Trust in wealth and social status instead of in Jesus Christ is a common pitfall. Drawing on historical anecdotes and personal testimonies, the speaker highlights how true Christian faith transcends socioeconomic barriers and calls for a genuine commitment to Christ. Key biblical passages underscore the importance of seeking spiritual security in God rather than in material possessions.

Automatically Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] I’ve been thinking about what goes on in some of those events, something that I’ve noticed that our heritage in Australia, which I think we can treasure coming from Britain, particularly in our politics with the constitutional system that we have… We don’t have people with machine guns killing people as they try and vote like other nations sometimes do. We have a very stable political system, whichever party is in or not in, nonetheless we have something that we’ve been blessed with because we got it from our British background. And that’s something to always remember with thankfulness to God. I did recently learn a little bit more about the Christians seen
[00:00:52] across the years, and realized something I hadn’t quite noticed previously, that there is one problem that is connected to it. You won’t mind if your background is from the old country, if I say some points that are on the deficit side, but one of the problems with the Christianity in Britain is that it seemed to get tied up with the upper classes, very much. And uh, I noticed that first when I went to university here in Adelaide, and had a friend that I used to talk to about the Saviour, and eventually he became a Christian. But in the stages I was working on him in our first year university,
[00:01:36] he…I asked him to come to church. And he said a funny thing. He says, Oh, I can’t do that, I haven’t got a grey suit. I said, what do you mean? I didn’t have a grey suit, I’m… But apparently where he was from, the people who were Christians were all very well-to-do. I’m sure that wasn’t the case everywhere, but it was with him, and when they went to church they always dressed up and looked immaculate. And it was a feature that the church, maybe the Church of England, at the time was connected to the royalty and connected to the upper classes And even in the politics, the people who were of the one side
[00:02:24] that was represented by the Tories, they were more likely to be Christian minded. Now, the churches they went to weren’t necessary like ours. Ours, if you walk in the door, you’d have to be pretty slow not to realize we’re a gospel church. And we love to tell the story of Jesus and how he died for us and to call people to come to know the Savior.
[00:02:49] But that doesn’t happen when Christianity is tied to something that’s within our human domain, more like economics. And some of the reasons why there are many people who criticize Christianity has to do with the era where Christianity was represented by nations that were well-to-do and saw the opportunity of making money out of all the other countries.
[00:03:18] And the biggest criticism some of the countries have against Christianity is that in those years there was a lot of scalping of the world in the sense that the money went back to Britain. And in the era that Britain ruled the seas, it was their carrying all the goodies back to Briton. And even the development of the United States happened because there was a business of ships going to the new country of Americas And taking all the many goods there.
[00:03:49] And there was set up the first stock exchange and the necessities, in New York. I was talking about this the other Sunday morning. Which was set up because of the business that was there from trading of stocks. The stock exchange was the stocks of the ships. The only thing that gave some relief to being attached about the ships but was when they developed their train system of what went on the back of the trains all across the country.
[00:04:19] It increased the amount of things that were exchanged and traded. And Christianity, in the States, likewise, has been connected very much to the, I don’t think I should call the upper classes, but more that side of things that was into business and making money, and I think that’s a bit of a difficulty coming to us out of history. a difficulty coming to us out of history. But the problem of riches is something that Jesus spoke about and as we’ve been through the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel…
[00:04:57] as Jesus spoke about what is real Christianity and what he was leading to set up in the new Covenant, that he was the one that instituted… uh… Jesus was setting up, that there’s a danger in our economics, if we put our trust in it, and there’s a problem and so on, previous Sunday mornings, I’ve been talking about Jesus’s word about looking out out for, what he called Mamum, is the rest in riches and assets and, to give you your security when you trust in how much you’re worth, when you trust in your bank account,
[00:05:39] when it’s the good salaries that you’ve achieved to have and you rest in that. You’re making a mistake because you’re trusting in mammon, that’s called mammon, where your security is in your funds and in your assets. And so it is something to be aware of a danger in. And similarly when people get busy in life’s developments and seek to have securities, This danger can get a grip of you so that you trust in your work and you trust in the money, but you don’t trust in God.
