Men Standing Together In Australia - Christ Our Captain
An update from Riley Spring, Lead Pastor of Sovereign Grace Church Parramatta and National Leader for SGC Australia…
We are so thankful to God for the amazing time we had recently at our first ever SG Australia Men’s Conference with our dear friend Eric Turbedsky serving us. It was a special time as the men of our churches gathered together united in our devotion to Christ.
Earlier in the year we had an awesome Women’s Conference which was really well attended, but we have more women than men and so we assumed our men’s conference would have far less men attend. Instead, we had more men come! So much so that we were only just able to fit into our ministry centre. But that added to the fun as we squished in and made it work. I think there was a collective sense of brotherhood and joy to be gathering as men of God.
We ate together, played dumb fun games together, sang hearty, manly songs together and sat under God’s word together. Our theme was “Christ Our Captain”, where we wanted to have our men see that Christ is not just our saviour but also our captain and Lord who gives us our marching orders for life.
Eric preached three powerful messages from this theme, three marching orders from Christ our Captain: Love, Fight, Rest! These messages resonated with the guys and helped clarify their life, particularly around Christ’s call to love his people, the church.
On this idea Spurgeon remarked in his last ever sermon:
Depend upon it, you will either serve Satan or Christ, either self or the Saviour. You will find sin, self, Satan, and the world to be hard masters; but if you wear the livery of Christ, you will find him so meek and lowly of heart that you will find rest unto your souls. He is the most magnanimous of captains. There never was his like among the choicest of princes. He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle. When the wind blows cold he always takes the bleak side of the hill. The heaviest end of the cross lies ever on his shoulders. If he bids us carry a burden, he carries it also. If there is anything that is gracious, generous, kind, and tender, yea lavish and superabundant in love, you always find it in him. These forty years and more have I served him, blessed be his name! and I have had nothing but love from him. I would be glad to continue yet another forty years in the same dear service here below if so it pleased him. His service is life, peace, joy. Oh, that you would enter on it at once! God help you to enlist under the banner of Jesus even this day! Amen
As Pastors, we were so pleased to see the level of enthusiasm and devotion of the men of our churches. If you want to see a video slideshow of the event, please click here!!
A big thank you to all those who helped make this happen, especially Sovereign Grace Church of Orange for releasing Eric to come and serve us so well.
We hope that God will use events like this to help us stand on His Word, resist the cultural downgrade of masculinity, and build Godly men for the future. Our plan is to do this again every two years. I am already excited for 2026!
‘Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
1 Corinthians 16:13
