The Rodeo

This last weekend I attended the Katoomba Men’s Convention with a couple of friends. The theme was “Telling it like it is”, and was a collection of talks on Jesus’ sermon on the mount.

I learnt a good few things, and took a bunch of notes. I think I took as many notes in five talks as I did in five weeks at university - amazing how your attitude changes towards things like that, isn’t it?

I’m going to type up my notes in the next few entries so that I can look back over them easily, as well as allowing anyone who didn’t take any notes, or didn’t attend, to have them available to reflect upon. If you want to add any further comments or your own notes to them, please feel free to do so.

So, the first four things I learnt:

1. It’s a men’s convention. This means lots of testosterone. You can’t be heard singing too high or people might think you are not a man. This resulted in the songs getting lower and lower until the bass rumble threatened to bring down the shed.
2. Two and a half thousand voices singing in unison can (and will) send shivers down your spine.
3. If you forgot (read: didn’t bother bringing) your bible, reading over the shoulder of the people in front is a viable option. Good Christians that everyone was, there was a large amount of study bibles, with copious notes at the bottom of the page, making it very easy to read along without shoulders getting in the way. If you are lucky enough to have two people with the same study bible in front of you, you can read the right-hand page on the person in front and to the left, and the person to the right will reveal the left-hand page.
4. It’s easier to bring your own bible.

RodeoClown: is a man.

Mike Raiter (a missionary in Pakistan for eleven years) gave this talk on Matthew 5:1-16.

• Teaching and Healing were Jesus’ ministry
• Matthew chapters 5-7 show his teaching and 8-9 show healing and miracles.
• You can’t have Jesus as a teacher without the miracles, and you can’t have the miracles without Jesus as teacher - you have to take both.

• The sermon on the mount is not how to become a Christian or how to get right with God. It is what we should be doing once we are.

• The beatitudes describe the disciples (i.e. us) and their (our) future.

• Poverty is powlessness and helplessness and hopelessness. People in abject poverty cannot help themselves - they have to beg of those who are rich.

• You cannot save yourself, no matter how hard you try.

• We are helpless (poor in spirit).
• We have to go to the one who is rich.
• We have to ask for help (meekness).

• Of the eight blessings described six are yet to come, two are already here. Read the passage, it should be pretty easy to see which is which.

At this point Mike talked about a swimmer who swam some huge distance to the Californian shore (from an island or something, I can’t remember which). She swam for fifteen hours and she was exhausted. It was foggy and she couldn’t see anything and she asked the people in the boat with her to pull her out of the water. Once she got back in the boat the fog cleared and she could see the shore just ahead - she had given up with only a short distance left to swim. She said that she’d have kept going if she could see the shore.

• We need to keep our eyes fixed on the shore (i.e. the rewards described in the beatitudes), if we only see the fog we will give up too early.
• The one thing that sustained Israel in Babylon was the hope of Jerusalem.
• We need to keep our eyes on the shore (repeated for truthiness).

RodeoClown: hopes the fog lifts soon.

David Cook (principal of Sydney Missionary and Bible College in Sydney) gave this talk on Matthew 5:21-48.

• 5:21 - Murder: It is not just the act of murder, but the attitude that is wrong.
• 5:27 - Adultery: Again, not just the act, but the thoughts that are the problem. Do what is necessary to cut it out (gouge out your eyes if you have to - get rid of the cause).
• 5:31 - Divorce: We are called to love our wives. If you don’t love her anymore, too bad, you have to. It’s a command, not a feeling.

• Love your wife
• Love your neighbour
• Love your enemy
• No matter what you think of her as, you have to love her. It’s the man’s responsibility.

• 5:43 - Contrast:
• 5:44 - Love and Pray: Don’t let your attitude of love and goodwill be affected by their antagonism.
• 5:45 - Reason: God is kind to all; good and evil.

• Loving your enemy shows how you relate to Christ.
• You don’t have to be creative in showing your love:

• Talk to them
• Pray for them
• Ask to pray for them

• Impossible: It’s not natural to love your enemies, it’s only the Holy Spirit that lets us respond with love to those who are antagonistic towards us.

RodeoClown: heeding.

Mike Raiter gave this talk on Matthew 6:1-18. I think it should be we men, not us men. But anyway…

• Jesus’ worst words were for hypocrites.
• Matthew 5:20 is the key verse.
• Righteousness: Godly conduct (righteousness is not from Jesus’ grace in this context - this is our righteousness). We have to be better than the pharisees.

• Intention and action is what he wants.
• The truly righteous are men of integrity - what we do and what we say are the same.

• This is not an optional extra! These aren’t unreachable ideals - we have to do them.

• We won’t be perfect, but we must be consistently men of integrity - it’s demanded of us by Christ.

• The reading is just three examples, we should be like this in everything.
• What you intend is as important as what you do.

• The examples given are exaggerations - they are like cartoons:

• One hand not knowing what the other is doing.
• Praying in the cupboard.
• Fasting - spruce up! (Don’t let everyone know about it).

