Australia Day (First Instalment

When we look at Australia to day and see the skyscraper skyline of Sydney and the development around Botany Bay this painting  of what took place on the shore of Botany bay in 1788 (only 228 years ago) seems almost unbelievable.

Many tribes of Aboriginal people had been living off the land here for many years of course, and they were as perplexed by what was happening as were the  British convicts who had arrived on the “First Fleet” of sailing ships and were forced to make this inhospitable looking piece of land their home.

It is interesting to note that the first thing the people in the painting above did when they landed on the shore, of what has become known as “Australia,” was to hold a Christian church service and thank God for their safe arrival and this set the pattern of weekly Church services on Sunday. As the years rolled by little church buildings were constructed wherever the people went to settle. These early settlers lived close to nature and had none of the luxuries of life that we have to-day so they became reliant on God and looked forward to the preaching of the Gospel from the Bible and learned to become more Christian in their behaviour.

I heard a story that goes like this: there was a boy who told his mother that he didn’t want to go to church because he didn’t understand the preaching and therefore thought it to be “a waste of time”. His mother didn’t comment but asked him to take the basket that she kept the dirty potatoes in, down to the creek and bring back a basket full of water each day for a week. At the end of the week she asked him how much water he had managed to bring back. “None” he replied “it was a waste of time”. “Did you notice anything about the basket” she asked, “yes” he said “it is a lot cleaner”.

 Similarly, going to church made these deported British convicts a lot cleaner too as I noticed when I was born in Australia 145 years after that flag was raised on Australian soil. We never had to lock our house, our car had no ignition key (just a switch) and when we went to the picture show on a Saturday night we left our groceries etc. on the back seat of the car where anyone could take them, (because it was an open car with no boot and no windows), but no one touched anything.  Women, girls, and anyone else could walk home at night unmolested. It is vastly different now though as we have to lock our house and turn on an alarm. Lock the car, and hide valuables in the boot and no one walks home alone at night.  For the moment then, imagine that we are “baskets” like the one I mentioned above and you will find it easier to see why things have deteriorated like they have.

What do I mean? Well like “potato baskets” people are constantly being filled with the “dirty potatoes” of immoral T.V. programs, also “dirty” rough and violent D.V.Ds and the “dirty potatoes” of excess alcohol and illicit drugs are used by many. The dirt out of all this rubs off and remains in people, and as most Australians don’t go to church anymore the Gospel of respect, love, and decency, doesn’t wash through their framework and help to remove this dirt. So a lot of people are affected by these bad things and the Police and law makers are at a loss to know what to do to solve this problem. As you see though, the answer is obvious. Revelation 1: 5 talks of Jesus blood washing our sins away, and Titus 3:5 talks of the “washing of regeneration” by Jesus. Paul got it right in Hebrews 10:25: “Don’t neglect worshiping together as some do”   Best wishes until we talk more on this subject next week. Regards, Tom.

A Wonderful Father

I guess that most loving parents, who had the money to afford it, would like to establish their children in a secure position in life by either helping them to obtain a University Degree and, or set them up in a secure business of some type, and yet they would also like to allow the child to use their own initiative in developing the business without too much supervision from the parent. Well our Heavenly Father did exactly that for us, His children, by stocking the earth with every food and raw material that we could possibly require and letting us work it out from there with the intelligence He gave us.

There are thousands of types of fruit and vegetables for our sustenance. I have illustrated a few here to just remind us of His great provision for us, and there are countless other resources too.

You see God wants us to enjoy culinary delights, and no matter what our tastes are He has catered for them.  Likewise whatever work we would like to be engaged in the resources are there for us to pursue it and develop our skills too.

The earth is not just some planet like Mars that we decided to inhabit, No! It was purpose built and designed for us: the air is just right for us to breathe. The rain water is just right to drink. The soil contains all that is necessary to grow all our food and the oceans are stocked with seafood too. We have all the minerals imaginable, together with coal and gas and oil sufficient to last until the end of the world. Whereas the renewable resources like timber, crops, vegetables, livestock and fowls will reproduce “after their kind” in whatever quantities we require. Of course when we talk of God designing a place for His children to inhabit, we must realise that He knows the future and thus foresaw the things we would require and also knew the quantities of non-renewable resources necessary to last until the end of the world. After all He knows what the world’s “Use by date” is. Therefore there is not the slightest possibility that we will run out of anything that is necessary for our livelihood. Consequently it makes good sense not to worry about anything (Philippians 4:6). Those who have been brought up to not believe that God designed everything will worry of course, because if everything designed itself, there could be a dreadful disaster somewhere down the track. However the incredible designs in nature bear witness to the fact that the Bible is true and God engineered it all.

 This Donut advertisement highlights the fact that the earth alone produces crops that make flour and of course we should be good stewards of what we have been given. (So that is my excuse for eating donuts).

