On Sunday our church had the Huskisson Scripture Union beach Mission Team running our church service. The team of around 70 people come down to Huskisson each year and set up camp in the camping ground near Moona Moona Creek where they reach out to the campers with the gospel message.
Each year around 2000 volunteers spend 10 days of their vacation involved in any one of 56 beach missions around New South Wales.One of the great ways of reaching out to people is through drama and the group treated us to the first part of a skit with Pirate Sally. The skit will run each day as a serial. Just from the first episode it was easy to see how it would capture the children’s interest and in a fun way convey the gospel message.
The team also sang a couple of sings they use in ‘Scooping.’ Scooping is when the group goes around the camp site singing with their guitars sounding like they are having fun and inviting children and interested parents to come along and join them.
Another young man gave his testimony of how he became a Christian and then speaker George Statheos told of how he grew up in the Greek Orthodox church and went to church all his life but it wasn’t till he was a teenager and a friend invited him to his church that he actually heard the gospel and committed his life to Jesus. He is now chaplain at Penrith Anglican College.
His message was that God is in the business of changing lives. As a teenager, he and several of his friends decided they wanted to change but it wasn’t until he committed his life to Jesus and he allowed the Holy Spirit to work in him that his life began to change.
George directed us to the passage in Colossians 3:1-17 and said that it is most important to know where you are heading. With that in mind we need to keep our minds on ‘things above’ not on the things of this earth, verse 2. We need to put off the sinful nature and all those things that belong to it. Look at the list in verse 5. And again in verses 8 and 9. But the important thing is that when we put something off we also need to put something on and that is the ‘new self’ and the qualities that go with that new self. These are ‘A heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience’ to name a few, verse 12.
The next verses give more examples of those qualities we are to put on and most importantly we are to let ’the word of Christ rule in your hearts’ verse 15. God’s Word is life changing. Are you allowing God to change you from the inside out?
Bible verses from The New American Standard Version
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Are you letting God speak to you?