3 Things about the Holy Spirit

1. The Holy Spirit is a Person.

How can we know this to be true?

The Holy Spirit: -Can be grieved: “And grieve not the holy Spirit of God” Eph 4:30 -Has a mind: “the mind of the Spirit” Rom 8:27 -Has knowledge: “knows the thoughts of God” 1 Cor 2:11 -Processes affection: “the love of the Spirit” Rom 15:30 -Has a will: “distributing to each one individually as He wills” 1 Cor 12:11

2. The Holy Spirit as the Promise.

The background to the story is that Jesus has just risen from the dead and is spending His last few days with the disciples before going back to heaven. He had some very important things to tell them, they would not see Him on earth again. They had been His closest friends for the last 3 and a half years. And he was leaving them with the responsibility of carrying on his work (which is found in Luke 4:18-19. Evangelising/spreading the good news, encouraging others, healing and deliverance). Jesus knew that they wouldn’t be able to complete this work of spreading the good news in their own strength and ability, and so one of His last conversations with them was to urge them to wait for a supernatural gift that would help them. This gift they were waiting for; found in Luke 24:49 “I am going to send you what my Father has promised. In Acts 1:4 And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me."
This gift that the scriptures are talking about is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and his power

3. The Holy Spirit and his Power.

Acts 1:8 - But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you The gift of power is not receiving the Holy Spirit in salvation. When people are born again, their conversion is dependent on and effected by the Holy Spirit in response to their repentance and commitment to Christ. The Holy Spirit, in salvation, draws people, convicting them of sin, then pointing them to Jesus and making His sacrificial death real. The Holy Spirit then enters people lives and baptises them into the Body of Christ, the church. Salvation is to be confused with the gift of power to carry out the task of evangelism. Even the disciples were saved before the day of Pentecost.

SHOUT IT OUT

I was in Brisbane this week for a youth pastors intensive. I have never driven to Brisbane or in Brisbane, but I have been there before. Some of the roads are three lanes and that is even in the suburbs, it’s crazy (I live in Bundaberg and the most lanes we have are double). I didn’t have a map of Brisbane so I went onto google maps to get directions to my friend’s house and the place where the intensive is. I printed these maps out. Even though I had these maps, of parts of Brisbane I still got lost. Sometimes I couldn’t find where I wanted to go because it wasn’t on the map I printed.

On Tuesday morning when I was on my way to the intensive I nearly took a wrong exit. In Brisbane they have the inner city bypass, again three lanes. I knew I had to be in the far left lane so I wouldn’t take the wrong exit. But all of a sudden I started veering left. I looked up and I had accidentally taken the sunshine coast exit, I had to turn back into the right lane otherwise I would have gotten totally lost and probably missed most of the first few sessions at the intensive.

There’s a scripture from Matthew 7:13-14 (MSG) it says:
13-14"Don't look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don't fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.

There are two points out of this verse that relates to my experience. The first is from verse 13, ‘Don’t look for shortcuts to God.’ Some people like bits and pieces of the Bible... the verses that suit them but they don’t get the full picture of God’s love and what he has done. It’s like when I didn’t have the full map of Brisbane, just bits and pieces and I still got lost.

The second point is from verse 14, ‘The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.’ I had the map of how to get to the intensive but I nearly went in the wrong direction because I was listening to music. I have to pay attention. It’s the same with our Christian walk; we can get distracted from all sorts of things, not necessarily bad things but we can veer in the wrong direction until it’s too late.

-Michelle

The Power of One

Love... there are many types of love but there is a love that is so great!! Jesus talks about this love in John 15 :12-13 (NLT)

12 This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. 13 There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

WOW!!! Jesus showed us this type of love when he died on the cross for us, and we are to love people in the same way. What a great challenge. It was ANZAC day a few weeks ago, on that day we celebrate our freedom because of the sacrifice men women paid for us. Some of us may have gone to one of the services or marches and experienced an overwhelming ceremony honouring the lives of those who served and who still serve. There have been many books written about the ANZAC’s and some of us may have even had assignments on them. This is our heritage.

