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Written by David Hassan

Published: 19 December 2016

Jude 3-16

Fads and trends come and go, as they say keep it long enough it’ll come back into fashion.  So what was your favourite fad of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s 90’s 00’s?  Like did you ever own: a Smoking Joe or a Coffin Bank, or ever get a twiggy haircut, or wear the paisley shirt, listen to the beach boys on your LP player or on a cassette tape, or for fun run your 6 inch record at 33 1/3?  Or has it been the same for you that song you bought on vinyl, bought again on CD and now rebought on iTunes, and you’ve watched it many times on YouTube.  At your primary school did you call it recess or little lunch, and for fun bring your pet rock or sea monkey’s?  Were you ever present for a Harlem Globe Trotters basketball game?  Or could do around the world with your Coke-a-Cola Yo Yo?  In the 1980’s did you: ever crack your rubick cube, own a cabbage patch doll, wear leg warmers, admit to actually liking Michael Jackson, can you sing the words to Nina’s 99 Luft balloons in German!  Or have you ever wanted to be: MacGyver, Magnum PI, a Charlies Angel, the Six Million Dollar Man or Wonder Woman.  These things defined those years and in some ways we can point out movements in churches that can define generations of Christians as well.  There have been movements like the Toronto Blessing, or the deliverance movement, or even something as sinister like the Jones town Massacre.  These are things that take followers of Jesus into all sorts of extreme places.  So it is today as we read Jude verses 3-16 we see how Jude, the brother of James, the half-brothers to Jesus,

had to be able to acknowledge Jesus’ rightful place in his life.  Jude wants to see these Christians continue to be people of faith.  The question is: “How do you reflect your hope in Jesus?”  As Jude tells it we are to have a heart check.  As we read in Jude verse 3 and the first part verse 4

3 Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints  4  For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you.

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Written by David Hassan

Published: 07 December 2016

Jude 1-3

Accrording to Mcrindle reserach[1] from 2011 the top 6 reasons given by people for not attending a church are:

47% not relevant to my life

26% don’t accept how its taught

24% outdated style

22% Issues with clergy/minister

19% Don’t believe the Bible

18% Too busy to attend

 Those statistics were taken from those who either never go to church or attend one less than a month

 Australia also has more churches (13,000) than schools (9,500), more Australians attend a church service each week (1.8 million) than people living in South Australia (1.6 million).

 From the National church life survey data taken in 2011. When asked what Christians should be actively involved in:

80% said we should be active in public policy through making public comment on policy issues

75% said we should be advocating and lobbying governments

63% believe that the church should publically advocate on policy issues

69% believe that church goers should campaign for global poverty and injustice issues.

In 1960 41% of the Australian population attended church at least monthly, but by 1980 this figure had declined to 25% and was heading down to 20% by 2000[2]  and in the last census was showing the church was slightly down again.  Further, over the last four decades Australians attending church at least once per month has more than halved from 36% (1972) to 15% currently.

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Written by David Hassan

Published: 24 October 2016

2 Samuel 9

Some circumstances of life are just tragic, and they are all the harder for us to work our way through when they affect children.  How many of us give generously to the appeal, to help out a young family, whose child has been struck with cancer.   Or who of us help out the family with a child who has a major disability?  It’s where we are introduced today to a man named Mephibosheth.  Mephibosheth is one of those people we meet in the Bible, who is met with tragedy and uncertainty in life.  How Mephibosheth came to be unable to walk goes back to the time Saul & Jonathon went out to do battle against the Philistines at mount Gilboa.  The result was both Saul & Jonathon die in the battle. The news of their deaths filters back home, and we read in 2 Samuel 4:4

4 (Jonathan son of Saul had a son who was lame in both feet. He was five years old when the news about Saul and Jonathan came from Jezreel. His nurse picked him up and fled, but as she hurried to leave, he fell and became disabled. His name was Mephibosheth.)

