Daniel Bullock / Firm Foundations. Fresh Faith. / What is your part in the story?

That video, uh as Andrew said, is a picture of the vision that we have for the BUV to be a union of 500 flourishing churches, making disciples and transforming Victoria.

But it finishes with a question, it's a really important question.

What is your part in the story?

And it's not only a good question to put on the video, but a better question, the better question to be asking in the middle of a 75th uh anniversary series.

Last week you looked back, you remembered Charles Hemming, the bike story, and you rehearsed the great history of this church, and it is a great history.

From the humble beginnings of riding a bike around paddocks to the old tramway baths to the first Sunday school class on the corner of Middleborough and Springfield Roads, the preschool that doubled as the church because the building materials were too scarce to build another building.

From firm foundations, God has been faithful and you've named it well over the past 75 years.

And Andrew did a great job last week.

Even he did say the oldies are coming this week.

I did listen and watch on the online, so didn't get away with it.

Next week, you look forward together and declare his faithfulness to the generations still to come.

As Andrew said, my job this morning is to beat in the middle, the present tense.

Not what God has done and not what God will do, but what God is doing right now in Blackburn North in this church through you, the people, sitting in these seats today.

And I want to start by telling you where I fit into the story.

I came to New Hope as a young man who'd been a Christian for all of five years.

Five years, that's it.

I had energy and very little experience.

The church could have given me a safe job, you could have told me a trainee or an intern or something like that, but you didn't do that.

Instead, you called me, you handed me a significant leadership responsibility, and you trusted me long before I earned it.

I served here for over ten and a half years as an associate pastor, and I left this place prepared to lead a church and eventually prepared to serve the Baptist Union right across Victoria.

So understand what's happening this morning.

When I stand up here in front of you as a director of mission and ministries for the BUV, you're not looking at a guest speaker.

You're actually looking at a return on investment that this church made decades ago in a young bloke who hadn't done anything to deserve it.

That's not being sentimental.

In fact, it's a whole sermon.

And it's straight out of the passage.

Your series verse from Hebrews says, Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you, consider the outcome of their life, of their way of life, and imitate their faith.

I'm one of the outcomes.

And what I want to press this morning is that the second half of this verse, not just remember them, but imitate them.

Let me set the scene for you in John chapter 4, because what's happening to this story really matters.

John 4 · chapter mention

You'd probably know this story that Jesus is travelling through Samaria and he stops at a well.

It's a pretty hot day, it's the middle of the day, and he he sends his disciples off into the town to get some food to go and get some lunch.

Jesus is thirsty, but he's got nothing to draw water out of the well, and along comes a woman.

She happens to be a Samaritan woman and she's carrying a bucket to draw water out of that.

And they strike up a conversation.

Jesus asks her to give him some water.

Now, this is a conversation by the rules of the day that should never have happened.

Should never have happened.

Jews and Samaritans didn't uh relate well together, they didn't like each other, and so they certainly shouldn't have been uh having a conversation.

And certainly a rabbi talking to a woman in public was not proper as well.

And so this conversation is going on that shouldn't have actually happened.

Yet it's such a profound conversation that it ends with this woman believing that Jesus is the Messiah, that Jesus is the Christ, and she leaves that place.

And we're told that she leaves her water jar, which is the symbol of what gave her life, of what would give her her refreshment, if you like, leaves that behind because now she's been filled up, refreshed uh through through Jesus, and she goes back into the town to tell everyone.

Meanwhile, the disciples who have been out shopping come back, they come back, they've bought their food, and their focus now is on lunch.

Rabbi, they say, eat something.

You must be starving.

You must be starving.

And Jesus gives them an answer that sails right over their heads.

I have food to eat that you know nothing about.

And they're baffled.

They start muttering to each other and wondering whether somebody has actually brought Jesus some food while they were gone, while they were in town.

So Jesus spells it out for them.

He says, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

That's the turn here in the conversation, and it's worth slowing down for just a moment here.

The disciples are thinking about a meal.

Jesus is thinking about a mission.

They're asking what's for lunch, and he's telling them what he lives on, what sustains him.

And having moved from food to the Father's work, he gestures out to the landscape.

He says, Look around.

And he uses a farming metaphor that everybody would have known.

In their world, you sowed your seed, and then you waited four months for that to grow, and then you would harvest.

So when someone said it's still four months until the harvest, what they meant was you need to be patient.

You need to be patient.

It's not time yet, the results are yet to come.

