Jesus said to His disciples, Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations.
The Lord said to Abram, Leave the land of Ur of the Chaldeans and go to the place I'm calling you to go to.
Moses was told by God to go to Pharaoh, and to say on God's behalf, Let my people go, go.
Jesus said, before you come to communion, Go first and be reconciled to those you are out of fellowship with.
To go means to start and to stop.
We've been thinking about this throughout the month of January.
Go means to say yes, and typically also it means to say no.
GO24 means making the year, 2024, a fruitful, God-honouring year.
And GO24 also means being intentional throughout every 24-hour period.
So GO24 as the year is clearly made up of days, and how we live our days, you may not have thought of this, but it is how we live our years and our lives.
How we live our lives is made up of today.
Change has to start on one of these 24s that we live through.
So this morning, we're going to study a portion of Scripture from John's Gospel.
We'll get to Psalm 27 at the end, but we're actually going to be in John chapter 6.
So if you have a Bible there and you'd like to turn to our text, we're in John chapter 6 and starting in verse 1.
I think this particularly well-known story, the story of the feeding of the 5,000, a version of which is found in every one of the four Gospels, which is a rare thing actually, is a story which well describes the go of faith.
And the go of faith we see from our text today, it involves the step, the test first, and then the step and the thanks, the blessing, and the overflow.
So let's start with the test, verse 1 of chapter 6.
Sometime after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, that is the Sea of Tiberius, and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick.
Then Jesus went up on the mountainside and sat down with his disciples.
The Jewish Passover festival was near.
When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?
He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
James 1.13 says that God does not tempt us.
Praise the Lord.
But it doesn't say he doesn't test us.
In fact, testing is something we find all the way through the Bible.
Jesus was testing Philip, and of course Philip becomes a stellar evangelist later on, so he must have done ultimately okay with the test.
How do you go with tests?
We mentioned at the beginning of January that there was a memory verse, and I got feedback from people who were particularly stressed that there was going to be a test before you come in the door right out Philippians 2.
No, but we react to tests in different ways.
For some people, it's a motivating force.
Others, it's just a source of anxiety.
But God, He does test His people, whether it's Gideon who thinks he's going to have 30,000 soldiers, and he has it whittled down to 300, and he's tested in his faith, or David, tested in going up against an enormous giant named Goliath.
Over and over again, you find throughout the Old and New Testaments that there is a test that's given by the Lord to His people.
A woman who can't bear children is told that she will be able to, and there's a test of whether she would believe or not.
Of course, that's what happened to Sarah, and Abraham, after 25 years, was given the child of promise, Isaac, and then sometime later when the child was a teenager, God said, I want you to go and offer him as a sacrifice in worship to me on Mount Moriah.
And it was all a test.
John 6 is set around the Sea of Galilee.
It's the time of the Passover festival.
And if you think about Passover, it was a great test, wasn't it?
The people of Israel were told, put the blood of an unblemished lamb on the doorpost, and it will mark you out as my people.
Don't forget to do that.
I'm testing you.
Obey.
And you will be marked as my people, and the angel of death will go over you, and you will be spared.
And they were.
And that's the Passover.
That's the origin of today's coming around the table.
And then they were taken to the seashore on the Red Sea, edge of the Red Sea, and they again were tested.
Would they believe that God was their God?
And He would open up the Red Sea.
And He did.
So Jesus is here once again.
Once again, God in human flesh, and He's testing Philip.
So we have come to our beginning, our formal beginning of this idea of GO24.
If nothing else, GO24 is a reminder to me, and I hope all of us, that just because we have, by the Lord's blessing, a wonderful air-conditioned room we sit in now.
And it means that throughout winter it's warm, and in summer it's cool.
And most of us, not all of us, but most of us would have driven into a car park underground, and when it's pouring rain outside, it's lovely.
It feels like we're very blessed.
And you don't even have to walk upstairs if you don't want to.
At NorthernLife, we provide lifts.
In fact, God has provided a lift.
