Last Sunday was Fathers’ Day and Dave spoke about the fatherhood of God, using 1 John 3:1 and 1 Cor 4:15 as the basis of his sermon. The whole topic of fatherhood has been downplayed greatly in recent years, partly perhaps as a reaction against a patriarchal society and the rise of feminism and partly because so many people have been brought up with absent fathers and therefore find it difficult to understand God as a father. Nonetheless, fatherhood is God’s idea, and the role of the father is central to God’s dealings with mankind. Even from early childhood, Jesus Himself constantly referred to God as His Father and very often referred to God as our Father. The prayer that He taught His disciples starts with those very words – Our Father.

John reminds us that we are children of God and that this relationship is based on love, not duty. Like all children, we have rebelled against Him, we have given Him grief, we have objected to His guidance and His care. But like all fathers, He has continued to love us and to care for us, through thick and thin.

Dave looked at 5 characteristics of the fatherhood of God:

1. He is our creator, our maker, and takes immense joy in the fact we are made in His image.

2. He is our provider (Matt 6:31-33), taking care of our every need.

3. He is our protector (Ps 50:15), looking after us and keeping us safe.

4. He gives us peace and joy, providing us with comfort and meaning in life.

5. He gives us eternal life. Earthly fathers can’t do this, but the life God gives us is eternal. (John 6:47)

One of the Anglican prayers for Evensong is ‘lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord.’ It’s a prayer I often pray, rooted as it is in the imagery of light and darkness found in the Bible. Light dispels darkness; light brings illumination and clarity. John reminds us that ‘God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.’ (1 John 1:5) Darkness speaks to us of shadow and threat, fear and uncertainty, but light brings us to a place of freedom and joy.

Another prayer I often pray is ‘lighten our load, Lord.’ Here, the word ‘lighten’ means ‘to make lighter, less heavy’, and speaks of the burdens and loads we carry. Jesus urged us to come to Him when we are weary and burdened, to exchange the yoke of slavery – always being driven to do more and to earn favour rather than experiencing ‘the unforced rhythms of grace’ as the Message version of Matt 11:28-30 puts it- for His easy yoke. So many of the burdens we carry in life are ones God never intended to be on our shoulders; He is the God who ‘daily bears our burdens.’ (Ps 68:19) When we lay our burdens down at His feet, we can walk tall.

God’s lightening (not to be confused with the word ‘lightning’!) is what enables us to see clearly and walk freely. LIghten our darkness, Lord; lighten our load.

We started to look at the book of Jonah, reading Jonah 1:1-16. Jonah is often known as the ‘reluctant prophet’, since he initially refused to obey God’s command to go to Nineveh and preach against the city. We are not surprised by his reluctance, for Nineveh (situated in Assyria, now modern Iraq) had a reputation for barbaric cruelty and fearsome warriors, but it turns out that Jonah’s reluctance is more to do with his awareness of God’s mercy than fear! One of the highlights of the Bible is that we see people are they are. Even prophets are human (see James 5:17) – we are shown Elijah’s depression and fear, Jonah’s stubborn reluctance to obey God, Jeremiah’s feelings of inadequacy very plainly. There is no place for pedestals in the Christian faith; God alone is worthy of our praise and worship.

God’s call to us may well take us to unfamiliar and unwanted places (literally or figuratively); there will usually be a battle between us and God in which we argue with Him and ultimately learn that nothing can thwart Him and there is no place to which we can run from His presence (see Ps 139: 7-12). All God’s people need to learn to surrender to Him, to pray ‘not my will but Yours be done.’ (Luke 22:42) We will find, like Jacob, that there is actually victory in our ‘magnificent defeat’ (Gen 32:22-32). We don’t have to go through the trauma of shipwreck and being swallowed by a big fish if we will learn to submit to God’s plans for our lives now!

Our new Bible study series on three of the minor prophets – Jonah, Joel and Amos – began last night. We talked generally about the role of prophets and prophecy in the Old Testament and New Testament, and saw that prophets can be both male and female (Exodus 15:20, Judges 4:4, Acts 21:18-19) and are those people who speak forth the word of God: ‘this is what the Lord says’ is a common phrase found in the mouths of all prophets. We often see the prophets as speaking about future events, and there are often ‘layers’ in prophecy, where they speak directly to people about specific events happening at the time, but their words can often be applied to future events as well. ‘Forth-telling’ and ‘fore-telling’ are words we use to distinguish between these layers in prophecy.

