31 May 2026 - See Differently to See Further - Pastor Richard Green

It's so beautiful to be here.

What a great church! Don't tell the Singaporeans.

Malaysia is better.

What do you think your worship team?

Great job! Great job.

Just magnificent.

It's a great honor and privilege for me to be here in this church with Pastor Clarence and Debbie.

They are phenomenal leaders.

Just beautiful leaders.

When David, where's David who picked us up?

Thank you, David.

What a generous man, a beautiful man.

Just thank you.

I'd known how many churches, I thought I knew how many congregations you had until David was telling me, and I thought, oh, I feel exhausted.

But you are just doing so many great things and seeing the kingdom of God advance.

This morning when I was in uh Chinatown, um I got into that building and I was just really, I was excited.

That congregation is only four weeks old, and it's in a part of the city, which I think, wow.

And while we're in worship, I felt the Holy Spirit impress upon me just an idea and a scripture, so I'm gonna share it because I think it's for your whole church.

When I got in there, I had an image of Joseph and Joseph's coat.

It was a coat of many colours.

How do we know it was a coat of many colours?

Because it says it was, but what I saw was a picture not of a coat like this that takes all the colours and blends them together and it produces one color.

But every single colour on that coat was distinct and beautiful and necessary for it to be a coat of many colours.

And as I stood in the service, I felt the Holy Spirit take me to Genesis 49, verse 22, and it says, Joseph is a fruitful vine, a fruitful vine by a spring, and its branches plural go over the wall.

Genesis 49:22

And all of a sudden I could see this vine in Chinatown and right through Malaysia and out of Malaysia, out of this church, like many branches going over walls.

And I believe that that what you're already started to do, and these many, many congregations, um, is part of that, and it's beautiful.

It is so beautiful.

Please, please don't look like the West.

We like everything to be the same.

If I come to Malaysia, I don't want to eat McDonald's.

Does it make sense?

We need the multicolored coat, and I see a vine coming out of here, and what your pastors have done have been incredible.

In fact, in fact, I'm not even sure if I should say this.

I was watching Debbie and I've seen Clarence.

Now I've had Debbie speak to our Russian speakers on Zoom, and they said to me after, poof, poof, that's Russian.

For incredible.

They were really impacted by her.

I'm and you understand cultures.

And I'm sitting here thinking, I think I should try to bring them to all those countries you can't pronounce: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and all the Russians.

I reckon they'd be awesome.

And if we lost uh Clarence in the snow, we'd never lose him because he'd stand out.

He's so dark-skinned.

But the Lord is here, he's doing something wonderful in your team and in all of you.

And the Lord wants to extend churches that reach the unreached.

So, Father, I pray this morning, strengthen our heart, help us to go beyond where we already are, understand what we're called to, and Lord, I pray that you would grow this wonderful network.

And Lord, I pray you keep our pastors very, very healthy in Jesus' name.

Amen.

This church is so important.

I've brought Asher and Sedef from Pakistan here to see this church.

Because I want them to learn from this church.

Because I believe that they will have one of the great churches in Pakistan.

Okay, I want you to, we're going to go to a passage.

My thing this morning is we need to see differently to see further.

That's up on the screen, I think.

So see differently to see further.

We're going to read from John 5, verse 19 and 20, a passage that you're probably well familiar with.

John 5:19

I'll make sure that I'm reading the same.

So if we can put that text up.

Then Jesus answered and oh, thank you.

Then Jesus answered and said to them, Most assuredly, I say to you that the Son can do nothing of himself but what he sees the Father do.

For whatever for if we can just go back a bit, we jumped a bit.

So can do nothing other than what he sees.

Whatever he does, the Son also does in like manner.

Now on to the next verse.

For the Father loves the Son and shows him all things that he himself does, and he will show him greater works than these that you may marvel.

Now, let me give you the context.

The context is very important.

What has happened before this is that Jesus has healed a man who has been disabled for 30 plus years.

Many years disabled.

He heals him on the Sabbath.

And what happens is a controversy occurs because of the healing of the Sabbath.

The religious leaders don't know what to do with this because in the Jewish tradition, you did no work on the Sabbath.

Now what Jesus goes on to say, and you will know this from reading that passage, that Jesus says, I do the work of the Father.

That phrase was the big problem.

Because in Jewish thought, though they believed that God created the heavens and the earth six days on the seventh day, he rested, they believed that through God's divine initiative, his work continued to sustain things on the Sabbath.

So in effect, the work that Jesus is claiming is also part of Jesus saying, I am in the Father, and the Father in me.

He's claiming divinity.

That's why they got upset.

