Service Times
River City Church Sunday Worship
11:00 AM
School of Grace
Alternate Wednesdays 8pm
Midweek Home Groups
River City Church Sunday Worship
11:00 AM
School of Grace
Alternate Wednesdays 8pm
Midweek Home Groups
Reading about the history and beliefs of a church can be helpful, in that we all need accurate information to help us come to an informed opinion on anything. Learning such useful information is the familiar concept we know as ‘education’. But the Bible tells us a remarkable thing; that to come to the correct opinion about God, we need something more than education, something more than all the information our natural senses can accumulate.
Ironically for a high tech society that is so saturated in information, it takes a media of communication quite unfamiliar to most; ‘revelation’. This can be defined as nothing less than ‘God’s disclosure of His own nature and His own purposes’.
We believe God has done exactly this and continues to do this through His Word (The Bible) and His people (The Church) by the power of His Holy Spirit. Each of us who have come to love Him and follow Him, have a personal story. It is a story of a life changing relationship with our Father in heaven, not based on our performance, but on faith in Jesus Christ.
What a wonderful thing to know that God is for you and not against you, that He loves you so much, that He offers you that best that He can give you; Himself!
Are you hungry for more of God? Then be encouraged, for God has already been working in your life. His desire is to draw from you something precious to Him; your response to His love, your fellowship, for He is a God of relationship (Genesis 1:27). He knows us and desires us to know Him. “But the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship in spirit and in truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. (John 4:23)
For each of us, this begins with the realisation that our selfishness leads us away from God and that our sin has separated us from Him. (Romans 3:23) Even this revelation is by the grace of God, a work of His Holy Spirit (John 16:8)
This truth convinces us of our need for a solution to our sin problem and the Good news or ‘gospel’, declares that this solution comes in the form of a person, a saviour who is Jesus Christ.
He is the only one who can help us because He is the only one who came to take all of our sin onto Himself, so that we could be reconnected into the life of God. (1Peter 2:24).
Believing in Him and trusting in Him from day to day as our Lord and Saviour, brings us into a new life of wonderful communion with him and millions of other Christians throughout the world, who profess Him as Lord. (Romans 10:9,10) This is the eternal life that Jesus promised each person, who would turn away from their sin and open their lives to receive Him as their Lord and Saviour. (John 17:3).
As we turn to Him, we experience the wonderful truth that Jesus promised in His story of the Prodigal Son. As the Father sees His child coming home, He runs to embrace him (Luke 15:20). So we too experience the comfort and equipping of the Holy Spirit as we journey home to our Father in heaven. (1Corinthians 2:12). The revelation of His love for us brings about a "metanoia", such a change in our belief system that the way we are living is transformed. This metanoia is translated as the word "repentance", a word that has unfortunately become more associated with the idea of what we can do for God, obscuring the truth that repentance is by His grace (Acts 11:18)
As each of us receive a revelation of God’s love for us, we find we cannot but be impacted too by His love for others. What is God’s purpose in revealing Himself to us? We can see the answer right throughout Jesus’ teachings and the New Testament record of the early church. When Jesus was asked by his disciples; “Teach us how to pray”, they were in essence asking “Where do we fit into all this? What should we ask for?”
Jesus reply was more than a prayer to be recited, it was a blueprint for His Church, a declaration of His great purpose. The opening words tell us so much about God’s desire for each of us.
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed (holy) be thy name.”
Our starting place in seeking God, is not with who we are, but a recognition of who He is. This is where so many are led astray, by being told that they can find answers to life’s great questions by looking within themselves and away from God.
The life God gives us is not an independent life, for in truth He does not know any other sort of life but a shared life; Father, Son and Holy Spirit in communion with each other. We are invited into this communion. . We are vessels made to be filled with the Spirit of God and to be changed by Him into His likeness. Because this is so fundamental to our makeup, you could say that this is the way our “software” is programmed. It is inevitable that if we do not worship our Father God we will end up worshiping something or someone else.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Here we find the result of right worship. It is that our lives begin to reflect on this earth the will of God so that His glory would be seen on the earth. His purpose for us centres around His desire that we would be united with Him. This was the cry of Jesus’ heart throughout His ministry, voiced again as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. “And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: “I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. “O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me. “And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”
John 17:20-26
Here we have God’s purpose for His Church; that it would reveal to the world the nature and glory of God through a demonstration of lives empowered and directed by His Holy Spirit. Lives united in a deeper bond that any earthly ties or ambitions. Lives set free from the fear of death and released to love and serve others in the unconditional love of Christ, a love that has come into those lives as Jesus promised it would, with the presence of His Holy Spirit. (Romans 5:5)
At the heart of God is the mystery of the Trinity. To be in relationship is to be able to give and receive love and so we find it is not possible to grow in the knowledge of God outside of the experience of being in relationship with each other. God’s Word tells us quite plainly that it is not possible to say we know God if we hate our brother. (1John 4:20) This is how we are to recognise God’s people; not by the name of the church or denomination but by observing if they love like their father loves; if they love their enemies! (John 13:35, Romans 12:14)
The Church of God is not an earthly institution but a spiritual organism, a body of people from all diverse nations and backgrounds who are being built together into a supernaturally united body whose Head and source of life is Christ. The local ‘church’ or gathering of God’s people is the place where this supernatural building of Christ is most clearly seen, as it is where the lives of local Christians are formed and melted and moulded together. This should be happening in such a remarkable way that the name of Jesus is clearly declared as the only name that could be responsible for redeeming such brokenness into something beautiful.
This is the vision of our church; to be a living witness to the power of the resurrected Christ. To be a place where lives separated from God through sin are restored into relationship with a loving heavenly Father. A place of celebration and proclamation through words and deeds that through faith in Jesus Christ we can each experience the power of His shed blood to cleanse us and of His Holy Spirit to enable us to live for Him and not ourselves.
This life of God flows like a river through the lives of His people and everywhere we go in this world the presence of His life in us should bring healing. Like the leaves of a book, our lives are to be read by the nations as stories of healing. Together we are part of that great city of God spoken of in the book of Revelation from which flows His Healing life to all nations.
“And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations”.
Revelation 22:1,2
If you have any further questions on anything you have read here, please contact us. If you would like to spend time considering some of these issues in further depth, then you may find some of the resources on our links pages helpful.
Remember, God is for you, not against you. He Has already given all that He has for you. He has poured out HImself so that you can know Him and be one with Him. We know Him 'by faith' and the good news is that faith comes as we hear the truth about Him (Romans 10.v17). So hear, believe and live life in the abundance that God desires you to.
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." John 3.v16,17