Deut 13:1-5 and Deut 18:14-22 give instructions about how to recognise prophets and prophecy, and it was acknowledged that prophets are not infallible and we bear a responsibility for weighing and testing their words against all we know of God (see 1 Thess 5:21). Prophets are those whose encounter with God and calling give them the impetus to speak His words; a prophet’s calling is often one which engenders fierce opposition and they need this life-changing encounter with the Holy One to carry them through the opposition they face.

The minor prophets are so-called because their prophecies are shorter than the major prophets (Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah), not because they are less important! Their prophecies may well speak to particular events at a particular time, but we should not treat them simply as historical records, for the themes they address – the rebellious nature of people, their tendency to substitute other things for God, their reluctance to embrace God’s ways in the faith journey of life – continue to apply to us all.

Today, after a week of dazzling sunshine, it has been overcast and we have seen some rain. It makes me ponder the need for equal doses of sunshine and rain to make things grow. Both are needful; both are not equally welcomed, as a rule!

When it’s cloudy, it’s easy to feel downcast and to wonder where the sun has gone! Rationally, we may know it’s still there, but we miss its warming presence. We can feel like that with God too. The warmth of His presence encourages us and blesses us, but when darkness seems to hide His face, we feel alone, bereft, vulnerable. The Bible assures us He will never leave us or forsake us (Heb 13:5), but an absence of light so often leaves us floundering.

Into this situation, what is our lifeline to God’s light? Nicky Gumbel says of encouragement that it ‘is like verbal sunshine. It costs nothing and warms other people’s hearts and inspires them with hope and confidence in their faith.’ (BIOY)

This is one reason we are encouraged to keep on meeting together, so that we may spur one another on positively and build each other up (Heb 10:24-25, 1 Thess 5:11). Everyone is prone to discouragement and disappointment; people are facing situations we know nothing about and there is no one who does not benefit from encouragement. A smile, a kindly gesture, words of affirmation and encouragement, are like vitamins to the soul.

Barnabas, known as the ‘son of encouragement’, is an inspiration to us in this regard. He spent a year in Antioch where ‘he encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.’ (Acts 11:23-24) May we all do this every day.

In 2 Samuel 24, we see a strange event, a test which David failed, another of those incidents which seem innocuous to us but which have catastrophic consequences. David chose to take a census of Israel and Judah. We are so used to the idea of a census every ten years (2021 has seen yet another UK census) that we may fail to see why this became the source of God’s anger blazing against David. To us, a census is an eminently reasonable, pragmatic, practical thing to do; forward planning needs data; it’s good to know how many people we are dealing with! Counting people does not appear to have been universally despised in the Bible; there are many, many lists of numbers therein (even a whole book with that name!) So what’s the problem?

God’s people are constantly called to live in trust rather than to use the world’s methods and teactics. Even Joab – David’s chief of army, hardly the most spiritual man from all we read of him, protested against this measure (‘why on earth would you do a thing like this?’ 2 Sam 24:3) He was overruled (a reminder that those in authority don’t always get it right), bringing the news of 800,000 able-bodied fighting men in Israel and 500,000 in Judah (2 Sam 24:9) – presumably a great comfort to a king who was constantly facing wars on every front.

Far from providing David with reassurance and satisfaction, however, he came to realise that his actions had actually replaced trust with statistics (2 Sam 24:10). He had based his thinking and strategy on human ideas (protection in numbers, ‘might is right’ and so on), rather than on God. The man who had once defied all human strategy and logic in slaying Goliath, the man who had survived opposition and persecution through trusting in God, had succumbed to the age-old temptation to trust something visible rather than God.

David’s heartfelt sorrow and repentance remain the springboard to his ultimate success: he acknowledged his sin and asked for God’s mercy (2 Sam 24:10-14) There were terrible consequences (70,000 people died in a plague in a day), but there was ultimate restoration. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the site of the temple later built by Soomon was the site where the plague stopped, a living reminder of this incident, a symbol that God can bring glory from our most serious mistakes and failures.

The human tendency is always to trust what we can see and understand rather than what is invisible, intangible and (frankly) inexplicable. Trust is at the heart of the gospel message, but it’s a message even Christians of many years don’t much like.

We will never earn God’s pleasure by following the crowd, wanting to be like the world and having neatly packaged answers to all of life’s mysterious questions. What pleases God is faith – and that will usually look reckless, adventurous, crazy and downright terrifying to us. Don’t be tempted to replace trust with anything at all. Trust in God has to be at the heart of everything we do.