Midweek Manna | E1

Gday church, midweek manna for this week I wanted to talk about the heart behind why we have provided this community rhythm as we’re now going to call it.

The basic idea of it is that in the same way that fish don’t realise they’re wet, we don’t fully realise the effect our culture has on us. A culture that doesn’t follow Jesus.

A culture that is spiritually forming us whether we like it or not.

I think a majority of followers of Jesus would say they want to grow to be like him.

I want to just reinforce that these practices are purely invitational and we know that everyone is at different stages of life and discipleship.

I also want to say it’s actually not about the practices. I know a lot of people have a range of experiences, good or bad with I guess you’d say fundamentalism or empty “religious” things you need to do.

This is not like that at all. This in no way earns any sort of favour from God. This in no way is a shortcut.

The practices in themselves are just a tool. The end goal is to grow to be more like Jesus, but that requires us to admit that our culture is forming us away from Jesus and unless we make some conscious effort to organise our lives to be with him more - to pursue him more - we can’t expect to grow to be more like Jesus. They are purely a tool to give us more space in our lives for God to form us.

and these practices are just different ways that Christians over the past two millennium have done just that.

Probably the hardest thing for us modern people, for me definitely is that we actually have no control over how quickly we are formed to be like Jesus.

What I mean is it’s not necessarily correlated that the more time you can allocate to being with Jesus the faster you’ll grow to be like him.

It is completely up to Him.

He wants to work with us in all stages of life, it isn’t just the retired or the young adults who can pursue this life. It’s open for everyone and it looks wildly different for everyone.

So be encouraged, be creative with it. It all stems from the realisation that our culture is not doing is any favours in trying to follow Jesus, so this is a small but practical and I think essential way that we as a community can help each other pursue Jesus