It wasn't a lazy saying, it was actual sensible saying.

It was uh responsible wisdom.

Everybody knew this.

And Jesus turns it on its head.

I tell you, he says, open your eyes and look to the fields.

They are ripe for the harvest.

Now, right now.

Here's what he's saying: stop assuming the harvest is always somewhere else in the future, it's right in front of you.

And it literally was.

As Jesus spoke, the people of the town in that Samaritan village were already walking towards him because of what the woman had told them when she went back into the town.

The harvest wasn't four months away, it was actually coming up the road as he spoke these words.

And the story proves him right.

John tells us many Samaritans from that town believed because of the woman's testimony, and they asked Jesus to stay two, and he stayed two more days, and many believed, and once they heard Jesus for for themselves.

Then Jesus says one more thing to the disciples.

Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.

So this passage leaves us with two plain truths.

Firstly, it's possible to be so busy with what's in front of us that we don't lift our eyes to see what God's doing right now.

And secondly, whenever there's a harvest, someone almost always, someone else almost always did the sewing.

That's new hope.

That's your story.

Everything you gather in today grew from the ground that somebody else broke.

Charles Hemming never saw that cafe, that wonderful cafe you've got out there, or the community care ministry that you have, or the preschool school you have now, or the Chinese or the Farzi congregation, or the hundreds and hundreds of people who've come to faith in this place.

He rode a bike, he drove a bus, others sowed, and you've reaped.

The question this morning is whether the reaping generation is willing to become the sowing generation again.

Let me be honest with you, as someone who loves this church.

For over 15 years in my role as a director of ministries for the Baptist Union of Victoria, I've had the privilege of engaging and being in Baptist churches all over Victoria and seeing them really up close and personal.

I've seen many churches go from strength to strength to strength and really do well, really, really flourish.

But I've also been in churches where there was once great life and great mission, and then 30, 40, 50, 100 years down the track, those churches are a shell of themselves, simply trying to survive, simply trying to keep the door open.

Why does that happen?

Why does it happen?

Not because the people were unfaithful, not because they were terrible, bad people.

Most of them were full of godly, generous people who loved Jesus deeply.

The drift of these churches is much, much quieter than that.

Somewhere in the middle of their story, almost without noticing it, they became comfortable, they became content, and they became cautious.

I'm not describing new hope here, but I'd be no friend of this church on your 75th anniversary if I didn't say this plainly.

The drift doesn't mainly threaten struggling churches, it threatens churches that have done well and that are doing well.

Success is a wonderful gift of God, but it carries with it a very subtle danger.

Jesus told a story exactly about this.

You know the story, it comes from Matthew 25.

We call it the parable of the talents, or in fact, we used to call it the parable of the talents, a bit of an aside here.

In the NIV now, they call it the parable of the bags of gold.

Now I was sort of intrigued with this, so I've sort of looked, why is it now the bag of gold and not the bag, not the parable, the talents?

Now the reason is, it might be in other versions, they still call it talents, but NIV, the reason is because talents is a is a word in English that means kicking a football or singing a song, right?

And so we get confused.

So we get confused with that sort of thing.

But also, a bag of gold might depict what the the essence of what the stories is trying to get at.

In those days, a talent was around 34 kilograms of precious metal, right?

A year's, 20 years' wage.

20 years wage.

It was a huge, huge sack of coins or gold or whatever it may be, probably silver, but in the NRV they call it gold just to make the point.

So you need to understand what we got here.

So we'll use the bags of gold, we'll go off the the modern, the modern sort of translation here.

And so a talent, as I said, was roughly 20 years of a laborer's wages.

So even the servant who gets one bag, one bag, wasn't given a little.

He'll entrusted with a fortune.

A master's heading off on a long, long journey, and so he entrusts his wealth to his three servants.

To one he gives five bags, to another, two bags, and to a third he gives one bag, according to their ability, the scripture tells us.

The first two go at it at once and they put their money to work.

They go and invest it and they double it.

The third digs a hole and hides his master's money.

After a long time, the master returns.

And he comes to the first two and he says, and they come to him and they say, Hey, look, we've doubled our money.

Isn't this fantastic?

He goes, Well done, good and faithful servants.

You've been faithful with a few things, I'll put you in charge of many things.

Come and share in your master's happiness.

Then the third comes forward.

Master, he says, I knew that you were a hard man, a hard man.

So I was afraid, and I went out and I hid your gold in the ground.

See, here is what belongs to you.

