipping Him became the most enjoyable part of my life.  This is what it means to be set free to worship Him. Non-Christians and non-born-again Christians regard worship as a duty.  It’s often boring for them.  They find other things in life much more enjoyable than worshipping God.

John the Baptist, as Zechariah prophesied, had a special ministry of preparing the people for Jesus.  He went before Him to prepare the way so that when Jesus came into their lives, they would experience forgiveness of sins as God’s compassion let go the cleansing blood of Jesus, like the sun coming up in the morning lighting up everyone’s lives.

As soon as we are born again and the light of Jesus shines in our lives, God calls us to prepare others to receive Jesus, so all of us together may be freed from darkness and the fear of death into the wonderful way of peace with Jesus. 

PRAYER: Father, thank you for sending us Jesus to set us free from sin and make us holy.  Help us to come to the point when worshipping you becomes the most joyful part of our lives and enables us to be like John the Baptist and prepare people’s lives for you to come in as Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

WEDNESDAY 2nd. DECEMBER
Philippians 1.1-11
The power of prayer

One of the ways we can really help each other to be ready for Jesus when He comes is to be constantly praying for each other.  In today’s reading we have a wonderful insight into Paul’s prayers for the people he had shared the good news with in Philippi.  Paul is in prison praying for them.  As Paul prays he is so confident that God is answering his prayers that he prays with joy in his heart.  One of the things he is confident about is that he knows that when God begins a good work in a person’s life, He will carry it on to completion.

When people, who have experienced Christ healing them or saving them, drop back a bit and seem to be losing His help, don’t give up on them.  Keep praying for them, really believing that God will finish in them what He started.  When my wife, Wendy, was filled with the Spirit she was completely healed of all back pain (which had been extremely severe).  

When, a few days later, the pain came back, someone pointed me to the verses before us today.  We believed that God would complete what He had started and within a few months she was totally healed, never to have back pain again. When Paul prayed, he prayed with “all the affections of Christ” and he held the people he was praying for in his heart.  

He loved the people so much that he couldn’t stop praying for them.  He prayed that their love would get deeper and deeper, bringing them closer and closer to Jesus, giving them depth in their spiritual lives and new insights which would give them power to live really holy lives and be blameless, always ready for Jesus.

PRAYER: Jesus, help us to prepare each other for the coming of Jesus by praying for each other.  Give us joy when we pray because we believe you complete what you start.  Give us such a strong love for each other that we may all be filled with so much love that we will always be ready for you.  Amen.

THURSDAY 3rd. DECEMBER
Isaiah 63.15-64.4
You, O Lord, are our Father

God is our Father.  He is the most wonderful father we could ever imagine.  If only we could see the magnitude of God’s love for His children, our faith in Him would become so much stronger.  God is so loving towards us that His will is that we are always set free from all the things that lead us astray and destroy us.  His love is so great, however, that He does not force us. He gives us the freedom to wander from His ways.  He lets our hearts grow hard when we turn away from Him.  When we have turned away that God doesn’t love us any more and that He has forsaken us.  This is far from the truth.  He has to let us suffer the consequences of our turning away.  He hates seeing us suffer and He lets us suffer for our own sake.

To get us back on the way, His Spirit gently reminds us of His enormous love and that He’s a father who really cares for us more than we think.  The Spirit reminds us of the great things God has done for us in the past and this restores our faith in Him and causes us to repent and come back to Him.  God always acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.  He is so wonderful, no eye has seen, no ear has heard a god so great and wonderful as our God.

PRAYER: Father God, thank you for being such a fantastic Father who loves us so much.  When we go astray and our hearts get hard, gently remind us of your fatherly love and assure us that you will always act on behalf of those who wait for you because you love us so much, through Jesus our Saviour.  Amen.

