Aussie males are a pretty comfortable lot. Pretty secure and happy, generally speaking.
Many of us have the time to think, formulate our own views, and have been encouraged to do so. How different we appear to the males growing up in Australian in the 1930’s.
I wonder how we would go today if someone did actually attack Australia, and it become obvious that the general population of men had to go to way to defend our country. Forget wars in far off oil rich countries, what would we do if we had to defend our country?

Would we have the toughness, the agression, the willingness, the risk taking ability to take up arms and defend our land?

(This post was inspired in part by something Saint Gaz had on his site. )

I imagine most Christians struggle with belief at some point in their lives.
Doubts, fears, dissapointment with God.
If you are like me you have friends who struggle.
Have you ever warned them about that, exhorted, encouraged them to believe?

Heb 3
12See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

It appears from this passage that if our fellow Christian is starting to doubt, we have to encourage them to stop doubting. Thats unusual, especially in this day and age when we encourage each other to journey together. Its almost non PC of the Bible.
We are to see to it…… That sounds a lot like confrontation to me. Confrontation is not something I like, at all. And generally I am a good listerner (I hope), and are rarely presciptive. But there must come a time when my friend needs a good kick, stop doubting, start believeing, and get on with it. (in love of course) 🙂

The last week I have been heavily involved in putting together our church’s business plan for the next 3 years. We have had to do this for financial reasons, as we seek some funding for our relocation.

Its a pretty steep learning curve, but remarkably straightfoward if you have some guideance. Its also a faith thing. Determining where you want to be, with Gods help. Planning and believing your church is going to grow.
God wants His Church to grow, but plenty of them are not. Why?
Irrelevance, pride, stubborness, old paridigms, apathy.
Belief that if God wants the church to grow, He will bring the people, and all we need to be is faithful.

I think faithful is the most overused word in dying churches, faithful, yes faithful to the bitter end

I am so excited with our church at the moment, amazing possibilities, a great group of people whom I really care about. Together we can actually get the Bedford Bus onto the road. This is truly the beginning of an amazing ride.

If you are a pastor, and want to have a look at our business plan, send me an email.

Here is my third message in this series, took me a while to put this together.
The audio includes audio from a video I showed, sorry you cant see it!
Here I talk about doubts, lack of faith, when God seems absent….tough times.
I hope I prompt questions as much as share encouragements.
Download this or listen right now.

“the club has broken the 39,000-member mark on Monday before a ball has been kicked in anger in 2007”. Schwab: “Our new membership level represents an increase in our membership of over 9 per cent on our record 35,666 members set in 2006.”

No one can accuse me of being a bandwagon hopper. I thought this moment might come. Memberships and good seats are going to get harder and harder to come by.

Good luck trying to get a seat to see either of the WA teams this year.

Dealt with issues of faith this week. Tough sermon to write, spent a lot of time on it, trying to be concise, while also be comprehensive. Deliberatly asked and raised more questions than what I gave answers for. The whole point of this series has been that I want people to be vulnerable, be open. So to give pat answers is not going to help that.
Showed a good clip which dealt with issues of faith and a guy did not know how to pray for his sick friend.

Doubt vs faith, a battle we are stuck with this side of eternity. To try to pretend otherwise is ludicrous. But yet……

There are times The Holy Spirit breaks through in marvellous and suprising ways. Sermon will be online tommorow if you are interested.