And the master calls him wicked and lazy.

And here's what unsettles me about this story.

The third servant didn't steal anything, didn't steal anything, he didn't gamble it away, he didn't waste a single cent.

He kept it perfectly safe and handed exactly back what he was given.

And Jesus says that is the one outcome the master will not accept.

The one outcome he won't accept.

In the kingdom of God, preservation is not the same thing as faithfulness.

So let me name the three ways good churches and good Christians quietly bury what God has put in their hands.

The first way we do it is through comfort.

When we're looking at lunch instead of the fields, the disciples in John 4 were not wicked people.

They were not wicked people, they were just occupied or pre-occupied.

They came back with food, and their thinking was all about the meal, and in the meantime, while they were thinking about their lunch, the whole town is coming up the road because one woman who had one conversation was so excited that she went in there and she couldn't keep quiet about it.

That's how comfort works.

It doesn't announce itself, it just narrows our field of vision to what's happening inside the house.

Comfort rarely creeps in at the start of a story.

In the early days, there's really nothing to protect, is there?

When there's a church just starting.

You're in a paddock, then there's a bus, then there's a preschool on a Sunday.

You face outward because there's nothing inside to hold on to.

Comfort creeps in through the long middle.

And 75 years is a pretty long middle.

Now there's plenty worth protecting, isn't there?

Heaps worth protecting.

Buildings, what magnificent buildings worth protecting.

Programs, traditions, the way we've already done things around here.

This is how we do it at New Hope.

Let's protect that.

Let's hold on to that.

Comfort isn't sin.

In fact, God gives rest and a church church should feel like home.

We should feel comfortable coming to church.

The danger, though, is when the church slowly starts organizing itself around the comfort of the people who are already here rather than the people who are not here yet.

Here's the picture that I can't shake.

A bus exists, or a bike, as Andrew wrote in last week, a bus or a bike exists to take you to places, to take you to people.

A hole dug in the ground exists to keep things in.

So whose comfort is shaping the decisions today in this church?

The second thing is contentment.

When success becomes the reason to stop.

Look at the servant with the five bags.

If anyone had grounds to sit back, it would have been him.

He could have said, you know, I've got plenty.

He's got a hundred years, a hundred years of salary here.

I've got plenty here.

No one's going to blame him for playing it safe.

He's got a huge, huge sort of responsibility here to look after this resource.

But the scripture tells us he went at once.

Didn't even hesitate.

Went at once.

And notice he's rewarded.

It's not retirement.

Oh good, you can retire now, mate.

It's I'll put you in charge of many things.

Plus, an invitation to come and share in his master's happiness.

In God's economy, faithfulness is rewarded with more responsibility, and the joy is in the going, not in digging of the hole.

You hope can I say this with real, real affection?

In that parable, you are a five-bag church.

You have people, lots of people, gifts, incredible talents and gifts here, facilities, facilities to die for.

Amazing facilities, partnerships, a preschool, a cafe, community care arm, congregations in multiple languages, and a reputation that many churches, Victoria, would just would love to have.

You've got so much here.

The temptation of a five-bag church isn't failure, it's contentment.

It's looking at everything around us that's been built and quietly concluding the work is done.

It's done, isn't this good?

Let's enjoy it.

You know, there is a holy contentment scripture celebrates.

Paul talks about it.

He says, I've learned to be content in all circumstances.

But being content in Christ is a world away from being content with the city where many people still don't know Jesus, where many people don't know where their next meal is coming from or where they're going to lay their head tonight.

We hold both, one with deep gratitude for what God has done, and a holy dissatisfaction about what's still undone.

So, what would it mean to be profoundly thankful for all that's been built here, but not yet satisfied?

And the third one is caution.

When fear is dressed up as wisdom, this is the heart of it.

Listen to the third servant again.

So I was afraid, he says.

Underneath comfort and underneath contentment, there is usually fear.

Caution sounds responsible, doesn't it?

Let's not rush this stuff.

Let's just slow down and take our time.

It's still four months until the harvest.

What if it doesn't work?

Let's just be careful.

We've done it before, let's be careful.

Sometimes that's genuine wisdom.

Of course, we need to be discerning.

But often it's fear wearing a sensible jacket.

And notice where the servant's fear came from.

It came from his picture of the master.

I knew you were a hard man, he says.

I knew you were a hey man.

What he believed about the one he served shaped everything he did with what he'd been given.

Same for us.

Same for us.

