John 1 and a Street Preach

Hi, Every. Hi, Becca.

Love it. Ready to go?

Yeah, yeah. Eyeballs.

OK. Welcome back, everyone.

Welcome, Dave. Should we all say hi, Dave?

Hi, Dave. Lovely to see you.

It is genuinely lovely to see you.

We are spending a year once a month on on Wednesday evenings,

once a month on Wednesday evenings.

Isn't that better? Going through something called

the Introduction to the Trinitarian Faith course with a

real emphasis on really understanding this extraordinary

mystery that the nature of God is for the Son and Spirit, one

substance, three persons. And we want to emphasise we are

not. This doesn't mean we're Tri

deist. We don't believe in three gods

and we're not monotheists. We don't believe in one God that

exists with only one person within that God.

We believe in Father, Son and Spirit, 3 persons in one God.

And that belief was wrestled through after the collection of

the Old Testament came together and then people lived in the

light of that and then the there was a then Jesus comes in the

flesh. He lives and dies and is

physically risen from the dead and and people know that changes

everything. Somehow in what we call the

Christ event, something changes. And then for three centuries,

people wrestled with the implications of how we

understand God and the nature of the collection of texts.

We call the Old Testament, then the witness to Jesus that we

call the New Testament. They're a collection of

witnesses to the person of Jesus, either passed down

through all tradition, through memories, and then through

through scribes, writing, or personal revelation.

That collection of witnesses to Jesus through looking at all of

that which we now call the Bible.

For three centuries, people wrestled with what does this say

about the nature of God? We believe, all of us know that

we live according to what we really believe is true about

reality. All of us know, all humans know

that we what we actually believe is how we live.

So if a storm comes and we don't believe God's got our back,

we'll be scared. And what these things do is they

form and invite us into a depth of revelation of God's love for

us that he has got our back. So sometimes the language might

feel a bit complicated or convoluted.

Don't worry about that. As Origen said, God is simple.

What that means is there isn't a bit of him that's Father, a bit

of him that's Son, and a bit of Him that's Spirit.

He is not mixed. It's not like oil and vinegar.

He is 1 God in three persons, and we are invited into the

Godhead in union with the sun. We are in the Godhead, in union

with the sun, and what we want is for that to go from something

we might think about and be quite interested in to have a

breakthrough revelation in the way we live our lives.

Because what we really want to do is share good news that's

actually good news. When we've had an amazing

experience or we've achieved something incredible, we are

overflowing to tell that to someone else.

We know we have something good to share, but I think if our

understanding of God isn't good news, we don't really want to

share it. We're apologetic, we're

embarrassed, we're ashamed. So we need to understand what it

is that God has done for us in Christ, who we are in Christ,

what God is like in order that we are overflowing with good

news. So what we're doing this year is

we're wrestling through questions about that.

There are lots of different perspectives, but I sometimes

listen to a podcast called by someone called NT Right and I've

noted the question people are asking.

The question above all the other ones like sexuality or politics,

is how we address these issues of if people haven't heard God,

if they haven't had an opportunity to hear God, if

people were born before Jesus, can they know God?

Issues of universalism, Christian universalism, all

these questions are being asked in online spaces and we want to

have the courage as a community to ask them amongst each other

and wrestle through it. As a community, what do we feel

the nature of God is like? Because we feel God reveals

reality in community. Reality is Trinity and we

operate in the image of God. Reality is forged in us as a

community, travelling together, wrestling this through.

No one has a revelation on their own in their bedroom.

That's the full revelation of God.

God reveals himself in the body and he reveals it in person.

So we are going on a journey this year to try to try and

explore and understand more of what we think the nature of God

is like. But not because we just want to

have interesting ideas in our head, but because we want to

know we're loved. We really want to know how loved

we are, deeply loved we are. And we also want to be good news

for other people. So there are things which will

resonate, things which don't resonate, Things we might go,

oh, that's liberating. Things we might push back on.

It does matter, but in some ways it doesn't matter.

The point is we're having this conversation together and we're

going to work through together what we think God is like and

what we think the good news is. And I'm so grateful for Paul and

Grace and the family being here and bringing this to us.

