Term 2 Programme

Mondays@Christies Beach Baptist Church 7.30-9.30pm:

Acts of the Apostles Martin Bleby
In this treatment we see the Acts of the Apostles as a crucial stage in the whole purpose and action of God. We are still in the unfolding of this action!

Marriage Andrew Klynsmith 
Marriage is more than just a convenient arrangement between a man and a woman—wonderful, or difficult, as that might be. It is designed to reflect and participate in the ultimate marriage between Christ and his people.
 
Christies Beach Baptist Church, Fowey St, Christies Beach


Keith Chessell-The Story of God:
The Story of God (New Testament) Keith Chessell
Salvation history—the unique story of human life with God, the Creator, Redeemer and eternal heavenly Father, who in Jesus Christ has fulfilled all that He purposed and promised.

• 7.30pm Monday–Mt Barker;
  
• 7.15pm Tuesday–Victor Harbor;
  
• 7.30pm Wednesday–Mitcham.

Mount Barker: Cornerstone College, 68 Adelaide Road, Mount Barker;
Victor Harbor High School, George Main Road, Victor Harbor;
Mitcham Baptist Church, 20 Albert St, Mitcham


Tuesdays@NCTM (6.45pm tea, $3),7.30-9.30pm:

The Story of Salvation Andrew Klynsmith and Hank Schoemaker
An interactive overview of the whole Bible, helping to supply a reliable framework for faith in God, especially for younger believers and enquirers.

New Creation Teaching Centre, 936 Ackland Hill Rd, Coromandel East

Thursdays@NCTM 9.30-11.30am

Creation and the Liberating Glory Trevor Faggotter
True knowledge of creation helps us to be at home with God in all that He has made. Without it we are adrift in the universe. The battle for the creation will issue in new heavens and a new earth.

God and Prayer Martin BlebyCan we say that God has called human creatures to be, through prayer, nothing less than God’s fellow-workers in all that God is doing? Where must we be, and what must we know, to be able to pray in this way?

New Creation Teaching Centre, 936 Ackland Hill Rd, Coromandel East

Where Lay His Head?

Safe in their nests the snuggling birds, 

Deep in its lair, protected in its hole, 

The fox cub often hunts, or hunted is; 

But on the broad face of his own created earth 

Christ roams without a place to lay his head.

 
To lay his head?! But Martha’s house was his, 

And Peter’s, too, and others loved him fair. 

How say we then he has no lair, no nest, 

No place secure, no love from friends?
He walked on earth as love embodied!
 

They loved with passionate love who lived so close, 

Who heard the rich voice cry out the truth 

And saw the dear body break and bleed 

On the cross of cruel strain; they loved
Until their hearts of pain wept tears.

And yet it’s true—the cruelty of men 

Bound in Adamic hate and fear, they cannot cry 

‘Come gracious Lord and dwell in me!’ 

They turn upon their lusts of life 

And spurn the Holy One who loves.
 

I, too, know somewhat of the fear. 

I know the rejection of the words I speak, 

And in my nightly dreams I feel 

The sadness of the hostile hearts 

That scorn the love I long to give.
  

This is the fellowship of ours, 

The walking in the lonely place with him, 

But yet secure in compassionate pain, 

Knowing rejection does not condemn

But helps to make me one with him.


From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, p.79-80.

Bringing Grace and Sin Home by Preaching Holiness

To bring sin home, and to bring grace home, we need that something else should come home which alone gives meaning to both—the holy.

The grace of God cannot return to our preaching or to our faith till we recover what has almost clean gone from our general, familiar, and current religion, what liberalism has quite lost—I mean a due sense of the holiness of God. This sense has much gone from our public worship, with its frequent irreverence; from our sentimental piety, to which an ethical piety with its implicates is simply obscure; from our rational religion, which banishest the idea of God’s wrath; from our public morals, to which the invasion of property is more dreadful than the damnation of men. If our Gospel be obscure it is obscure to them in whom the slack God of the period has blinded their minds, or a genial God unbraced them, and hidden the Holy One who inhabits eternity.

This holiness of God is the real foundation of religion—it is certainly the ruling interest of the Christian religion. In front of all our prayer or work stands “Hallowed be Thy name.” If we take the Lord’s Prayer alone, God’s holiness is the interest which all the rest of it serves. Neither love, grace, faith, nor sin have any but a passing meaning except as they rest on the holiness of God, except as they arise from it, and return to it, except as they satisfy it, show it forth, set it up, and secure it everywhere and for ever. Love is but its outgoing; sin is but its defiance; grace is but its action on sin; the cross is but its victory; faith is but its worship.

The preacher preaches to the divinest purpose only when his lips are touched with the red coal from the altar of the thrice holy in the innermost place. We must rise beyond social righteousness and universal justice to the holiness of an infinite God. What we on earth call righteousness among men, the saints in heaven call holiness in Him.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.38-39.