And so we come up and we walk in the doors, and it's a lovely room with an electronic drum kit.
It's not even that loud.
And the pews, well, they're not pews, they're comfy chairs.
And I could go on.
And it's all quite comfortable, isn't it?
And I think GO24 for us all is a reminder that just because we've been blessed doesn't mean we should avoid risk.
Amen?
Often what happens in churches, certainly if you think of the churches of the last 50 years that you know about in Sydney, and some of which are a dilapidated shell in the building, and it's metaphorically a symbol of what the church is like, churches that used to be many hundreds making thriving progression into the world with the kingdom and the gospel being proclaimed, are now shells themselves.
And if we were to look back on the history of those churches, at some point they've stopped going.
At some point they started to protect more than engage in risk.
And it's one of the dangers, one of the dangers.
There are many great things about having an older congregation, but often we get risk averse, and we're protecting our nest egg as we get older.
But we have to find a balance, don't we, as a church, of taking meaningful, God-directed, healthy risks as we go forward into each year.
And so GO24 is, in a way, a way of saying, Gird up thy loins, NorthernLife, let's take some kingdom risks together.
Now the next question is, so what are we doing that's risky?
Fair enough.
We probably aren't doing as much as we could, but we are doing some things.
We're struggling to meet our budget, so that's good.
That says we upped it by about 10%, and we're hoping that we'll be able to match it.
And we're not just buying new pews for that money that's gone up in our budget.
It's things like we've never done before.
We have said that we will support Hamish Noble, who is working somewhere else, not as one of our staff, but we're supporting him about 95%, up to 95%, of his financial needs to work as an evangelist and a trainee at Sydney Uni.
He's a missionary, but we've never sponsored someone in mission as much as we've said we will sponsor Hamish.
And I think that's exciting, and we all believe it's exciting.
We've increased our giving to International Care Ministries, ICM, by 500%.
We believe in the work they're doing, particularly in the Philippines, to the ultra-poor.
And so we said, you know what, instead of 3,000, we're going to give 15-plus thousand dollars, and we will sponsor five transform programs.
And so we're going to hear more about that, Lord willing.
But I just want to encourage us that we are stepping out in faith in faith, in the go of faith.
We filled up this baptismal pool a couple of weeks ago as part of that go of faith.
It was a risk.
And we didn't know anyone that was getting baptized, but in fact, in the next two weeks, we had 10 people baptized.
Excuse me.
And now there's the 11th, and there may be more sitting here today because we've got clothes out there, and that's part of the go of faith, that we've bought clothes, that every time we have a baptismal service, it's ready there if the Spirit prompts you and you're a saved person.
Jesus is your Lord and Savior.
We'll be ready to baptize you.
It's part of the go of faith.
And there's lots of other points.
New leaders are stepping up to lead life hubs, starting new ministries, all sorts of things.
But I think our greatest prayer as a church is not so much in GO24 what we do together, but what we do as a scattered church, all out there in our lives, that we would come together and be encouraged and inspiring of one another.
And then we trust the Spirit to take us out into the world that we live in and to be the scattered church on behalf of Jesus for his gospel, and going by faith into God's next test, because we will be tested.
Amen?
You will.
You can put it in the diary.
A test is coming, and the test involves a step, a step like Indiana Jones had his great iconic step in one of those early movies that Harrison Ford did.
The go of faith involves a step of faith.
Verse 7, Philip answered him, It would take more than half a year's wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite, Lord.
Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up, Here is a boy with five small barley loaves.
Barley loaves were the cheap loaves, so this is a poor boy.
Five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?
The step of faith, in the goal of faith, is a step, I think, which involves mathematics.
Andrew is doing the maths, Philip is doing the maths, and they're saying, as Jesus said, do the sums before you build a tower, and they're like, we can't do this, Lord.
There's just too many of them.
There's five thousand men here.
We've got barely anything.
How have you gone in your life when you feel like God has given you a step of faith to do?
I think it's really important to do the maths.
