Sonia

Good morning.  It’s lovely to be back here with you today and for those of you who didn’t catch it earlier on I’m Sonia and along  with Ross and the three girls, we have been your CMS Mission Partners for the last about seven years we’ve been working in Thailand and today is our opportunity to say thank you and to tell you a bit more about what we’ve been doing.  We’ve got a bit of a tag team sermon going on so I will be starting off and then Ross is going to be coming up.

So since we last visited you back in 2006, we’ve been at Christchurch, a city centre church in the middle of Bangkok.  We’ve been working there for the international English speaking congregation there.  It’s a place of great variety.  It has about forty nationalities represented in the congregation; of people who with a wide range of background and experience are seeking to follow Jesus there in Bangkok.  As a couple we’ve been involved in a lot of different things that we could tell you all about but as we’ve been thinking and praying about what to share this morning we felt that passion for Jesus should be our theme.

So this morning we’re going to look together at that Luke 7 passage that Ross just read and we’re going to weave into it some of the stories of people that we knew in Bangkok who impacted us with their passion for Jesus.  If you are a note-taking type, you may be pleased to know that we have three points and they all begin with P.  So see if you can catch them.

Passion for Jesus is where the rubber hits the road in Christianity.  Sometimes our faith can become intellectual assent to Christian beliefs and morals but without our heart really being captivated by Jesus.  And there’s nothing wrong with the former but God wants and has created us for more.  He’s made us for relationship with Him.  So this morning let’s ask ourselves the question “Are we passionate for Jesus?”  Has He really got hold of us and are we allowing Him to take our lives and transform them with His love and life so that we in turn can impact others.  

 Whatever and whoever we set our hearts on that’s where our energies and our time will be focussed.  Is Jesus our passion or have we allowed other things to get hold of our heart?  Have a look with me at that story from Luke 7 and you might want to have it open before you.  In it we have two very contrasting approaches to Jesus.  One is distant and cold and the other is intimate and heart – led.

So let’s first consider Simon the Pharisee’s response to Jesus and what we can learn from him.  Underneath the veneer of respectability Simon is actually proud and self-righteous.  He may have invited Jesus to dinner but he was actually cynical about Jesus and he treats Him with indifference.  We know this from verse 44.  He didn’t even give Jesus water for His feet which was a basic social etiquette for that day.  Someone of Simon’s status in society wouldn’t have just overlooked this.  He was sending a clear message of disapproval, by not giving Jesus water for His feet, by not kissing Him in greeting.  So what about us?  Maybe we’re not as cynical about Jesus or as self- righteous as Simon the Pharisee, but it is easy for us to have some similarities to him.  For those of us who have been Christians or church-goers for a long time, we can keep Jesus at arm’s length and be indifferent or even actually disrespectful to who Jesus really is.  We can concoct a very sterile, safe, head-based faith with Jesus fairly detached from everyday life where he won’t cause us any problems.  Our faith can become about abstract knowledge rather than about a vibrant, living relationship.  If this in any way describes you today, then as we briefly share some stories, I want to encourage you to open your heart to God’s Holy Spirit again.  Ask Him to give you His love and ask Him to draw near and revive that living, vibrant, passionate relationship with Him.  Without this we’re really shells of what we could be.

So let’s turn our attention now to our friends in Bangkok alongside the second character in the story, the so-called sinful woman.  Firstly let me introduce you to Durin.  Durin is a good Thai friend of ours.  She’s in her forties and she’s got a son at university who she’s been bringing up since her husband left her when her son was small.  Durin runs and lives in Shalem House, which is an emergency house for families from the provinces whose children get sent into the Bangkok hospitals because of serious illnesses, heart problems, cancer or serious accidents.  She’s also the main catalyst for all the social work of the Christchurch Thai congregation.  I had the privilege of working with Durin in a number of areas.  She was a great example to us.  She was almost always smiling and gracious and she served other people with real love.  She had a huge job on her shoulders and she often felt unsupported even, it has to be said, by her leaders but she knew that God had called her to serve people in trouble and she persevered at it with a grace and a commitment and a patience that was a real challenge to us.  Because Durin was passionate about Jesus, serving Him was more important than those discouragements that she often faced.  This perseverance is like the sinful woman in the Luke 7 story.  She was determined to worship at the feet of Jesus, even in a very intimidating environment.  There were many reasons why she could have stayed away.  She hadn’t been invited, she wasn’t wanted by most of those present, they would have despised her for such a public display of affection.  At any moment she could have been thrown out or worse.

