Welcome
Jonathan and Helen Gould would like to extend a warm welcome to you from our church fellowship.
Vineyard Brisbane West is a growing community of followers of Jesus living in the Western Suburbs of Brisbane and Ipswich who love worshipping God and doing the things that Jesus did.
Join us on Sunday for our main service at 9:30am in Forge Close, SUMNER just off the Centenary Highway.
Our constant desire is to see God’s Kingdom break into lives, as his will is done on earth as it is in heaven. We are ordinary people with an extra-ordinary God that together we want to share with our world.
Join us for our current teaching series APOCALYPSE NOW and NOT YET, as we anchor ourselves in the ‘main and the plain’ of God’s word teaching on apocalyptic literature and the book of Revelation, helping our community stand strong in Jesus’ victory in the face of winds of chaos blowing through the nations. We are centring our vision on the Lamb of God, knowing that what we hope for shapes what we live for.
“Revelation is not about the antichrist, but about the living Christ. It is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world. That is, like every other New Testament book, Revelation is about Jesus Christ—“A revelation of Jesus Christ” (Rev 1:1)— and about following him in obedience and love.
If anyone asks, ‘Why read the Apocalypse?’, the unhesitating answer must be, ‘To know Christ better.’”
Here is the overarching narrative theology that frames this series: Our conviction is that the unifying message of the Bible is about Jesus the Messiah (Christ), the anointed King who establishes the Kingdom of God, renewing all things so that our loving creator God – Father, Son and Spirit can dwell in fullness with renewed humanity.
The Kingdom arrived, or was inaugurated, through Jesus’ proclamation, demonstration and His commissioning of the church to teach and practice the things He taught his disciples. Our calling is to be faithful witnesses, and make disciples (to the ends of the earth) who do the things that Jesus taught us, living the future today, in the sure and certain hope of His imminent return bringing with him the fullness, or consummation, of His Kingdom reign.
In this overlapping time between this age and the age to come, we live in the tension of the “the already and the not yet” of the Kingdom, postured to partner with God to see the breakthrough of “the presence of the future”. Jesus has already been revealed or apocalypsed, is now being revealed, and has not yet been fully revealed as King.
Jesus is victoriously enthroned as King today, seated above the dark powers that blind the minds of the unsaved and oppose us, obscuring the truth of who God is and who we are. We must resist our true spiritual enemy in this cosmic battle and not fight against flesh and blood, instead we are to love and pray for people who stand against us.
The book of Revelation (The Apocalypse) was written as a letter to the 1st century church (in the first instance) with a pastoral-prophetic purpose, to bring challenge and comfort in the face of immorality, idolatry, suffering, persecution and death. It is Jewish apocalyptic literature that speaks in the symbols and categories of dream language, moving to a rhythm of a poetic-politic pendulum.
The Day of the Lord and His Judgement (Justice = fix things or put all things right) has arrived in the Cross and Resurrection for the Church, those faithful to the new covenant who gladly bow the knee to the Lamb that was slain, worshipping Jesus as King and allowing the Holy Spirit to transform us into His likeness, and yet we look with hope to the End and our full salvation, the final judgement of Evil and Empire, that last day when we will be raised by Him, praying Come Lord Jesus.
What we hope for shapes what we live for. If our hope and identity falls short of our high calling to be raised up as Royal Priests – Kings and Queens of the new creation – fashioned in the likeness of the Lamb, then we miss the opportunity to reflect the true image of our Father God in this life. The whole of creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed, literally apocalypsed!
Revelation 5:9-10 The Message
Slain! Paying in blood, you bought men and women,
Bought them back from all over the earth,
Bought them back for God.
Then you made them a Kingdom, Priests for our God,
Priest-kings to rule over the earth.
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