FRIDAY 4TH. DECEMBER
2 Peter 3.1-9
The Lord will keep His promises

It’s very easy to get impatient with the Lord.  We can pray and pray and pray and nothing seems to be happening.  Then, to make matters worse, other people can see us praying and they can see that our prayers don’t seem to be answered so they begin to mock us and make fun of our religion and do all they can to ridicule us.  When this happens, God wants to stimulate us to wholesome thinking.  He wants us to see the big picture, not just the tiny bit we are involved in at the moment.  He wants us to see Him as being absolutely in control of the whole universe.  God has a plan and that plan will be fulfilled. One thing we mustn’t forget is that God is outside Time as we know it.  For Him a day is like 1,000 years and 1,000 years like a day. God is not slow in keeping His promises.  On the contrary He is very patient with us.  He’s such a good Father.  What seems slow for us isn’t really.  God loves us all so much that He doesn’t want anyone of us to perish.  He longs with an enormous longing for every one of us to repent and be His for ever.

PRAYER: Father, help us to understand that what seems a long time for us is only a few seconds for you.  Keep us believing you will always keep your promises and help us to be as patient with you as you are patient with us, through Jesus Christ our Patient Saviour.

SATURDAY 5TH. DECEMBER
Luke 3.1-16
John preparing the way

A very important part of our ministry (for we all have a ministry in the church) is preparing people’s hearts to receive Jesus as Saviour and Lord.  When Jesus does come, He does fantastic miracles.  He baptises us with the Holy Spirit, thoroughly cleansing us with His Spirit’s power and filling us all with the power of His love.  The change is so enormous when Jesus comes in that we say we have made a completely new beginning in life - we are born again.

As the bulldozers go in to make a new road, so we have to show people what to push out of their lives so that Jesus can come in.  This is what John the Baptist was doing on the banks of the Jordan as he baptised thousands of people.  The main thing he told them was that they had to be fair dinkum.  It was no use pretending to be religious and being one thing on the outside and something else within.  He told them it wasn’t good enough to think they were okay just because they were Jews - God’s chosen people.  They had to show fruits that they were of God.  For us it’s not good enough to think we are okay just because we’ve been born into a Christian family and been baptised and confirmed.  We have to be ready to really and truly get rid of all that’s blocking Jesus and let Him come in to take complete control of our lives, baptising us with His Spirit.

PRAYER: Father, thank you for sending John the Baptist to prepare the people for Jesus.  Enable us to prepare others by showing them gently what they need to repent of and what a huge difference Jesus will make to their lives.  Amen.

SUNDAY 6th. DECEMBER
THIS WEEK,S MESSAGE

Jesus could come again at any time or even if He doesn’t we don’t know when our own lives will come to an end.  For this reason it’s very important that we all make sure that we are ready NOW.  We should also do all we can to help all the people we come in contact with to be ready.

How can we be ready?  The answer is easy.  All we have to do is to return to the Lord, surrender our lives to him and He will make us ready. He will purify our hearts and make them ready.    Long before Jesus came the prophet Malachi predicted that He would cleanse us.  He would be like the refiner’s fire and the launderer’s soap.  He would make us all acceptable to the Lord.   His predictions came true. When Jesus died on the cross for us He took all our sins away and purified our hearts.

John the Baptist prepared many people for the coming of Jesus by urging them to repent. The true meaning of repentance is to turn away from all your sins and turn to Jesus and put all your faith and trust in Him.  By faith we accept that His sacrificial death on the cross has taken every sin away. By faith in all that Jesus has done for us our hearts are made ready for Him. We often call this the finished work of Christ.   Jesus goes much further than just forgiving our wrong doings.   When we totally surrender our lives to him, He transforms our whole personalities; He causes us to become new people, born again as God’s sons and daughters. He goes on to baptise us with His Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit gives us power to love and power to share our faith with others. (See Romans 5:5 & Acts I: 8)

How can we help others to be ready for Jesus?   There are three important things we have to do.    We begin by praying for them. As we pray for them we show lots of love for them. We then go on to share our faith with them and lead them into a relationship with Jesus.  The best way to share our faith is to invite them to come to church with us.

Praying is a very important part of winning people for Jesus.  In 1954 Billy Graham, the famous American Evangelist, led thousands of people to Christ in a crusade he held in London. Before the crusade started over three thousand prayer groups in India prayed for the people of England. As well as that many all night prayer meetings were held across London and other parts of England.   All over the world Christians were praying for the British people. No wonder so many people were converted and made ready for Jesus Coming! Come On, lets pray, love and witness!!!!