Our second group of Year 7 Ag and Food Tech students have been hard at work creating planters to grow ingredients for their cooking in Term 3 and 4 - ultimate paddock to plate. ie self-watering planters - some very different and creative planters produced this term.
Warm greetings, RCC Community. My name is Chris Drew, and I joined our wonderful RCC family as the new Year 6 teacher in January. Woohoo! My wife, Mrs Drew in Pre-Kindy, and my 4 children who also joined RCC are so happy to be here. I am honoured share the devotion I shared with the staff recently here in Tidings this week.
For some context, this term the staff have been reading C.S. Lewis’ timeless collection of talks ‘Mere Christianity’. We have then been sharing our hearts, and how the Father touches our hearts whilst digesting the many truths and challenges written by Lewis. Below is how I was challenged, and I am grateful for God’s grace as I continue to grow in relationship with Him.
Have a good weekend and week ahead!
As I have been reading ‘Mere Christianity’ I have found the collection of thoughts to be like different meals: Lewis’ writing style can sometimes be like a Sunday Roast where you can have a solid idea that is easy to follow for a number of pages - It is familiar, it is enjoyable. But some of the pages jump around from idea to idea, and I imagine it more like a Korean meal where there are many small plates in front of you, you take something, taste it, and you’re not quite sure what it is or whether you like it. Then again others are sweet (easy and pleasant on the soul) and have a familiar texture.
The great theological truths discussed so far during devotions, such as of the Moral Law of the universe, and the existence of suffering and evil as part and parcel of the loving gift of free will are like Sunday Roasts. Over the years they have sustained and fed my questions and growth as a Christian. But then as I got to the next section of Book 2 Chapter 3, it was like I had discovered a new recipe where flavours and ingredients I had always known came together to create a new meal. It opened my senses and woke me up to a truth I had previously neglected. A comparison would be a bit like the animated film ‘Ratatouille’ when the fireworks go off after he combines some amazing French ingredients, normally apart from one another.
I feel like I always had a sense of this though and want to share a video I showed my students in the past that always grabbed me no matter how many times I watched it. (Search Opening Scene of Son of God)
It is essentially the first few lines of the Gospel of John, which explains how Jesus Christ has always been, since the Creation of the Universe.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
I would like to finish with reading this ‘new meal’ straight from Lewis, but want to start by trying to explain why I think I, and maybe others, sometimes miss this truth. We make meaning with what is presented to us in the world. Jesus is portrayed in so many ways, and even in church representations. Watching films like ‘Son of God’ for instance. Seeing figures of Him on the cross. Seeing him in the manger. Even imagining him walking along with the disciples while reading the Gospels, simply being human. I, without realising it, place the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit in boxes, and unintentionally “rank” them in importance. After reading this however, I have fresh revelation of who Jesus Christ is to me, which translates into a renewed urgency of how I must portray Him to those around me, if for nothing else, for His glory.
Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history. Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is "humble and meek" and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings. I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.
