What are you putting away as you tidy Christmas up?

Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits – who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

Psalm 103:1-5

Phew, it’s over. Presents given and received. Gifts unwrapped. Turkey cooked, eaten and remains frozen for the inevitable turkey curry, turkey fricassee, turkey … Christmas has been well and truly done, and wasn’t it great? Carol singing, Christmas events and services, Christmas morning – all opportunities to share our faith and tell others about Jesus.

Now the new year is upon us, it is nearly 12th night, and time for the Christmas decorations to be carefully boxed up and stored until next year. Easter eggs will be appearing in the shops in the coming days. For some the credit card bill will drop through the letterbox with the cost of Christmas in cold black and white, for others it is time to start saving for next Christmas. All too easily we move from Christmas to the next thing on our calendar.

The Psalmist, David, knew the danger of moving on too quickly, for him he could see the risk of forgetting what was important. He cried out “Praise the Lord O my soul and forget not all his benefits.” He recognised the agency of God in his every day life, it is God who forgives his sins – and David knew he had many to be forgiven. It is God who heals all his diseases. It is God who redeems his life and crowns him with love and compassion.

As I reflect on those words I wonder how we would write them today? If we are honest we might admit that all too often it is the therapist or counsellor who helps us live with our compromised lives; it is the NHS who heals all our diseases; it is our hard work that satisfies our desires with good things. In short, we rely on almost anybody other than God.

Now of course there is nothing wrong with therapy and counselling, with the excellent NHS or indeed with hard work. But there is a lot wrong in a life that forgets God and all his benefits and that substitutes reliance on those things for reliance on God.

So as the year turns and Christmas is put away, why not take a check and consider what else you are putting away, what you put away as you leave the building where your church meets on Sundays, and ensure that with David you can say those marvellous words from Psalm 103.

What is your Advent resolution?

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.

Isaiah 9:6-7

Advent is upon us. The start of the church year. A time of reflection. A season to anticipate the coming of the saviour into the world – the return of Christ who will bring all things to completion.

Or at least it ought to be, but as the world heads into Advent what is going through our minds? For some it will be fear based on the actions of ISIL/ISIS in Europe recently. For others it is the frenetic activity required to prepare at work for the Christmas break. For others its the organisation of Christmas itself, perhaps coping with the ever increasing excitement of children around them. For some it will be sadness at the memory of loved ones no longer around to celebrate Christmas with them. So many pressures and thoughts competing for our attention!

Yet in the passage in Isaiah we find some words that we could meditate on to help us to recenter and to find hope in Christ. There are amazing promises in the short paragraph. For example, to us, yes us, a child is born, a son is given. To us? Who are we for such a gift? What love the Father has for us, what grace. And not just for us because of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. Whatever is going on around us the truth is that Christ’s peace is extending across humanity and across his creation.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It wasn’t some bit of wishful thinking, some acknowledgement that God should be allowed to get on with what he was doing. It was a prayer that committed the one praying it to be the hands and feet that saw that kingdom come, to see God’s will being done. To make that happen Jesus left us with the counsellor, the Holy Spirit, who empowers and enlightens us, who enables us to be the answer to the prayer that we pray.

So Advent is a time when we can meditate on the wonderful truths of Jesus and all that God has done for us. As the church year starts we can make our “new year” resolutions, resolutions to be the answer to the prayer that we pray daily to see God’s kingdom come and his will be done, to be people of peace filled with God’s Spirit bringing light and life to those we encounter, introducing them to the God who gave everything for us and for them.

Chasing that next dream

Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself.
Matthew 6:34

My cousin runs East of Scotland Microlights and when we holidayed in Edinburgh last October he finally persuaded me to go for a flight with him. To my amazement I found I thoroughly enjoyed the flight – it was like being on a motorbike but with no trees, cars or safety barriers to hit! The decision was made, I have to learn to fly.

With a bit of work I sorted out three weeks of leave in the spring and set about getting a medical certificate from my GP. A medical certificate should have been easy, but it seems not to have been. So I’ve been involved in a frustrating 2 month multi-visit discussion as we work through various issues.

After the last visit I was despondent as without the medical I can’t solo, and if I can’t solo then I can’t get my licence and I was on the verge of cancelling the whole trip. Then I had an email from my cousin’s wife. She emailed about those who pass their test, get a licence, buy into a microlight and then park it in the hanger waiting for the perfect weather to fly it, whilst it just sits there unused.

