Queen's Road Cell

The Secret To Fruitfulness In Discipleship Good morning church. I would like to thank the pastors for this opportunity to preach the Word to us today. We have been talking about discipleship as we go through the sermon series on the book of Revelation, and learning discipleship lessons that we can apply to our own lives. This morning I hope to help us spend some time thinking about the fruit of our discipleship journeys through John 15. Let us pray as we prepare our hearts to receive God’s Word to us. Dear Heavenly Father, We thank you for your great love and inseparable love toward us. We thank you that You have saved us and have given us abundant life both now and forever. We pray that even though being your disciples can be tough, we ask for grace to obey in times of difficulty. We pray that our faith may not be defined by duty, but filled with the love and life of the Holy Spirit. We pray and ask this morning that you will open our eyes and hearts to hear what You ha...

Edmund Chan acknowledges the difficulties even 'seasoned' Christians have with witnessing. He says that the big picture of the Church is that, while our purpose is to glorify God in worship (e.g. Eph 1:1-14), our mission is to make disciples through our witness (Mt 28:28-30) He speaks about a "PDA lifestyle": 1) walking in personal revival so that our witness comes from a deep love for the lost, a realization of God at work in our lives and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, 2) a sensitivity and alertness to the direction of God to set up divine appointments for us to take advantage of, and 3) active obedience to His Kingdom purposes. These 3 components are a contagious faith in action. The idea of 'divine appointment' finds its basis in the doctrine of "providence". which is that God determines all things, and also determines how they come to pass. We can be alert to deviations from our normal routines, even though we may find them inconve...

I was sharing how I found in the book of Judges (Chapter 1) how t4he Israelites did not destroy the Cannanites from their midst but "put them to forced labour". Their lack of total obedience and single-mindedness led eventually to apostasy and oppression by their enemies. I can see how in my own life it would be possible to forgo total surrender simply because of the usefulness and convenience of certain things and situations, even though these things would be out of God's will. Winnie also shared her lesson about the ingratitude of the Israelites in the wilderness, who scorned manna from heaven and thought of the nice food they had in Egypt. I shared how a participant in last week's FTP had raised questions about alleged contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, about the wrongness of the NIV translation and about the inerrancy of Scripture. There was a claim that NIV had 'cheated' by using the tense 'had formed' (Gen 2:19) rather than ...

In this chapter Edmund Chan cites Ex 18:21, Ac 2:46 and Mk 3:14 as evidence that SGs are a "biblical pattern". I think that the first reference has to do with administrative organization and that the last is just about the calling of the Twelve. The middle passage promotes SGs by implication only (there is a larger gathering at the temple and smaller ones in homes) but does not exclude the possibility that they are a byproduct of the historical and cultural circumstances of the time. We also have the way Jesus dealt with people (the thousands, the 70/27, the 12, the 3 and the one) to say that we should be stratifying our attention to particular individuals rather than relating to everyone in the same (superficial) way. Perhaps it is better to look at the "one another"s of Scripture and ask how we can best fulfill them in our present context (see below). This relational aspect is not possible in larger church contexts. I think this inescapably leads us to the neces...