This is the first time I think you've run this course in an

actual community in person rather than online.

So it's a real privilege that we can wrestle with this content

together. So I'm going to pray for Paul

now. And we want to have time at the

end for people to receive a fresh revelation of Jesus and a

fresh revelation of God's love. Lord, I thank you so much for

Paul and I thank you for his story.

His story is 1 of breakthrough revelation of your love and a

change of mindset about what you're like and what and what

reality is. And I just thank you for that.

And we, we want to receive fresh revelation today as Paul says a

lot in the Bible. Paul in the Bible says

repeatedly in his letters, the biggest thing we pray for is for

revelation of what you're like, of your love, of what Jesus is

like and who Jesus is. That's why we pray.

We ask for revelation. We need our eyes to be opened.

We need the darkness to be overcome by the light.

We need the veil between US and you, the lies we believe about

you to be taken away and removed and for us to see you as you

really are. And so we cry out to you to do

that work amongst us today and in the days and weeks and months

ahead. May we see you as as you are.

May we be known and loved by you, and may we experience that.

And may we be good news as a result.

Amen. Thanks, Alice.

It was really well said. So I'm going to start looking at

John's gospel and on Sundays when I'm here, we'll probably be

dipping into John's gospel throughout the year.

What I'm going to do today, just a couple of points about the

gospel. Then I want to read the prologue

and see how we get on because of trying to keep it short and then

want everybody to have time to pray.

So John's gospel, I mean couple couple of background facts often

considered by most Bible scholars and historians to be

the last gospel written, possibly the last book written

in the New Testament, the the the latest.

There are a couple of outliers who argue for it being the first

one, but you know, nobody really knows.

But anyway, I like the the perspective of Clement of

Alexandria who is 2 generations on from John the Apostle.

He was kind of his spiritual grandson, discipled by Polycarp,

his discipled by John and Clement records the background

to the writing of the Gospel of John.

And he said that John was in Ephesus.

He had a whole community of disciples in Ephesus, in the

church there who sat under his teaching and his disciples.

He, John, was getting towards the end of his life.

He was very old. We don't know exactly how old,

but old. And he'd been exiled on Patmos

before it had the the Book of Revelation.

Then he was back in Ephesus, having come back from exile.

And his disciples basically said to him, John, you need to write

down some of the stuff that you're saying because we haven't

really got a good record of it. We need you to put something

together. Why don't you write a gospel?

And they kept hassling and hassling and hassling him until

he said, all right, yeah, let's do it.

And Clement said, but John sat down and proposed to compose a

spiritual gospel, is the way that he put it.

I think that the wedding is something, if I remember

something like seeing that the bodily facts had been laid down

in the other gospels, he sought to compose a spiritual gospel.

So in other words, according to Clement, who's pretty close to

the, you know, the original source here, this gospel assumes

you've got a bit of a handle on the facts from the other gospels

or other writings and stories that are around about, you know,

the the kind of material facts about what who Jesus was and

what he did and said. That what John sought to do was

present a gospel that communicated the spiritual truth

of what this was all about. So out of all the four gospels,

John's Gospel is the one that is most most developed, most multi

layered in terms of its theology.

It's complex and you can certainly read it.

And I know it's sort of with those tracts, lovers of bridge

tracts, you know, people used to give out a lot would have John's

Gospel in it thinking that this is a good thing to kind of give

people to begin with. I get that.

Like on one level it is, you know, it's you can sort of read

it as a as a story and get hit with the sort of headlines.

But it is definitely the most complex of the gospels, one of

the most complex, maybe the most complex of the New Testament

books and extremely multi layered and not without its

controversies over the years, you know, people have accused it

of being anti-Semitic or being gnostic magical, you know, all

kinds of things. And I'd say that if you want to

get into John, try listening to it in audio rather than trying

to try and go through quickly in one or two settings and just see

what what lands for you while you're reading it.

I think one of the risks we have in in sort of, we're so used to

close reading that you might think, I want to read that read

that book. And then you immediately you're

sort of starting to kind of pour over each word and each verse.

