Dave spoke this morning from Hebrews 10:22-23, reminding us that God keeps His promises. So often, we feel frustrated and even downcast because we feel that God has not yet fulfilled all His promises to us (as individuals and as a church.) Over the years, we have had many promises from God about God’s work flourishing in this area, about how God will pour out His Spirit on the Dearne Valley so that it is as if a dam had burst, that our building will not be big enough for the people God will send to us. Some of these promises have seen fulfilment, but many more have not yet, and we were reminded that delays between God giving a promise and fulfilling it are not uncommon in Scripture.

Abraham had to wait 25 years from God’s promise of a son to the birth of Isaac. Jacob and Moses spent many years waiting for God to do what He had promised them. Moses spent 40 years away from Egypt and then spent 40 years leading God’s people in the wilderness. That’s a long time! There was a long period between David being anointed as king and Saul dying. Many of the prophets did not see with their own eyes the Messiah they had prophesied about; both Simeon and Anna were very old when they witnessed Jesus’s arrival. This period of delay between receiving a promise and seeing its fulfilment can be very discouraging to us. So often, in the period when we are called to wait patiently for God, we try to take things into our own hands (Abraham sleeping with Hagar who gave him a son, Ishmael… but this was not the son of promise, and this action led to enmity between Hagar and Sarah and trouble all round, for example.)

If we insist on going our own way, we may well suffer. A lack of faith will always be troublesome to us: the Israelites lacked faith in the wilderness and many died there. If we wait patiently for God, however, we will see the fulfilment of His promises, as Joshua and Caleb did.

What should we do, then, about the promises God has given to us?

1. We should continue to pray with thanksgiving, focussing on who God is.

2. We should remind God of His promises, pleading with Him to fulfil these as Abraham pleaded with God over Sodom and as Moses pleaded with God not to blot out His people despite their sin.

3. We should confess our sins and the sins of the people of this land, repenting of these in humility. All around us we see immorality, violence, idolatry and a rejection of God. We need to pray as Daniel did (Dan 9:17-19). Daniel found God’s promises in His word and spent time calling out to God in desperation. Until we wrestle with God like he did, we will not receive the promises of God: God is looking for persistence and perseverance

4. We must remember that our relationship with God involves dialogue, and that means learning to listen to God as well as to speak to Him. Sin will stop God working in our lives (the defeat at Ai in Joshua 7 came about because of Achan’s sin). We need to spend time listening to God and doing what He says.

Today we walked around the estate near Aldi and also prayed outside Highgate Primary School. Here are some photos from today’s walk:

Estates tend to be a lot bigger than they look from the main road, often being made up of lots of streets and avenues. We were reminded that what can be seen from the outside is not the whole picture; our inner life matters so much and we need to put down roots in Christ so that we not only grow individually but also so that the life of Christ then overflows to others. We were also reminded that generations matter to God: my own father attended Highgate Primary School many years ago and we live in a community where generations often stay in the same area and the blessing of God can be passed on from generation to generation.

This van reminded us of an important truth:

We all need to be ‘part of something.’ God wants us to be part of His family, part of His church, and part of His work in the world. As we pray and walk in our area, we are asking for God’s blessing on our community and for our church to reach out to our community with the love of God and the good news of Jesus Christ.

As a student and teacher of foreign languages, I have spent a lot of time learning irregular verbs, verbs which simply don’t fit the usual pattern of conjugation and which have to be learnt. If you don’t learn these, you end up sounding very strange (think of the child’s ‘I buyed a new toy’ instead of ‘I bought a new toy’), and if there’s one thing that marks you out as a foreigner, it’s not mastering these things!

In the series ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, Bernard Woolley likens our subjective response to situations to irregular verbs, using emotive conjugation to make his point (this mimics the form of a grammatical conjugation of an irregular verb to illustrate humans’ tendency to describe their own behaviour more charitably than the behaviour of others.) He says, “It’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I have an independent mind, You are eccentric, He is round the twist.” (“The Bishop’s Gambit”, “Yes, Prime Minister.”) One of the most famous examples of this is related to stubbornness: ‘I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.’ Our subjective opinion really does influence the vocabulary we use!