As I pondered this I realised that I was focussed on the destination, the licence, rather than the journey, learning to fly. I then remembered the words of Jesus quoted above. The process of learning to fly is part of the journey. On that journey I will get to spend three weeks with my cousin and his wife who so tragically lost his 21 year old daughter to suicide last year – there are fantastic opportunities to spend time with them, to simply be with them in their grief, and maybe to bring some of the goodness of God’s kingdom into their lives. Then, of course, there is the sheer fun of the lessons themselves.

It didn’t take much to realise that this lesson applies to so much more of life than this unique opportunity. Many of us live wishing or waiting for the better things of tomorrow. By being focussed on tomorrow, we fail to follow Jesus’ command to live in today. We rob God of some of what we can offer as our minds are elsewhere rather than here and now.

A focus on tomorrow leaves us living in disappointment and discontent and wishing we were elsewhere instead of enjoying where we are now. So let’s take a moment at the start of this month to commit to God that we will live in today, and enjoy the day that he has made, and leave tomorrow in his safe hands.

A vision for a bigger Lent …

As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem

Luke 9:51

Lent is upon us and this is the time of year when the Christian church stops and gives thought to the suffering of our saviour, Jesus. We take time out of our busy lives and contemplate his life and death. Some will have given something up for Lent thereby recalling Christ’s own 40 day fast in the desert at the beginning of his ministry. Lent culminates in the Easter weekend where we recall the torture and crucifixion of Jesus and then celebrate his resurrection.

With the strong focus on suffering, crucifixion and resurrection it is very easy to reduce Jesus’ resolution to set out for Jerusalem to a simple story of Jesus dying on the cross for my sins and being raised to life so that I might have eternal life. And yes, Lent and Easter are all about that, Jesus did die on the cross for our sins and in his resurrection we have the promise of our own resurrection – at least those of us who have surrendered our lives to him and asked him to be Lord of our lives.

Yet Lent and Easter are about so much more than our personal salvation. Jesus came to bring God’s kingdom rule back to this earth, a rule that humans rejected from the very start. In Genesis we find humans rejecting God’s rule and God no longer walking with them in the garden. In Acts we find Jesus giving his Spirit to his church and walking with us in every moment of our lives, no longer just in the cool of the evening. As we saw in our autumn series he empowered his church to proclaim and demonstrate his kingdom rule through healing the sick, casting out demons and raising the dead.

But to stop there would be to miss even wider truths of what Lent and Easter are about. As God’s kingdom rule is restored to this earth through what Jesus did, our world is turned upside down. Paul summarised this in a pithy statement in Galatians 3:28. Racial harmony is restored, there is no longer Jew nor Greek. Power relationships are restored, there is no longer slave nor free. Gender relationships are restored, there is no longer male nor female. Of course, God’s kingdom is here now but it won’t be fully here until Christ returns so sadly gender inequality continues, people are still enslaved and racial distrust continues even in this country.

During Lent we are going to think about an aspect of gender inequality and see what the Bible has to say about it. During April we will be bombarded with political messages ahead of May’s election and that will give us opportunity to engage with politicians to see positive change in our society. There are plenty of opportunities for us as God’s people to extend his kingdom rule, to play our part in restoring his creation to the beauty with which it was made.

Let us take Lent slowly this year and spend some time pondering the implications of Jesus setting out for Jerusalem and committing ourselves to resolutely extend his kingdom rule into our broken and needy world.

The best of intentions

Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unploughed ground, for it is time to seek the Lord
Hosea 10:12

One month into the new year and our resolutions and best intentions are probably already beginning to fall by the wayside as the pressures of day-to-day life take their toll on us. My own resolution to exercise instead of taking a lunch break every day failed in the first week of the year, although I have managed since then to get back on track!

Through Hosea God was speaking to a people whose hearts were not for the things of God, urging them back to him. As I was preparing for a recent evening sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, that famous passage about love, I was struck by a commentator who said that our emotions reveal our values and beliefs. As I pondered this I started to wonder what my emotions said of what I value and believe. What is my emotional response to people and situations – is it always a response of love that reflects their intrinsic worth in God’s eyes? Or do I find myself irritated or angry by something they have said or done? As I thought about it I realised that in some instances my responses were good, but with a moment of honesty I realised that I also had some poor responses. I wonder what you realise about yourself as you notice your emotional response to people and situations?

To put this in Hosea terms, when we find ourselves not responding in love it is an indicator of hard unploughed ground in our hearts. We cannot reap the fruit of unfailing love because there is hard unploughed ground. Yet the call is to break up the hard unploughed ground and to sow for ourselves righteousness, reaping the fruit of unfailing love.