The Unity of Humanity in Sin and in Atonement

The more public we make the sin, the more social and racial, so much the more are we driven upon a treatment of it which is ethical and not temperamental, which is racial as well as personal, and not only racial but divine.

Now there is no treatment of it which satisfies these demands of the soul, the conscience, society, and God, but the atonement in Christ’s cross. In the old juridical theories the social, or racial, aspect of the atonement, its connection with the moral order, is one of the great truths. And the more these theories become unsatisfactory on other grounds the more should the truth of their social sense of sin be developed in terms of modern society. But then the more sin is socialised so much the more imperative becomes the necessity of an atonement. 

As man grows the sin grows. The kingdom of evil grows with the kingdom of good. Sin, self, exploits every stage in the progress of society. It becomes unified, organised, and it must therefore be dealt with at a centre. The social organism has a common and organic sin. And a collective sin must have a central treatment. 

The more I lament and amend social wrongs the more I must realise before God the responsibility for them of me and mine. It is not only the Plutocrats. If it is man that is wronged it is man that has wronged him, it is man that has sinned, man that is condemned. You cannot split up the race. You insist, indeed, on its solidarity. Its unity and solidarity is one of the commonplaces of modern thought. Surely, therefore, if sin there be, man is the sinner. The wrong inflicted on man sets up a corresponding responsibility on man at his centre. There must be a central and solidary treatment of sin and one where responsibility is borne in man, even though it be vicariously. And any atonement becomes a matter of judgment, and not mere repentance or reparation. That seems inevitable if we believe in responsibility, and also believe in the unity of the human race. It seems logical.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.35-37.
 

The Cross and Reconciliation

Our chief natural legacy from the past is distance and alienation from God. The chief problem of the present (and of every present) is to reduce and destroy that. It is reconciliation.

But reconciliation is no aesthetic, or educational, or impressionist affair. It is not a revival. It is not a question of touching a certain number of individuals, and gathering them for salvation out of a lost mankind. It cannot be done by a magnetic temperament, a noble character, or a lofty sage. It means changing a whole race’s relation to God. For good and all that could only be done from God’s side; and it was done in the cross.

We have to be redeemed into that reconciliation, and redeemed as a race. It was a work that had to be done, and not merely a personal influence that was to be conveyed. Christ did not die simply to affect men but to effect salvation, not simply to move man’s heart but to accomplish God’s will. All we may do to reconcile men to God is but the following up of a great and final deed of God— the cross.

It is the cross, then, that is the key to Christ. None but a Christ essentially divine could do what the Church beyond all other knowledge knows the cross to have done for its soul. The divinity of Christ is what the Church was driven upon to explain the effect on it of the cross. Nothing less could explain the new creation, which is so much deeper than any impression on us, and calls for an author so much more than prophetic, hortatory, or impressionist in soul.

The atonement of the cross is the key that opens the door, but the house we enter is not made with hands. It is the very heart of God we have in Christ. We are not landed in a vestibule but straight in the sanctuary of the place. This Son of God is God the Son.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.29-30.

A Meditation On Motivation

The word motivation technically relates to energy or force. Gradually it has come to mean ‘that which impels one to take a certain line of action’.

Paul, of course, does not use such a word. The closest he and others come to this is the word ‘constraint’ (e.g. II Cor. 5:14). We know that the energy or life force– especially for Christian service–is the Holy Spirit. In another sense love is the motivating force. On the practical level, what was it that drove the early Christians to proclaim the Gospel, even to martyrdom?

The answer must be that their own experience of salvation, of being redeemed from the bondage of sin and evil, of having their sins forgiven, of being justified, sanctified and adopted, mast have been so dynamic as to fully liberate them. This was how they knew the love of God in action. In fact their hearts were flooded with love by the Holy Spirit who also came to live in them and empower them.

We can see it also from a slightly different viewpoint. What must have been the effect of seeing Christ risen from the dead? Because he has not, just now– at this point of time in our age–risen, and appeared to us, we are not so deeply affected. Yet today the Spirit has to make that resurrection and triumph over death and sin just as immediate and total to us, as he did to the early believers. The reality of Christ, and his presence by the Holy Spirit was so vivid that they could not but talk about it.

Were we to listen hear, meditate, and realise, then we would be just as motivated or constrained as they were. If we were to know dynamically the new birth by the word of truth (James 1:18; I Pet. 1:22-23), the ‘washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit’ (Titus 3:5-7), then we too would be greatly motivated. As it is we need–time and again–to come back to the overwhelming grace and love of God in order to receive fresh constraint and (thus) driving power.



From Proclaiming Christ's Gospel In Today's World, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, p.25.