ASI Pacific Union 2012

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ASI Pacific Union

John Bradshaw

Pacific Union ASI Worship Service

Pretty well straight across the South Island of New Zealand from Christchurch is a national park creatively called Westland National Park.

It's called Westland or Westland National Park because it's on the west side of the South Island.

Now New Zealanders have got this naming thing down to an art.

If you look at a map of New Zealand you will see that it's 2 main islands.

Now I get a bit miffed when preachers ask these real hard questions and expect you to know the answer but I'm just wondering because after all we're in Loma Linda and a lot of very educated people here.

Top 1 is called North Island, bottom 1, again I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but the bottom 1, what do you think that might be called?

We've got a lot of Australian tourists in New Zealand.

We wanted to make it easy for them to find their way around, so north, south, west.

Place over here called East Cape, makes it very easy.

In Westland National Park you'll find a beautiful glacier, Fox Glacier.

Not far from Fox Glacier is another beautiful glacier, Franz Josef Glacier.

But there's something quite stunning, I can't call it unique, but it's stunning in Westland National Park.

It's not a teeny tiny lake, you're not going to confuse it with Lake Michigan, It's not gigantic.

It's a decent sized lake, but it has a fascinating quality about it.

It's known by many people as a mirror, or the mirror lake, or a couple of lakes, a mirror lake.

There's 1 in the bottom of Yosemite National Park near the valley floor 3 4 miles away from the end of the loop little mirror lake if you get up there in I think it's Clackamas County Oregon near Mount Hood there's a lake there called Mirror Lake.

Oddly enough, it's right near a mountain called Tom, Dick, and Harry Mountain.

We thought New Zealanders had naming issues.

And it's a mirror lake, but Lake Matheson is bigger, and it's more splendid, and the reflection is even better, Because not far from Lake Matheson is New Zealand's tallest mountain, Mount Cook, 12, 000-some feet high.

And if you look over there a little bit to the left or the right, depending on your orientation, There's another mountain, New Zealand's second tallest mountain, Mount Tasman.

And so if you get to the right spot and look across Lake Matheson, you see the southern Alps and these 2 great big beautiful tall mountains reflected gloriously in Lake Matheson, Mirror Lake.

Reflections, there's something about them.

Strictly speaking, a reflection is the change of direction of a wave front at some sort of interface between 2 different media.

So what happens is that the wave that's heading this way comes back, comes back after it hits the wave front.

And so you get sound waves being reflected.

Did you know, you probably did, did you know that a duck's quack doesn't echo?

Probably the 1 that we think of most is that light waves get reflected.

We are, without reflection there would be no sonar.

Without reflection there would be no seismic waves in geology.

And when it comes to reflections of light, you get 2 different sorts of reflection.

1 is diffuse reflection, that is the light gets reflected but not the image.

You can see here there is a light being reflected from the wall but there's no image being reflected.

You might, you might, you understand that.

A green book will reflect light but it won't reflect an image.

And then There's another kind of reflection and that's called spectacular reflection.

After that, they'd use something like polished stone to reflect.

And then after that, they used polished brass.

I've been told that in Bible times they would use polished brass as mirrors, that sort of thing.

It was less than 200 years ago that a German chemist figured out how to make what we would call a silvered glass mirror.

Today what you see as a mirror is usually glass or glass substrate that's got some kind of aluminium on the back of it.

And aluminium is like aluminum but it's what smart alecks use.

Mirrors can be a blessing or if you have a teenager in your house not so much.

Greek mythology talks about a fella who was quite taken with what he saw in a mirror.

It wasn't a mirror, it wasn't a glass mirror, it was a pool, a reflecting pool.

Very proud man, good-looking man they say, But unfortunately for Narcissus, no 1 believed he was better looking than he believed about himself.

Somebody named Nemesis, interesting name, a goddess, realized that Narcissus was full of himself and led him to a reflecting pool where Narcissus sat and gazed into the water and was so smitten with this reflection of himself that he refused to move and he stayed there gazing at his own beautiful face until he died.

Reflections are good, But you know there's a certain science, there's even a psychology about reflections.

You need to know what's important when you look in a mirror or perhaps we can press that even further and we ought to say maybe the mirror's not what's important.

Maybe you need to be aware of what other people see when they look at you and when you are a mirror.

We've been put on this earth for a reason and that's to be mirrors, to be reflectors, not to be taken with our own image in a mirror.

But instead to be concerned with, as our theme for the weekend states, reflecting Christ.

And I wonder if you would begin with me this morning by turning your Bible to Exodus, the 34th chapter.

Really, you could say that all God has called us to do is to be reflectors of Jesus.

I'm gonna try to keep this about as simple as I know how today.

Exodus chapter 34 verse 28, not because it is a complex subject, it is a simple subject.

And I think that if we can start with a simple subject and make it simple, then we've done something.

Exodus chapter 34 and verse 28, the word of God says this, he, that's Moses, was there with the Lord 40 days and 40 nights.

He did neither eat bread nor drink water, which is remarkable.

And he wrote, that's God, he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the 10 Commandments.

Moses was up on Mount Sinai and he received the 10 Commandments from Almighty God.

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Pacific Union ASI Worship Service

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