As I've said before, we finished up at our last church in 2014, and we felt like, Leanne and I, felt like God was calling us to start something new, different.
We've been there for 19 years as pastors, and so we started something.
It was a church for the scattered church.
It was a church online four years before COVID, and we started this not-for-profit called Jesus Collective, and we set ourselves a target of raising support for this different creative venture that would reach people far and wide through online church services.
Again, before COVID made it, that everyone did it.
And we set this target of funds that we would raise to support my work.
And we made some of it, but we didn't make all of it.
And we got to the line in the sand, which was about the end of February in 2015, and I thought to myself, will I keep pushing?
Look for another door.
Or is God shutting that door?
And so we did the maths, and we went, we're going to do all our savings if we keep going down this path.
And so we said, no, that's a line in the sand.
We're not changing it.
We asked the Lord, that's the line.
We said no, we walked away.
And because we walked away, we said no to that.
There was a goal of faith that involved saying yes to a conversation with Hornsby Baptist, and we ended up coming up here, and it's been a wonderful blessing.
And I just share that because I think sometimes the goal of faith involves recognising it's not what I thought it was going to be.
As much as it's filled with faith, and like this is my goal, this is it, we're in it.
Sometimes the Lord says, thanks for all your heart and your passion and your zeal, but no, go down that one.
And it's okay.
Amen?
The step of faith.
The point being, it is a good thing to do a sober calculation, to actually work out, as the disciples did.
How are we going to do this?
In 1983, Opera Australia took a gamble in their production of La Boheme, and they brought out the most famous opera singer on earth at the time.
It was an Italian by the name of Luciano Pavarotti, and my dad was so thrilled that he got to sing alongside Pavarotti at the opera house.
He was singing the bass, and Pavarotti was singing the tenor.
And as was the custom of our family, we often got to go and see the operas.
And so when I was 13, I got to go in and see La Boheme, and we would go down the bottom underneath where we used to drive through at the opera house, go in through the part where the security was all there, and you have your name at the desk, and you go through, and the green room was up the stairs, and at the bottom of the green room, we were going in after the show to say hi to dad, and often he would introduce us to some of the stars.
It was fun to do.
And I got to the bottom, and I got this, it wasn't that exact bottle of just fruit, but I got a little bottle of orange juice at the vending machine.
I was about to walk up the stairs to the green room, and this huge man came down, and with a big beard, and he looked like a big Italian man.
He looked like Pavarotti.
It was Pavarotti.
And he didn't know who I was, but he came up to me, the first thing he said to me was, Ah, would you give me that orange juice, young man?
So I gave it to him, and he took the top off, and he sculled the whole bottle.
And no joke, he said to me, this is not to put him down, he's gone home now, he said, that will teach you to trust a big fat Italian man.
And I've said that story a few times here, I know.
But I put that up there because it's a very important picture.
We have to hope that Andrew didn't go and do what Pavarotti did to me, to the small boy.
I want to hope that one of my favourite characters in all the Bible, honestly, I love the small boy of John 6.
What a cracking example of faith.
What a step of faith.
So I'm just going to say Andrew and Peter and the boys did not come and steal his lunch.
I want to believe that he actually went with his lunch and went, instead of Oliver, give me more, he said, do you want this?
Small loaves, small fish, we can expect small boy.
And he offered what he had.
And Jesus took it and did something monumental with it.
This go of faith, it involves a movement for us all this year.
There is a leaving, there is an entering, there is a risk, it is exciting.
Sam's taking a step of faith today.
What is the step of faith for you this 2024?
Is it a conversation, a physical move, a financial move, a work move, a relational move?
If you're struggling with the step of the go of faith, maybe just move to the next stage, which is the thanks.
Jesus said in verse 10, have the people sit down, there was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down, about 5,000 men were there.
Jesus then took the loaves and gave thanks.
He gave thanks in advance.
Isn't this a beautiful picture of the step of faith?
Thanks with faith and hope, thanks with expectancy.
It takes me, as I read the text, immediately to Joshua 3, verse 14.
