Own Tomorrow: not AMP

I stum­bled across quite a visu­ally beau­ti­ful com­mer­cial today. Its script follows:

In the future, one thing is certain.

Someone’s going to drive it.

Someone’s going to col­lect it.

Someone’s going to lie on it. Sit on it. Sleep on it.

Drink too much Ger­man beer on it.

Some­one will sit in front row seats, here, here and here.

Some­one will land it. Some­one will save it. Some­one will find it. Then get hap­pily lost in it.

Some­one will sleep five stars, some­one will sleep under the stars.

Some­one will ski down it, fly over it, and scream across it.

Beau­ti­ful things will still be made in the future. Some­one is going to buy them.

Someone’s going to walk it. Some­one is going to ride it.

And at the end of the day, someone’s going to watch it.

And there’s no rea­son why that some­one can’t be you.

Since 1849, AMP has helped more Aus­tralians own their tomorrows.

Own tomor­row. AMP.

Emo­tive as it was, it is also, of course, absolute hog­wash — GFC or no!

Some­one once told this story:

A rich man once thought to him­self, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’

He decided, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

But God said to the man, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have pre­pared, whose will they be?’

You don’t own your tomor­row. It’s not even yours today. The Bible says there is one good kind of stor­ing up to be done — I can “store up God’s word in my heart, that I might not sin against Him.” (Ps 119:11) — yet I still fail and need to fall upon His mercy.

The man who told that story was Jesus. (Luke 12:16 – 20) He promises peace and a greater secu­rity than all the riches of the world.

Own eter­nal life. Jesus.

# by Josh Street on February 24th, 2010 Tags: , , , , ,
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Division not Peace: ESM Weekend Away 2010

This week­end Evening Church from St Matthias went away to the North­ern Beaches together on a week­end enti­tled “Divi­sion Not Peace”, exam­in­ing Jesus’ teach­ings from Luke’s account of his life.

The teach­ings of Jesus were clearly divi­sive in the Gospels and con­tinue to be so today. Light illu­mi­nates dark­ness. Christ reveals sin.

He also pays for it. And is worth fol­low­ing. The unsweet­ened real­ity of the end of Luke 9 is at once immensely painful and wholly true.

Our speaker, David Ould, faith­fully preached Jesus’ words with­out coat­ing them in false com­fort or apol­o­gis­ing for their truth and good­ness. The hard truth of the gospel is such that, though we find great joy in the King who pays sin’s great price, we wept and prayed for those who do not yet acknowl­edge Him.

We fail as much as any fallen, sin­ful peo­ple do. Pray for us that we would love like Jesus, which rightly includes declar­ing the real­ity of divi­sion as sin is exposed by the gospel.

Sundae lies

From Tori

Tonight while dri­ving me home, Josh and I stopped at Mac­cas and bought a choco­late sun­dae. He asked me whether there are McFlur­ries in China and I said yes. He was glad, and joked that this isn’t some­thing he’d be will­ing to give up for Jesus. We laughed, because this isn’t true. We both would give up much more than McDonald’s ice­creams for Jesus. I love this boy.

# by Josh Street on October 12th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , ,
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The view from TG office yesterday

Sunrise over Coogee @ TG HQ

Fri­day was a pretty insane day, but I snapped this photo (cam­er­a­phone, dunno what hap­pened top right!) arriv­ing at our office in the morn­ing before get­ting into it. We’ve got a pretty incred­i­ble view over Coogee, which is fan­tas­tic… except for when the sea and sky are such amaz­ing colours and you know there’s not a chance of actu­ally get­ting out­side to it!

There were some sheets of light rain and these incred­i­ble clouds that cleared off to per­fect skies and an ocean that even I, some­one who doesn’t par­tic­u­larly rate swim­ming and has never learnt to surf despite liv­ing within 5km of the coast his whole life, wished I was free to head over to.

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
to declare your stead­fast love in the morn­ing,
and your faith­ful­ness by night,
to the music of the lute and the harp,
to the melody of the lyre.
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

Psalm 92

We were made to work even before sin entered the world, but I reckon work/time-outside-on-a-beautiful-day bal­ance would’ve been bet­ter then! For those trust Jesus, a future is com­ing where every day all are freed to give thanks to Him for­ever…  even those stuck in beige office towers!

# by Josh Street on August 1st, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Darkness and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I enjoyed the lat­est Harry Pot­ter film last night — and it is the first in the series I am gen­uinely able to say that about. The rest have been frus­trat­ing for a vari­ety of rea­sons. Some are tech­ni­cally poor, oth­ers are merely vic­tims of ter­ri­ble direc­tion and script work.