In the panic following the death of Jonathon and his father King Saul, and with David around somewhere with his band of misfits, any living relative of Saul’s expected to swept aside.  These relatives of Saul were part of the old order about to be replaced by the new.  Mephibosheth’s nurse it seems tried to grab him on the run, fleeing for her life.  The result was Mephibosheth being dropped, breaking both feet of the boy.  In the healing they obviously didn’t join well, ending with him being crippled in both feet. This was A regrettable outcome to a tragic day.

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Written by David Hassan

Published: 10 September 2016

2 Samuel 2-4  (3:6-34)

 What are you like at your worst relationship?  You see I have a friend who broke off his engagement with his fiancée & he was so jealous when he found out she was engaged later on, he went and slashed the tires of the car of her new fiancé.  It was later on my friend admitted he was such a bonehead or blockhead, as he identified how he had become filled with so much anger.  My friend found that he surprised himself by the way he reacted to the news, of the person who he thought he would share the rest of his life with, he found instead made his life so difficult.  Just as we see today the question is where are you most tempted to want to take revenge on someone?  You might never act on it, but you thought it didn’t you!

In 2 Samuel 2-4 we follow on from the death of Jonathon & Saul and David’s lament over that; and how in that we can see how angry, ill wished revenge and retaliation, can come washing over us as we see what occurs in the time following Saul’s death.  As what we read happens after a decade of being on the run, and how David was hunted down in the wilderness and had to learn how to live on the defensive whilst David remains God’s anointed king.  Where we find David now is now he is no longer on the run.  David now is in a position of strength.  At 30 years of age he is finally in charge.

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Written by David Hassan

Published: 08 August 2016

2 Samuel 1:1-27

CS Lewis the writer of the Narnia series was 58 when he married an American English Teacher & Poet Joy Gresham in 1956.  The couple spent 4 years together until Joy’s death from cancer in 1960.  Joy was 45.  To deal with his grief Lewis wrote about it as his way of processing it “A Grief Observed” is what came out of reflection on that time, of walking through the death of Joy.  Lewis wrote:

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.  At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.” [1]

Today we run into David’s experience of grief, as it is a grief rightly grieved, of Saul & Jonathon’s deaths.  David in lament is as someone put it this way

“where God draws us into the depths of a healthy human spirit as it deals honestly and prayerfully with devastating loss and all its attendant emotions.”[2]

Grief, sadness, loss all step us into the tangle of life alongside the good and bad of all of it.  As we step into this passage today we see in the long story of David’s life in 2 Samuel is the continuing story about God’s protective providence; which doesn’t mean we are sparred from meeting head on the heat of life lived in a fallen world.  This story of David will now turn towards kingship, just as our gaze is now shifted forwards seeing that there is no ordinary crown for God’s one and only Son, who will come to deal with death, and show us how to live.  As we read in 2 Samuel 1:17-18

17 David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan, 18 and he ordered that the people of Judah be taught this lament of the bow (it is written in the Book of Jashar):

Saul & Jonathon both die at the battle that David and his men were turned away from in 1 Samuel 29.  Here we find David still in exile, still taking his protection from the Philistine King Achish of Gath, which is also the hometown tribe of Goliath the slain giant.  David and his men hired themselves out as mercenary fighters, and so it is while David is out of the way, and in no way can he be implicated in the death of Saul, a messenger comes to him right from the battlefield to Ziklag.  The condition the messenger arrives in cannot be good news verse 2

2 On the third day a man arrived from Saul’s camp with his clothes torn and dust on his head. When he came to David, he fell to the ground to pay him honor

The news he bears comes in two parts, and David displays a need to know the details about Saul death, how Israel’s King was killed on the battlefield.  When David presses for more information about how Saul died, everything about his death becomes complex and troubled, Verse 10.

10“So I stood beside him and killed him, because I knew that after he had fallen he could not survive. And I took the crown that was on his head and the band on his arm and have brought them here to my lord.”

