Sermon notes (.pdf) sermon_Acts 6&7
Sermon notes (.pdf) sermon_acts 6
Sermon notes (.pdf) sermon_Acts5_1-11
[note] just a quick note here about a misreading I had in the sermon. For the reason unknown, I always though that the feet in v.9 were the feet of Ananias. I just thought that it would be a dreadful picture as the dead body was lying there for three hours with his feet uncovered. Christine had checked my sermon and she didn’t realize this misreading either, in fact, she thought they were Ananias’ feet as well. She said that there was a similar scene in Wizard of OZ. Weird! As someone pointed out after the service, I read v. 9 more closerly, they are “the feet of the men who buried your husband…” So, sorry about the mistake!
Sermon notes (.pdf) sermon_Acts_4&5
I still remember today 20 years ago, the last semester before I graduated from university. On June 4th, it was a cloudy morning and I with my roommates were lying on our bunk beds listening to “Voice of America” to find out what was happened in Beijing last night and the news shocked us. The event changed my life forever. I lost my faith in the government and its ideology because of that, yet I didn’t know what to believe. Until 1997 I was found by Jesus, I had lost in a wilderness. Who would have thought that today I am a minister!
20 years, it has been a long time!
This documentary “It happened in Tianmen Square” is very helpful for you to know the event- part 1; part 2
Sermon notes (.pdf) sermon Acts 2_14-41
Having just finished the preaching series on the Gospel of Mark, everything from this book is still very fresh to me. Our FIG (Friday night International Group) is also studying Mark using the Swedish method led by Mike at the moment. Last week we studied the passages from ch. 9 “Jesus heals a boy with an unclean spirit”, one guy from the group said that the application for him was from v.24 “I believe; help my unbelief!” Isn’t it exciting?
It is also exciting to hear this whole book is being performed in many theaters by Max McLean, and the show has been welcomed by the secular press.
[Between two worlds] An interview with Max Mclean
The Gospel of Mark DVD from Amazon
Have you ever lacked for evangelistic materials – the bridge, two ways to live, christianity explained/ explored, or evangelism explosion? Have you ever been trained to use these tools?
On p.35, the challenge is “we have produced plenty of creative evangelistic materials, but little to help Christians connect their faith to the whole of life.”
Many churches often organize camps for evangelistic training every year – a set of program, very busy. But people are still having trouble for actually doing it, or ironically have no time to do it – too busy to do training – church service, prayer meetings, social at church, Alpha etc – these things occupy all our time. Haven’t we ever thought that the best places to present what we believe are work, school, college, sport, arts, leisure, rest? and the best way to present is to simply live out?
The vast majority of Christians have not been helped to see that who they are and what they do every day in schools, workplaces or clubs is significant to God, nor that the people they spend time with in those everyday contexts are the people God is calling them to pray for, bless and witness to. So we pray for our Sunday school teachers but not, for example, for schoolteachers workign 40 hours a week in schools among children and adults who on the whole don’t know Jesus. We pray for overseas missionaries but not for Christian electricians, builders, shop assistants and managers in our towns … We have simply not been envisioned, resourced and supported to share the Good News of Jesus in our everyday contexts.
How does this idea impact the way we pray each day or during Sunday service? What we pray for on Sundays usually reflects the way we do church, isn’t it true?
Also, there are things that prevent us to live out our faith, one of them is the ghetto mentality – “We think of church as the faithful few, backs against the wall.” Thinking positively, we need to see that in fact we are dispersed throughout the world. We are already infiltrating the kingdom of Satan.
“The challenge for us is to make the gospel the centre of our lives not just on Sunday mornings, but on Monday mornings” At this point, I just realized that this is actually a rebuke for my sermon preparation as well. It reminds me that the applications must be for people to take home for next morning use.
We need non-full-time leaders who can model whole-life, gospel-centred missional living. It means thinking of our work-places, homes and neighbourhoods as the location of mission. We need to plan and pray for gospel relationships.
This is the strategy of “Total Church”. And now the question is how to prepare myself and others to do this?
Microsoft’s REAL Vision of the Future from Gizmodo
Sermon notes (.pdf) sermon_Acts2
[20/05] – an additional note
Kevin pointed out to me this morning that in my sermon the way I called myself “evangelical deist” is confusing. What I really meant was that although I am not a deist (I don’t believe in deism as much as I believe in God’s omnipresence) in theory, I’m still operating like a deist in practice. This is the sin I must confess. I borrowed this title “evangelical deist” from John Woodbridge’s lecture at the SMBC preaching conference. He used this title to refer to those who are evangelicals yet operating like a deist in practice.
Deism doesn’t seem to be that popular today, however, its subtle influcence in our daily practice is still alive, even in churches today that take their stand on the Bible. We don’t say this out loud that God’s interference in people’s lives came to a halt sometime in the past (in the apostles’ time, or at the Reformation or the revivals, but surely before our time). However, “our meager prayer lives, our anxiety, our dependence on novel techniques in evangelism, our hope in techonolgy to solve spritual problem, our doubt that loving discipline can restore wandering brothers or sisters to repentance and reconciliation – all these testify to our unspoken assumption that God’s real action is in the past and in the future, but not in the present. We act as though Jesus wound up the church and then flung us out on our own when we say, ‘Our church cant’ grow in this neighborhood,’ or ‘I won’t apologize until she does – and sho won’t!’ or ‘He says he’s sorry, but he’ll do it again,” or ‘What will become of us?’” (Dennis E. Johnson The Message of Acts in the History of Redemption, P&R Publishing, 1997)