[00:06:16] And Jesus is the one who spoke against it. And how he worded it is up on the screen. Where Jesus is talking about, uh, this issue that we have if you’re really going to get your life sorted out, don’t be a person who makes it that you trust in the economic side of your securities. but be a person who’s able to trust in God.” And here Jesus speaks if you look and see he’s the crowd of disciples around. By the way, the word disciples that means the 12, ones who are really keen followers of Jesus,
[00:06:52] but sometimes it can mean anybody who came and listened to him speaking, and so if there is a crowd of disciples you got to work out which that is. But Jesus had seen that the type of Christianity that was developing from his teaching was one that needed a corrective element. That corrective element is what Jesus is giving here and I’m bringing to you today. And he said to them, look at verse 34,
[00:07:22] if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it lose it. And that impulse that we have to set up the securities to be our own Savior is what is the reason for many people never really making it to come to Jesus as the Savior. The Gospel is about the facts that God saw we needed to be saved and He sent His Son into the world to be the Savior. He lived a perfect life and obeyed the law, completed and he offered himself as a sinless sacrifice on the cross to die for our sins. And in the hands of God he was raised again on the third day
[00:08:13] and he returned to heaven and has been made King of Kings and Lord of Lords. This Jesus is the saviour. The Bible proclaims and you need to find Him, you need to come to him, you need to be secure in him, not in everything you might trust in. And then in verse 36 he goes on to say, For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul or forfeit his soul? Jesus points out the fact that there’s a need for us to deliberately put our trust in him And not in all the other things that we might be tempted with, or give our energies to.
[00:09:02] For what can a Man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him, the Son of Man, that’s Jesus, will be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with his Holy Angels. In the ultimate test of the second return of Christ to judge the world, where your dependence is, is going to be the decision point. And if you’ve come in this life to a decision point of letting it be Jesus as your Saviour, that when he comes, you’re one of those who will find your trust was in the right place and you’re going to be with God in glory.
[00:09:48] Now the Christian reward isn’t only what happens for us in heaven. the Christian reward is the walk that we fight with Christ, and here and now. And that walk is vulnerable to the fact that we could put our trust in the wrong place. There’s many a person has been brought up in good training in the church, but never came to the point of finding Jesus’ Savior. And then all the career of life… all the things to spend your time doing… All the pressure to set up assets that you might have some proof of your existence being worthwhile. When that’s the wrong place to put your trust. People sometimes miss out and do not find what it is, as Letitia has found, to come at last to the Saviour.
[00:10:47] I’ve been searching for a chorus that I’ve heard sung in one of my places I went to preach, and there was a band who told me the words afterwards I asked him they were sung by this pluck. And I’ve only remembered some of them and I keep looking it up on the internet. If you know this song and can tell me the rest of it please do that sometime. But it goes like this. It says about the person’s sinfulness and the burden of life and it talks about the fact that he was trying hard to deal with all the burden of guilt that he had and that eventually, after feeling the mess of all of his life, he came to Jesus and he came to the cross, and the wording goes, I knelt in the shadow of Calvary’s cross, ashamed of lifestyle, of wanton and loss.
[00:11:54] But now, last, to the Savior, I’ve come. Then about it goes on, and I don’t know the words exactly how the weight just fell off his back, the burdens of his sin, and he began the Christian life. And my purpose this morning is really to bring to you the call, to cup and to kneel in the shadow of the cross, ashamed of a life time of wanton and loss, to trust Jesus in his death alone. There is nowhere else to trust in your acceptance in heavenly places but that in Jesus that he came and died for you. There’s no way to even get on the Christian life except to come to that Cross
[00:12:45] Where you give over putting your trust in every other thing Even if it’s mammon, even if it’s a good thing, your wonderful career, you’re medical doctor and you’re saving lives keep doing it It might be mine, you get to save one day. I could praise God, I won’t go off the tangent here, but for biblical professionals who saved me because I was given 2 years to live and I didn’t die 20 years ago, and I’m here today to tell you God does use even medicine and He uses the prayers of people who pray to step in. The one that you need to trust is the person with the power and it’s not a politician.
[00:13:34] It’s Jesus, it’s God and it’s a foolish thing to be found trusting anything else. Well, there is a story, I have heard this story from a number of different preachers and I have even looked it up in the internet to see how literal the details were. There was a story about the rich people in England that I was talking about and how their society was one where the ones who had the religion were also the richies but the style of religion they had wasn’t one where they, many of them necessarily trusted in Jesus. They believed, they were Christians, in terms of belief but many of them were not saved. Now, I know that because that style of person from Britain that came to Australia, is one part of my heritage.
[00:14:31] I’m a little bit French, a little bit Scottish, a little bit Welsh, but there’s an English part as well. An English part came down through my mother. Her grandfather was a politician in Melbourne. He was in the parliament, and he had two sons, who were very uppity boys, One played for Collingwood which is wonderful if you understand those terms, and the other one was played for South Australia in cricket, and used to tell me how he made a hundred runs on the MCG, and the family were ones where the girls of the family would go along the cheer for the boys.