In Acts 19:1-10, we see Paul preaching and teaching in Ephesus, once again attempting to persuade the Jews and God-fearers in the synagogue that Jesus is the Christ and that the kingdom of God is near. Once again, we see how the Jewish people rejected the good news. ‘Some of them became obstinate; they refused to believe and publicly maligned the Way.’ (Acts 19:9)

Being obstinate or stubborn in the Scriptures often refers to a hardening of our hearts and instantly brings to mind not only Pharaoh’s response to Moses (see Ex 8:15, Ex 9:34), but the people’s response to God in the wilderness (Neh 9:29). God’s people tend to be good at hardening their hearts, but often we see this sin more easily in others than in ourselves and tend to treat ourselves more charitably and leniently than we do other people. The writer to the Hebrews offers us sound advice: ‘encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.’ (Heb 3:13) This chapter refers back to Psalm 95, which itself refers back to the wilderness wanderings. On these occasions, the Israelites hardened their hearts and refused to believe God; the Jews in Ephesus were in the same position (and missed out on God’s offer of salvation as a result.)

We are called to let God’s Spirit soften our hearts so that we are not hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. It’s easy to feel we are simply being firm or to see our refusal to change as a positive sign, but we need to be careful lest we are deceived. Stubbornness is not always something to be praised!

A power struggle is a situation in which two or more people or groups compete for control in a particular sphere. The power struggle can be at home (between a husband and wife or between a parent and child or between siblings) or at work (between a boss and colleagues or between colleagues vying for favour) or between neighbours (‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is a form of power struggle!) and these can be extremely wearing, a ‘battle of the wills’, so to speak. Power struggles can result in all kinds of tactics, from sulking to tantrums, from manipulation to deceit, from cold shouldering to malice and slander, and can make life extremely difficult for those involved.

One of the difficulties with these situations is that the parties involved may not always be on an equal footing. When one person is in a position of authority over another (an employer with an employee, for example), the power struggle can result in bullying and intimidation. Ephesus was a very prestigious place in the Mediterranean world in the 1^st century, ‘a great city at the hub of the trade routes of the world, full of culture and money and temples and politics and soldiers and merchants and slaves. And power.’ (Tom Wright, ‘Acts For Everyone’, Pt 2, P 113) Into this situation, Paul arrived, preaching a gospel which demonstrated God’s power over all the world. (Acts 19:1-22)

Luke tells us that ‘God performed unusual works of power through Paul’s hands’ (Acts 19:11) and this chapter shows us people being baptised in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying as well as healings, exorcisms and deliverances. It shows us not a power struggle between equal forces, but a demonstration that God’s power is far greater than any human or satanic power. It’s perhaps not surprising that in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he talks of praying that their eyes will be opened to see ‘his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.’ (Eph 1:19-21) Paul was well aware that in any power struggle between people and God, between spiritual powers and God, there is only one winner: God!

Our problem is that we tend to see evil as all-powerful. Eugene Peterson says, ‘We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don’t see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.’ (‘Run With The Horses’) This becomes a vicious circle as we cower before the devil and refuse to believe God has the power to deliver us and establish His kingdom where we are.  Eugene Peterson goes on to remind us that “evil is not inexhaustible. It is not infinite. It is not worthy of a lifetime of attention.” What this passage in Acts teaches us is that in any power struggle with God, God will win. He is not called omnipotent for nothing!

Ephesus (in Turkey) was a centre of power (magic power, political power, religious power), and Paul’s ministry demonstrated that the power of the name of the Lord Jesus was stronger than all of them. This power was strong to heal (in ways that hadn’t happened before, with handkerchiefs and cloths that had touched Paul’s skin somehow bringing healing power to the sick. Acts 19:11-12) It was stronger than exorcists who thought they could just add the name of Jesus to their repertoire of magic charms, only to discover that the demon they were addressing on this occasion respected Jesus and Paul but had no respect for them. (Acts 19:13-16) People saw these unusual signs and came to believe in God as a result, as was demonstrated by them burning their letters and charms as a sign of their repentance and renunciation of occult practices. (Acts 19:17-20)

God’s power is not magic, however. Magic attempts to gain power without paying the price of humble submission to God. God’s power has dominion over magic (as is seen by the burning of the costly magic books and the confession and renunciation by those who had been practising magic.) What these verses do clearly teach us is that we serve an omnipotent God whose power is often visibly demonstrated in our midst as stepping-stones towards faith.

Jesus Himself told His disciples, ‘believe on the evidence of the works themselves’ (John 14:11); signs are given to stir our faith and open our eyes to the might and power of God. He went on to say, ‘Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.’ (John 14:12-14) Paul’s ministry in Ephesus was an outworking of those words and a fulfilment of those promises, with the result that ‘the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.’ (Acts 19:20) Can the same be said of our ministry in Goldthorpe? If not, why not?