Now, in this passage, we're going to see a couple things that lie at the heart of the passage.

There is one big significant thing in this passage, but I'm going to look at three aspects of this passage because I think they're important to us.

What the Pharisees saw was a person breaking the rules.

What Jesus saw was the restoration of a person.

They saw broken rules, Jesus saw restored life.

They saw a problem, Jesus saw a human being.

They saw what happened, Jesus saw what his father was doing.

And this is radically important to us.

We could say this is an issue of perspective.

It's an issue of the way you would see things.

And Jesus sees differently because he lives differently.

Many of us, and I'll speak for me, I'm a Westerner from Australia.

We talk about our vision, our sight, our, and it's not coming from a union with God, it's about our ability.

And Jesus is saying something very differently.

In businesses, they have a thing called SWOT analysis.

Have you heard of that?

Strength.

Okay.

Guess what?

It doesn't work.

All the contemporary businesses, the up-to-date MBAs, all that say they've got rid of it.

They're using what they call appreciative inquiry methodology, which is actually looking for what you what your company does well and doing more of that.

They brought Starbucks to Australia, over 400 Starbucks.

There's hardly any left.

Why?

Because in Australia, we do better coffee.

I went to a little coffee shop in Chinatown with Clarence and I thought, oh, hallelujah.

Because at our hotel there's a Starbucks right in the foyer.

Oh, it's disgusting stuff.

If I come to if I come to Malaysia, as I said, I don't want to eat a Big Mac.

I want to eat your Yeah, wow my Lord, have mercy.

Lord Jesus, forgive me.

It's about perception.

Now there are three things hidden in the words of Jesus, and I'm going to just mention them first, and then we're going to look at each one.

Firstly, union changes where we see from.

Second, in this passage, is attention changes what we see, and love changes how we see.

And so we're going to unpack those things.

So let's start with where you see from.

So the passage there is the son can do nothing by himself.

Now I'm a Westerner, and this is how Westerners treat that passage.

They often think I can do nothing by myself because I don't have the ability by myself, I'm weak.

Jesus was not talking about his limited ability.

What Jesus is saying, that he can only do that which he's in union with God to do.

The phrase should be translated, the son can do nothing from himself.

Is a better translation.

And when it's saying the son can do nothing from himself, what he's saying is he's not saying he can't do it, but what he's acknowledging is that the from is actually partnership with God.

It's his union with God that enables him to do things, not his limitation.

Does that make sense?

It's subtle, but it's radically important.

The reason it's really important, and it's really important, particularly for us who are Westerners, because in the West we have elevated individualism.

Now I'm gonna get a little bit sort of maybe controversial, just sit with me for a second.

The radical left and the radical right have the same parent.

It's called the autonomous self.

What was very interesting in America during COVID, the radical left had the same t-shirt as the radical right.

But the radical right, the anti-vaxxers were saying, my body, my rights, same t-shirt.

The autonomous self is the problem.

We are not called to be autonomous selves.

We are an interdependent people.

My daughter taught me this lesson very powerfully.

You will remember when the riots were on in Hong Kong, when China was coming back to take control.

All those students were on the streets.

Many were being prisoned, some were being shot at, killed, and right, so that was close.

And then shortly after came COVID.

The joke in the West was they're not frightened of bullets, but they're frightened of germs.

Because when COVID happened, everybody had masks on.

But you know my daughter said to me, Dad, we're so arrogant in the West.

In the West, we wear a mask to protect us.

In the Southeast Asian cultures, they wear masks to protect other people, to respect the older.

And if we don't have union with Christ, as if somehow God and Jesus will support our work, we're looking at it from the wrong end.

We don't say, Lord, I'm doing this, bless me.

No, no, no.

Our job is to be like Jesus.

I can only do that which comes from the Father.

And if He's not doing it, if I'm disunified with God, I'm never going to achieve anything.

It's really important for us.

Modern culture celebrates independence.

People say to me, Are you an autonomous church?

And I say, I hope not.

I said, Where in the Bible is the word autonomous?

It does not occur.

Independent churches do not occur.

The word is not there.

They were interdependent.

We're family, we're collegiate, we work together.

And this church is a beautiful example because you have many colours, but you work together.

You need applauding.

Well done.

So it's very important that we, if we're going to see differently, we need and if we want to see further, we've got to start with being in union with him.

Not independent from him, but in unity, in intimate connection with him.

Now there's a lot of teaching about vision.

Vision, vision, vision.

Vision is overrated.

Culture will eat vision any day.

If you have the right culture, your vision is not.

I am a church planter.

I lead a very big church.

We've planted over 120 churches.

And I can tell you, I talked to the pastor and said, forget about your vision.