But in spite of these many obstacles, she did what she desperately wanted to do, which was to worship Jesus.  Hebrews 12:1 says to us “Run with perseverance the race that God has marked out for us.” It doesn’t say to run any old race but to run with perseverance the race that God has given to us.  So the first question that I’d like to ask as we think about our passion for Jesus is “How’s my perseverance?”  Is my heart so gripped with Jesus that I’ll get on with the job that He’s given me to do even when I face discouragements?  Durin persevered.  The sinful woman persevered.  If we are passionate for Jesus, we will persevere.

Ross

Let’s turn our attention now to the second of our stories for our friend Vijay.  Vijay’s an Indian man in his early thirties who’s married with a little kid.  He’s got a job, I don’t understand – some sort of software job and he works very hard to get the job done.  Vijay’s mother is a Christian and had introduced him to some aspects of the Christian faith but whenever Vijay arrived in Bangkok, he wasn’t really sure where he stood with regards to the Christian faith and as he put it, he felt compelled to come to Christchurch to find out more.  He started coming to our small group and we heard a little bit about his story and we invited him to come along to an Alpha Course where Vijay firmed up his faith and grew in it and decided to get baptised.  And that’s when the fun began because Vijay’s wife and his wife’s family, a beautiful family, a Hindu family and they were very against the changes that were happening within Vijay.  The night before Vijay was due to get baptised a lawyer friend of his phoned him and said, “Vijay, do not do this, do not get baptised tomorrow.”  The reason given was that in Indian law if you have got evidence that one of a partnership er converts, then the courts will back the other partner if there is any dissolution of the partnership so he would relinquish his rights to his wealth, his kid, and everything else and this put Vijay in a real dilemma.  He spent a number of hours, in fact the whole of that night praying about what he should do, talking with us on the phone.  In the end at about five in the morning, after a sleepless night, Vijay decided that baptism was a step of obedience, that God was asking him to take and that he needed to trust God over the consequences of that decision so next morning we had a very joyful baptism service at Christchurch.  And it was a really gutsy sacrificial step which Vijay made which was a challenge to me.  Where is God really in my list of priorities? Are we really willing to take up our cross as Christ invites us to and make sacrifices in terms of our career, in terms of our status, our reputation in order to follow Jesus ?  Following Jesus is about giving our whole lives over to Him in response for all that He has done for us and all that He continues to do on our behalf.  Think again about the sinful woman from Luke 7.  She was preoccupied with Jesus and with Christ alone.  The fact that there were those present in the room who were disgusted with her and you know they weren’t hiding their disapproval.  I’m sure their disapproval of her was very evident but the fact that that was going on didn’t deter her because she cared only what Christ thought of her.  Sometimes we are so preoccupied with what others think of us rather than being preoccupied with what Christ thinks of us.  Did you notice how the woman pours her perfume over Christ’s feet.  Commentators suggest that this perfume could well have been a large part if not all of her savings because in a culture where there were no high interest savings accounts and stocks and shares and things like that, it was customary for, for women to make their savings in terms of perfume, storing it up bit by bit for future years.  And yet her priorities meant that she was willing to pour it all out as an act of worship for the person that she was passionate about, this Jesus that she wanted to honour.  In Luke 12 Jesus tells His followers to seek first the kingdom of God and these things would be added to us as well.  So our second question as we think about our passion for Jesus is this: “What are my priorities?”  Is serving and worshipping and living life for Christ our top priority like it was for Vijay, like it was for this sinful woman?  Are we willing to step out like Vijay and trust in the ultimate goodness of God, even if in the short term it looks like it might cause us problems.  Let’s pray that God would give each of us a sacrificial and a gutsy faith that we’ll be prepared to put God first no matter what the consequences may be.