The messenger of this awful news was also Saul’s killer he was also one cool customer, who was not only capable of killing a king, stripping his dead body, seizing the symbol of Saul’s royal legitimacy, the crown and the amulet.  With all these things in hand he races off to Ziklag to a waiting claimant to the throne.  He was expecting his payday.  It is the tension of the story that we all hold our breath for how David will respond?  Any lessor man would maybe have rejoiced.  I want you to just think of Saul’s track record with David.  David was driven to the wilderness with his band of social misfits, to the fringes of his nation, as a fugitive.  David and his men were hunted, tracked and attacked by Saul.  We can recall all those daring escapes and thrilling escapades, which all have taken their toll, so we could understand if David gloated over Saul’s death.  So it is here we get to David’s response, and it isn’t the way this messenger expected things to go.  For David instead of celebration, David grieves; instead of hoped for gratitude, David falls into an immediate inconsolable grief.  Notice that David’s first response isn’t to celebrate that the way to power is now open, David first wants to grieve the King is dead.  It is here we find that this messenger is an outsider, an Amalekite, a descendant of Esau and one of Israel’s enemies.  What the messenger doesn’t know is, that it’s not messengers who crown kings, it’s God who anoints them.  David’s response is loyal to Saul, to kill God’s anointed King is an act of treason.  This messenger expected a reward, and is instead met his swift and decisive execution.  It is why when we step on the pages of the New testament we’re meant to get that when Jesus comes into our world, He is the Messiah King of all the earth, as John put it this way  John 1:14

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

At the death of Jesus, we are to see we all deserve death, for killing the author of life, and with the completed work of the cross, Jesus is able to bring to us instead forgiveness from our sins, and new life for our future.

If we step into the pages of the Psalms so many of them are laments,  where the brutality of life, is met with the gaze of grace, to see the God we trust in, is the same one who lifts up our heads with hope in the face of the darkest hour.  Like I wonder if David was thinking of this time when he wrote  Psalm 13     

1 Long enough, God— you’ve ignored me long enough. I’ve looked at the back of your head long enough.  2 Long enough I’ve carried this ton of trouble, lived with a stomach full of pain. Long enough my arrogant enemies have looked down their noses at me. 3  Take a good look at me, God, my God; I want to look life in the eye, 4 So no enemy can get the best of me or laugh when I fall on my face. 5  I’ve thrown myself headlong into your arms— I’m celebrating your rescue. 6 I’m singing at the top of my lungs, I’m so full of answered prayers. (The Message)

David’s grief was because he cared, and David draws us into a grief observed, just like CS Lewis did on the death of his wife.

With David life matters, as we keep on seeing David lived with extravagance he also grieved fiercely, and here’s why for David “His exuberance and lamentation were aspects of the same life-orientation and commitment: life matters.  David honored human life…extravagantly.”[3]   So take the way we see our world deals with death, and how our media fixates on all that’s bad.  It’s true isn’t it that one sure fire way to get your name in the news is do something bad, really bad.  It is a kind of trivialization of life, where it is all about the optics of a disaster than it is about lamenting seriously or loving carefully.  It is why I want us to take notice how David responds in verses 19-21

19 “A gazelle lies slain on your heights, Israel. How the mighty have fallen! 20 “Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines be glad, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice. 21 “Mountains of Gilboa, may you have neither dew nor rain, may no showers fall on your terraced fields. For there the shield of the mighty was despised, the shield of Saul—no longer rubbed with oil.

Then verse 24

24 “Daughters of Israel, weep for Saul, who clothed you in scarlet and finery, who adorned your garments with ornaments of gold.

In the face of all the dangers David faced from Saul, David choses to be shaped by God’s sovereignty.  Just as we face the fact, that if David had allowed Saul’s hate to determine his life, he would have been destroyed, he would have been consumed by that hatred and the desire to have his revenge.  David would have lived a life bent over with self-preoccupation.  The question is do we see how God’s grace is freeing even in the face of grief?  That we come to the one who not only brings mercy, but also knows how to speak to us in the darkness by shining the light of his truth in our souls.  Our comfort comes from the Lord who can invade the darkness with love, forgiveness and mercy.  God understands what it is to face death and through it bring about his full purposes as we see him do for us in Jesus. The grief we feel is so often a sorrow that continually reckons with the specific promises of God: his lovingkindness, his watchful care, his forgiveness, the reality that he is our only true refuge.  As someone puts it this way “This experience of sorrows in search of the God who willingly makes himself known can become increasingly our own. Like the Psalms take us by the hand. We learn how to honestly face trouble, how to give voice to deep internal struggles… can we see here is where God can fill us with a sense of confidence, safety, and even (on occasion) exultant joy.”[4] Christian faith is riveted down by the humility that honestly reckons with our need.  See how David doesn’t run for pity, he doesn’t turn inwards, instead he reaches out to know God’s strength.

