Mission Statement

In classical sacrifices, the people get the good bits, and the gods get the refuse, the bits that would get thrown out otherwise.

Not our God. Leviticus (particularly Leviticus 3) describes the sacrifices that our LORD demanded from His people of Israel. God gets the kidneys, the tail, and all the fat. He gets the prime steak, He gets the best.

Today we do not literally give sacrifices of animals. For us the ultimate sacrifice has been made through our Lord, Christ Jesus. But should always be our ambition to do the same thing - to offer God the best of what we have, to offer Him the fat, and not the smoke and bones.

Saturday 10 September 2011

Acts 17

And Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus. (verse 7)

It was rare to be persecuted for being a Christian. No, you were persecuted for being a Christian and nothing else, for having no king but Jesus, for believing that He is King of kings and Lord of lords. Believing that Jesus is higher than Caesar is what got most Christians into trouble.

It is the same today. Christians are relatively safe as long as they are not exclusive. Jesus can be their God, but we mustn’t stop others from having their own gods. We mustn’t proclaim God’s standards; they are to ‘intolerant’. Sadly, much of the Christian church has succumbed to the world’s standards. I’ve sat in sermons where the preacher has declared that the phrase “I am the way, the truth and the life, and nobody comes to the Father except through me” is just for Christians. Churches are splitting over whether practising homosexuals can be ministers. Purity is laughed at. We must be like the world in order to escape being persecuted.

This is not the way! Rejoice in your sufferings, for in suffering, even in small amounts, we show our Saviour to be worthy, to be the only one worth living and dying for. When we suffer for His sake we demonstrate to the world a small portion of just how great He truly is.

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