The Shower

Feb 29, 2024

Today’s household object is the shower and our Bible passage is Psalm 51:1-7.
Just as toilets flush away our urine and faeces, so the shower is the quickest way to wash ourselves and keep our bodies clean. Psalm 51 reminds us forcefully of our need for cleansing when we have sinned; David – the king of Israel who had sinned greatly in committing adultery with Bathsheba and conniving to have her husband killed – longs for God’s cleansing; in the Message version, we read, ‘Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean, scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.’ (Ps 51:7) Sometimes, our showers may be swift; on other occasions, we may have to scrub the dirt away!
Easter is the only solution to the human condition of sin. It offers us hope that we can be cleansed and given a fresh start. Some people shower at the start of the day, wanting to start the day well; this is a reminder, perhaps, that each day can begin with prayer. Others shower at the end of the day, wanting to finish well; a reminder that we can pray at all times and need God’s cleansing always. Jesus is the Living Water who can make us clean and whole.

Waiting For God

Feb 29, 2024

“Wait for the Lord. Be strong and take heart, and wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:14)
“It’s certain that waiting’s the most bitter lesson a believing heart has to learn.” (Michael Card, ‘Maranatha’)
Waiting is a topic on my ‘top ten’ list of important life lessons; it’s probably number 1 in my chart of most hated things. Like many people, I have a natural tendency to impatience, and waiting isn’t something I find easy.
Waiting for God is hard, because it leaves us frequently frustrated, forlorn and feeling forgotten. God speaks – what heady days those are! He makes promises to us – how we embrace these with fervour and passion! But then comes that uncomfortable bump into reality, when nothing seems to change and we are left wondering if we have heart aright and what is going on.
It’s not helped by turning a page or two in the Bible and seeing their promises fulfilled… while failing to compute the timescales involved. Because let’s face it, a story about every incident in the life of Abraham’s 25 years of waiting for his son to be born would hardly make riveting reading, going something like this:
“Got up. Had breakfast. Did some business deals. Had lunch. Walked for a bit asking God when my son and heir will be born. Had a row with Sarah. Had dinner. Went to bed.”
Frustrated is the first emotion I feel at God’s delays. Why promise me something and then delay? Why tell me something and then make me wait? Frustration leaves me feeling thwarted. How can I settle into the routine, into the mundane, when You’ve shown me so much more? Why take me on a rollercoaster ride when You know I detest them?!
Then I feel forlorn, struggling to believe ‘the dream’ will ever come true. It’s too good to be true. I don’t deserve it to be true. Pragmatism coupled with my natural pessimism start to colour the picture, and instead of the vibrant colours of faith, I’m left with a drab monochrome.
From there it’s a short step to feeling forgotten, forsaken, abandoned even. “God doesn’t really care.” It’s hard to maintain faith in that stage, or at least to maintain faith in the God who is (loving, kind, faithful, merciful, gracious, benevolent). A failure to understand God (which rationally I know is perfectly normal and inevitable since He is omniscient and I am not) quickly gets mutated into (at best) feeling forgotten by Him and at worst into a resentment of Him akin to the child’s petulance at having to wait a full year for its next birthday the day after basking in the glory of a pile of presents! This is the ‘moody, sad and very grumpy’ stage of faith which is not pleasant to experience or to witness.
So what is to be done in these waiting periods which, if I’m honest, seem to comprise a large percentage of my life?
Two more ‘Fs’ help me as I wait: faith and formation. Faith is having confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1) It’s not about having it all yet or seeing it all now, as the rest of that chapter points out in relentless example after relentless example, dismantling any false belief in the instantaneous nature of God’s timing. Faith is how we live. It’s not an optional extra. It’s the core ingredient in our relationship with an invisible God. Faith means we believe God over and above what we see or how we feel. “It doesn’t matter what I see,” Aaron Shust sings (‘Deliver Me’)
Formation – well, this is what God is doing in the times when it seems like He’s doing nothing. He is forming us. He is shaping us into the image of Christ. (2 Cor 3:18, Rom 8:29) He is refining us, testing us, forging us and forming us into His image. He’s doing whatever is necessary to make His plans succeed. He’s knocking the youthful arrogance out of Joseph through the trials of betrayal and injustice. He’s changing the hot-headed murderer Moses into a fearless, bold leader who relies on God and not on his ‘fortuitous’ upbringing… He’s doing plenty of things that are character-based when all we long for are action films!
If you are currently waiting in a state of forlorn frustration, tempted to forge your own way ahead, learn from the mistakes of others and stop. Self-help in these instances won’t cut it. Learn to wait for the Lord. It takes strength to wait. But waiting for Him to do the impossible is never a waste of time.

