Sermons

If you're ever gone for a long bike ride, or a walk, or a run, you need to know where you are and where you're going. You have to get your bearings. Perhaps you've done that thing where you get on a train or you get on a bus and you get it to drop you off some distance from where you live, or from where you're staying, and then you walk, run, or cycle back to where you started. As you get off the bus or the train, you're looking around, aren't you? Going, "Well, where am I? Which direction was the bus going in when it dropped me? What landmarks are there to tell me where I am?

A number of folk in this church love the sport of running. I gather that there's an increasing Trinity Church contingent at the Wykeham Lakes Park Run on a Saturday morning. If they change the time so it's not 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, I might be tempted to give it a go myself. But running is a popular activity for many today.

You'll be glad to know that the reading was short, but I'm going to preach on a single verse this morning—one verse for you. But I'm going to do that in its context. That verse is Galatians 6:10: "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers."

Let me ask you a question: what kind of priest do you think you need? Most religions have priests. Now, what does a priest do? A priest will represent you before God, and having represented you in the presence of God, the priest will bring to you things that you need from God. They might dispense you with forgiveness; they might give you blessings for success in various areas of life; they might give you wisdom—either general teaching or specific guidance that you might need.

We live in a very distracted age. Whether it's notifications on your phone shouting at you, "Stop what you're doing and look at me now!", whether it's you're trying to browse the internet to maybe buy your weekly shopping and pop-up ads invite you to visit pages that are nothing to do with the task at hand...

You choose to watch a single episode of something on Netflix, and as it comes to the end, you're told that maybe you'd like to watch this next – and unless you press stop, it just starts.

I have a bit of a soft spot for the Book of Proverbs. It is a very down-to-earth book. It's very useful; it's very practical with daily life. This morning we're looking at Chapters 25 to Chapter 29, and a little bit like a box of chocolates, there are a few proverbs that are little personal favourites of mine—and the coffee creams go first, the chewy toffees never go—and some of my favourites occur in these five chapters we're looking at this morning.

When I was an undergraduate at university, we had a week-long series of events for people who are not yet Christians to come and find out about the Lord Jesus. We had a series of talks, one a night for a week, on Luke's Gospel, and the speaker was the now late Australian evangelist John Chapman — Chappo to his friends.

Are you somebody who is motivated by a carrot or a stick? If you're faced with a choice, are you more motivated to make the right choice by the appeal of the right one, or the fear of what may go wrong if you take the wrong choice?

At work, what incentivises you to put in that little bit of extra effort? Is it the idea that you might be noticed and so rewarded, or the fear that your career could be harmed if you just work to rule?

How about with Jesus? Is his appeal one of carrot or stick?

Well, school reports are not what they used to be. In the old days, you used to get a little paragraph of text from each teacher, describing personalised words as to how each child is doing. In the modern day and age, you just get categories: you're either doing better, worse, or as expected — and not a lot more feedback than that.

Well, I'd like to introduce you to myself, aged 10 years and 2 months, and I've just completed the Easter term at school. I was in class 4G. Okay, here is French:

Why don't you come with me? We love a warm invitation to join in something special. Come with me to the concert at the open-air theatre. Come with me on our holiday. Maybe even, for some of you, the reason you're here this morning in church is because someone who comes here regularly said to you, "I'm going to church on Sunday – come with me."