A wonderful world like I have just described is the perfect setup for a population of happy people, particularly seeing that we have been instructed to “love our neighbours as we love ourselves” and show forth the fruit of the Holy Spirit which is love, joy, peace,  patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control. So if we put all this (that I have mentioned so far) together and combine it with these New Testament Christian attitudes, then everyone in the world would be friends, well fed and happy, and that is what God had hoped for. However selfishness “raised its ugly head” and look at the mess the world is in? To the extent that “all have sinned” and wouldn’t make it to Heaven unless God intervened. So He sent Jesus to pay the price of our sin. You see Jesus was truly human but was also divine as Paul says (2Corinthians 5:19) “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them”. Seeing our hopeless plight He lovingly came and paid our debt as 1Perer 3: 18 points out:  “The Just” (Jesus) “dying for the unjust” (us), and is now waiting for each one us to ask for forgiveness (in prayer), so He can cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If you haven’t “claimed” this forgiveness yet, then don’t delay because you never know when you may be “called home” and you want to be sure that you do have a home in Heaven to go to.  Don’t you?   Best wishes,  Tom.                                                                                                                                

Strongholds

God has not only a wonderful sense of beauty but also a great sense of humour: don’t you just love this little “green man” here with his arms stretched out to you? He could have come straight out of some science fiction movie. Of course God is very versatile too; just look at this next flower, designed to brighten up our environment.

To change the subject a little bit, the third photo is one that most gardeners are familiar with: Clover growing in the lawn.  That is now quite a large patch of clover and will take a lot of work if the gardener wants to eliminate it as it would have dropped a considerable amount of seed into that soil and as they say “one year’s seeding means seven years weeding”. If, on the other hand, the first plant had been pulled out when it first appeared this problem would never have occurred.

When referring to negative things like this,  that take over

in our lives, the Bible refers to them as potential “Strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:4&5) and warns us that we must “nip them in the bud” as soon as they confront us, this applies to anger, dishonesty, immorality, selfishness, resentment or whatever, otherwise they become sins and undermine us as that clover is undermining the lawn.

The day after I took the first photo of the lawn, the gardener came and mowed it as you see in the second photo. But that solved nothing as it was the equivalent of giving it a haircut and if he keeps doing that it will take over the entire lawn in a few years. The only answer is for him to either dig it out or spray it and repeat the process each year as new seedlings germinate.

We have all been guilty of allowing “weeds” of bad behaviour, (like I mentioned above), to take hold in our lives at some stage because that is how we are, so the Bible sums it up by saying: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God”(Romans 3:23). We can of course make a “New Year’s Resolution” to change our ways but that is just the equivalent of “mowing the lawn” which can give a good impression for a while but will not delete the problem. So I am sorry to say that we are stuck with the problem, and what a problem! The Bible says: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). That “death” referred to there is very nasty, and really means that our Souls (the real us), will suffer eternal separation from God in a dreadful environment.  

Thankfully the thought of us suffering like that so horrified God that He arranged for Jesus to come and be crucified for all our sin and “cleanse us from all sin” (1 John 1:7) so that we can be free to go and be with Him in Heaven when our time comes. Our part of the bargain is for us to “Believe on the Lord Jesus”, repent of our sin and endeavour to follow His ways in future, as outlined in the New Testament. Which is quite simple but challenging, and is the equivalent of the gardener digging out all that clover and helping us to maintain a lovely clean lawn in future by not allowing clover plants to establish themselves and form “strongholds”(Ephesians 4:26 & 27). You can guarantee that Satan will never stop trying to put temptations to sin in our path though, and they will always look attractive on the surface.

A lady was trying on a dress that she could not afford and that would be a financial burden on her. The temptation to buy it was great until she remembered the words Jesus said when he was tempted, so she quoted them out loud: “Get thee behind me Satan”, and a moment later she was quite sure that she heard a voice behind her say: “It looks good from the back too”.

Best wishes as you think all that through, if you haven’t already done so.    Regards,     Tom.

Water of Life....

Being a person who was born and lived in dry Western N.S.W. where the summers are hot, I just love rivers and waterfalls. Rivers usually commence as small streamlets in the mountains and become waterfalls as they go over cliffs. Then as they find their way towards the flatter country they become real rivers. From the time water reaches the ground as raindrops, it tends to find its way back to the ocean from whence it came. Of course some of it is delayed because it sustains people, animals, plants and trees, and other living things for a while. We are like that because we came from God and are returning to God and whilst we are doing so are expected to do good things too. Of course without water nothing can live, for example, no matter how good the soil in the middle of the Sahara desert might be it is useless because it has no water.

