A memorial service for Mr. Jack Hallatt will be held at Riverside Baptist Church on Monday, August 18th at 3:00 PM. Jack passed away Thursday, August 14th, at the age of 101. Jack’s obituary can be seen here.
Please join us in this celebration of his life, and if possible please bring a dish for a meal to be held following the service.
Thanks to everyone who attended and especially to those who prepared and served the meal.
This is the message that I shared yesterday:
A Faith that Works, Galatians 2:20
If you ask most people who knew Jack Hallatt to describe him they would say something like “he was a good man”, “he was a kind man”, “he was a loving man, “or he was a patient man”. As a result, it would be forgivable for us to think that somehow Jack was better than most people. But, if we were to ask Jack about this he would direct our attention away from himself, and tell us that whatever good he had was a direct product of his relationship with Christ. I know this because it was something that we sometimes talked about. See, most of us only knew Jack after he had experienced the presence of Christ in his life for many years. Very few, if any of us, have any knowledge of Jack apart from his relationship with Jesus. I believe that there is one Scripture verse that describes Jack’s experience very well, that verse is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians chapter 2, verse 20:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20, ESV)
As this verse says, Jack was crucified with Christ. Jack had come to Christ and experienced a great exchange. Jack came with his sin, his foibles, his anger, his impatience, and exchanged it for Christ’s righteousness, and received His love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness. In other words, what we saw in Jack was the fruit of Christ’s Spirit exhibited in Jack’s life. The life that Jack lived in the flesh was a life characterized by his abiding faith in the Son of God. As such, Jack was a model for us on how to live out our faith, a model on faith in action. His was not just a “Sunday go-to-meeting” faith, it was a day-by-day, everyday, in weakness and in strength, in joy as well as in adversity, kind of faith. It was a faith that endured, a faith that worked, the only kind of faith that really matters.
If Jack was able to talk with us today, he would tell us to enter into that same faith. Not only did Jack experience the daily benefits of that kind of faith while here among us, he is now experiencing the ultimate and eternal fulfillment of that faith. He would tell us to quit trying to live our lives according to our terms, and to be crucified with Christ. To allow Christ, the One who loved us enough to suffer and die for us, to take control of our lives, direct it into His path, and allow Him to develop His fruit in us. Just as it was true of Jack, let it also be true of us that we can say:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.