What I keep on taking away from seeing David here is seeing how I deal with my grief, affects the way I will come towards you in your grief.  The temptation of grief is to lose sight of God, and start thinking that all we have is now, when we are to see that in God we have one who lifts up our heads with his tender mercy and love and knows the way through the valley of the shadow of death, with Jesus as our shepherd.  As the cross not only is the place Jesus deals with our sin, he also there begins to prepare us for the resurrection to come.

It’s in the face of death Jesus has the last word when he tells us in Matthew 10:38-39

38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

Let’s pray…

David Hassan @ Tamworth Community Presbyterian Church 7/8/16

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Written by David Hassan

Published: 12 July 2016

David Hassan@Tamworth Community Presbyterian Church 3-7-16 

Psalm 124 

Do you find being a follower of Jesus hazardous? 

Discipleship isn’t for the faint hearted, which is surprising to us as we often focus in on the blessings of God in us,  the new life we have received, how God’s renewing, enabling spirit at work in us assures us of the hope we have.  SO the question is how do you match that up with our growth in grace and humility coming at the back end of trial and testing?  This is where we meet ourselves in Psalm 124, a Psalm all about the hazards of being disciples.  The hazards of discipleship is a life of spiritual formation that gets us wanting to look more and more at Jesus so we can look more and more like Jesus.  Why discipleship is so hazardous is because spiritual warfare is always raging all around us, and the consequences for complacency can pierce us with all kinds of grief.  The trouble is that we so often we treat God as a kind of complaints clerk to the troubles of life.  So let’s be oriented to where this Psalm points us, in verse 8 brings the hope we are to hold onto when we cry out to God[1]  8  Our help is in the name of the LORD,  the Maker of heaven and earth.  God didn’t go off and leave us

Please look with me at the start of this Psalm of ascents, the superscription, what's written under the Psalm's number, and see what you notice who this Psalm is written by, or for.  Notice that this is a psalm of King David.  David the King who conquered armies and secured Israel’s land, the man who also knew the bitterness of being attacked and loosing men in the battle, as King David was known as the warrior King.  Thing is that David also knew a lot about having a remarkable escapes, in the Old Testament David is pursued allot, he is stalked by Saul who had hit squads after him.  David also knew the pained bitterness of being betrayed by his own Son Absalom, who mounted a coup forcing David to flee Jerusalem with his family.  David knew about the threat of invasion, as he lived with it constantly with the Philistines.  From all of the trouble we get a glimpse into how David responds, and what we get to see isn that these life events taught him about how to rely on God in all things,  knowing that when life is tipped upside down, we are to orientate hope by turning towards trusting in God.  I think this is why we so easily relate to his emotions.

So what about Psalm 124 what does it teach us?  As we see immediately this Psalm poses the problem, we read of it in verse 1-2

 1  If the LORD had not been on our side--  let Israel say-- 2  if the LORD had not been on our side  when men attacked us, 

To state the obvious here is a kind of leader response kind of song, the leader says the first line and the group sing the second.

The reason for the song is plain, "If God hadn’t been on our side when these men attacked us" we would have been helpless, just as the the Psalm ends in Verse 8 with the answer: 

8  Our help is in the name of the LORD,  the Maker of heaven and earth.

The most effective help received, wasn’t physical help nor the most powerful weapon the Psalmist had, it wasn’t the size or strength of his army.  It was God’s name.  This trouble David speaks of was big enough to swallows an entire army, we're to imagine an overwhelming force that ordinarily cannot be repelled or resisted, so we read in verses 3-5

3  when their anger flared against us,  they would have swallowed us alive; 4  the flood would have engulfed us,  the torrent would have swept over us, 5  the raging waters  would have swept us away. 

