Evening Service (Online) - Victor Brittain-Wong 07Jun20

The Pale Blue Dot – Sunday 7 June 2020 Bible Reading Gen 1:1 – 2:4a, Psalms 8, 2 Cor 13:11-13, Matt 28:16-20 What a great song by Chris Tomlins, Indescribable. You are an amazing God. Thank you Bimbi for the opportunity to speak at St Paul’s again. Just over 2 weeks ago, we celebrated Ascension Day. This was the day when Jesus ascended back to heaven and he will one day return. Jesus told his disciples in John 16:7 that if he goes, He will send the Holy Spirit to us. Last Sunday, we celebrated Pentecost Sunday, this was when the Holy Spirit came down on the disciples and they were baptised in the Holy Spirit and we can read that in Acts 2. Today is Trinity Sunday. The Trinity is perhaps one of the most difficult subjects in Christian theology but I won’t go too much into the reasons why. The word ‘Trinity’ is not in the Bible and by that I mean, the word itself is never used in Scripture. However, it is of course pure biblical teaching! The general term in the Old Testament for God is Elohim. The Hebrew word is plural. One of the readings in the Lectionary for today is Gen 1, the account of creation. The first reference to the Trinity can be found in Gen 1:26; Then God said, “Let us make man in our image”. We see God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit in creation’s story. The Trinity: One God in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is one in his essential being but in this being there are three persons. The three persons are self-distinctive in the one true God. The divine essence is wholly in each person. This means the Father is wholly God, the Son is wholly God and the Spirit is wholly God. Though they are three persons they do not compete with each other. There is no rivalry in the Trinity. They heap praise on each other: Father John 5:20 Jesus John 16:13, John 15:26 Holy Spirit John 16:14 We can praise any person of the Trinity. We also see a reference to the work of the Trinity in the message of John the Baptist. John preached repentance toward the God (Matt 3:7-8), faith in a coming Messiah (Matt 3:11) and baptism of the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:11). And this is what you have done; if you are a Christian, repented to God, having faith in Jesus and baptised in the Holy Spirit. As Christians, we have our identity in God. At St Pauls, we may be familiar with this; our identity in God, our intimacy with God and our impact. And you may have seen this diagram before on the Powerpoint slide, Identity, Intimacy and Impact. As you can see on the slide, I have also added the Trinity. Faith puts us in the family of God. John 1:12-13 “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” and in Romans 8:14 “for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” We are adopted by the Father. Our identity is no longer in our work, our job title, our rank, our wealth but our identity as sons and daughters of the Father, the King, of God. That means we are given the privileges of sonship (1 John 3:1 that we should be called children of God). We are made co-heirs with Jesus, God’s one and only Son. A privilege of ‘sonship’, ‘daughtership’ is to have access to the Father. We have access to the throne room of God. Hebrews 4:16 “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need”. That means we can pray, we can talk with God, we can have fellowship. Because of our identity, we are able to have access to God, we can know Him, read His word (the Bible). If we want to know Jesus better, we need to know the Bible better. Why? Jesus is the Word. In John 1:1 it says “in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God”. John 1:14 Jesus is full of grace and truth. But it is not enough just to have our identity and as in any love relationship we need to cultivate time to know each other better. We come to God as sons and daughters not servants or slaves, this will help to grow even deeper in our intimacy with Him. If we want to impact our neighbourhoods, if we want to impact our communities, if we want to impact our nation, our world, the greater our intimacy the greater our impact. I used to visit the Lake District for the Keswick Convention. I loved the Lake District with the beautiful views and walks. There were sheep along some of the walks and when I tried to call them they would walk away. However, they would recognise the shepherd’s voice. Our intimacy helps us to recognise His voice better, just as a sheep know its master’s voice. We also learn to be more sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s promptings and speaking to us. It is often said that children spell love not as L O V E but as T I M E. When Judith and I were going out, I was always excited when we were able to meet up and boy oh boy, did I not wish that time would have stayed still. I just loved being in her company, I didn’t want to leave. Earlier Neil read Matthew 28:16-20, verse 19 “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” What is to be our impact? To preach the good news of Jesus, to heal sick, to love our neighbours as ourselves, to love God and to bring the kingdom of God ‘on earth as in heaven’. What the world needs now is not just love. It needs God. It needs us to bring the love of God and all that it means. Knowing and possessing our secured identity in Him, access as sons and daughters to Him to grow deeper in our intimacy with Him, gives us increased anointing to impact the world. We are born for a purpose. God has a purpose for you. A friend of mine, Dr RT Kendall, retired former minister of Westminster