The new year is almost upon us… and it seems to be the time to think about the year ahead and make resolutions. Sadly most people make resolutions that are often very self centred: ‘I won’t eat as much chocolate this year’ or ‘I will spend more time at the gym’. As Christians we ought to make resolutions that are for God and his Glory.

So with that in mind I thought I would write some suggested ‘New Years Resolutions’ that are child friendly! The first few are specifically for parents but the last one is for everyone!!!!

1. Encourage your children in their knowledge and love of God!

Can I suggest you read the bible with your child daily… and don’t          forget to pray with them. But don’t stop there. Make the most of the opportunities HBC provides to help your children know God as well. Be regular at church and Sprout. Get involved in Kids Club - even if it means you need to drop an afternoon activity.

2. Model and encourage evangelism with your kids!

Be active in proclaiming Jesus to friends and family. Pray for those who are lost with your children. Pray for missionaries as a family. Encourage your children to invite a friend to Wave! Why not invite their parents????

3. Get involved in kids ministry in 2010.

There are so many opportunities with HBC to minister to children… Sprout, Kids Club, Wave, Women’s Bible Study Creche and Scripture Teaching. In November a local school was brought to my attention. It is quite a large school with about 25 classes. They have 4 Muslim instruction classes each week but NO protestant Scripture. My prayer is that this year we will be able to start teaching Scripture in this school and that hundreds of children would hear the good news of Jesus - for possibly their first time! Can you help????

Let’s make resolutions that bring honour and praise to Jesus!

Recently, Ben Broadfoot and I were thinking about how to describe things like “sin” and “grace” in new - culturally tangible - ways. Here’s one we came up with…

Sin : When we abuse God.

Abuse is a really strong word in our culture. We have a common concept of what it means to abuse a substance, but the word is especially powerful in “relational” contexts; self-abuse, emotional-abuse, sexual-abuse, child-abuse.

This made us a bit hesitant to start with, because we thought it might be a word thats a bit too strong to use to describe sinning against God. But the more we thought about it, the more we realised that the word wasn’t too strong, rather, our view of sin was too weak.

How do we abuse God? We abuse God by misusing his good gifts to us. Gifts like money, family, friends, and ultimately life itself. God gave us those things to use for his glory and his fame and his pleasure, and we take those good gifts off him and misuse them right before his eyes (see Rom 1:18-21).

Its worse than offering someone your car, and watching them crash it into a tree on purpose… its worse than offering someone your body and watching them mistreat you for their own pleasure… its worse than entrusting your child to someone, only to watch them harm them instead. When we misuse God’s good gifts, we truly become God-abusers.

Doesn’t that make God’s act of forgiveness all the more amazing?! Its almost as if God endures self-abuse on the cross, in order to avoid punishing those who’ve abused him. Maybe a new way of describing “grace” is “God’s self-abuse in order to forgive those who’ve abused him”?

photo credit: nicdalic

During 2010 six of our MTS apprentices will be preaching at UniChurch on Paul’s letter to the Philippians which speaks clearly on the centrality of Christ in every part of life.

This series will be spread out over the year, but make sure you get along and hear these young men opening the word of God. Also the second year apprentices (Ben, Geoff, Steve & James) will take questions from the floor after their talks.

So get along to UniChurch in 2010, it’s going to be a great year of opening God’s word and worshiping together.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the jumble of words in the graphic… It’s a word cloud made from the text of Philippians. The bigger the word the more times it occurs in the book. Pretty cool huh? Check out www.wordle.net if you’d like to mess around with this yourself.

I’ve been struck by the number of things related to our concept of Christmas that are frankly quite hard to believe. Even when you set aside things like a reindeer-powered-sled, much of the Bible’s account of the first Christmas is hard to believe. think about the virgin birth or the moving star — there’s a sense that these really could be roadblocks to unbeliever’s faith. But I don’t think they’re the hardest things to believe about Christmas.

Even the idea that God could take on “human form”. Its difficult to comprehend that isn’t it? It seems so unbelievable… and yet, I think its still more reasonable than the hardest thing to believe about Christmas.

I reckon the hardest thing to believe about Christmas is the reason WHY God took on human flesh.

Look at what Heb 2:14 says:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

“God-the-Son” took on our flesh to save us from his wrath.

That’s purely astounding, and almost completely unbelievable. And yet, if you believe that one aspect of the Christmas account, all the rest is pretty easy to believe isn’t it?

We want to be a church that reaches out to young adults in Newcastle with the news about Jesus that saves them from hell. We want to be a church where everyone is excited about seeing new people join us, hear about Jesus, repent and entrust their lives to him.

The week before hundreds of young adults descend on the uni and unichurch… we want to get together, pray together and plan together about how we’re going to help them know their God who died for them.

So, come along and join us in seeing Jesus glorified.

