Ryde Presbyterian Church

This Saturday (the 20th of June) is our next Family BBQ and Movie Night! As usualy we will have the BBQ on at about 5pm and we will put the kids movie on at about 6pm. During the Kids movie the adults will have the opportunity to drink coffee and hopefully eat chocolate! It is a great time for our families to meet together and spend time as a big family together. Hope to see you there!

This Sunday (the 14th of June), we are having our yearly Community Church! This is one Sunday that we have every year where we invite some of the locals long to join us and see how we do things. We try and keep it informal and relaxed with a big morning tea afterwards! We will spend some time thinking about why Jesus is Good News! Feel free to drop in!

Ths Sunday we are having our next church lunch...at my place! Bring some food to share!

The following Sunday (14th June) we are having our Community Service. This is when we invite people from the community to join us for church. It happens once a year and usually results in lots of visitors joining us for the morning. As usual we have a big morning tea, great music, kid's program, thought provoking discussion and friendly people!

I have been challenged recently about how much we are tempted to water down the Gospel. Luther said that religion was the default setting of every human heart (or words to that effect!). We are always tempted to reduce things to what we have to do (religion). We often fail to understand or forget that the Gospel is about being freed from what we have to do. Paul said to the Galatians that it was for freedom that Christ had set them free! We, just like the Galatians, seem to want to go back to slavery, to having to do certain things. We are like the Israelites who kept wanting to go back to Egypt!

The NT makes it so clear that this freedom that we have will change us. 1 John tells us that this freedom enables us to fulfil the new commandment (a new expectation) which is so much like the old commandment (the old expectations from which we were set free). The new expectation is that we will love one another.

If there is any way that we are going to be the people God wants us to be, if we are going to change and learn how to love, then we must first embrace the freedom we have in Christ. Otherwise nothing changes and we do not have a Gospel that is good news. We simply have a religion where we try and meet the old expectations...something we can never do.

Christ has set you free, so be free, and in being free... be changed!

This coming Sunday we willl have our first talk in a series that will hopefully better equip us and encourage us to invite others into a relationship with Jesus. We will be starting by looking at 1 John 1 and the Word that John claims to have heard, seen and touched. I find John's first letter a great read with the way he presents the Gospel and how we come to live in the Light. John is known for talking a lot about love, and in this letter he reminds us that God is love, and that love conquers fear, and that in Jesus we can be perfected by love. Great stuff, though sometimes hard to fully grasp - such is the nature of love!