[00:15:13] This is going back a bit of time, but it was an uppity family, and they went to went to church, but they didn’t know Jesus because the church was that English form of doing all the right things and people trusting in the ceremonies, if you like, and the connection, but they didn’t know the Lord and my mother was that person who didn’t know Christ. And she had a rich heritage from her family. We won’t go into the details, but she had a group of friends in her teenage years. Just as Letecia told us about the friendships, she found both at school, but also in churches. Where these people, this youth group had a fellowship, and there was one fellow had a car and he used to drive the others, but he was rather stingy and always asked them to pay for the petrol.
[00:16:10] My mother remembers being asked to pay for the petrol. And it wasn’t actually quite the right thing to do in those uppity circles, to demand petrol money. But this bloke did. But then he came into an experience of coming to know Christ. And when he came to know Christ, he changed his attitude and he stopped asking money from his passengers. And he did other things. He took them to Bible studies, and my mother
[00:16:40] I notice the difference between the Christianity that was the formal Christianity of the Society because your dad’s a parliamentarian, in Melbourne this was. And he told her the gospel and my mother became a real Christian someone that has come to the cross of Christ. I melt in the shadow of Calvary’s cross Ashamed of a lifetime of wanton and loss Whatever that is it can be nice looking things that is your lifetime of trusting the wrong place or it can be things that get you into the vices. I knelt on the shadow of CEO of Calvary’s cross
[00:17:25] Ashamed of a lifetime of wanton and loss My burden was heavy I had bought it a lot I had bought it alone. And there is a sense in which people who don’t know Christ, although they won’t admit it to you when you meet them and you try and tell them the gospel, they’re carrying a burden, a burden of not being able to find the way.
[00:17:51] A burden of their vices or their trust in their prideful things. But when you come to the cross, As in Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, he knelt at the cross and the burden came up his back. And you begin the Christian pilgrimage at that point. Well, that happened to my mother. And, she learned to find Christians with whom to fellowship and eventually that was my father who went to college and became a Christian leader and I have a heritage that’s the result of her getting past that background from the British aristocracy, that side of things where being uppity and being
[00:18:44] in the upper echelon was where people trusted. I heard the story of where there came a very vital Christian witness amongst the upper classes of Britain by the conversion of a woman who was one of those people that was invited to royalty parties and invited to the hoity-toity sorts of stuff and he went to church. But a church which was formal, and a church which didn’t ever tell the gospel accurately. And this woman’s name was Lady Anne Erskine. This is an area where they were of the upper-class, ladies and gentlemen. And Lady Anne Erskine was very famous for when she put on a do and whatever, and she was an extremely beautiful woman that dressed wonderfully and had horses and caretakers who take her around London and around England.
[00:19:54] And but there came a preacher to the church where she went to, who though he was in that system was a person who himself had come to know the Savior. And this man tried to preach the gospel in the church. And he also was an eloquent preacher so they appreciated him because of his eloquence. But when he said he wanted to somehow get more of the local folk who were in the moron, You know, not the upper class into the church. The leaders of the church resisted him and didn’t want him taking their religion down to the lower classes. And even though he tried various ways
[00:20:43] to get that to happen in his church, they made sure it didn’t. It was to stay a church for the people who were the leaders of the nation and the owners of the money. That’s a feature of Britain in my heritage from there that I don’t appreciate. Well anyway Lady Anne Erskine was one of those people who the leaders of the Church were safeguarding to be the important people. And so there came a moment when the fellow who was the preacher decided that he’d try try a new tactic, to get to speak to the common people.
[00:21:28] And he started having an extra service, not agreed to by his church leaders, but just off his own back he went and started preaching in the parks on Sunday lunchtimes, or just Sunday afternoons, and great crowds began to gather. He was an eloquent preacher, his name is doctor Roland Hill, and he would preach to them the gospel. Anyway, there was a great crowd that was gathered in the park. And Lady Anne Erskine decided that she would go for a Sunday afternoon carriage ride
[00:22:04] and she had, sitting in the carriage with all the well done up attire, and she had a driver who was driving and someone else sitting up there, you know, how they do in the carriages. and she went driving just for an afternoon. But she came across the park where all of the people were listening to Dr. Roland Hill as he explained that the Gospel calls us to make a decision, to make a statement that we will trust in Jesus and not anything else. And he was elaborating this to the crowds when he saw at the corner of his eye the carriage of Lady Aniriska and pulled to a stop at the top of the park. And she had sort of let the witness down
[00:23:00] and she’d rested her gloved hands on the door and she was sort of leaning out and Dr. Roland Hill recognized her, he did a very cheeky thing in the middle of his sermon. of his sermon, and this actually happened. I’ve chased it down, and this is an event that actually happened. I know it sounds a good story. But it actually happened in the middle of his sermon when he realized she was listening. He says, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve got something for sale.
[00:23:34] It is the soul of Lady Anne Erskine, and all the faces of the crowd, looked up and saw her there, looking out the window. And he says, who bids for the soul of Lady An Obscen? Satan bids. A little bit of money. A little bit of social acceptance, and he had a list of things had described me well. All those religious people that didn’t yet know Jesus. And he says, who else bids? Jesus bids. He bids his life.