Your vision is Jesus anyway.

Be in union with him.

And whatever flows out of you will work.

A church in Baghdad will look radically different to a church in Sydney.

A church in Malaysia will look radically different.

It's very important.

But the matter is not our vision getting a vision.

Our issue is being in union with him.

And once we are in him, we are seeing from a different place.

Let me give you this illustration.

If we can put the photo up.

Okay, so after many, many years, three decades of leading our church, which we've transitioned, my wife and I took three months off, and we drove from Sydney right across the desert through the other side of Australia.

We drove 13,000 kilometres in the outback of Australia.

That's one road we took.

It's called the Nullabor Plains.

Took us four out four days to drive it, and it's that straight.

Now that's the good bit of the road.

Now, while what do you see in that photo?

What do you see?

Now you're going to see something different to me.

I'll tell you what I see.

I'm Australian.

I was raised in Australia.

We are taught that the desert is dangerous.

The desert is dry.

That bit of land there, they only get three, it only rains three times a year.

They get less than five mils of rain.

So when we look at that, I look at the sides of the road, I see the dirt.

When I look into the bushes, I see the dirt.

Now we were well prepared.

Extra water.

We carried 190 litres of water.

We had a generator, power generator, because we know if we break down on other parts of that track and no one comes along, many people perish.

Just because it's hot and they run out of water.

So what I see there is dry.

I see dry, dusty, dangerous.

Be careful, but we're not afraid.

We pull in to fill up some water, and in front of us is these two young Germans.

And they're in one of these combi vans.

And I'm thinking, oh Lord have mercy.

Their tires are bad.

I think if they break down, they're gonna die.

Right?

That's what I'm thinking.

We've got a caravan and spare wheels and jacks and everything.

And I needed them later.

And I'm talking to them.

And I said to them, Where are you from, Germany?

With Chat and all that.

I said, What's the most surprising thing?

They said, We can't believe how lush and green Australia is.

And I went, What?

Entschuldigung, which means excuse me, in German.

They said it's so lush and green.

I got back in the car and said to Kathy, they think it's green.

And she laughed.

She says, What are they looking at?

Then we got in the car and we drove.

And I said to Kathy, why don't we pretend that we're Germans?

Not Australians.

And let's look at what the Germans are looking at.

And as soon as we did, do you know what we saw on that photo?

We saw all the green leaves.

See, we looked at the dirt that wasn't producing certain things.

They were looking at the leaves that the soil had produced.

Their frame from where they looked was radically different to us.

And for the next two months, my wife and I would laugh every day.

Wow, it's lush here, isn't it?

And we are so grateful to those two Germans because they made us aware of something.

Now, most of us are seeing from the wrong angle.

So where you look from will change how far you see.

If you look independently from union with him, you're gonna see something different.

But as soon as you're in unity with Christ, you're gonna see what he wants you to see.

Do you know we don't need more vision, we need more devotion.

It's pretty simple but challenging.

Okay, the second point is that what you see is about attention, your attention changes what you will see.

So it says in John 5 19, he can only do what he sees his father doing.

The in the the original language of the Greek, Quini Greek, it's not one word, it's not the meaning of just seeing with your eyes.

It's the word it means discerning, carefully observing, but most significantly it is drawing upon apprentice language.

So just as a carpenter will learn from a carp, the son of a carpenter will learn from his father by observing what the father does.

A fisherman would learn from his parents, who were fisher people.

Observe.

And this is the language that Jesus is using.

I only do what I see the Father doing.

So this careful observation will change what you see.

Now we are trained, at least I'll talk about my context.

So in the West, in Sydney being a Western country, we are trained to see what isn't happening.

That's why we have the SWOT analysis.

The SWOT analysis, I work with businesses and I get them to change.

It's old-fashioned anyway.

It's about 60 years old.

But you're looking at strengths and weaknesses.

As soon as you put that there, you're looking at what isn't happening.

Now, what I've noticed from my study of business globally, the Chinese don't look at what's not, they look at what they can make.

And they're far more opportunistic.

And while this mess is happening in the world, guess what China's doing?

Woo-hoo! Let's go, baby.

I'm in Russia.

The amount of Chinese development in Russia is unbelievable.

Russia is booming because there's a different mindset.

Now we can be so careful when looking at what isn't happening.

And we do it in churches as well.

Give an example.

Let's do a survey.

I'll send you out into the community and we'll survey the community and we'll work out all the needs that the churches are meeting.

And then we'll come back and put all those needs up on a board.

Do you know what all happened?

You'll look at all those needs and you'll think, flip, we're not doing much.

But God is not asking you to meet all the needs, He's asking you to meet the needs He's meeting.

