Many churches around the world – and particularly those of a more liturgical bent or traditional history follow a church calendar. This calendar allocates various days and weeks throughout the year into seasons. Each season emphasises significant aspects or events within our faith and so provides opportunity to reflect on those aspects.
Broadly speaking these seasons are Advent, Christmas and Epiphany at this time of year and then Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost.
We haven’t been here for the past couple of weeks but Mark tells me we’ve commenced a sermon series looking at prayer. A couple of week’s ago he spoke on Derek Prince’s 7 conditions for answered prayer. And last week he spoke on perseverance.
One of the underlying Scriptural bases for those ideas is found in Hebrews 11:6 (reading from the NJKV):
The Sword of the Spirit and Praying in the Spirit – Ephesians 6:17-18
A Spiritual Armour recap
A couple of months ago we started a series of sermons on the Holy Spirit. We began with his titles, his ministry and receiving the Spirit. We moved onto the Spiritual Armour of God from Ephesians 6. This recognises fact that we’re engaged in a war whether we realise it or not, and whether we want to be or not.
My father, known to his grandchildren as “Poppop”, was known for his fairly quick and somewhat acerbic wit. He was also a pragmatist (wonder who inherited some of those characteristics!)
An example of his somewhat unusual humour was when he bought a mobile phone at around age 80 and then proceeded to try to understand the instructions as they related to the phone in front of him. He annotated one page of the instructions with various questions as to “where?”, “what?” and “which?” because the physical phone button titles didn’t correspond to the titles in the instructions:
This chapter is written by Jean Rutherford who, early in the chapter writes:
It is our minds, as well as spirit and will, which are needed in analysis of any Biblical passage. Lack of spiritual life leads to dry academic discussion; lack of mental discipline and hard thinking leads to ‘beautiful thoughts’ floating in a void and to an unbalanced view of God’s truth; lack of will makes the whole operation sterile, since the object of Bible study is to help us to discern God’s will and His purpose for us, and then to obey Him.
Around a month ago we commenced a series looking at the Holy Spirit. In between there were some special services for NAIDOC week and Mark resumed this series two weeks ago. At that time he began looking at the armour of God from Ephesians 6.
The path we’ve come down is that the Holy Spirit is within us to teach and equip and counsel and remind and empower and gift. A deal of that equipping and empowering is because we are in a war, a spiritual war. To be honest there are battles that we are often oblivious to and ill-prepared for.
A month-or-so ago I came across a book at a second hand bookshop called studying God’s Word edited by John B Job.
It was published by IVP over 45 years ago1 and so the style is a little dated. Despite that, the content is helpful. It covers different ways or methods of, not surprisingly, studying God’s Word. Some of these methods include analysing a book of the Bible; analysing a passage or chapter; character and background studies; word studies and theme studies.
[The following is the text of a sermon preached in our church on Sunday 30th June 2019]
Holy Spirit: A Pencil Sketch Biography
Studies and Masterpieces
Good morning and welcome to our class in Australian Art 1943-1944.
For our first slide 1 I’d refer you to this controversial work from 1943.
What can you tell me about the title of the work, the name of the artist, the size of the work, what media was used, the style of the work, the nature of the controversy surrounding it or indeed something about the subject?
