My grandchildren are involved in a musical theatre and dance class and are learning songs from ‘Matilda the Musical’ as part of this. ‘Matilda the Muscal’ is a show based on the Roald Dahl story of a little girl who overcomes the constraints of a vicious headteacher to flourish and grow. There’s a strong emphasis in the show on Matilda’s resourcefulness and intelligence and on the need to challenge injustice:

‘Even if you’re little, you can do a lot,/ You mustn’t let a little thing like ‘little’ stop you’ goes one song (‘Naughty’). The song rails against what it perceives as fatalism in stories (citing the nursery rhyme ‘Jack and Jill’, the tragedy ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and the fairytale ‘Cinderella’) as examples of this attitude which is deplorable. The song urges resistance: ‘Just because you find that life’s no fair/ It doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it/ If you always take it on the chin and wear it/ Nothing will change.’

I understand the tenor of the song and there is indeed a place for defiance and a refusal to accept injustice. Much change over the centuries has come as people, including Christians, have spoken out and campaigned against evil; the motivation for social justice and change has often come from Christians who know God’s ways over the world’s ways. But I still find elements of the song disquieting, particularly the line ‘Nobody else is gonna put it right for me/ Nobody but me is going to change my story!’

This is where I part company with the song, where I cannot agree with the lyrics. Because the Gospel story tells us that this is a lie. Only God can ultimately change our story. Moses had to speak up for justice to Pharaoh, but it was God who struck Egypt with plagues and parted the Red Sea to allow His people to move into freedom. Only God could save us from our sin by stepping into our world and changing us and the world through His Son, Jesus.

Resistance and a passion for justice are definitely part of the Gospel message. But the notion that it’s all down to us, that we are the only ones who can change our story, is not true. Christianity is the story of God changing our story and doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Self-help won’t get us to heaven. Only Jesus can do that for us.

Basing our lives on the promises of God – which are ‘Yes’ and ‘Amen in Christ Jesus (2 Cor 1:20) – is the only way we can really live according to God’s ways. Tonight we looked at five promises of God found in Psalm 119:

God’s Unfailing Love & Salvation

‘May Your unfailing love come to me, Lord, Your salvation, according to Your promise.’ (Ps 119:41)

God’s unfailing love brings salvation to us and enables us to stand firm. ‘Salvation’ means to be rescued from the consequences of sin and disobedience and to be led into a relationship of unfailing love, where God is our heavenly Father who loves to give us good gifts. (James 1:17)

God’s Grace

‘I have sought your face with all my heart; be gracious to me according to Your promise.’ (Ps 119:58)

God’s grace, His unearned favour, is the foundation of His dealings with us (see Eph 2:8-9). We cannot manage on our own; our righteousness is as filthy rags. (Is 64:6) We need grace and mercy; we need God to treat us not as our sins deserve. (Ps 103:10)

God’s Sustaining Power

‘Sustain me, my God, according to Your promise, and I will live; do not let my hopes be dashed.’ (Ps 119:116)

To be sustained means to receive the help, support and strength we need to live; this verse connects it also to hope. Hope is probably the thing that we need most on a daily basis. If we have no hope, no expectation that God will do anything, then we will soon become depressed and despondent. Without hope and the expectation that God is involved in our daily lives, there really is no point to life. But the Bible paints a very different picture of life with God. The Message version talks of there not being ‘enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!’ (Rom 5:5, The Message) This is a picture of hope, a roomful of containers into which God pours His blessings and gifts, rather like those six massive jars filled with water which Jesus turned into wine at the wedding at Cana. (John 2:6-10)

God’s Preservation

‘Preserve my life according to Your promise.’ (Ps 119:154)

David is in awe of God’s majesty and wonders ‘what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?’ (Ps 8:4) The Bible teaches, right from the start of creation, that humanity is special, made in God’s image, made to be in relationship with God. Because of this, whatever our needs, whatever troubles we face in life, we can ask God to defend our cause and redeem us and preserve our lives.

God’s Deliverance

‘May my supplication come before You; deliver me according to Your promise.’ (Ps 119:170)

Deliverance is very similar to preservation. The psalmist asks for God to deliver him, to rescue him, to help him according to His promise. Like all the other prayers, it presupposes that God hears and answers prayer because He cares about us.