April 25th, 1915, was the day the Anzac’s landed at Gallipoli. Bill Gammage in 1974 said,

“The best Australians were loyal to their mates in every circumstance. One laid down his life by giving his gas mask to a friend; another shot through the arm, stayed with his wounded mate for seven days in ‘No Man’s Land’ at From elles, scavenging food and water from the surrounding dead and at night dragging him slowly to safety until at last he rescued him; a third gave up leave in England to search a Flanders Battle field for the body of a mate killed there; a fourth walked 28 miles to tend his mates grave.”(Cullen. E (2002) pg 53)


When we hear about the ANZAC’s we don’t hear much about God or whether or not some were Christians. According to historian Michael McKernan, two motives stand out as to why Australians volunteered as chaplains.

“First, many wanted to demonstrate they were willing to participate in the nation’s solemn moment of sacrifice. In this, they closely identified with the nation’s commitment to the war effort. Second, most wanted to provide the ministrations [or support] of Christianity to all of those who served in the A.I.F. and to make certain that no soldier was lost to the Christian faith. Evangelicals overwhelmingly concurred. Chaplains from the evangelical churches knew well the theme of ‘sacrifice’ and identified with the call to be willing to ‘lay down one’s life one’s friends.’

These men and women have shown us that we have the power to impact people's lives... Jesus also showed us. This power to impact other is love!!!

1 John 3:16 (NIV) 16This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.

And we ought to do the same. TRUE LOVE!!!

-Michelle

Youth - Place Your life before God

Well to start with, so much has been happeing at youth, we are in our fourth month and it's awesome!! April and May is our second term (you could say) out of five. This lot of 8 weeks has had the focus of offering. The last focus was Visionary... V.O... I spoke at the start of April on Offering and titled the message, Place yor life before God. Here is part of what was spoken about...

Romans 12 (msg) 1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

The first point is, PLACE IT.

The best part about life is that God is helping us. Philippians 4:13 says that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. God also says that he will never leave us or abandon us. We know we are not doing this thing called life on our own so let’s look at this verse more closely.
An offering; some versions say a living sacrifice. So what does this mean? When you look up the route meaning of offering: it means to offer up/ present unto/bring/lay forward.

It is a form of worship – and expression of devotion and respect. Throughout the Old Testament they had different offerings. The most common one would be the Burnt Offering. This offering would be taken up daily. To make payment for sins, a worshiper voluntarily brought an unblemished animal to the priest and laid his hand on the animal’s head to express identification. The priest then killed it and burned it up completely, symbolising the person’s total devotion to God. God took pleasure in these offerings, or sacrifices of worship because they foretold of Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross.

The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary says that offer-ing: thing offered as sacrifice or in sign of devotion.

Now being apart of the new promise that God made through Jesus we don’t have to burn a lamb every time we want to show God that we love him and worship him. We can take our everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. God is pleased with different sacrifices of worship: thanksgiving praise, humility, repentance, offerings of money, prayer, serving others, sharing with those in need.

We can make a decision to give these areas of our life completely to God – it doesn’t mean we can’t do them, because between you and me I love shopping. But when we do them God can speak to others through us. Personally living this Christian life at 90% is just not worth it. When we fully realise that our life is better in the hands that created and planned it than our own we will live much more fulfilled lives.

The Second Point is EMBRACE IT.

Romans 12:2 Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out.

The NIV says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Transformed is like the word metamorphosis like the lifecycle of a butterfly. Renew in the Greek means ‘renovation or to renovate.

- Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking... so what does this mean. It’s like those books that asks you to find the pink surfboard with the yellow flower on the beach. You think it would be easy but when you look at the page there are like 50 surfboards and half are pink and have yellow stars or other shapes and it takes forever to find it or you just give up.