Whatever your pledges were as you entered 2015, one thing God is asking of each of us is to break up the hard unploughed ground in our hearts – the selfishness, individualism, envy and so on. Ploughing is hard work and takes time, but God’s call is clear. Then we need to ask God to sow his love afresh in our hearts as we chose to put aside the things that harden our hearts so that he can grow his love in us. As we do this we will reap the fruit of unfailing love as our emotional response to people and situations changes, reflecting God’s love into the lives of others, bringing light into their lives, and introducing them to the God who loves them so very much.

Let us pledge to make 2015 the year when our hearts are ploughed and entirely yielded to God and his purposes so that we can reap the fruit of unfailing love as we seek him.

Got any spare change guvnor?

I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing
2 Samuel 24:24

During Calvary’s week of prayer in September this passage from 2 Samuel was brought to us. The context of the passage is that David was seeking to build an altar to the Lord on the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Araunah was quick to offer David his oxen for the burnt offering, his threshing sledges and ox yokes for the wood, and his threshing floor to build an altar on – all without charge. However David was resolute in his commitment that he wouldn’t offer God a sacrifice that cost him nothing.

Later that day, as we met for prayer again, somebody else felt they had a picture from God and they interpreted it as saying that we have a tendency to put him in a bag and chose whether to carry him into situations with us or to leave him outside to be picked up later.

The following morning two other scriptures were brought, all on the same theme. One from Malachi (1:13b) says “When you bring injured, crippled or diseased animals and offer them as sacrifices, should I accept them from your hands?” The other was from Amos 5:21-24.

As I reflect on these scriptures and the picture I notice a consistent theme through them. A challenge. A personal challenge but I suspect also a challenge to us all, both individually and as God’s people.

The challenge is simple – do we give God the best of what we have? For example, when we plan our day do we put time with God first? Do we give ourselves to prayer and the Bible when we are at our best, or do they have to fit in with everything else? When we give financially, do we give generously from what he has given us, or do we give from what is left over after everything else has been paid for? When we decide whether to get involved in the things that God is calling Calvary to do, do we give the best of our time or only get involved if we have spare time? When we meet people in need of an encounter with the Kingdom of God, do we only give them time if we aren’t in a rush or do we stop and put them first?

As I ponder those examples I realise how often God gets second best, the spare change of my life if you will. I realise afresh how often I short-change God, the God who gave everything for me. I find I’m brought back to my knees in repentance with a fresh determination to ask the Father to change my heart that I might better serve him and not my own needs, putting him and the call of his kingdom first in everything. I wonder, will you join me on my knees in that prayer?

Where you fix your gaze is where you end up going

Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came towards Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out ‘Lord, save me’

Matthew 14:29-30

Today is one of those rare days between storms, it’s not raining and the sun is shining. Recently however the winds topped 100mph in North Wales, trees in the park opposite my home lost their branches, and large parts of the United Kingdom either sat under flood waters or were at imminent risk of flooding. Two years ago ground water levels were so low that large areas of England had hosepipe bans, today the levels are so high that flooding is expected to continue long after the rain finally stops. Our television news has regularly featured people who were looking at the storms and were afraid.

This set me thinking, and I was reminded of Peter walking on water. His problem was that when he saw the wind he was afraid and began to sink. Let me illustrate why he began to sink with an explanation dear to my heart – an explanation from the world of motorcycling. Sometimes motorcyclists get a bit carried away with things and find themselves in a tight corner carrying a little too much speed to get round safely. When you are riding a motorcycle then there is a golden rule – where you look is where you go. So, if you find yourself in a corner going too fast to get round safely, looking at the corner will almost inevitably mean crashing. If, however, you force yourself to look at the exit of the corner then in all likelihood you will make it safely through the corner and on to the next bit of road.

So it was for Peter, when he looked at the wind he began to sink. Up until that point he had been walking on water because he had his eyes fixed on Jesus. As soon as he looked away toward the wind and the waves he began to be afraid and his fear overpowered him and faith evaporated leaving him with the desperate cry “Lord, save me.”

And so it is for us. Whether it is the wind and the rain, or perhaps financial worries or health concerns, or maybe despite our best efforts things are not working out as we hoped in some area of our lives, the answer in all these situations is to determine to look away from the problem and fix our eyes upon Jesus. So why not use the storms we see outside as a reminder, and each time the wind blows or the rain falls take a moment to say “Lord, I trust in you.”