Pastor Bob Engwicht graduated from Bible College in December 1974. The following year, alongside his wife Naomi, he founded a church in Narrabeen, focusing on reaching out to young people in the local community.
Bob’s dedication to assisting troubled and hurting youth became the passion for his life. After eight years in Sydney, Bob and Naomi returned to his birth state of Queensland, where they began working with over 150 at risk youth, offering accommodation and a safe haven.
In 1992, Bob and Naomi pioneered Twin Rivers Church in Eagleby, an area marked by low socioeconomic conditions, numerous youth challenges, and a high population of single mothers in housing commission homes.
Twin Rivers Church is situated on 5 acres, encompassing a church and a care ministry. The ministry includes a food outlet, a café, a commercial kitchen preparing food for the homeless, as well as traineeships and a ‘work for your destiny’ program, formerly known as ‘work for the dole.’
Bob has also played diverse roles in the local community, including serving as the President of the Beenleigh Chamber of Commerce and contributing to both the local community and business sector.
Recently, Bob shared a special 5-minute sermon with us during Sunday Morning Together, highlighting his own incredible testimony of God’s goodness, and the importance of living life in the spirit. Read Bob’s full message below:
‘Romans 8:28 says, we know that all things work for good for those who love God and are called according to his purposes. It’s an amazing verse, and it’s one that we can look at and grab a hold of. But we need to read it in the context of where it comes from.
As you read through Romans 8 particularly, you get that picture that it’s all put together there in a package. It’s not a verse on its own. Even the verse that follows it, verse 29, says for those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His son. We see that God has predestined us, and we understand that God is at work in our lives.
He called us and He loves us intimately. And when we look at Romans 8, it talks about how God wants to bring about the law of the spirit of life. It talks about the law of sin and death, and living according to the flesh only brings death and cannot accomplish what God wants to in our lives.
But when we’re in touch with God and God has come into our lives and changed us, that’s the big key. Romans 3:23 and Romans 6:23 talks about the wages of sin being death, but the gift of God is eternal life. And the life that comes is through the spirit and through God’s Holy Spirit coming to dwell in us.
Romans 8:11 is a favourite of mine as well. It talks about God raising Jesus from the dead, and that same resurrection life will come into us. He will raise us to life, and we can live our lives through the Spirit of God living within us and through us.
There is a need to understand that God is for us, and that we are now walking and living in the spirit rather than according to the flesh. If we only remain motivated by our own flesh and what benefits us and not God, then it may not be the case that all things work together for good.
Because if we’re still living our life out of the flesh, the life of the flesh produces death. But where there’s life in the spirit and we’re living in that, knowing God’s spirit directing us and growing us, it means that we can say that all things work together for good.
It doesn’t mean that they’re always pleasant, but it’s always good that God brings out of it. In Romans 8:12-13 it says so then beloved ones, the flesh has no claims on us at all, and we have no further obligations to live in obedience to it. When you live controlled by the flesh, you’re about to die. But if the life of the spirit puts to death the corrupt ways of the flesh, we then taste His abundant life.
As we follow God, we don’t experience death, we experience life. Not only life, but life in its abundance, which is one of the promises that Jesus gave when He was on earth. Verses 14 to 15 says, the mature children of God are those most motivated by the impulses of the Holy Spirit who did not receive the spirit of religious duty.
A number of times I’ve talked to Christians who talk about that they don’t feel they’re good enough, and need to discover God’s great blessing on their lives.
Recently, I had a mower accident where I rolled my ride-on mower and went over a half metre embankment. It landed on top of me, and I was pinned under this mower and I thought I was going to die. My wife had gone out, but she had this impulse to come home and found me after half an hour.
I remember lying under this mower, thinking God how can you work this together for good? I thought I was going to die, but God spoke to my wife and she came home because she felt she needed to come home, and she found me.
While she rang the ambulance and the fire brigade, she was holding the mower up with a crowbar so I could keep breathing because I couldn’t breathe. As I discovered later on, I had 14 broken ribs. But while she was holding it up before the fire brigade and ambulance arrived, she heard a pop in her back.
After three days it got so painful they X-rayed and discovered her whole left kidney was full of cancer. And so in the last three months, not only did I have the roll over, she’s been in and had the kidney removed.
The doctors were amazed that she had no symptoms. But given even a few weeks or months, the cancer would have started to spread through the rest of her body. And it was then I realised all things do work together for good.
I said to the doctor, I’m really glad I rolled the mower, and he said, I wouldn’t go that far! I said I would, because now our life together has been extended. So let me pray for you.
Lord God, thank you for the listeners of Vision Radio. Thank you for the message of hope that comes out. Thank you, Lord that all things do work together for good. And if people are struggling with situations and difficulties in their lives, I pray that You would bring healing and release. And Lord, bring that hope that everything will work together for good to those that love God and are called according to his purposes. Amen.’
Listen to Bob’s full message below:
