Page 8 - Southwell School_The Chronicle December 2022

FROM THE CHAPLAIN’S PEN
CYEAR’S END
hristmas is on the horizon, and it will great to celebrate the day again within All Hallows with our traditional 8.00am service. In this season
we are taught not to focus on the material things at Christmas. However, can we be more worshipful in our attitude towards things, stuff, and material and still not deviate from the real meaning of Christmas?
God uses and used the material things to bring his purpose to this world. God is much about the physical. He can use the physical material things to give him glory. Here are some examples: at Christmas time God became material. He became stuff – he became flesh. He dwelt among us. God uses his physical creation to bring him glory and to advance his kingdom.
“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
His creation shouts it out. If you unravelled the DNA
in the human body and put it end to end, it would go back and forth to the moon a thousand times. God used only four different molecules to make 7 billion different-
looking people.
The sun is a great
power plant. If you were to mark off one square metre on the sun, you would find that it is giving off 70,000 horsepower of energy continuously.
There are a tremendous number of square metres on
the sun’s surface: more than 10,000 times the number of square metres on the surface of the Earth. I will leave you to do the maths on the energy output of the sun but it is an awful lot of horses! Yet when God created the sun, he had to put into that act of creation all of the energy that has come from the sun and all that which is yet to come from the sun. There is still enough energy in the sun to last for some thirty billion years. Astounding!
God was specific in the way he told the Israelites to build the tabernacle and temple. He told them to use golden lamp-stands, acacia tables, and robes woven from blue and purple yarns. In Revelation we read about the New Earth where we walk streets of gold, gates of jasper, and trees with leaves of healing next to rivers.
So materials aren’t bad! In God’s created order, things are the stuff through which we experience, understand and
ALUMNI BAPTISM
SERVICE
To register your interest and for further details contact obga@southwell.school.nz
Est. 1911
10am Sunday 5 March 2023