The lat­est, how­ever, has been remarked upon by var­i­ous review­ers as tak­ing a sig­nif­i­cantly darker turn — reflected both in (gen­er­ally) well-done dig­i­tal colour grad­ing as well as the­mat­i­cally. The idea of “dark­ness” in this film is intrigu­ing, par­tic­u­larly in light of the acknowl­edge­ment of Dum­b­le­dore as one of the great­est wiz­ards of all time and the con­tin­u­ing strug­gle and dichotomy between forces of good and evil in the film.

The demise of Dum­b­le­dore (oh, yeah, spoiler alert — but you’ve already read the books, right?), that great force for good, rep­re­sents a notable set­back for this cause. I men­tion him par­tic­u­larly because he is, until this moment in the saga, the char­ac­ter with the most com­plete view of the sit­u­a­tion. He is wis­est and most pow­er­ful. How­ever, as he enters the cave con­tain­ing a hor­crux with Harry, I was frus­trated with their col­lec­tive inabil­ity to illu­mi­nate the room.

Cry lumos as loudly as they may, even Dumbledore’s cast­ing of bea­cons of light across the cave fails to sig­nif­i­cantly brighten the envi­ron­ment. I was reminded of the tri­umph over dark­ness that God has given us in Jesus, so absolute that fic­tion does not even approach its con­quest. The Bible speaks of a future, renewed cre­ation where God’s holy city has no need of a moon, or a sun, for it is so illu­mi­nated by the glory of His pres­ence. (Rev­e­la­tion 21:23 – 24)

This is not fic­tion, and there is no bat­tle that has not already been won by Jesus Christ the liv­ing king of all.

God has deliv­ered us from the domain of dark­ness and trans­ferred us to the king­dom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemp­tion, the for­give­ness of sins.
 – Colos­sians 1:13 – 14

…that you may pro­claim the excel­len­cies of Him who called you out of dark­ness into His mar­velous light.
 – 1 Peter 2:9

# by Josh Street on July 18th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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SUEU Annual Conference ’09

600 people singing at Annual Conference 2009

This week I had the priv­i­lege of join­ing six hun­dred oth­ers from a Chris­t­ian stu­dent group at Syd­ney Uni­ver­sity for part of a week-long con­fer­ence. I was meant to be there the whole week, and was pretty dis­ap­pointed to find myself stuck in bed for a cou­ple of days after “flu-like symp­toms” descended on me Sun­day evening! Still, made it up on Wednes­day in time for the sec­ond half of the week. Rowan Kemp gave some great talks, explain­ing from the Bible who God is & why the Trin­ity is essen­tial for under­stand­ing Him, how Chris­tians are given a “deposit” or guar­an­tee from God now as a sure sign of what is to come, and what “Spir­i­tual gifts” are and their use­ful­ness not just to indi­vid­u­als, but for the whole of God’s church. And plenty of other stuff, I’m sure!

Chinese-English bibles (中文-English Bibles)

I’d orig­i­nally been going to help out lead­ing a Focus (Inter­na­tional Stu­dent) small group but for obvi­ous rea­sons (i.e. the whole not arriv­ing til Wednes­day thing) this didn’t work out. Yin and Michael led the review group (based around the talk con­tent) until on Thurs­day Yin got sick and, as many of the stu­dents had gone home (they were only attend­ing part time), we com­bined the two Focus review groups into one. Phil and Anna served this group by explor­ing some of Christianity’s promises and claims: pray that God will use the mate­r­ial this group went over to con­tinue to stir thoughts and point peo­ple to Christ as King and Saviour.

On Thurs­day night, Rowan shared a vision for the next 50 – 70 years of the lives of Chris­t­ian peo­ple in that room, where by sus­tained prayer for many dif­fer­ent min­istries God might take the lives of many there for His pur­poses and glory through­out the world. It’s an excit­ing dream and one I want to prayer­fully pur­sue for the rest of my life, thank­ing God for those who are pas­sion­ate about so many dif­fer­ent ways He gives us to serve and ask­ing that we could do so more com­pletely because of the Spirit now in us, mak­ing us more like Jesus.

Ends of the earth: Jam & China this morning

sus group september dvd

About to share some fun stuff from Chi­nese friends I col­lated with Tori last year (for a DVD resource for Aussie friends think­ing about car­ing for China through prayer and other things) with the Jam kids this morn­ing. Pray­ing that Jesus would keep work­ing to call peo­ple to Him­self in China!

# by Josh Street on June 28th, 2009 Tags: , , , , ,
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