'The Vine' and more

Yesterday was a great day! It started with a great service at Church, which included a particularly challenging sermon. We were looking at the first half of Romans 6, where Paul talks about the fact that our sin nature has died and in Christ we have a new nature that can say no to sin. Matt, the preacher, used a particularly good illustration to explain why this doesn't always seem to ring true in our lives. He compared the sin nature to a vine (not to be confused with the vine of John 15) that he had growing on his Church building back in the US. One of the jobs of keeping the yard clean was to rip down these vines that grew up the side of the building. They were quite strong though and it was hard to rip them off the wall, so what you had to do was cut it off at the roots and leave it for a while to die and then after waiting many weeks, the vine would be weak enough to rip off.
Likewise, our sin can be like that. We have died to sin, the old body was crucified with Christ - it has been cut off at the root. But its still there, but slowly losing its grip on our life. We need to continue to trust in the power of Christ, that is given us when we choose to follow Him, rather than our own strength, to rip that vine off the wall. And one day, the vine will drop off altogether, when we meet Christ face to face.

The day then continued in its awesome ways, as a group of us went to the beach. It took us an hour to get there (unlike the 5 minutes or so it used to take in Sydney), but it was well worth it. I hadn't seen the ocean since I arrived in Japan, so it was refreshing to swim, to feel the sand between my toes, enjoy the sea breeze. We had a lot of fun just hanging out.
When we left, we went to Nagoya station and got some Cold Stone (or Cold Rock for my Australian readers) and the girls working there sung for us as they made the ice cream. Then we all got a photo with them. They all went out back to get their cameras to get a photo for themselves too haha. All in all a fun day!