Similarly, and irrespective of how bright we may be, we cannot

achieve anything of Eternal worth without the “Living Water” Jesus offers us. Jesus, when talking to a Samaritan woman who had come to draw water from Jacob’s well, told her that what she really needed was the “living water” that He could give her and she would then never be thirsty again as she would have living water springing up within her to Eternal life. However she misunderstood Him, thinking He was talking about visible water when He was actually talking about the Spirit that He could give her. You see, this lady, like all of us, was looking for fulfilment in life.  And in her case had done so by having “five husbands and she wasn’t even married to the one she was living with” at the time that Jesus spoke to her. (This is something our society condones to-day, but Jesus would not have approved of it). Whether we realise it or not there is a “God shaped vacuum” within us which causes us to yearn for the contented relationship with our Heavenly Father that we were designed to have, and if we don’t realise that need and find that fulfilment, we will spend our life seeking it in other things such as: wealth, entertainment, recognition, position, immoral behaviour, drink or drugs or whatever, none of which will give lasting satisfaction (as the Samaritan woman would have found out).

Jesus said (when He was about to return to Heaven) “It is expedient for you that I go, because if I don’t go, He cannot come”. He was speaking here of the Holy Spirit or “Comforter” that He was sending to be with us “and in us” who would be like “Living Water” and would help us to do God’s will so that the “Fruit of The Spirit would flow out from us as a river of love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, meekness, kindness, goodness, faith and self control.   

     If the “fruit of the Spirit” (depicted here) is missing from our life, it is because the Holy Spirit has not yet come into our life to fill that vacuum I mentioned. To rectify that we must ask God’s forgiveness for past sin and ask Him to fill us with His Spirit.

If you are having trouble understanding how all that works then you are not alone, but we don’t need to understand how something works in order to use it do we? Take your computer or iphone, for an example, with them you can instantly contact an audience of millions of people or have access to all the books in the Public library and yet have very little idea (if any) of how that works either. We just have to accept many things in life without fully understanding them and the fellowship and communion of The Holy Spirit is one of them.      Best wishes, Tom.        

 Bible References used:  John 4: 10 &14, John 7: 38, John 16:7, Acts 2: 38 & 39, Galatians 5: 22.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good Crops or Bad Crops

When a farmer sees a crop like this he is either delighted envious or frustrated.The one who is deighted is the one who owns the farm or is someone who has the Christian attitude of loving their neighbour as they love themselves and therefore just likes to see others succeed. (Somehow I think there is a shortage of those who feel that way).

Probably there are quite a lot of farmers like me who just feel a bit frustrated and if you analyse the reason for our attitude you may well find that we were mixed farmers; there is an old saying that dates back to the days when there were “blacksmiths” heating steel and people soldering with soldering irons that were heated in a fire, that says: “Too many irons in the fire and none get hot”. Which simply means that if we attempt to do too many things at the same time we run the risk of neglecting them all to some extent. I was interested in growing crops once, but much of my time was taken up by attending to sheep and cattle, so I was what some people call an “After Farmer”. You see an “After Farmer” prepares the wheat field that is ready for preparation “after” he has crutched the sheep and later although the weeds need spraying he really can’t fit that in until “after” the sheep are shorn and so on. Consequently his crop is mediocre.

There are a number of things that can spoil a crop; one of these is the presence of weeds that help themselves to the available moisture so the wheat plants start to dry off. Another very important problem is an inadequate amount of fertiliser available. The crop may exist in such a paddock but will not yield a worthwhile crop of grain. Furthermore when healthy plants are growing together they tend to support each other from being flattened easily by wind gusts.

There is a real parallel here between the crop of wheat and people like us who want to change our ways and live good Christian lives. Paul pointed this out to the people of his day in his 2^nd letter to the Corinthians  chapter 6 and verses 14 to 18 by telling them to not fellowship with people who were behaving badly by saying: “what fellowship has light with darkness?.... come out from among them and be ye separate”. In other words, just as weeds undermine wheat plants; fellowshipping with those who do wrong things can undermine us. That may sound judgemental but it isn’t meant to be. God loves us all and we are to do likewise. However if (to take a radical example) you have been on drugs and have decided to break the habit, it would be a mistake to continue going to parties where drugs are used because the pressure of your peers would be hard to resist. New Christians, those who want to live a changed life need to fellowship with others of like mind and what better place than at church, because there they will get the equivalent of the Superphosphate and Nitrogen that make the wheat plants grow and just as the healthy wheat plants support each other in windy weather so we are supported by the friends with whom we fellowship if things get tough. Of course there is also plenty of support available by reading the word of God and asking God to “Deliver us from evil” as Jesus said we should. (in the Lord’s Prayer).

We must realise too that we don’t all have the same gifting or abilities: Jesus said that even in good soil some plants will produce 100 fold, some 50 fold and some 30 fold. Likewise He knows that we don’t all have the same ability and therefore He never expects us to do what we are not capable of doing but to just do our best for Him and we will receive His recognition of “well done good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25: 21).

Remember though that it may be alright to be an “After Farmer” but it is never alright to be an “After Christian” everything in our life should revolve around our Christian ethics and our Christian way of living.

Best wishes as you consider this.     Tom.