Lithgow Baptist Church

Our Pastor

Lithgow Baptist is led by Rev Ian Altman

Ian, who was born in 1967, is married to Carolyn and together they have two children Melina & Bryce. He is an ordained minister of the Baptist Union of NSW and graduated from Morling College with a Bachelor of Ministry degree in 1996. Since that time Ian has served at Windsor District Baptist Church and Carlton-Kogarah Baptist.

Ian is also a licensed Marriage Celebrant and trained Pre-marriage counsellor.

You can contact Ian at any time on 0412 682 819 or email him at ian@lithgowbaptist.org.au

A Message From Pastor Ian

Significance & Love

Have you seen the movie “Ants”, (it’s not a bad movie). Z, one of the main characters raises some very important questions, questions that a lot of people raise. Maybe you have asked them yourself?

Z made these statements, he said:

“There has got to be something better out there, I feel abandoned, I feel inadequate, the whole thing (ie life) just makes me feel insignificant.”

Those questions, whenever we ask them, all boil down to just two issues.  These two issues are so important to all of us that everything that we do is either in search of them or because of a lack of them – true.

These two things that I am talking about are significance and love.  They are our basic needs.  Everything that we do is in relation to them.  From the clothes we wear to the people we hang out with, and the way that we relate to those around us is related to a search for, or an attempt to feel significant or loved.

The thing about our basic needs, about being and feeling significant and loved is that they can never be found within ourselves, that is also true. Our significance and love will always come from outside of us; will always be tied to someone or something. Like the clothes we wear, or the job that we have, or the relationships that we seek to develop. Our basic needs of significance and love are always there and they drive us.

The biggest indicator that demonstrates our inbuilt need to feel significant and loved, is the way that we feel and what we do whenever we are feel insignificant or unloved.  Without significance and love we can feel hopeless, or even despairing.

As a result we can lash out, or we become angry, or we seek to escape the reality of feeling insignificant and unloved, through drugs, or alcohol.  If we are not in touch with reality we don’t have to worry about feeling insignificant or unloved.  The worse case scenario for a lack of our basic needs is to check out of life altogether. Our basic needs constantly not met, a constant lack of significance and love, will eventually cause us to ask as Z did, whether we matter at all.

I am writing about significance and love because for a large part of my life they were real issues for me.  You see, I am or was, whichever way we look at it, adopted.  This is something that I have always known, my parents, adoptive parents, were always honest with me about being adopted.  Being adopted brings with it a whole range of issues, and none bigger than feelings or doubts of significance and love.

You go through life wondering why you were given up, and there may be some legitimate reason, but you just can’t help feeling at some point unloved, unwanted. You go through life with issues of significance because you don’t really have a history, you look in a mirror and you see a face that you don’t really know, you may as well be looking at a picture in a magazine, because you know as much about the face in the mirror as you do about the face in the magazine. They are both kind of just there without any history, any connection, any real significance at all.  Issues of significance and love were certainly real for me as I grew up.

Today I would like to share with you about where I found my significance and love, where my basic needs are meet. Just before I do that, let me ask you a question. Do you know how you can tell when you are significant or loved by another?

You can tell when you are significant to another person by the way that they treat you after you have let them down in some way, or hurt them.  If, after you have hurt them, they still want to relate to you in some way, than you are significant to that person.

We can tell whether we are significant or loved by another by the way they treat us after we have done something that we know that we shouldn’t have. True

As I said before, I want to tell you about where I find my significance and love, where my basic needs are met and why.  Like everyone, even you, my significance, my need for love is met outside of my self, and I find it in and through the person of Jesus Christ.

Now I don’t know what you think about Jesus, but there are some thing, some facts about this person Jesus Christ that  you should know about.

Firstly, Jesus was a real person who existed over 2000 years ago, it’s a fact, and history tells us that. If don’t believe that than you would have a hard time believing anything that history tells us. You can’t believe that Elvis Presley was the king of rock and roll if you don’t believe that Jesus existed, because there is more historical evidence for Jesus that there is for Elvis.

Secondly, this one person Jesus Christ has undoubtedly been the most influential person in the history of this world. That also is true. But they are not the reasons that I find my significance and love, my basic needs, in and through this person Jesus Christ.

The reason my basic needs are met in and through this person Jesus Christ is because of what God has done for me through Jesus.

It is in the Bible, which is simply God’s way of communicating with us and that makes sense when you think about it. If you were God and you wanted communicate to this world, you would do it in a way that was easy for everyone to understand.

What better way than in our own words, words that could be put together and then taken from one place to another? The Bible is a collection of God’s words to us. It’s there that I find out just how significant and loved I am. The Bible tells us a lot about God, a lot about us, and a lot about just how God thinks and feels about us.

God by nature is perfect; we on the other hand are less than perfect. The word that the Bible uses to describe our lack of perfection is the word sin. I am sure you have heard of it. Simply, sin means doing what we want instead of what God wants, and as a result we end up hurting God, or tuning away from God, or as the Bible puts it, we fall short of God’s standard.

Romans 3:23  All of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

All of us have sinned, have done our own thing, have turned our back on God and what he wants and have done what we wanted. This results in us destroying our lives, we do all sorts of things when we do what we want instead of what God wants. We lie, we cheat, we hurt others, just to name a few.

But knowing that I am less than perfect is not the thing that gives me my significance. It’s what God has done about my sin, it’s the way that God has treated me despite the way that I have treated him.

When we read on in the Bible we read these words in Romans 3:23  All of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. 24 But God treats us much better than we deserve, and because of Christ Jesus, he freely accepts us and sets us free from our sins.

If you remember I said you can tell just how significant you are to another person by the way that they treat you after you done something that you shouldn’t. The Bible tells us, tells me that despite the way I have treated God, he has treated me much better that I deserve.

God has every right to wipe me out, but he has chosen not to. Rather than make us pay for the way we treat him, God has decided to pay for our wrong doing. The Bible also says in  Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

You see, God, though the Bible tells me that on one hand I have let Him down, I have broken His law, I have sinned and the penalty for that is death, yet on the other hand the Bible also tells me that God, because of the way that he feels about me will forgive me and give me life and pay the death part, the penalty himself, which is where Jesus Christ comes in.

Jesus is God’s Son sent to pay our penalty. That’s how significant I am to God, I am so important to God that he would give up his own Son for me, but not only for me but for all of us as well.

John 3:16-17 God loved the people of this world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him will have eternal life and never really die. 17 God did not send his Son into the world to condemn its people. He sent him to save them!

1 John 4:9-10 God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

God was motivated to send Jesus for me by his love for me, and he did it even when I did not love him. Now that is love. That’s the reason that I find significance and love in Jesus, because Jesus represents God’s love for me. I am significant because of Jesus, I am loved because of Jesus.

Finding my significance and love in and through Jesus Christ means that they will never be taken away from me, they are not dependent on anyone or anything, they are dependent only on God, and God will never fail me or let me down or ever stop loving me.

Significance and love -  you will search for it, some people spend their whole lives searching for love and significance, going from job to job, from relationship to relationship and never finding it.

My search for significance and love, for my basic needs, came to an end when I met Jesus. Your search can end today, all we have to do is accept the life that Jesus offers.  Jesus said “I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.” Jesus offers us life, life in all its fullness.

Let me encourage you, even challenge you to find out more about Jesus and commit your life to Him, you could not make a better decision. You can find out how to do this here.

- Pastor Ian