• True integrity is a life lived before an audience of one:

• These verses don’t mean that no-one should see what you do, rather do them so God receives the praise.
• Do it for Him.

• Consequenses: Just because God graces us to believe and obey doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to believe and obey or a culpability if we don’t.

• If we do things for people’s recognition, we’ll get what we want and that will be all.
• Seeking men’s acclaim, not God’s.
• Do things for God and we will get paid by him.
• Do it with God as your audience.

• We will be commended and rewarded if we do these things for God.

• The reward isn’t specified, it could just be God’s praise.
• Look for God’s praise, not men’s.

This teaching provokes two responses:

1. It is liberating: We don’t have to be perfect in our prayers/sermons etc, as we only need to be judged by God, not men.
2. Fear: of the one who will assess us.

• If we do our righteousness in secret, people can’t judge us.
• Learn from Vitalis

RodeoClown: wants to be like Vitalis (but won’t be hiring any prostitutes).

David Cook gave this talk on Matthew 7:1-6.

• 7:1-6 - Resist Pride:

• Do not be judgemental
• Pride in our mortality forgets the grace of God
• Don’t think you can’t judge anything - but be discrning as to what is important and should be judged.
• Pride is an aggressive cancer of the soul.

• Realise you are poor in spirit
• The early church realised they couldn’t bring anything to God. Now we bring what we think we know.
• Human pride is repulsive to God (think along the lines of magnets with the same polarity - they can’t join together. Spin one ’round and… snap!)

• 7:13-23 - The Two Ways:

• Two gates, two roads, two men… two of everything

• Pride of the pharisee is the worst kind.
• It’s hard to listen when we’ve heard it all before.

• 7:26 - The Sand:

• 7:24, 26 - The Difference:

• To be a Christian is to have lost control to Jesus.

• The Lord’s Prayer is the core of the sermon

• Be passionate about God’s honour
• Be dependant on God for physical and spiritual sustenance
• Be careful

One other thing I noted, but can’t remember exactly what it referred to is the following:

Love is spelt:

• T-A-L-K for your wife
• T-I-M-E for your kids

RodeoClown: is fighting pride.

Jim Ramsey gave this talk which is labelled in the book we were given: A practical guide for husbands. Why this talk is called ‘Tin Shed Time’, and not just billed as another seminar is beyond me - at any rate, I think this talk had the most post-talk conversation and action. Probably because it was far less theoretical in nature than the other talks.

Let’s Run a Rescue Operation

1. Family first…
   • Before Jesus
   • God made maleness and femaleness
   • Family was there - be it people/tribe/clan/house
   • The father’s line was used to follow the geneaology
2. Genesis
• Women became part of the man’s family  and not vice-versa
3. Patricentrism
• Father is at the centre
4. We won’t understand marriage apart from Jesus - Mark 10:6-9
• Jesus teaches we are male and female
• There is a difference (and it’s not just the plumbing)
5. We won’t understand Jesus apart from the cross - Mark 10:45
• Jesus didn’t come to be a martyr for a cause, rather he came to pay our ransom
• His death becomes the standard men have to have our marriage role meet
6. We won’t understand marriage apart from the cross -

Ephesians… then Eph 5:25-33

• verses 5:25-33 need to be placed in the context set by the rest of Ephesians

1. Men are to accept Jesus died for me to be forgiven, he is committed to us with no qualification - Faithful
2. We have to love our wives sacrificially
• Men protect wives
• Wives protect kids
3. To be unfaithful to our wives while relying on Jesus’ faithfulness is sheer, rank hypocrisy!

Colossians… then Colossians 3:19

• Submitting should be initiated by the woman
• It is not commanded by the husband
• It’s a command from God to wives
• It’s hard for wives to submit when their husbands are:

• indecisive
• moody
• childish
• demeaning
• not willing to pray
• etc…

1 Peter… then 1 Peter 3:19

• God won’t hear our prayers unless we are considerate
• (hmmm… this sounded right in context, but on it’s own sounds wrong - read the verse I guess)

• …at this point, the speaker pretty much stopped following the notes and talked about the problem that pornography presents to women.

Pornography

• This is a huge problem for men, and the temptation is huge. It’s everywhere in our current society.
• If you decide you are going to stop looking at porn: do something about it RIGHT NOW! - ring someone or talk to someone, and get them to keep you accountable. Otherwise you won’t stop, and will put it off and it will come back to haunt you.
• Pornography hurts your wife because she will think that when you make love to her you will be thinking about what you have been watching.
• Don’t!

At around this time, Jim started talking about adultery and how it is basically courtship - you don’t just jump in bed with another woman (usually), but rather it builds up from a friendship. He asked:

‘If you were to commit adultery, who would it be with?’

He then said that if you have a name come into your head in the next second or two, you are very probably in big trouble! Talk to someone about it right now, and do something to stop it - change jobs if you have to.

One final note, a quote at some point came out: “Foreplay starts at breakfast”, to which someone replied “It’ll be the longest day of your life”.

But worth it.

RodeoClown: wants to be a great leader.