Fear and loathing

Sometimes I'm not motivated to get into a particular task. Often, that's because I don't think I'll have the time or energy to do it really well. It won't be up to the standards that I hold up others' work to. I never felt scared, but fear in a way has removed motivation. Fear of my work being pathetic.

Or, I could obey God's word, instead of just reading it.

I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.

Ecclesiastes: what do you reckon?

Over the next few weeks I'm going to post a few thoughts on Ecclesiastes. Particularly, I'll be using two or three different approaches from different commentators and seeing how they hold up. Which has the best explanatory power for the material found in a book at once so easy to relate to and at the same time so difficult to understand?

I've found Ecclesiastes to have be far better represented in the 'favourite book of the Bible' stakes than the 1/66 chance which probability would afford it. In fact, I've heard more people quote it as their favourite than any other. And all have a strong opinion on its message. And most of them conflicting.

Thus it will be interesting, not to claim to know the answer, but to post thoughts to provoke those who're interested in this multi-faceted book.

So, to kick off, what do you think is the main point of the Teacher?

Is it normal to... #1

I'm trying to work out whether some of my responses to everyday situations are normal or complete over-reactions. What do you think? Would you be just the same?

Would you:

Be minorly-moderately annoyed if someone grabs your arm and moves it from where it was happily resting on the table while you're involved in conversation elsewhere? But here's the kicker: What if the person who moved it was your spouse?

Kutuzov family history

I've been doing a little bit of delving into my family history over the last year or so, and it's yielded some interesting results. Tales of Communist v Tzarist battles, Cossack warlords, indigenous Australian history and even apparently some French blood. :o

Firstly, I thought I'd start with the Kutuzov side, and some easy background. My dad is Russian from Harbin (North-eastern China). My babushka (grandmother) is alive, but my dyedushka (grandfather) died when I was about 2. Here's my dyedushka with my dad:



And here's my babushka in her first ball gown:



Subsequent history posts will have amusing stories too. Don't fear this will become an exercise in slide-show-death-by-blog.

The agony of choice

Back from mission, but no blogging impetus to speak of. I'm completely wrecked after a week of firstly being nervous about a kids' talk that went well and then worrying about an evangelistic talk which didn't go so well.

The kids' talk was made considerably easier by the fact that I used one of the excellent Kidswise talks by Sandy Galea and some awesome props made by my wife.

The sermon on the other hand, was agony!

The loose theme we'd been given was 'Life Matters'. I had initially wanted to do a talk about the tension between life and death in Ecclesiastes. The tension is created by death's ending of life and thus frustrating and cutting off all humanity's work and relationships. Hence, they are in vain. The talk would finish in 1 Corinthians 15 with the resurrection and its result: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

The problem, though, is that I wanted to explore some different ways of dealing with this tension between life and death. Options such as denial, religiosity and acceptance. After a couple of weeks agonising over preparing this kind of talk, I gave in. I can't do a talk like that well enough yet. To be able to connect that philosophical stuff to real life in an engaging way in a 15 minute evangelistic talk to your average person from the street was a bridge too far.

So I decided to do an exegetical talk on John 11 (Lazarus' resurrection). But by then I only had a couple of days to prepare, and I wasn't really 'feeling' the passage as an evangelistic talk. So it wasn't so crash hot.

I'm not sure if any non-Christians were there. Very few people at church at all on that rainy day.

Still, it was good to stretch myself. Now I've got some thoughts about my limitations as a preacher to explore.

A break in transmission

Sorry. Can't blog. Missioning.

Still, Some bits of my preaching prep for Sunday morning. Prayers appreciated.

- - -

John 11

The two different responses to Jesus.
You can see the miracles themselves, even believe that they’re real, and still not believe that Jesus is the Son of God. The issue isn't believing the miracle. The issue is: "having seen the miracle, would you believe that Jesus was the Son of God?".

The bloke who wrote this down was there. He saw it happen. He saw Jesus do heaps of amazing things. But why did he write this episode down? Why was this one recorded?

He tells us. Right at the end of his book he tells us why he chose this particular sign to record. “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

John wrote down what happened that day for you. In fact he wrote the whole book hoping and praying that you would believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Why? Because he wants you to have life. He doesn’t want death to be the end for you.

Just when you thought the job was done

Just so you know, this is NOT what it looked like when Nathan's goalkeeping performance won us the Grand Final (yes, it is Worthy of Capital Letters) on Saturday.