We see what the Holy Spirit is doing, and we do that.

Now He says, I only do what I see the Father doing, the carpenter's son, the shepherd's son.

This is deep apprenticeship learning.

It's not cognitive learning.

We need far more apprentice models in churches than we do academic development.

We do.

Now I'm not against academics.

I've got two doctorates.

I'd be a hypocrite if I said I was.

However, I can tell you right now that it's not your intellectual knowledge that will actually change things.

It's your ability to come alongside somebody who's far more advanced than you and work alongside of them.

Are you here, would love to plant a church?

Don't go to Bible college, spend time listening to them and do Bible college.

Who would like to run a great business?

Many of you.

Find somebody who's running a great business and learn from them.

Who would like to be a great mother?

Observe a great mother and go and learn.

It's we learn.

Jesus said that when a student is fully trained, they will become like their master.

It's simple, it's called incarnation, and we violate it all the time.

We think we can put people through Bible colleges and courses and they pop out as church planters.

Our greatest church planter that I've ever worked with was Magi Goroko in PNG.

Totally uneducated, completely uneducated, could not read or write.

Within five years, he planted 190 churches.

I wish he was here.

He's my friend.

He went to be with the Lord while preaching on Easter Sunday at the age of 59.

But he was just the most magnificent church planter.

It's this apprenticeship model.

We've got to get alongside the people that Christ is using and learn from them in all areas of life.

Now, what stops us seeing what's really there is not rebellion, but it's familiarity.

I get familiar with my wife, so I stop seeing her.

Whatever you get familiar with, you stop saying, you stop value.

We have to see afresh.

You know, when we did that three months, just my wife and I.

I was very stressed.

We got a caravan, it's very small.

I'm gonna have to live in a very small confinement with my wife for three months.

The first week we nearly killed each other.

But once we learned, it was like we went back to being boyfriend and girlfriend.

Because all of a sudden we're no longer familiar with each other.

We need to fall in love again with the scriptures, we need to fall in love again with worship, we need to fall in love again with our church.

Familiarity stops us saying.

I want to show you a uh a picture on our travel, they're clams.

Okay, they're clams.

Um on our travel, I did a lot of fishing, I love fishing, and but I'd never ever uh fished for or collected clams, never in my life, never, and these are delicious.

Oh, mama mia.

In Italy, southern Italy, they call this they do spaghetti vongalay.

Anyone had spaghetti von Galay?

Oh, it's a die for.

It's really awesome.

And so I got to this place in the middle, right on the coast, very remote, and somebody said, Oh, you can get those in the sea.

And I thought, really?

I never collected them in my life.

So I went across the sand dunes, went into the water, and there's a man there, and he's doing this in the sand.

And I said, What are you doing?

He says, I'm collecting vongalae.

I said, Really?

Yeah, he said, this is how you do it.

Right?

So I get in the sand and we're doing this.

Two hours later, I have four.

Just four.

Because I'm copying him, I'm copying somebody else.

And I cop and after four hours or two hours, my knees were sore on my hip.

And I thought, I'm not gonna do that and get four.

So then I thought, I wonder, I actually did this, it sounds crazy.

I thought, where would God put clams?

And I thought, well, I think God would put a clam where the water's running nicely over the shallow sand, and there's something for so I started looking for spots like that, and this is honest, honest truth.

All of a sudden, instead of copying another person who wasn't working, I started to look where I think God might have placed them, and all of a sudden I see one, then I see two, then I'm seeing four.

On that pack, I caught, I would collect 300 every day.

That was my legal limit.

That's the South Australian legal limit.

I never go across my limit, but boy, I've got a freezer full of them.

300.

And what I noticed was as soon as I could see one, I was no longer looking and comparing with somebody else.

I was looking for where God might be at work.

We do it all the time.

Instagram is a shocker.

We're comparing ourselves against people all the time.

Churches do it all the time, ministers do it all the time, business do it all the time.

We're copying what someone else is doing, and everything's familiar.

We've got to get out of the familiarity and begin to look for where God Himself is at work.

And that produces a vision that's different.

Okay, next point, our third and final point, is that it's not just where you see from or what you see, but it's how you see.

Jesus says the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.

You will know, because you've probably many of you have been in church a long time, perhaps, you'll know that the dominant word when it talks about God's love is agape.

That is not the word here.

It's filler.

It's desires, it's it's it's love of something.

What is really interesting is that when you start to allow your heart to direct your desires, your what you look at it changes everything.

Now, when I look at you, what do I see?

I can just see flesh and blood, but as soon as I start to see from the point of view of God's love, I'm seeing you differently.