Our final story is of Tommy.  I wish that I could bring Tommy along and introduce you to him, or him to you would be a better way of putting it.  He’s a lad in his early twenties and he’s one of a family of five from Vietnam.  Like many others in Bangkok, Tommy had to flee his home and become refugees because their Christian faith had put their life in danger.  Thailand attracts many many refugees because it’s easy to get into and it’s a really cheap place to live.  But it’s a terrible place to be a refugee because for a number of political reasons the Thai government do not acknowledge UN refugee status so you live in constant fear as a refugee of being herded up and brought to one of the Thai holding centres, which are really not pleasant at all.  Refugees are not supported at all by the state and it’s true to say that they’re often mistreated, resented by the Thai people at large.  They’re also very easily exploited and they don’t have many places where they can turn to for protection.  Being part of the staff team at Christchurch, we met lots of refugees.  We had the privilege of a number of them becoming part of our church family and, Tommy, like many of the refugees that we met at Christchurch had understandable grounds to be fearful, to be anxious, to be angry with God, to turn his back on God.  And yet also like many of the refugees that were in our church, this man had a vibrant faith.  If he was here today, the thing you would notice most about him would be his smile and his laugh.  He has a vibrancy of life about him.  He lived life, with its very restricted options for him, fully.  He had no English yet he taught English to his friends and family.  He worked on the sly in a local hospital so that he could scrape a wee bit of money together to support his family and people back home in Vietnam as well.  He was a man who was marked by joy.  We had just the pleasure and privilege of being with him and of getting to know him through Alpha and baptism preparation.  Tommy, like the Apostle Paul describes in Philippians 4:12, has really learnt to be content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.  I, on the other hand, can get depressed with a football result that comes in.  Tommy’s perspective was not from his day to day difficulties.  His outlook on life was not based there.  His perspective on life was from the goodness of God.  That was the standpoint from which he looked out on life. 

In our passage from Luke 7, the woman who worshipped Jesus is described as sinful, a sinful woman, that’s her descriptor and I’m sure there were many ways in which her life was very difficult but she doesn’t focus on this.  She doesn’t shrink back from fear of what others are thinking about her.  Her perspective is based on her confidence in Jesus.  She knows that she can approach this Christ as she is.  She knows that what He thinks is what matters and as she draws near to Him did you see how Christ accepts her and honours her.  This can be our experience if we approach Christ in humility and faith, whoever we are.  Whatever we’ve done, we’re not discounted from the love of God.  We can find forgiveness and love and life if we approach Christ in humility.  We don’t have to be perfect in order to approach God, which is a good thing.  We just need to ask God for His perspective and trust Him that the other things in life that matter less, that He will sort out in His time.  So our final question to help us consider our passion for Christ is “What is my perspective in life based on?”  Is it on what others think of me?  Is it on my current circumstances?  Or is it on the reality of who I am in Christ and the goodness of a God who loves me?  I wonder what circumstances are in your life at the moment?  You know it’s impossible to tell.  You know, I look down and I’ve no idea what’s going on with you.  God does.  Whatever those circumstances, if we have a living relationship with God, our perspective, our outlook on life can come from a place of real peace, a real shalom, a real sense of being held by this almighty God.  Yes, we can still get angry and cry out to Him but God invites us to know His grace, His faithfulness and underlying security, a rock beneath us, even in the bad times so lets pray to have this perspective, the perspective of our friend Tommy, the perspective of Paul.  God invites each of us to follow the example of the woman in Luke 7 and our friends Durin, Vijay, Tommy by being passionate for Christ.  Remember our faith is primarily about relationship with God, about knowing Him and allowing Him to know us as opposed to just knowing about Him.  When our heart is captivated by Christ, we’ll be able to persevere, we’ll be able to have God at the top of our priorities and He will give us His perspective to live a life of honour to Him. 

Let’s pause and pray.  Father, I thank you that so many of us have examples round us of people who have full lives of relationship with You and I thank You for the examples of our friends in Bangkok.  I thank You for the challenge of those lives for our lives and we pray, Holy Spirit that You would come, that You would enable us to be passionate for Jesus in every aspect of life and then to share that life with others around us.  For Your glory, Amen.

Ross and Sonia Wilson 27-06-2010

(Apologies for any errors in transcription from tape to written text. CMD)