Chapel, often quote “God is never too early, He is never too late, He is always just on time”. You and I are here now for ‘such a time as this’. In preparing for this talk, it brought me back to my early years when I was growing up in a small city in Malaysia. Then, the street lights were not too bright and there were not many of them. This meant that we were able to look up to the skies at night and look at the moon and the stars. Near the equator, one is not able to see a large moon as one does in the Northern Hemisphere like in England. I love gazing into the heavens and looking the numerous stars and am always amazed by them. It gave me an interest in astronomy among many things. In today’s reading, Psalms 8 and verses 3 & 4 it says “when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him?” We can see how big the universe is from looking up to the stars, the sun, and the galaxies. If we were to count each of star in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, one per second, it will take us more than 3,000 years and they are spread over 100,000 light years. There are many more galaxies in the universe and some are even larger than our Milky Way galaxy. Yet God knows each one by name, he has counted each and every one of them. This makes us feel so so small and lead us to feel that the universe is just too big for us. And so it should, but what if the vastness of the universe is not for us but to display the splendour, majesty, greatness and glory of God. Psalms 19:1 says that the heavens declares His glory. In Sept 1977, NASA launched the Voyager space crafts with its original mission to study Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn’s rings and the larger moons of the two planets. After completing its original mission, NASA decided to send the space crafts further out. And as Voyager 1 was zipping toward the far edge of the solar system, NASA turned its camera around to take a panoramic view back towards earth. The photographs were taken on Feb 14 1990, it took several weeks to download all of the images and the final download occurred 1 May 1990. Here is the composite of the images that has since come to be known as the ‘Pale Blue Dot’. The white lines are the beams of sunlight reflected off the lens of the camera. And just a little to the right off the centre you can see a dot caught in one of the beams. That pale blue dot is planet Earth. The late astronomy professor Carl Sagan described it, the earth as “on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam”. I would like to read a little more from Carl Sagan, he wrote “Look again at that dot. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives on the pale blue dot”. He goes on to say, “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.” We don’t see any cities, any countries, we don’t see the strife, the poverty, the pain, the glamour, the triumph. We are not so big after all, not quite as important, not as grand. A tiny dot is our earth. We feel small, we feel insignificant. Carl writes, “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” Alas, I am glad to say that Carl Sagan is wrong. The earth may be but a pale blue dot, but it is to this earth and only our earth, that God tells us that He knows us, He is aware of us, loves us. It is to our earth that God sent His Son, Jesus to be our Saviour, to offer us forgiveness, redemption and reconciliation. Rev 13:8 Jesus is the Lamb slain from the creation of the world. God had us already in mind before He spoke and creation came to be. He already planned for our salvation. Isa 53:6 that God laid on Jesus the iniquity of us all Rom 5:8 that while we were still sinners Christ died for us 2 Pet 3:9 …God does not want anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance Yes, we may seem insignificant but no no no. We are significantly significant. John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. So my brothers and sisters, my friends, let me encourage you with this. Truth has a name, Grace has a name, Hope has a name, Love has a name. His name is Jesus. There is grace everywhere, long before you decided what to do with God, God decided what to do with you. And He invites us to a relationship with Him, a relationship that will never ever end. Before I close, I would like to ask you 2 questions: Have you come to place in your life, where you know for certain that if you died, you would go to heaven? If you were to stand before God (which you might), and he were to ask you, “Why should I let you into my heaven? What would you say? If you are not able to say for certain that you will go to heaven. If your answer to the second question is not, that you are trusting in Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. May I encourage you that you can know for certain and you can know Jesus. Jesus said that He is the only way to the Father, to God. He is the way, the truth and the life. He also says that once you belong to Him, no one and nothing can pluck you out of His hands. As I close, I will lead us in a prayer. If you feel that you have drifted from God, if you want to know Jesus and to accept Him into your life, please join me in the prayer. Lord Jesus, I need you, I want you I am sorry for my sins, wash my sins away by your blood I welcome your Holy Spirit into my heart As best as I know how, I give you my life. If you prayed that prayer or would like to know more, please email us at office@stpaulscrofton.org.uk and if you would like prayers, you can email us on prayers@stpaulscrofton.org.uk We end this Sunday evening service with a song by Martyn Layzell; Lost in wonder