It undoes me every time.

When I look at Sadeth and Asher, I've been in their house, I know where they live.

I see not two people, but I see the love of God being extended to them.

When we drove out the outback, we would go through these tiny little towns, very small and very remote.

And everyone we went through, we thought, Lord, these people need something of hope, they need you.

This morning, when I was in your church in Chinatown, I'm looking out the window, and from the view of that church, you can see all these massive buildings.

But when I'm looking, I'm not seeing buildings, I'm seeing people.

I'm thinking to myself, there's a family there, maybe on the seventeenth floor, and they're struggling, they're arguing and fighting because the pressure of life is so tough on them.

And so I look and I see, I don't see men, I see people.

When you look with love, see the Pharisees didn't look through love, they saw a man that was healed and they saw a broken rule.

When we look, we can see judgment, or do we see redemption?

As soon as you love, the Father loves the Son, and out of love he shows him.

This is a very simple message, but I am absolutely convinced that we unfortunately unintentionally in our desire to have vision and see, we've disconnected ourselves from union with God.

We'd rather read a book on vision than we would spend time in his presence.

We'd rather develop a strategic plan than spend time asking him to speak to us.

Now I want to bring it to a close by just the offer of the Lord.

We read it in Matthew 11 28.

You'll be very familiar with this passage.

Come to me.

All you who are weary and burdened, for I will give you rest.

There are a lot of people who are just exhausted by trying to have the right vision, to get it right, to do things right.

They're exhausted.

And Jesus doesn't criticize the attempt to have vision, he just says, Hey, enough.

Just come.

Come to me.

I know you're weary, I know you're burdened.

Charles and Debbie, they run, oh Clarence.

I've been doing that.

I thought, gee, it's terrible.

I'll be calling Charles Clarence.

Clarence and Debbie.

When I was told what they're they're doing and how and the way they're doing it, I thought, oh my Lord, have mercy upon them.

Because that's what Kathy and I do.

And I can tell you they would be very human because they'll be trying very hard to do things very right.

And I want to tell you that they've probably got pressure on them to turn this church and what they're doing into what looks like a multi-site, a certain style.

That pressure on them is, but the Lord is saying to them, I'm so pleased with you guys.

You've heard me and you're stuck with it.

But at times, you try to get bigger vision.

And he says, Come, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened.

I can't imagine what it's like for this pastors in Thailand.

Different culture, moving countries, family behind, grief, all that.

Pressure on you must be enormous.

Just incredible.

And you probably feel, I wish we could do more or better.

And the Lord's saying, I love you.

He's saying, Come, come, come on.

You know, come to me.

No, no, don't come, just stay there.

Not me, come to him.

Well, you could come, I'll give you a cuddle.

But he's saying, Come, come.

But then it says, Learn from me.

I really like what it says in the message paraphrase.

Is it a paraphrase?

It says, Come and learn from me.

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

God is calling us to look from a place of union so that we can be attentive to what's in our eyes, and He wants us to look through the lens of love.

I want you to close your eyes for a second.

Some of you are really exhausted.

You've been trying really hard to get your marriage to work.

You've been trying really hard to make your family work.

Some of you have decisions you're not sure what course to do.

You're at university and it's a real battle.

Others of you are trying to get things right for your businesses.

And you're trying really hard.

And when things don't go well, you think you're doing something wrong.

You're tough on yourself.

You never feel that you're meeting people's expectations.

And the Lord's saying, Come, because I want you to see differently so you can see further.

And I want you to know that you are, or I, Christ, am in you.

And that gives you a place to see in partnership.

And he wants you to see differently because that's the place of fruit.

If that's you and you feel like that, I would like to pray with you.

So I would love you to put your hand in the air.

Don't want anyone looking.

Just place your hand in the air.

This is your moment.

I'm gonna pray for you.

There's nothing magic in prayer.

What makes a difference in prayer is trust.

So as you put your hand in the air, I am trusting God, I'm trusting you to God.

And I'm believing, surrendered to Him, that you are going to begin to see differently.

See further.

See more freely.

So it's not a push and not a grind.

Holy Spirit, come upon every person who's placed their hand in the air.

Lord, I pray that you would visit them with your Holy Spirit.

That you would move powerfully in your Holy Spirit.

Lord God, I pray that you would take off all unhelpful comparisons.

Get them free.

Lord, let them have confidence that you are the creator of the heavens and earth.

And if you speak to them, that is more than anything in the world.

And from you, Lord, will come all answers.

I pray you would give each person here the space to become more in tune with you, growing in their intimacy with you, because it's in you that we will bear much fruit.

And thank you, Jesus.

Amen.