If you believe God is harsh and exacting, waiting for you to get it wrong, then you'll bury everything that you've got.

But if you believe that God is generous and loving and merciful and caring, you'll find courage to have a go.

And this master in this story is generous.

Before anyone had anything to prove, he handed over his fortune to them.

Grace came first.

Truth, trust came first.

Your own values put it perfectly.

Grace changes everything.

And grace changes this too.

Grace frees us from the fear of failure, because this is the parable because in this parable, the only real way to fail is to actually never try in the first place.

Charles Hemming didn't wait for a building.

This church didn't wait for building materials, they had a go.

And 30 odd years ago, this church didn't wait until the young associate pastor was ready.

You took a pun on me.

And that's what a church looks like when it believes its master is generous.

So where might fear be masquerading as wisdom in your life and in the life of this church?

Let me go back to the question at the end of our video.

What's your part in the story?

It's really the master's question.

What are you doing with the resources, the experience that I've given you?

And out of that, I would like to give you three invitations as you wrestle with that question.

Firstly, the invitation is to invest in people.

The single greatest need across our movement is the next generation of pastors, church planters, and church leaders.

Some of you and some of these folks are in this room this morning.

They're in your youth group, your young adults' ministry, your language congregations, and like me, most of them have no idea yet what God intends to do with them.

Somebody has to call them out.

Somebody has to tap them on the shoulder.

Who could you tap on the shoulder this year and say, I see God's call on your life?

Just think about some of the people here who got.

Some lot of people in New Hope, Blackie North, who got their start here in and through this church.

Andrew talked about it, how this church has been a church of raised up leaders.

Dale Stevenson, Crossroad Baptist Church.

Let's start it here.

He now is the pastor of the largest Baptist church in Australia.

Mark Purcer works alongside him seven or eight years here in this church.

Troy and Bromwitt, aren't it?

New community ringwood.

Nathan Steer at Campberwell, Craig Wright at Ivanhoe.

Jess, who's going to be speaking tonight in Ballarat.

We could go, oh, yesterday I had breakfast with Jude Waldron.

Another person from we could just go on, dozens and dozens of people.

See, you know, Bruce and over there, you could probably name about a hundred of them.

Been here that long, you probably know them all, don't you, Bruce?

Fantastic.

Absolutely.

Of course, this church.

This church has produced dozens and dozens and dozens of pastors and leaders and missionaries and chaplains and teachers.

So who are you seeing God's call now on hand on now?

Who are you seeing it?

And what are you going to do about it?

Keep raising up leaders.

Don't stop.

This is a really unique ministry of this church.

The second thing I would ask you to do is to continue to multiply.

In fact, multiplication is in the DNA of this church.

A church that started on wheels with hardly anybody, and into a bus, and it's become this church.

It is today with multiple congregations, many, many, many people also contributing to the planting of churches in Templestow and Altham and Ringwood.

So where's the next bus going?

Which suburb?

Which language group?

Which generation is waiting for a church that comes to them?

Our vision to be the Baptist in the Baptist Union is to be 500 flourishing church, making disciples, transforming Victoria.

And five-bag churches that multiply are central to that.

We're actually relying on the five-bag churches.

We need you to be in this space and doing this stuff.

And third thing I'd like to invite you to do is to give generously.

Generosity is the antidote to fear because open hands can't dig holes.

And hear this clearly: every person here has been given at least one bag.

There are no zero bag people in the kingdom of God.

So this isn't a question for the leadership team or the pastoral team, it's a question for every one of you.

Charles Hemming never saw what this his bus would become.

The people who backed the young, inexperienced associate pastor in this church had no idea that what they were investing in, and frankly, neither did I.

That's how the kingdom works.

That's how God works.

One sows, another reaps.

You're reaping today what people who are no longer with us worked for, and the fields in front of you right now, right now, are ripe for the harvest.

So let's imagine it's 2051 and you're celebrating New Hope's 100th anniversary.

Someone stands up here, and their job, their job is to tell the story of the past 25 years.

They get to tell this chapter, the chapter we're in now.

What will they say?

What will be their story from this 75th to the 100th?

Will they say this was a season, new hope, with all of its success, and a great church became comfortable, content, and cautious?

And said, This is the time to sort of just celebrate what we've been.

Or will they say this was a generation that lifted its eyes, saw the fields, and went at once?

Firm foundations, fresh faith, the bus is still running, the wheels are still turning.

What's your part in the story?

Would you pray with me?