A calamity like being caught in a fowlers snare, is the kind of trap that catches a bird & the thing with a fowlers snare is that more what is caught struggles to set itself free, the more entangled it becomes in the trap.  The only difference being caught in that trap is the hope of a remarkable escape Verse 7

 7  We have escaped like a bird  out of the fowler's snare; the snare has been broken,  and we have escaped. 

Thing is you don’t get out of a fowlers snare all by yourself, you need someone to set you free.  So in this Psalm the point is clear if God had not been on our side our cause would have been helpless, and then comes the turning point for me in the Psalm comes in verse 6

 6  Praise be to the LORD,  who has not let us be torn by their teeth. 

Notice that after the overwhelming feeling of this catastrophe about to happen, David turns to praise, as he directs worship the right way.  What happened was that God spared his people, and it’s not like God is acting anonymously here,  he is the Lord God almighty, He is the maker of heaven and earth.

 So how does Psalm 124 fit into the Psalms of Ascents? Because this is really a Psalm all about hazards for pilgrims who set their feet to follow God.  Please look closely again at this Psalm.  This isn’t just a Psalm for an individual here or there, we are to notice that this is a  Church Psalm, of the gathered community of believers coming together.  This is our song for God’s people standing as a witness to God’s promises, even when we’re buffeted by personal disappointment, or shaken by trouble or anxiety, or even when life is turned upside down by calamity.  This Psalm reminds us about getting on together with the business of making God’s name known, and pointing to God's sovereign choices.  Just as Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said:

13   “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.   Matthew 7:13-14 ESV

 So what does Psalm 124 mean for me as a pilgrim following Jesus today?  In answering this question, the first thing we see is the raw honesty of this Psalm.  Do you notice that God isn’t in the sugar coating business, as we’re so used to seeing the spin of the modern media.  This Psalm isn’t part of a propaganda campaign to convince us that God is more than all the other gods on the market.  This is an honest prayer by someone struggling with real threats and struggles, and about how hazardous discipleship with Jesus is.  There’s no shortcuts, as repentance and faith is all about giving our lives over to Jesus, in reality being a disciple of Jesus has no easy route or way in following him, or taking on his way of life and not the worlds.  There is a challenge that  every day we have to put our faith on the line, because every day I am limited in my knowledge of the future[2]  The thing is I don’t know what lays ahead, good or bad; and yet every day I am called to lay it all before God, and to ask him to lead me all the way.  So Psalm 124 reminds me not so much about the hazards but more about the help God has provided for us, as our help comes from as Paul writes in Colossians 1:17-23

 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation-- 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.

 Just as the Psalmist tells us in verse 8:

8  Our help is in the name of the LORD,  the Maker of heaven and earth.

Our personal link of God come in the flesh, the head of his church and his people is the one who forgives our sins, is the same one who reconciles us to God.  Also as we live with the uncertainty of not knowing how each day will end, God does.  I think this is why David brings us back to praise as being the way to respond to all this in this kind of prayer:

Praise you God that in trouble I call out to you, PRAISE YOU God that you do not treat me as my sins deserve, but you desire to forgive them and remove them from me. Praise you God for this church family you have placed me in to carry each other’s loads and bear my own burdens.  Praise you God that you love me even when I sometimes give up on you. Praise you Jesus that you destroyed the fear of death and destroyed any power of Satan through your death on the cross.  Praise you God that in the grip of trouble I can look through to the other side to see you there

Which is the very point of this Psalm, as the very thing we can we do when in trouble is praise God for everything he is, and also for all the help we have from him through Jesus

 Let’s pray…

[1] Idea taken from Eugene Peterson Al Long Obedience In The Same Direction Downer Grove, Illinois:IVP, 2000 p71

[2] This idea taken from Eugene Peterson A long obedience in the same direction p76-77.