And I think this is a book that needs, it needs to kind of

overview first. Like you, you, you go through it

quickly, see what hits you and then go back and do kind of

close reading afterwards. Again, a couple of important

things. I, I think there's millions of,

of things. But to me anyway, what's been

important to me that the Gospel is not in chronological order.

John is not interested in in sequences of time.

It's not that there isn't an order to what comes.

There's very definitely an order to what comes in the in the

Gospel, but it's not in chronological order.

And that's deliberate. So you'll see in the other

gospels, there's the story of Jesus cleansing the temple.

In the other three gospels, he does it right at the end of his

ministry, before he's crucified. In fact, it's the triggering

event that gets everybody really ready to crucify him.

But in John's Gospel happens right at the beginning.

There's a reason for that. It's it's not because John's

trying to say, I mean, I've heard people say, well, Jesus

cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning, once at the

end. Or I've heard people say, oh,

well, John was trying to correct the other, the other writers and

put it at the beginning. It's not those reasons at all.

John assumes, you know, that Jesus cleansed the temple at the

end of his life. This is common knowledge.

He's put it at the beginning because he's making a point.

So what is that point? How does it speak to us now?

And that's true for all of these things that as we see them come

out in, in the gospel, he's making very deliberate points by

what he has people say at certain times in certain places

and certain sequences. So the order is important, but

it's not chronological. So don't get confused about

that. The other thing is sometimes,

you know, in the if you've ever wondered or you've been in that

kind of apologetic space, people will say things like, well,

Jesus never claimed to be God. It was his followers who claimed

to be God. Well, that's a fundamental

misunderstanding of what's being said in the Gospels.

So Jesus repeatedly talks about being the Son of man in the

Gospel of John. Actually, the phrase Son of man

is, is what is the claim to be in God.

In fact, the Son of God is not a unique title.

Lots of people call themselves the Son of God.

Pharaohs and you know, Caesars and whatever would call

themselves sons of God and all the rest.

That was not a claim to divinity.

When Jesus says I'm the Son of man, he is laying, that's a

claim to divinity because that connects into the Jewish

tradition about this figure, this prophesied Messianic figure

that Daniel sees in a vision called the Son of Man.

So when Jesus says I'm the son of man, that's his claim to be

God. There are at least 7 instances

in across the gospel where Jesus uses the divine name.

Yahweh translates as I am. You know, it's the verb to be.

I am a taboo name that Jews weren't allowed to say.

You know, if that's you sometimes see people write G-D,

you know, to try and honour that tradition and Jesus uses that

name 7 times to refer to himself.

They're called the I am sayings. I am the bread of life.

I am the way, the truth and the life.

I am the the door to the sheepfold.

I am the light of the world before Abraham was I am 7/7

times at least maybe 8 depending on exactly how you categorise

it. But these are these are clear

statements by John showing us the divinity of Jesus.

So if anybody is, if you kind of come across any of those sorts

of arguments that they show that somebody doesn't really know

what they're talking about if they're asking that kind of

question, he's saying, well, Jesus didn't say he was God.

No, he absolutely did. You just didn't understand him.

It's right there. And John has that laid out for

us. So the emphasis on the divinity

of Jesus is very strong here. Lots of ways that comes out.

And this is central to John's gospel, The good news as told to

us by the apostle John. Why is it good news?

The essence of that is in who the person of Jesus is.

You have all the way through, you have a theme of light comes

out and life. We'll see that in the prologue

as well. And towards the end of the book,

you get some definitions begin to come in, such as what does it

mean to have eternal life or God's kind of life?

And John will say things like this is eternal life, that human

beings may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom

you've sent. So eternal life is an intimate

knowing and relationship with God.

So and then you see at the end of the gospel, John says, why

have I written all this stuff down?

I've written so that you may believe and continue to believe

and that in continuing to believe, you may continue to

have life. So the purpose of the book is

very well laid out. It's evangelistic.

It's there for whoever reads it, whoever hears it, to be inspired

in faith, in believing in who Jesus is and what he has done

and what he continues to do. And in that belief, engaging

with, enjoying, participating in and accessing God's kind of

life. Throughout the Gospel, we get

glimpses of what that kind of life looks like.