The people, they broke camp, they come to the Jordan.
The Jordan is at a time of year where it's full, it's flooding.
The priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant went ahead of them.
They're heading for the promised land.
They've got to cross the Jordan.
Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during the harvest.
Yet as soon as the priests who carried the Ark reached the Jordan, and their feet touched the water's edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing.
It piled up in a heap a great distance away.
It doesn't stop flowing until their feet touched the water.
Isn't that a beautiful picture?
The thanks.
The expectation.
Thanks in advance.
Not in a cheeky way like you might write in an email.
Thanks for your prompt response.
We don't do that to the Lord.
Humbly we say thank you Lord for your trustworthiness, your faithfulness, your goodness, all the things I'm thanking you Lord for that I know are who you are.
I know Lord God that you have said and you have demonstrated in my life, you will not give me a snake if I ask for a fish.
You will not give me a stone if I ask for bread because you're good.
And I'm going to thank you for your blessings.
And sometimes we talk about pre-framing and reframing.
We can reframe as we look back and we look for the fingerprints of the Lord in our life and we sort of go, oh, I didn't know you were doing that Lord.
Back in 2014, what was God up to?
Well, he was, I can reframe our story before we came to Hornsby Baptist and to say God was in that.
But you know, instead of reframing, you can pre-frame.
You can just decide God never stops being good.
Everywhere we go in life, everywhere we have the opportunity to obey, we can pre-frame by seeing God's goodness in advance.
Amen?
It's powerful stuff to do.
And we need eyes of faith for this.
It's often not just these eyes.
Paul writes in Ephesians, I pray that the eyes of your heart might be enlightened, that you might know the truth.
We need eyes, the eyes of our heart, to pre-frame, to see our good God knows us, knows our story, knows our frustrations, our challenges, our doubts, and yet He's testing us with a step, and He wants us to be thankful beforehand.
And then He blesses.
He distributed to those who were seeded as much as they wanted.
He did the same with the flesh, with the fish.
The blessing, it came.
Praise God, it arrived.
God came through with what was required on that day with the 5,000 plus people.
They ate and had their fill.
We've noticed in Mark's Gospel, if you've been part of church the last month, there is often in the Bible a command with a promise.
Step out in faith, and I'm going to bless you.
It was the classic Abrahamic command that had a promise.
Go, step out.
I want to bless you that you might be a blessing to all nations.
So here the food began to multiply.
There was a challenge, a command, a request the little boy got, and he responded, and then the food started to multiply.
I mean, how it happened is a wonderful thought to think about.
It's such a kingdom picture, isn't it?
People stepping out, making themselves available to God, and then God blessing and multiplying exponentially.
I hope we can be really aware to not miss the significance of this part of the story, because there's all these people, and God won't share His glory with another.
So God could easily just say, like Moses tapping the rock, or just say to the disciples, do something simple and then I'll rain manna down, because I want to take all the glory.
But the significance of this story is that God would care about a little boy who we don't know his name, but that little boy gets to partner so that in the year 2024 we talk about it.
Isn't it amazing that that's the God we serve?
He's interested in the little people having a part in His story.
He really is.
So do we have to say anything else at this point?
Probably not.
If you could just take that, that's wonderful.
This is how God works.
Go and offer what you have to Him.
Say, here, Lord, you've given me these resources.
Multiply.
Not for me, not that I could stash them in my garage, basketfuls of blessing, but that you would give them away.
And this is the principle of the mustard seed, isn't it?
Little things grow into big things.
Insignificant things become significant things in the Lord.
Romans 4 says that God calls that which is not something that is.
It's what He does.
So are you waiting for a blessing in your life as you're beginning another year?
Are you being obedient?
Some of us are waiting.
Some of us, if you think about these five stages, some of us are already giving thanks.
We've seen the blessing.
Others are right back at the start.
We're beginning to assess the level of testing we're about to go through.
Well, it's the journey of an apprentice to the master to be tested, to take steps of faith, to give thanks before the blessing and then to receive the blessing.
