To change a life

Themes: Moore College

This week I’m away on mission in Springwood. The best thing about Mission is getting to see and hear brothers and sisters from College as they get their hands dirty with preaching, teaching, encouraging, and organising ministry – as they plant and water the gospel seed.

Last night my good friend Anthony preached a cracker sermon from Mark 9:14-32. He put his heart and soul into the words and as his love for Jesus shone through it was impossible not to be swept up along with him.

I preached at the 8am Service at Christ Church, Springwood – an old sandstone building on the Great Western Highway. Here’s part of my introduction:

Many great and terrible powers there are in the world today, but nothing is great like the power to change a man’s heart.
When bombs went off over the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima the terrible power of burning suns was unleashed upon people’s upturned faces, but in that power was proof that a greater power is needed to change men’s hearts.
When a man stood on the moon, or when he could first put a computer in his pocket, or when an African-American first stepped up to the podium as the President of the United States, we heard the rhetoric of change, we saw a power, maybe we thought we the power of change -
But time and again, though the powers change, though the dress of power changes, we see that what is in the hearts of men and women remain fundamentally the same. The same choices, the same fears, hopes, anxieties, loves, the same vices, the same track, the same parallel lines of life stretching away to the horizon…
What does it take to grasp those lines, to wrench them from their course?
What does it take to change the direction of a persons life?

Read the rest of my Mission Diary