And all those things are there for us to have some sort of an

idea of what we're participating in, what we get to enjoy and

engage with. So all all of that is there in

the Gospel of John and tonnes more bonus thought for

consideration. I quite like the idea that the

Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John basically say the

same thing. The Book of Revelation is John's

kind of psychedelic unravelling on the Isle of Patmos.

And the Gospel of John is now he's, he's finally at the end of

his life, able to put something down that's systematic, having

worked through his experience with Jesus in the flesh, having

worked through after that, the resurrection, the moving of the

Spirit, and then this download that he gets on Patmos and then

afterwards through his ministry in Ephesus, now he's putting it

down. And then there's one part in the

Book of Revelation where there's a small scroll and the Angel

says to John, you have, you have written and you, you must write

again. And I quite like the idea and I

can't prove it, but I like the idea.

You can kind of consider it that when the Angel says you must

write again, that what the angels talking about is the

Gospel of John. So John's got that vision.

Okay, I know at some point in the future I'm gonna have to

write this. Now, that's not a scholarly

view. Most scholars don't think John

wrote Revelation anyway, for one reason or another.

But you can get into an argument with them.

To be perfectly honest, a lot of this, who wrote what and when,

it's extraordinarily speculative, frankly.

So I wouldn't place too much currency in that kind of

argument. Pay attention to it, but don't

place too much currency in it. The tradition of the church is

just as credible on this stuff, frankly, because we've got

unbroken records going back to people like Clement of

Alexandria, at least just two generations on from John who had

personal links, who are giving us this sort of info.

And I kind of trust them more than I trust, you know, 21st

century sort of or 20th century scholar kind of working on it

grammatically. But anyway, digressions.

Let me read. In the beginning was the Word.

The word was with God and the word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made.

Without him, nothing was made that has been made.

In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has

not overcome it. There was a man sent from John

from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify

concerning the light, so that through him all might believe He

himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the

light. By the way, if you've got a

Bible on the table, you can open it up and follow along.

We're on page 1063, John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the

world. He was in the world, and though

the world was made through Him, the world did not recognise Him.

He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive

Him. Yet to all who did receive Him,

to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to

become children of God, children born not of natural descent, nor

of human decision or husband's will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.

We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son

who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John testified concerning him. He cried out saying this is the

one I spoke about when I said He who comes after me has surpassed

me because He was before me out of His fullness.

We have all received grace in place of grace already given,

for the law was given through Moses.

Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God, but God the one and only Son, who is

Himself God and is in the closest relationship with the

Father has made Him known. The Prologue, in the prologue

you get the, the thematic starter for the whole book.

So the, the thing, most of the things we, the, the themes and

the threads we can pick up within the prologue.

These are things we'll see repeated over and over again

throughout the Gospel. So it again, it's, it's very

condensed, fantastic. Probably more written about the

prologue than anything else I'd have thought theologically over

the centuries. Couple of highlights from the

prologue when it says at the start, in the beginning was the

word. The Greek word for word is

logos, where we get the word logic or ology in English.

And the logos is basically the idea that this is like the mind

of God out of which he creates everything.

And I like to think about it like this.

In Genesis 1, it says in the beginning God created the

heavens and the earth. It tells you what God did in

John One. It tells you how God did.

It takes you behind the curtain, what was going on in the mind of

God out of which God created the world.

So John is revisiting Genesis 1 very deliberately right here at

the beginning of the prologue. And he says here's the logos,

this principle, this spiritual template, this matrix out of

which everything's made. But he says this thing is not

just a thing, it's actually a person.

And this person is in fact God, but is also face to face with

what we call God. The word with.

There the word was God and the Word was with God.

The word with actually means facing.

It's not just with in a neutral sense, it has a relational

flavour to it that there is a face to faceness between the Son

and the Father that is behind the curtain of creation.

And what John is telling us here is that look, everything that

you see, everything that's been created has come out of that

relationship, that face to face us.

