DOING WHAT JESUS DID - THE GOOD NEWS - New Year's Sermon 2025 - THE WAY #8
09/01/2025
My first sermon of the year was my eighth in a series based around John Mark Comer’s book Practicing The Way. A book about discipleship we had already looked at Being With Jesus.
We had looked at Being With Jesus, then becoming like Jesus and now we were doing what Jesus did. We have looked at hospitality, now it was sharing the Gospel.
However, the first sermon of a new year comes with all kinds of extras. I have been off for a week, reading, pondering, thinking of the nativity, surmising what a new year might bring.
All of that was blended in and around Comer’s book.
Two quotes were driving my sermonic thought particularly.
The first was on social media as we lost the finest character of a U.S. President as America ever had - Jimmy Carter.
Carter said, “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. That something I have chosen - is my faith. My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have, to try and make a difference.”
That is a kick in new year’s inspiration.
My other quotation is from the novel I was reading over the new year - Niall Williams’ Time Of The Child. Set in Williams’ imaginary village of Faha in the west of Ireland the local doctor is Jack Troy.
Williams writes about Dr Troy, “Once it had come to him that the whole history of mankind had failed the Sermon On The Mount, the bitterness of that only resolved by the understanding he came to that maybe the aspiration was more important than the realisation and Jesus knew that… “
This resonated with me. I remembered that on the night of John Finlay’s installation as minister in my home church, Harryville, back in 1982 that Alastair Dunlop said that our new minister wasn’t holy but that he was attempting to be. What an aspiration for a new year.
Williams went on, “what filled Jack Troy then was the fantastic idea of grace as an actual thing”. Imagine that - grace as an actual thing!
Comer, among other things, suggests one of the ways that we share the Good News is by living a beautiful life. Life in all its fulness. He quotes 1 Peter 2:
12 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
Comer says that good could be translated beautiful.
Living these three quotes I suggest would be a wonderful ways of Jesus’ Good News in 2025.
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