- But then you have the ‘where’s wally’ show. Again you have to find him but he has red and white strips and he is amongst cave people. He is still sometimes hard to find you most of the time you can pick him straight away. We went to the tennis...ect

Personally though I want to one who lives my life and people don’t have to search my life to find out that I’m a Christian, I want them to just know. I want to get to the point where I don’t have to even think about the positive things I do, that people just ask, ‘hey there is something about the way you live your life... it’s different but better.’ We live in a world where people don’t know what Christianity is anymore. I intend to change that.

This can only happen when we fix our attention on God and are changed from the inside out. So how do we do this?? One step is just do what we were talking about before. Place our life at Jesus’ feet and embracing what God has done for us. This change that is taking place is like a renovation. We knock down walls in our life, re-paint ect.

It is never easy doing this and it doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a work in progress as we Place our lives before God and Embrace what he has done for us.

- Michelle

Making Time is important

So many things happen in our lives each day and it is amazing how we get caught up in the small and insignificant things. As some of you know I am studying primary school teaching and I have learnt that making time and prioritising is important especially with assignments and the like. I am also the youth leader at my church, Heritage Christian Centre. Doing both youth and uni can be time consuming but when you look back over your week, it is like wow.

I just want to encourage you that life can get busy and things can come into your life that you may not like or want but when you make time for God everything seems to fall into place.

-Michelle

Are you a Visionary??

Last night at youth we had to people come to the Lord, one for the first time and also a recommitment. Also I spoke about being a Visionary.

Proverbs 29:18 says - Where there is no vision [no redemptive revelation of God], the people perish... Without vision we will never get anywhere in life. It is like we are on a rocking horse, using all our effort to rock that horse. After exhausting our enery we are no closer to who or what we want to become.

So where do you want to get in life? Some people have never had a vision for the future. Some have a vision but are stuck; you don’t know what to do next. Thirdly some people have had a vision but were discouraged in some way and have abandoned that vision.

The story of Joseph in Genesis is a great example for us. He had no vision, then he received one. When he told his brothers they shut him down... he was stuck. However... he never gave up on that vision, the vision God gave him. He was created for a purpose and because he kept going he fulfilled that vision and dream.

So vision; many people have heard of a vision statement, mainly to do with businesses. For them a vision is a guiding image of what success looks like. It answers the question what do you wish to become. For us as Boom Youth our vision is that we would be a Voice and not an echo. This is a corporate vision, it is not meant to give you vision but to stir up your personal vision. So what is your vision?

Do you have a vision for your life? The vision that God has predestined you for?? Are you a visionary??

I want to be... I choose to be a visionary.

Action steps:
1. Start to think, ponder, dream about who and what you want to become.
2. Ask God to show you things and write them down.
3. Think of steps you can take to achieve your vision.

- Michelle Buckle

BOOM YOUTH

Well it finally came!!! My first youth night for the year... Ok for those who don't know, I am the new youth leader @ Heritage Christian Centre. I have been waiting for this night to come... I was soo excited and the night went really well!!! We started off with a song and then got into some games with food... gota love cheeze balls. Then we had a shopping challenge and one of our reguar boys won. Our youth music team finished their song set (They had a new song called 'Saved' by CCC in America).

I shared with the youth about why we are called Boom Youth. Our Church's mission statement is, ‘To provide an active example and witness to the community of the reality of Christ within our lives and within our church.’ Boom Youth is called to be a VOICE and not and Echo.

Boom Youth exists to empower young people, that is you, who are purpose built by God, who stand up, step out and shake the status-quo of the previous generation. If we work together we can empower each other to stand up, step out and shake the status-quo.

I spoke from In 1 Timothy 4 and how we as a youth group have a voice and can share about God. And how they should not worry about what other people say, especially if it is to do with the fact that they are young, as in chapter 12 Paul writes; Don’t let anyone think less of you because you are young. Be an example to all believers in what you say, in the way you live, in your love, your faith, and your purity.

I wasn't sure how many people to expext... but we had around 70 people and we had 1 recommitment. God is truely amazing!!

-Michelle