And this is this theme of the face of Christ is something that

comes up in throughout John's Gospel, but also throughout the

whole New Testament, the the engaging with the face of

Christ, this relational knowing John is saying this isn't just

about salvation. This is actually what the

universe was created out of. So when we see Father, Son and

Spirit, before anything is made, the Father, Son and Spirit have

a way of being. They have a way of living, a way

of existing that is completely mysterious to us.

But Jesus has come to make that known.

What is that life? What is that way of being?

What is the quality of it? What is the character of it that

that is The Fountainhead of creation.

So John goes on, everything was made by him and he, he's really

wants you to understand this. He says it twice.

Everything was made by him. Everything you see, everything

that has been made has been made by him.

Everything has come by and through the person of Christ.

So it's not that God the Father is the creator and Christ is

doing something else. John is saying Christ is the

creator. He made the world and in him it

says in him was life. So all of the life, all of the

energy that animates everything has come from him and that life

is the light of all mankind. So, and again, this theme of

light and what what light is spiritually speaking is another

another thing that comes up in the Gospel.

Get some introductions to John, which is John the Baptist, not

John the Apostle. It's very confusing to say the

book of John and then this is John in the first few few verses

and they're two different Johns. You'd have thought that the

Bible compilers could have done a better job of making that

clear. But anyway, there are two Johns

here. They weren't, they weren't very

imaginative with names right in this.

So John was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the

world. So what what is being presented

to us in the Gospel is that the good news here, so the beginning

of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the good news is announced by the

angels in the birth of Jesus. We don't get that story here in

John's Gospel. We don't get the the nativity

scene. We just get the one in whom all

life and light finds its origin has come into the world.

That's just that's what we get. So he's trying to not get us

distracted by the material facts and circumstances around Jesus

birth. He assumes you know that and

he's trying to say you. Look, the important thing here

is the very life that is God's has come into the world, not

just in the way that it was before, but actually it has

become flesh and dwelt among us. So that life has come in as one

of us. It's not just come in in a

metaphysical or mechanical way. That life has come in as a human

being. So we see Christ fully divine

and fully human at the same time in ways that don't confuse the

2. So he is 100% as human as we are

and he is 100% as God as God can be, and those things exist

simultaneously in him. Now this is the good news.

This is a gospel, right? This is the good news.

The good news is God has come in the flesh.

That's good news. So again, if you're anything

like my come from anything like my background, good news is,

well, Jesus paid the price for your sin.

That's not here in the 1st chapter of Sean, but this is

John's summary of the good news. The good news is Christ has

taken on flesh. And by the way, the word flesh

there is the bad word for humanity.

It's not the good word. So when we talk about all the

flesh, I'm wrestling with the flesh.

That sort of language, that's the word that's being used here

in the Greek. It's sarks, not anthropos.

Anthropos is the word for human. Sarx is the word for flesh.

So in the mistranslations of the book of Romans, which use the

use the word sinful nature, which is not the right word

actually the the it's the word sarx in in Romans.

So, so John is saying to us everything that we are, Jesus

has taken on, has assumed every aspect of what it means to be

human. He hasn't just assumed the good

bits, He's assumed all of the bad bits as well, yet without

committing sin. So he, he does not fall short of

what it is to be human. In fact, he, he fully

exemplifies what it is to be human, but he does so sharing

fully in all of our hang ups and problems and issues and

difficulties, everything that makes us feel less than.

He takes it on in himself. He says he came to his own.

Now who are his own. It's not talking about the Jews

here. It includes the Jews, but it's

not just talking about the Jews. We know who it's talking about

because it says so immediately before the world.

The world has come into existence through him.

All things have come into existence through him.

All are his own, and he has come to his own and his own has not

received him. And that's all of us, Jew and

Gentile alike, all of us have not received him.

This is another theme that we get throughout the whole gospel,

which is you'll, you'll see Jesus says things like no one

knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son wields

to reveal him. Even here in the prologue, no

one has ever seen God. Nobody.