The Toilet

Feb 29, 2024

Today’s household object is the toilet and our Bible passage is John 1:29-33.

The modern toilet is taken for granted by most of us. John Harington invented the first flushing toilet in Elizabethan times and Josiah George Jennings developed the prototype with Thomas Crapper making the first commercial toilets. The toilet flushes all our urine and faeces away into sewers. I remember watching a children’s programme with ‘Auntie Mabel’ years ago with my son which explored what happens after we flush the toilet, and it was fascinating, even if it’s not something we really like to think about much!

In the same way, we prefer not to think about sin. We prefer to hide our failures and focus on the positive things we do, without understanding that our sinful nature separates us from God and is at the heart of all evil in the world. The good news is that Easter is the time when we see that God has dealt with sin once and for all on the cross. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. (John 1:29) Because of Christ’s sacrifice for sin, we can know that our sins have been washed away; we can be forgiven and clean. (1 John 1:9)

Redeeming The Time

Feb 26, 2024

Our Bible reading for today is Isaiah 38:1-8 and our household object is the clock.
In the Bible passage today, we read of Hezekiah who prayed for an extension to his life when he was sick and was granted this with a sign, the miracle of the sun turning back on the dial ten steps. Clocks are there to mark time for us, and as the poem ‘Time’s Races’ by Revd Henry Twells remarks, the older we get, the more time seems to fly! Paul tells us to ‘redeem the time’, to ‘make the most of every opportunity’ (Eph 5:16), and this reminds us that we all have a limited amount of time on earth and need to use this wisely.
Ps 90:2 reminds us that God does not need time; He is eternal. (‘From everlasting to everlasting, You are God.’) ‘As we see the seconds, minutes and hours tick away, they connect us to the divine creator, and count down earthly time at the end of which we shall be called to eternal, resurrection life, brought and bought by Jesus Christ who crossed the boundaries of time to turn the clock back on sin and offer us a new, eternal future of faith, hope and love.’ (‘At Home In Lent’, Gordon Giles, P 57)

According To Your Faith

Feb 25, 2024

Tonight we looked at the subject of living by faith since it is according to our faith that so much happens in the spiritual life (see Matthew 9:29-30). Faith is what is needed to please God (Heb 11:6); it is a core ingredient to the spiritual life which cannot ever be omitted. To do the works God requires means we have to believe in the One He has sent (John 6:29); we have to be like Abraham who is our model in terms of faith (‘he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.’ Gen 15:5)

Hebrews 11:1 gives us our definition of faith and the rest of the chapter lists many people as examples of how to live by faith. In the New Testament, many miracles involved people whose faith was commended by Jesus: not only the two blind men who were healed by Jesus but  also the paralysed men whose friends brought him through the roof (Luke 5:20), the centurion whose servant was ill (Luke 7:9-10), the woman who reached out to be healed (Luke 8:48) and the blind man who wanted to see (Luke 18:42). Conversely, where there was little faith, Jesus did not do many miracles (Luke 18:8), a sobering reminder of the importance of faith.

Faith is often tested by God, and there is frequently a period of waiting between God’s promises and their fulfilment, as Abraham and Sarah remind us. Joseph too had to wait to see his youthful dreams fulfilled and suffered much in the intervening years. Faith grows in the soil of desperate situations where we learn to wait and to trust in God. We need to belong to those who do not shrink back but who have faith and are saved (Heb 10:39); we need to press forward and stay with God, no matter what.

Friend of God

Feb 25, 2024

This morning Dave spoke from John 15:9-17, where Jesus spoke to His disciples about being more than servants, about being friends. All of us need friends; we need to know we are important to someone else and that we are loved.
Often, we need self-acceptance first, for we can think that others would not wish to know us or be friends with us if they truly knew us. God knows everything about us; He knew us before we were even born, and He has chosen us to be His friends.
Jesus has chosen us not for what we can do or even what we might do! He has not chosen us simply to ‘make up the numbers’ or because He was forced to. He has chosen us because He loves us and wants to be friends with us.
Friends have ready access to each other: we don’t gaze from afar but are called to be close to Jesus. We are called to intimacy and to be with Jesus at all times, no matter what. In these verses He reminds us that He trusts us and works for us, forgives us and opens the gates of heaven to us.
Friendship with Jesus is not exclusive to us, however. He wants others to be His friend too and for us to be the means to them meeting Him. He is the best friend anyone could ever have. Let’s be friends with Him and introduce our friends to Him too!