Our Family Carols Event is almost here! It is so exciting to partner once again with terrific gospel partners like Quiz Worx and their gifted team of presenters and puppeteers!

If you can, please park in the SCU carpark to free up the LHS parking for members of our community.

As you would know, we will be holding the event on the large quad area at Lismore High with the puppets and stage area under the large shaded area to protect the equipment. Still bring your picnic rugs and outdoor chairs (we will have an area where you can set up chairs to allow visibility of the stage, particularly for young children and their families so they can get close to the action). There is also some tiered seating on the northern side of the large quad.

Our free BBQ and drinks are back and will serve from 6pm-7pm along with some other fun (face painting, bubbles, photo booth, temporary tattoos and more!). The carols will start at 7pm and we expect it to run for just under 90 minutes.

After carols we’d welcome some of you to stick around as we set up for our Christmas Day service back over in the hall.

Carols is always very popular with friends and families and members of our community and so we expect up to 300 people to attend. We are unaware of any threat, but in the interests of community safety we have invited security to attend the event. We will aspire to mark off areas to stop little people (or little big people – teenagers) from wandering too far afield. However, it is always such a positive night and we very much look forward to you and friends and family joining us for the twilight event.

Then, of course, join us for our Christmas Day service (Wednesday 25 December, 9:30am at LHS) where I will guide us through the second half of Matthew chapter 2 to meet a king from an unexpected place – for isn’t Jesus the most unexpected royal this world has ever seen? So I’ll leave us with this incredible section of Philippians chapter 2…
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

SP

This year, SCPC will do a one-off Christmas appeal for the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP). Luke Tattersall (retired Presbyterian minister and the team leader of the CCAP training in Zimbabwe that I attended recently) invited SCPC to support CCAP through its school, elders training or Theological College.

The Presbyterian denomination in Zimbabwe was founded in 1924, thus celebrating its centenary this year. But, not dissimilar to other African contexts, it has struggled to resist the prosperity gospel with
thousands of Zimbabweans flocking to the rallies of so-called ‘prophets’. Not only has that internal threat been prevalent, there have also been external threats from western arms of the denomination urging the leaders of CCAP to adapt to liberal positions in theology and practice.

It was into this contortion and confusion that Presbyterians from NSW began a partnership with CCAP over a decade ago. The main focus since 2011 has been threefold: the establishment of preaching training for elders across the nation, supporting the CCAP school outside Harare by purchasing teaching resources and the construction of additional teaching blocks, and the establishment of a theological college on the edge of Harare.

In spring this year, I had the privilege to visit the school and participate in a week-long intensive at the Theological college (a unit on Revelation, delivered by Peter Ryan the director of Cornhill Ministries based at Moore College in Sydney), and it was a fascinating and fruitful experience. You can read more about my experience in this edition of the Pastors’ Pen.

Your donation can go towards one of the three initiatives above. Or, if you prefer, you could also select ‘CCAP general’ and the Australian board of the CCAP Zimbabwe Supporters will distribute the funds to one of these three areas of need.

Click here to donate. The funds directed electronically to our account will be collected and distributed to the Australian board of CCAP.

If you have more specific questions regarding the Australian board you can email the office for contact
details for the chairperson.

I am excited about this Christmas appeal, for what greater message can we support than seeing the clear truth of Christmas made known simply in a nation that desperately needs it. Even Luther famously said in his preaching that he was desperate to be clear, Christ-honouring and accessible to all. So much so, that when he was preaching he had in mind the servant maid and the children. [1] These are the same goals of the Aussie team supporting CCAP to see the power of God’s word, accessible and present in the life of everyday Zimbabweans.

Can I leave you with this stunning image from the book of Revelation of Christ born at Christmas, who, though unassuming in a cattle trough at his birth, commands great power, authority and is simply supreme.

SP

12 I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, 13 and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man,[d] dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. 14 The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. 15 His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. 16 In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.
17 When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. 18 I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! Revelation 1:12-18

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[1] M. Lloyd-Jones Preaching and Preachers, (London: Stodder, 1971), 127.

If we are to seek first the kingdom in 2025 how can we strengthen this vision? By getting a better sight of God’s vision of the world through his word.

So, how can you spend more time with God in his word in 2025?

Here is a list of some of the resources we profiled since Vision Sunday (and will continue to promote across this month).

I love Dane Ortlund’s description of what it means for us to commune with God in his book ‘Deeper’:
… To read is to hear his voice. And to hear his voice of comfort and counsel is to hear an invitation to become the human being God destined you to be.
So build Bible reading into your life in the way you build breakfast into your life. After all, we humans are habit-forming creatures. Our morning coffee, our evening dessert, the way we care for our vehicles, our methods for decompressing such as jogging or movie or bird-watching – and all our habits reflect an acquired taste, over a long period of time, resulting in daily rituals without which we do not feel we have lived a normal day. And I want to say: Make the Bible your central daily ritual. Make it your habit without which you have not lived a normal day. By no means allow this to become a law towering over you and condemning you…. Stay hooked up to the IV of gospel and help and counsel and promise by reading the Bible each day. Draw life and strength from scriptures.
… Take your asthmatic soul in one hand and the oxygen tank of the Bible in your other hand, and bring the two together. Reading the Bible is inhaling.
And praying is exhaling. Breathe in; breathe out. We take in the life-giving words of God, and we breathe them back out to God in prayer.
… We can easily think of these two disciplines as independent activities. We read the Bible, and we pray. But the most effective way to pray is to turn your Bible reading into prayer. And the best way to read the Bible is prayerfully. [1]

In 2025, may our reading of the Bible prayerfully help us to align our vision to our Heavenly Father’s, as we together seek first His kingdom.

How is your Bible memorisation going!? Remember Matthew 6:19-34? I have started mine so far from verse 25 and here is my (unedited) attempt below…
Therefore, I tell you do not worry about your life. What you will eat or drink or the body what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes. Look at the birds of the air they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life. And why do you worry about clothes. See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. I yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.
How did I go?
Praise God for his mercies in our small grammatical errors!!!
SP

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[1] D. Ortlund Deeper: Real Change for Real sinners (Illinois: Crossway 2021), 151-152.