Anyone who claims to have seen God has not according to John

right here about who Jesus is the only one who can make known

to us what God is like is the one who is himself got very God

of very God in that oneness and the closest relationship with

the Father is the NIV puts it here that in the one who is face

to face with the Father, he's the only one who can let us know

what God is like. No one else can let us know that

and anyone who claims to can't. In fact, you'll see Jesus at one

point saying all who came before me are thieves and liars, which

is pretty inditing, particularly when all includes Elijah and

Isaiah and Moses and Abraham, David, all who came before me

are thieves and liars. They, if they claim to see God,

they didn't Phenomenal phenomenally provocative

language that that doesn't give us much wiggle room to get out

of out of the way of the person of Christ here.

Last point I want to make on this and then I'm going to try

something and then we're going to pray.

It says to all who did receive him, to those who believed in

his name, he gave the right to become children of God, children

born not of natural descent nor of human decision, but but born

of God. Some people have asked me about

this verse because I I maintained that all the children

of God right, independently of what you believe or decide, we

are all children of God on the basis of this chapter.

And some people have asked me, well, doesn't it say there that

only those who believe in him get the right to become?

And I just want to make a point on this, which is the word

become here is the same become that's used in is it in first

book of Corinthians, I think, where it says Christ became the

life giving spirit. Christ became the life giving

spirit. Nobody is saying that Christ

became a ghost became a spirit right that that would actually

violate Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever,

you know and his the understanding of his divinity.

When it says Christ became a life giving spirit, it means he

stepped up into the economic role of the life giving spirit.

That's that you can word study this become does not mean

something that was not becoming something that is it means it's

something that is steps up to engage the role of so this the

the the right to become means those who are by God's design

and God's grace called children of God by believing are able to

step up into their role as children of God.

So that's that's what become means here.

So don't, don't get confused in this sort of transactional sense

that, well, I wasn't a child of God and now I am.

There's the point here is up until that point, even here in

the, in the 1st chapter of John, he's trying to say, look, all

have come from him. Everything has come from him

that we are all of our origin is in the person of Christ.

We are all designed by him, known by him and with good, good

purpose and intention. You know, David says I was knit

together. You knit me together in my

mother's womb, right? All have their origin in him.

And that's a good definition of what it means to be a child of

God. But if you don't know that,

you're not going to live that way.

But those who believe realise Ah, now.

And in believing, that's all it takes to step up into begin to

assume the role that the way of your being begins to match the

truth of your being, which is what Alice was talking about.

How is it that this transforms the way that we live?

Because if it doesn't transform the way that we live, then

something's short circuited somewhere, right?

This has to transform everything.

It can't leave any part of life untouched.

So some some thoughts there from the prologue to get you started.

I'm going to try one thing, if you'll allow me, which was the

thought that came to me as Alice was praying.

And then we're going to pray, which is, as you know, some of

you, some of you know, I used to do a lot of St preaching back in

the day. And it's something I've, I

intend to do again. In fact, I'm waiting for, I'm

waiting for a setup to go and do it with some friends of mine up

in Birmingham. But I actually thought, I

haven't, I haven't tried this. But if you'll allow me to just

practise, what would it sound like to say this on the street

if I was there with a microphone with passersby in the, in the

centre of Broadmead or wherever? I'm just going to try it because

I have, I haven't, right. So I'm not going to do the

histrionics like the, the performance bit because I'm not

in the, I'm not in the mood. So I'm just going to say it Joe

had no, I'm not. I can't.

It's too, too, too, right. We haven't got enough time.

Call it my my microphone elevator pitch.

It'll go go something like this. We all we all know the world's

in a mess. Tonnes of problems.

We've all got on an individual level, national level.

It seems like it's going to hell and handbasket every other day.

And if you watch Satan sitcom the news, then you'll, you'll

definitely find all kinds of reasons to be hopeless, burnt

out, stressed, and all the rest. But I think all of us have an

intuition that this world hasn't just come from itself.

It's come from somewhere. It's come from a place.

We might call it spiritual, we might call it God, we might call

it a divine source. I don't know, people use all

kinds of words for it. But we all know we all have an

instinct within us that some things are good, some things are

beautiful, some things are are are worthy of paying our

attention to. And we all aspire to be more

than we are. But we're all basically just

trying to muddle through with the doing the best that we can.

