AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Paul Rankin

To be, not to do

I wanted to talk as much to myself as to you folks.

I've had an interesting year, a new job at Greater Sydney Conference which has been really good.

But about 8 weeks ago I actually had a transit-escheming attack.

My wife and I, my wife was driving, we were coming back actually from checking out some tyres and I was trying to talk to her and it was just gobbledygook coming out.

And my wife's a nurse and she said, we're going to hospital now.

And the only word I could say was Trevor, Trevor.

So she took me to see Trevor and Trevor said, you're going to hospital now.

And fortunately it was, as I said, it was just a transient ischemic attack, but it made me really stop and examine where I'm going and what I'm doing.

I'll be 63 in a couple of weeks' time, and really reassess.

And 1 of the things I came to the conclusion of is there's a lot that I do that doesn't need to be done, and as a result of that I'm actually, I don't want to skype, but as of Monday, I've got 9 weeks annual leave, some long service leave and annual leave, which is absolutely great.

In a couple of weeks' time, we'll be welcoming in the new year on 2020.

And it made me think back, for those of you that are old enough, to when the year 2000 came in.

And you remember the year 2000 and all the anticipation that came up to that?

And what happened is when they set up the computer programming, started writing computer programs for the computers back in the 1960s, they didn't think about the fact that the year 2000 was gonna come, and they only had the year for 2 digits for the year.

And so the theory was that when they got to the year 2000 all the computers would think it was the year 1900 instead of the year 2000 and there'd be chaos.

And the other thing that happened at the same time was that they had worked out that it's not a leap year on the 100 years, except for that fact that the Gregorian calendar says if the year's divisible by 400, it's a leap year, and so all of this happened.

And we were, I remember going in and waiting for that new year to come out, and this is, as I said, 20 years ago.

That was back in the days when they still had dial telephones.

And back in New Zealand, the emergency number's 111.

And if you've ever had to dial 111, I have had to, I was doing a Bible study and the person collapsed in the middle of the Bible study, and I tried to dial 111, and you go 1, and then you have to wait for it to go, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do before you can dial 1 again.

Yeah, it was also back in the days before they had iPhones.

You could go for a drive in your car and you could get some peace and quiet.

And cars had these things called cassette players in them.

And then it was big camp in South New Zealand where I was working as a minister.

And we took all of the youth into Christchurch, and the conference owned a multi-storey building in Christchurch at that time.

And we actually went to the top of the building, and we got up there, and we waited for the New Year to come in.

And because it was New Zealand, it was the first major country in the world that welcomed in the new year.

And so the media from all over the world was there to see what actually happened when the new year came in.

And we stood up there and we counted down 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 and nothing happened.

It was most, it was anticlimactic, it really was.

I reckon if I'd worked for the power company I would have flicked a switch somewhere just to create some excitement, but no, no 1 had any imagination.

And life continued on, and in those 20 years we've seen massive changes.

I remember as a young fella in 1975, the Reader's Digest, and that was back in the days when every outhouse and every toilet had a stack of Reader's Digest there for you to read because you had time to read in those days when you went to the toilet.

It was also handy if they ran out of toilet paper, but that's another story.

But the Reader's Digest had an article about what the world was going to look like in the year 2000.

And the key thing that I remember from that article was that the biggest problem in the year 2000 was that we'd only be working 7 hours a week because computers would be doing all the rest of the work and the biggest problem would be finding stuff to do with our leisure time and that was going to cause massive social unrest.

It didn't sort of quite work out that way.

And you know, Noel Coward wrote a song about mad dogs and Englishmen going out in the moonday sun.

And we have this, those of us from a British ancestry have grown up with what Max Faber called the Protestant work ethic, where Our salvation depends upon how hard we work.

And we work and we work and we work to try and get self-actualisation in some cases, because we think that's what we need to do as Christians.

And That work obsesses us and we get preoccupied with things that we have to do.

And I'm 1 of these people that likes a list.

And if I can get to the end of the day and have everything crossed off my list, I feel like I've had a good day.

Whether it needed to be done or not is irrelevant.

But when I actually stop and I look at what the Bible talks about the Christian life, I see a very, very different picture.

I want to share with you a couple of verses.

Jesus talking, are you tired, worn out, burned out on religion?

Come to me, get away with me, and you will recover your life.

I won't lay anything heavy or overfitting on you.

Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly." And it's that, let me rephrase that instead of asking a question, that's not how I feel my life is at the moment.

We're doing bathroom renovations at home at the moment.

The plumber's actually coming on Sunday to start doing the waterproofing.

And so we decided we couldn't afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars for someone else to do it.

So my wife and I have been trying to do it ourselves.

And so every spare minute it's been painting and decorating and cutting out wall boards and replacing wall boards.

But it's not just that, it's in the way that we work.

But That's not how Jesus paints a picture of what the Christian life is like.

This is after Jesus has sent out the disciples.

They've gone out, they've cast out demons, They've healed the sick, they've raised the dead.

And they come back and they're talking to Jesus about what happens.

And Jesus says, hang on a minute, come off by yourself.

Let's take a break and get a little rest.

For there was constant coming and going and they didn't even have time to eat.

And Jesus said this constant coming and going, not having time to eat is not how it's supposed to work.

I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God.

Then you'll have minds confident and at rest, focused on Christ, God's great mystery.

And 1 of the things I'm challenged with is as a Seventh-day Adventist minister, as a Christian, I have this enormous compulsion that I have to go out and save people and save the world and convert people.

And I've begun to come to a realization that that's my own megalomania.

God simply asks me to build relationships with people that I come across, to get to know those people, to love those people.

And then it's up to God to do it on there.

And when I believe, when we understand that rest, when we realize that what God wants for us is not this frantic running around trying to prove that we're worth something, but to simply rest and relax in God, then God will take responsibility for what is His responsibility.

And we can simply do what God's called us to do, which is get to know people, build relationships with people, and then leave the rest up to God.

So my challenge to you this evening is to step back and say, what is it that God really wants me to do?

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To be, not to do

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