And in case, excuse me, in case this is sounding like a clinical procedure manual about how to get the blessing, there's a test coming, great, I'll just say thanks, receive it, move on.
What is the component that makes this messy?
I would say it's time.
It's time.
It all happens in God's timing.
And there's this other component called suffering, and God doesn't have the same view on it that I do.
So he has this idea about time and suffering, and there's this piece called perseverance in hard stuff over time that produces proven character, which produces a hope that won't disappoint in a context of love, Romans 5.
So it is messy, I've just put that caveat in there, but I would put it to you that you'll find these five stages in your life.
It is the way God works, and it ends, I believe it always ends with an overflow.
We don't always get to see it in our lives.
Some of the saints of Hebrews 11, they didn't get to see it, but it doesn't mean God didn't do it.
When, verse 12, the overflow, when they all had enough to eat, He said to His disciples, gather the pieces that are left over, let nothing be wasted.
So they gathered them and filled 12 baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
The blessing came, and then there was more overflow.
After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, surely this is the prophet who is to come into the world, Jesus knowing that they intended to come and make Him King by force withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
So the ones who were serving in ministry, who looked like they might miss out, they didn't miss out.
They got a full basket each, 12 disciples, 12 baskets.
This is our God.
He blesses with overflow.
And I was so glad that Meredith was able to read out Psalm 27 in its entirety.
I just want to focus on the last part of it.
And I believe some of us need to hear this because the time component is wearing us down.
The patience and the suffering component is wearing us down.
But this is Psalm 27, a beautiful Psalm, where the psalmist just speaks of his confidence that God is always at work.
He says in verse 13, I remain confident of this.
I will see the goodness of the Lord.
I will see it in the land of the living.
I'm pre-framing my heart and my mind.
No matter what's happening to me, I'm believing.
I know it to be true, that I can wait for the Lord, and I can be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord, because He is good.
Amen?
Psalm 27, 13 and 14.
We serve a missionary God.
The Father sent the Son.
The Son sends the Spirit.
The Spirit sends the Church.
The Church sends individuals.
GO24 means let's go.
Let's be ready to go.
And that text is often as you are going.
It's not to do something fresh and new all the time, but as you are going.
And some of the GO will be go to the desert place, go to the quiet place, say no to the busyness, go to the place where you can be with God.
It's not all just about busyness.
It's Mary and Martha that we think about with the GO.
But how we live our days is how we live our lives.
It struck me that this passage moves towards a different teaching in a way, John 6, 29, where Jesus says, directly after feeding the 5,000, he says, the work of God is this, that you would believe in the one he has sent.
This is the work of God.
This is my work.
This is what fills my view of each day, each 24-hour period.
I want to do the work of God.
And that is to believe in these things.
I think the next slide here.
That's how we get through the test.
We keep believing.
There's a good God who sent his son to die for me on the cross, and he rose again to save the world.
And by faith, we can be forgiven of our sins.
And that causes us to have to step into that test.
But you can't do it without belief.
That's the work of God.
And it's also the work of God to give thanks when you don't really feel like giving thanks.
But if we say, I give thanks because I know who you are, and this is a step of faith, to give thanks before the blessing and before the overflow.
But surely once the blessing comes, once the overflow comes, we can believe that our God is good.
Amen.
Lord Jesus, we thank you for this wonderful story.
I thank you for that little boy who's a long time gone home to glory, but he encourages us.
And Lord, may we have that heart to offer up as a poor, humble human being the barley loaves and the fish that we have, the resources you've offered us.
Lord, would you bless your church, teach us what you need to teach us, help us achieve the steps that we've set before us in your name to do.
Lord, would you breathe on this year.
Lord, would you motivate us to pray with zeal and a belief that prayer only has power because you are powerful.
And we are your people, the children of light, and you've called us to be part of the kingdom of God forcefully advancing into the darkness.
Lord, we want to be children of light who pray the way you want us to pray.
So Lord, in all these things, we ask for your guidance in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