[00:24:14] He shed his blood. He offers forgiveness of sins. I don’t know the exact details of all the things, but he went through a number of things that Jesus offers. Eternal peace. The Bible says, the person who has the Son has life. He that doesn’t have the son doesn’t have life. and a part of what Jesus bids when He offers salvation is the life that you get when you come to Him and He comes to you and you become changed. There is no substitute
[00:24:51] for that movement of God’s Spirit at a person’s heart and life when they come to Jesus. He’s the source of the life that we’ve all been missing, And he’s also the provider of the forgiveness of sins. There’s a moment you can kneel in the shadow of Calvary’s Cross. Talking metaphorically of knowing that Jesus died for you. You can kneel in the shadow of Calvary’s Cross. Ashamed of a lifetime of everything else you trusted. well. That moment for somebody here this morning might be now, just as it was with Lady Anne
[00:25:35] Erskine. And there she is listening to this. It must have been a terrible thing to put her on the spot like that. But with that gloved hand she opened the door. And she stepped out onto the paper just at the top of the park, and she lifted up her and in that very polished, English way that they have, she said, Dr. Rowland Hill, I accept the bid of Jesus. And it was her moment to get in the door with God, to find Christ as her personal Savior. From that moment on, she became the source of evangelism amongst the up and outs. You know, sometimes we talk about taking the Gospel out to the down and outs
[00:26:33] What about the up and outs is so uppity that they’ve gone beyond our understanding of the Gospel? A good lot of the Christian denominations, particularly in Britain, who are in that category of Uppanauts, because they’re so doing all the right things in society, believing that they’re the leaders, that they don’t know the one thing that is more important in your life than anything else, is that you come to know Jesus, and you find in him, where is your trust for eternity and for time and to put your rest in Him. And there are many of those people who’ve been church goers who didn’t know what they didn’t know, who were unaware that they’d never found where it really counts to trust in the person of Jesus and knowing him personally. Well, that’s the story of Lady Anne Erskine. I’ve actually dug that story up and found
[00:27:44] when you type it in you’ll hear different preachers right around the world. I’m not the only one who’s pinch the story or found it useful as an illustration. But it’s something that happened in history and maybe today as we’ve heard the testimony of Letitia and she’s not someone from the upper now she’s so I said a struggle but she is a testimony a story and evidence of the fact that Jesus is in the business of finding people who need to transfer their trust from wherever it has been to him and put Put their rest in him to be the saviour of their souls Is that you? And just as Dr. Rollahill put that aristocratic lady on the spot
[00:28:44] I don’t apologize for the fact that every now and then I don’t do this every Sunday but every now and then I think it’s appropriate… to give you the chance to make the same decision as did Lady Eunice Dr. Rowland Hill, she said, I accept the bid of Jesus. It was about her soul. What to trust in for it to be saved. And Jesus on the cross has shed his blood, he gave his life for your soul. And he asks you to accept the gift that that can bring. We do that today and as we finish the service, we’ve had a beautiful service with the music sung and I like it when they bring some of the oldies and some of the new songs and we have
[00:29:41] a wonderful privilege in our church of having some pretty good musicians leading us and having some keen ones who organize all that. But as we have our final singing and we stand to sing, then, if you need to accept the bit of Jesus, if you need, come back to Him. That’s the story. If there’s some repentance that He’s been on your back to clear up, leave where you’ll be, and come and sing the song from in the front row, come and stand near where I’ll be if you like, when you’re in the front row, still able to see the screen, to see the words, but by coming with your feet you’re saying I’m going to accept the bit of Jesus. Will you do it? In this moment when Christ is calling, will you come and will you put your trust in him alone? He that has the Son has life. He that has not the Son of God has not life. And what good is
[00:30:52] there to get the whole world to lose the life of your soul. That’s what Jesus was asking in this Bible passage. Let me pray, and then we’ll have that music led to us, brought to us. And the opportunity is yours to come and by coming with your feet to say in my heart I’m seeking Jesus to put my trust in him. Heavenly Father we thank you for the way you’ve worked in history and we the way you worked in those British up-and-outas of how you bless the courage of Dr. Roland Hill to go out to the parks and to take the gospel to the people, and to how he had the audacity to call on Lady30 to make a public profession of her faith. That was pretty daring but I thank you for what you started in Britain from that moment. It’s not the only time, but
[00:31:54] Lord it’s something you did to bring the gospel to a lot more people there. May someone this morning, whoever it be, they might be the only one who needs so to step. But Lord, may you give courage to them this morning to come to accept the bit of Jesus. Amen.