Click here to register or for more information

Click here for the Taylor’s latest newsletter - the last one before they leave for Tanzania! Hear how we can be praying for them in the last weeks before they leave. Click here for the latest news from the Boxes, and get a bit of a feel of what Christmas in Slovenia is like.

Earlier this year, the elders formed a committee to do some thinking about whether HBC should ever buy a building.

That committee recently produced a document which recommended that the church should really aim to buy a building sometime soon. The Elders have had a good look at it, and agree with the reasons in the report.

We haven’t formally decided when we should do this, or where it should be, or how much it’ll cost. But this is something we should all start talking about some more.

To help kick that off, it would be good to read the committee’s report (along with the Elder’s thoughts) on the member’s area of the website. Please take a look! (We’ve also got some copies printed, and will have them up the back of our Sunday congregations).

The year is quickly coming to an end and the New Year will kick off in less than a month.  Whilst in many ways nothing changes with a new year, it is often an opportunity to re-assess, re-evaluate and re-apply yourself in many different areas.

At church it is an opportunity to kick off the New Year in a new ministry, to pick up a ministry for the first time, to change your ministry focus and now is the time to be praying and thinking about that.

But before you do it is essential that we understand the biblical basis for serving.  Paul writes:

⁷But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. ⁸This is why it^[a] says:
“When he ascended on high,
he led captives in his train
and gave gifts to men.”^{[b] 9}(What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions^[c]? ¹⁰He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.) ¹¹It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, ¹²to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up ¹³until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

¹⁴Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.¹⁵Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. ¹⁶From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.  (Ephesians 4:7-16)

1. Gifts are given by Jesus to each one of us.

Which means that if you are a Christian then Jesus has given you gifts to be able to serve the church.  This means we can never say or think:  ”I am not important here!” or “My ministry is insignificant”.  Neither can we think or say:  ”I’ll do it all!”.  Each one of us has been gifted to serve the church by Jesus.

2. Word gifts are given to prepare us for ministry

Paul says that apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastor-teachers are gifted by Jesus to serve the church.  These are all word based gifts!  But notice they are not the ones who do all the ministry.  In fact, they prepare God’s people for works of service/ministry.  This is an important distinction to make.  What this means for us is that we are all in ministry but some are gifted with word ministries so the rest of us can get on with the job of loving and serving one another.  In a recent sermon by Andrew Heard he made the point very clear.

God has given these four gifts to get you and me off our butts… to get us up an going in works of ministry. You don’t employ a minister to do the work of ministry, the work of service. You employ a minister so that he might get you doing the works of ministry. It is a great tragedy that ministers hog the priveldge and joy of serving to themselves. And it is a great tragedy when congregations think they are winning when someone does it for them, when in fact they are losing.

3.  Gifts are given by Jesus to grow us to maturity

Many people think that our giftedness and service is the end point of maturity.  How many times have you judged someone’s maturity in Christ by judging how much ministry they do?!  But that is not the point of the gifts.  The gifts are not given to set people apart from the rest.  But Jesus has graciously given some people particular gifts so you, and the whole church, can grow to maturity in Christ as you serve one another, speaking truth in love, eaxch part doing its work.

So my question for you is, how are serving the church?

There are so many ways to serve at Hunter Bible Church. If you want to serve contact one of the pastors of HBC, organise to meet up and have a coffee, and talk with them about where you would like serve.

Magnification - Dave Moore

Mission - Sam Hilton

Membership - Dave Allen

Maturity & Ministry  - Richard Sweatman

Meeting up with new believers has been forcing me of late to be constantly engaging with people who now have this new identity in Christ - ’saint’ - and yet are constantly struggling with sin and asking the question:

How do we understand what has taken place in us thorough the death of Jesus while we keep struggling against sin?

Whilst this is an issue for new believers (and is usually more tangible), it is a struggle we all face as Christians (though some of us have forgotten to struggle).  It is an issue of identity.  Who am I?

The answer, according to Martin Luther is simmul justus et peccator! Which basically means, the Christian is righteous and a sinner at the same time.  We have a paradoxical double character that is hard to live with.  In an old edition of The Briefing Gavin Perkins writes:

In one sense, the Christian is both completely sinner and completely righteous - not partially one and partially the other.  We are thorough sinners before ourselves, while at the same time we are completely righteous before God, clothed in the alien righteousness of Christ.  In ourselves and our own stained works apart from Christ, we are still wholly sinners; and yet in the works made perfect in Christ, a Christian is righteous.

The best way of coming to grips with all this is by reading Romans 5-8 in one big sitting.  This has been greatly valuable as i have sought to pastor new believers.  As we read I ask 4 questions:

Romans 5 - How am I made right with God?

Romans 6 - How am I to view myself now?

Romans 7 - How does chapter 7 change how I view myself ?

Romans 8 - How does the Spirit change my future?

It is a long and difficult section of scripture to read but reading it assures us of our salvation, make sense of our troubled existence, and gives us hope for the future!!