Most of the time we feel like we're on our own and we're

trying to solve our own problems.

But there's some really good news here.

And the good news is that that that divine mind, that that

wonderful heavenly place that we see in movies and books and we

try and put it into words. And that people who've had

mystical experiences or they've dosed out on mushrooms and have

said, I've had, I've had something wonderful happen to

me. And they try and put it into

words, try and try and articulate this something that

is good and true about this world.

That is not what we see on an everyday basis.

That the the really good news and that the Christian message

has tried to hold on to is that what exists in that spiritual

world has actually come into our world.

It's met us as a human being. This is the story of Jesus

Christ who 2000 years ago came out of that divine reality and

became one of us. Everything that we are,

everything that we suffer. He experienced it and in even

going all the way to to suffer a horrendous death, horrendous

suffering which many people experience in this world today.

There's all sorts of horrible suffering and when we suffer, we

feel like we've been abandoned by God.

We feel like no one is looking out for us.

And you know, the world is not the way it should be, but Jesus

came and met us there by taking on what it is to be human.

It means whatever you have suffered and whatever suffering

you may have inflicted on others, he has been there in it,

forgiving, embracing, continuing to share his life and his love

with you. And the good news is that same

life and love that is his, you can experience it now.

Just believe. And you don't even need to work

that up yourself. We can pray and ask Jesus to

make himself known to us so that you can experience that life

too. Whatever you believe about all

of this, whatever background you've come from, is not what's

important. What's important is if something

in you right now is saying, yeah, I think I need to connect

with that. To know that I've been brought

home, to know that I have a heavenly family that has got my

back and that everything is going to work out.

All right, That's what we want to pray for.

Because I think if we really could connect with that and we

really could live from it, then that would also change the

world. So, and then I would do a little

altar call, right? Because you know, it's kind of

close to an altar call. Does that sound good?

So, so anyway, there you go. I just just evangelise this.

Let's pray and then I'll do a pray prayer like this.

So if you want a little revised sinner's prayer, I might get

everyone around and say or have my little prayer team go and

pray with people and say let me let me help you pray.

If you don't know how to pray, use whatever words you like God

source whatever Father God, mother God doesn't matter.

Something in me is telling me that I need you.

Jesus. Would you show me if this is

true? I don't want to carry the burden

of my life by myself anymore. I don't want to carry the burden

of guilt of things I've done before, and I don't want to

carry this cycle of bad decisions and judgement and

broken relationships and cynicism.

I want you to give me the life that you have.

I want you to share that with me.

So would you help me to see it? Please meet me now.

And so now we'll just going to take the next 15 minutes if you

want to just stay in that place yourself or or not.

Like we want to make space for everybody to pray for each other

if that's what they want to do. But again, if you don't want to,

if you just want to keep engaging where you are, that's

fine. Let's start round tables.

Just pray whatever you feel is coming up.

And if you don't know where to start, like Alice said, the

Apostle Paul in the Bible is always just praying that we

might be able to see and might be able to know who God is and

what he's doing. So if you're stuck, you can just

pray that. But otherwise, just listen and

ask Holy Spirit, what, what should we pray or how should we

pray? We've got 15 minutes.

Bless you. Yeah, I think just just one

thing I felt was there might be some people here who don't, who

don't really believe they're a child of God, that sort of

mindset that that really does change everything about who we

are and how we live. And so that might be something,

if that resonates with you, that that verse that we have the

right to live in the reality that we are children of God.

It would be good to get someone to say to pray with you about

that. Yeah.

So I'm just going to. I'm going to pray now.

And I invite you to pray with each other.

I'm going to pray Paul's prayer in Ephesians.

I pray that the eyes of our hearts are enlightened, that we

may get to know you better. I pray that we know how high and

wide and deep and long the Father's love is, and know that

love which surpasses knowledge. And Paul prays to the Father,

through whom every nation in heaven on earth, every family in

heaven on earth derives its name.

That's who Paul prays to in Ephesians.

And so we pray for breakthrough revelation for us as a community

that we know who we are, children of God.

Amen.