X1fw Sermons

Adam Majerus walks us through our values that will guide us as a gospel-family.

Simon Leigh-Jones expounds upon the cosmic implications of the Good News of Jesus and God restoring all things in Him, as well as what it means for Christ First to be a Gospel Family.

Lent is a season calling us to follow the way of Jesus. Jesus the anointed King of all who enters the desert to be formed and shaped through obedience, humility, testing, and sacrifice. This is the cruciform way of life that we are asked to commit His followers. Lent provides us an entry point as we journey toward the Cross and resurrection of Easter.

In this final week of Epiphany we see the glory of God fully manifest in the Son of God at his Transfiguration on Mount Sinai.. There is so much to learn, see, and receive from this moment of the story in the life of Jesus: much to encourage as to His identity as the Son of God incarnate, but also to challenge us in our call to follow Him.

While invited into this deeply pastoral situation navigated by the apostle Paul in I Corinthians 8 we are inspired to be a people united in love not divided by knowledge. To be such a people we need to be a people of the gospel, of grace, and of worship.

Guy Miller, leader of the Commission family of churches, encourages us to be marked by worship, the gospel, and by grace as we move forward in this church plant journey.

The story of the scriptures is almost a grand narrative of the wonder that we are created in God's image and called to encounter with God. We consider the calling of Samuel and Nathanael and how we too are called to encounter God and call others into that encounter.

As we engage with the creation story and the story of Jesus' baptism we see that both stories echo each other. They are stories of an active, loving creator God being present in the world. There is also hints and directives that this presence of God in the world is to be through the baptized people of God.

Peace, it is a rare fleeting commodity. Whether it is the 'psychological' peace of a still heart, peace in the 'airwaves' of societal relations or peace that is the absence of conflict. What does Advent train in us in relation to peace and, perhaps most importantly, how can we be peace-makers that bring the peace we hope for?

Advent is boot camp in discipleship. The themes of hope, peace, joy and love drawn from the story told by the scripture readings in this season are THE themes of the gospel itself. The 'posture' trained in us is essential to live the life of a flower of Jesus in this time between times. Consider also how Advent happens in the midst of our 'secular' Christmas time.

After considering the individualized, personalized, moralized gospel that has for so long been the gospel message we've believed we consider why it is we've cherished such a gospel, what it's produced, and how we need to move on to something more beautiful, and more for the world. We look at each of those terms - individual, personal, moral - and contemplate how a Cosmic Gospel could be different.

There is a gospel message that most of us grew up with. As one author states it is "a truncated and inaccurate gospel of a highly individualized theological fire insurance policy." In this message Simon introduces us to a gospel in which the main message is of God becoming King and beginning the restoration and renewal of all things in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus: The Cosmic Gospel.

We are governed by a 'Cartesian Anthropology.' We think to be human is to be mind and matter, with our mind being important and our body being the unfortunate stuff around it. This has formed our Christianity and made it mind-centred, and disembodied. We need to undo that in our post-christian age and be a people who embody the values we have so as to write a gospel story together.

As we set out on a series considering what story we will write as a gospel-family we consider the time, the place, and the protagonist (Us!) of the story we shall write. There are counter stories that will woo us and self stories that we may want to choose but there is a mandate to write a story of the beauty, goodness and truth of the Gospel which can emanate from the shared table.

The feeding of the multitude displays the Kingdom economy so to speak. In a land no-one cared about, with people no one thought of (the poor and the outcast) Jesus fulfills the glorious words of the prophetic image of Isaiah 55.

Again and again Jesus says, "The kingdom is like," and again and again we're driven deeper into mystery. Thus the parables, in effect, reflect their paradoxical King and you only 'get' them if you're already following this King.

We look upon this "parable with a star billing" within the gospels and suggest that there is possibly another way of looking at it. One which invites us into mystery rather than seeking to intellectually 'get it.' It may just be a parable about the Kingdom and the God who is King of that Kingdom.

We're all geared up to be 'gateways', setting the boundaries and barriers as to why people can't be 'in' whatever club, or group, or class or whatever. This is, sadly, also the case with the gospel. Gary calls upon us to reconsider the barriers we've set up to keep people from our privatized, personalized gospel and perhaps retune ourselves to invite people into the grander, more glorious 'Cosmic Gospel.'

Through this difficult section of the Gospel of Matthew we ponder what it is to have the Cross of Christ as our sword in living out 'Cruciform Discipleship.' (Please excuse background noise.)

As we introduce our new series, 'Journey With the King' we look at our reading in Matthew from the Lectionary readings. Simon asks us to contrast of inviting Jesus into our lives with the picture painted by the gospels of Jesus as King asking us to join Him on bringing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. We ask questions around the nature of who we are as a people of this King: This people is Compassionate, for the world and ushers in the renewal inaugurated by the event of Jesus.