How can we expect God to behave towards us, based on His word?

We can expect God to save us, to show love towards us and to be gracious to us.

We can expect God to sustain us, preserve our lives and deliver us from evil.

Our hope in these things is not based on our goodness or our merit. We put our hope in God and pray that every promise He has made to us in Christ Jesus will be fulfilled, according to His faithfulness. Amen.

Filters in photography are sheets of glass or resin which are attached to the lens of the camera. They can be very useful for capturing scenery in extremely difficult lighting conditions; they can enhance colours and reduce reflections, and they can simply protect lenses. Filters are widely used in photography and cinematography. Some photographers only use filters in rare situations, while others rely on filters for their everyday work. Nowadays, lens filters are often used to modify the light before it enters the lens. You may see on some landscape photographs the boast that ‘no filters were used’, meaning that the photograph captures the scene exactly as it was! As I understand it, filters alter what we see. They change what we see; they manipulate what we see.

We live in a filtered world, whether we are aware of this or not. We are born sinful; our perspective, our eyesight, is skewed from Day 1. Sin has spoiled God’s original creation, and we live in a world that is somehow both indifferent to and hostile to God. The natural state of the world is alienated from God. Paul describes the ‘natural state’ in Ephesians 2: ‘You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat.’ (Eph 2:1-3, The Message) The world filters what we see, shapes our thoughts and attitudes so that we find it hard at times to believe God over and above what we have absorbed subconsciously from birth. The world’s message that we are all-important, that the world revolves around us, that this life is all there is and that we can live to please ourselves is directly at odds with what the Bible teaches. The Bible tells us that we were created in God’s image, that life is about God’s pleasure and will, not ours (Eph 1:5) and that it’s Christ who must have the supremacy, not us. (Col 1:18) The Bible tells us that God’s plan for our lives is for us ‘to be conformed to the image of his Son’ (Rom 8:29), and that trials are God’s way of refining our faith and making us fit for heaven. (1 Pet 1:6-7) It’s only as we remove the world’s filter from our eyes, from our worldview,  and allow God’s promises to be the only filter we use that we can live according to God’s ways. Eph 1:11 in the Message version says, ‘It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for.’ If we do not have Christ as our filter, if we do not allow the Bible to shape and transform our thinking, then our lives will not be lived according to God’s ways. Paul told the Romans, ‘Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.’ (Rom 12:2) For us to know God’s will and live blessed lives, we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds, which happens as we are exposed to God’s word and allow it to have the final say in how we live. We have to consciously let God’s truth seep into our lives and change who we are. It’s a little bit like the marinade which softens the meat so that our meal is tastier and more tender as we eat it. God’s truth, revealed in the Bible, soaks into us and transforms us from the inside out so that we are no longer conformed to the pattern of this world but are conformed to the image of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. When we live according to the promises of God, we are living in the way God intended for us; we are living as children of God who are led by His Spirit.

Sometimes as a teacher there are complicated things to cover which stretch a pupil’s ability to understand. But often, it’s grasping the basics which proves more arduous. The things that we should grasp quickly and build on can seem elusive to us.

Yesterday in the snow, local schools shut early, and I had the pleasure of doing some easy science experiments with my grandchildren, one being the simple test using pH paper to determine if a liquid is an acid or an alkali. We poured liquids onto these magic strips of paper in a petri dish and watched the paper change colour, checking the colours on a chart to conclude that lemon juice is an acid and milk is an alkali.

Now understanding why and how this happens may be more complicated, but the instantaneous change was easy enough for even my four-year-old granddaughter to grasp.

It made me think about what we call the ‘litmus test’ or ‘acid test’ in other areas, meaning a simple way of determining something. I was reminded of Jesus’s words, ‘by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’ (John 13:34)

Love is the simplest way of testing the reality of our faith. It’s so simple even a child can do it. Yet it’s something that adults often fail to grasp. We add on lots of complicated things and can then forget the basics.

So today, the challenge before every disciple of Jesus is to love others as the outworking of our love for God. It’s simple but profound. Love God. Love people. Even your enemies.