Hey

Tapping Bass is not boring : )

Hamish on a good day : )

Dom, David, Sam, John and Hamish are pretty keen musicians of varying styles ranging from progressive heavy metal bass to post modern Sax.

God stuff

All the guys believed in the concept of God except one who has been swayed by the evidence of science. Someone asked what the difference between Presbyterian and other Churches is. One student expressed his disappointment with religion in terms of there being so many, each claiming to be the truth.

Heavenly FlyBuys

Option 1: is where a religion will explain and help a person be good enough to impress God enough to get close to God or go to heaven or whatever. In essence each religion teaches a system of heavenly flybuys, do a bunch of stuff on the heavenly list and you get points. Get enough points and you qualify to go to heaven. I asked the students what they thought might win points for a person. Remember this is for any world religion such as Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism etc.

The List

Option 1: Earning Heavenly FlyBuys

• Pray

• Sacrifice

• Meditate

• Pay money

• Lose body part

• Sing

• Die

Hiccup

Option 2: God does the rescuing

The trick to option 1 is how do you know if you have enough points? And if you do bad stuff does that mean you owe points. So if you lie, steal, get angry, lust, then you might go in the negative so that you go into debt with God.

Option 2

This option is a faith based religion like Christianity. God comes down to us, he does all the work of getting enough heavenly flybuys and he also pays of the negative debt for the bad stuff we have done. All we do is believe in Jesus Christ and we receive salvation as a gift.

• Ephesians 2:8-9 "for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast."

Swimming in the lake

Despite the warning signs you go swimming in a lake. Towards the middle of the lake it is so deep that it makes the water very cold so that you start to cramp up. Then you realise that you’re going to die, you can’t swim back to shore. A rescue helicopter comes and offers you to winch you up. Option 1 is trying to swim back to shore yourself. Option 2 is accepting the offer to be rescued, by believing that they can and receiving the helping hand.

God offers to rescue you through Jesus Christ who is the only one who accrued enough points to pay for our ticket to heaven. No other world religion offers this gift of Salvation. This is why the Bible describes Jesus as being the Saviour of the World. He is in the rescue business not the coaching business. He won’t shout at you to be better than you can be, but instead he reaches down and rescues you from something you can’t possibly do yourself.