Uncategorized

How are you preparing for next weekend?

Dear BPCWA worshipper, Traditionally known as Christian holidays, this Friday will be Good Friday and next Sunday is Easter. Here in Australia, we are particularly blessed with a long stretch of holidays from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. This being the case, what is your perspective of these holidays?

Preparing to witness. Let us be holding forth the Word of Life (Phil 2:16) as lights! We have been displaying the invitation flyers for our Good Friday and Easter services at the church foyer before our service for several weeks. Carefully designed to reflect the Christian message, printed in colour, and complete with the maps behind, these flyers are intended to be used to invite friends and strangers alike to come for these services. If you are wondering who to invite, here are some groups of people you can consider: 1) Unbelievers, professing believers, and backsliders who are not attending church. Encourage your children to do so in school too! As a Christian holiday, unbelievers may be curious about how and why we celebrate Good Friday and Easter. Professing believers and backsliders too may be pricked by their conscience to come for these services as part of their perfunctory duty to the religion they claim to subscribe to. These occasions are good gospel opportunities, as the preaching of Christ’s death and resurrection are fundamental to the gospel of salvation. 2) Other Christians who are not attending sound churches. As we have preached over the past few Sundays, we are told to be lights that hold forth the Word of life. This is not just to unbelievers, but also to believers as well. Some churches may be more focused on games, music, and experiences than the truth. Others may be in ecumenical churches that embrace compromise and erroneous doctrines. With the 3 services that we have over this weekend, invite your friends to one, or even better, all of these. For example, while Melville Amphitheatre is available, it puts us in a position to have an Easter Sunrise Service in a very unique environment. Encourage your Christian friends to join us for this service, and even to stay for our Easter service as well. 3) Those who used to attend BPCWA for a period, regularly or on occasion.  Consider inviting these to visit us again, if they were not hostile to our church, our doctrines, and our practices. These could just have settled elsewhere for the sake of convenience, familiarity, or just pure lethargy and are no longer attending church regularly, or they may not be growing where they are currently and may be hoping to be able to learn more of God’s Word. Even if it is the second or third time around, you never know if the Word of God may speak to their hearts this time, if it is His time and will for them to return to the Risen Lord. 

Preparing to worship. Going away for a holiday to capitalize on a long weekend holiday? This is a weekend that many in the world are preparing to party. Easter eggs are sold, hot cross buns, and the supermarkets are preparing for people to host “Easter feasts”. On the other hand, many are taking advantage of the long Good Friday to Easter Monday weekend to go on a vacation alone or with their families. Some believers may even be planning and considering doing so, particularly since school holidays coincide with this period. With the ease of livestreaming and online services, this may certainly seem like an attractive option for many, even among us. Certainly, vacations are not sinful and neither are hosting gatherings. But if your idea of how to spend this long weekend has little to do with Christ and remembering His suffering on the cross on our behalf, then I plead with you to reconsider how you spend this and future Good Friday and Easter weekends. I know that it is very tempting to use a weekend where you do not need to take as much leave as you normally would have to for a break. I appeal to you primarily from the perspective of love for Christ. God has put us in a country that gives us this long weekend to commemorate and remember the death and resurrection of our Saviour. Especially as we see the war raging in Ukraine, I’m sure the believers there would have yearned to be able to worship God amidst the peace and serenity of the churches as they used to before the war. In these uncertain times, we cannot assume that there will always be another Good Friday and another Easter that we can spend in church. But more importantly, it is because this is a yearly season when we set our hearts on remembering our Lord’s passion and suffering. It is also a special occasion in Christianity where we can remember the victorious completion of the work which God had promised to us in the seed of the woman (Gen 3:16).

Or preparing for vacation? God does want us to set time aside to remember Christ’s death. For this purpose, He instituted the Lord’s Supper for us to do it “in remembrance of me” (1 Cor 11:25). It is what helps us to increase in our love for Him, and wean us from the love of the world. Let us therefore use these holidays every year as a time of meditating to prepare ourselves for the Good Friday, Easter Sunrise service, and Easter Worship service instead of planning to enjoy the world. We can plan for holidays at any other time. However, since God has graciously and providentially given us holidays in our country on these days, let us use and capitalize on what He has given to us to soberly return to the feet of the cross on Good Friday, and rejoice worshipfully with His people on the day of celebrating His Resurrection. Where will you lead yourself, and your family to each year during these holidays?

“Lest I forget Gethsemane, Lest I forget Thine agony,
Lest I forget Thy love for me, Lead me to Calvary.”

Yours in our Lord’s service,
Pastor