Tonight at our ‘Little Big Church’, Mickey and Daisy spoke about being sad, missing out on chocolate and sweets and about the meaning of Easter.

Today is Palm Sunday and our reading was from Matt 21:1-11. Dave’s sermon looked at the 4 things we can learn today from Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

1. We must trust God’s timing. Jesus has previously asked people to keep quiet about His ministry and identity, but as He chose to enter Jerusalem riding on a colt and thus fulfilled prophecy (Zech 9:9), He was demonstrating an awareness of the divine timetable which others did not understand. The excitement of the crowd temporarily deterred the authorities, who would otherwise have arrested Jesus at once. Luke’s gospel records that they complained saying, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples!”  And He answered, “I tell you, if these become silent, the stones will cry out!”  He was saying, “Don’t you understand? This is the moment that God my Father has been preparing since the foundation of the world for you to have Your Messiah. I am officially here. And if I stop my disciples from singing, then you are going to hear a literal rock concert!” We need to trust God’s timing, even if we don’t understand the road we have to travel.

2. When we give Jesus our time, talents and possessions, God is glorified. We don’t know who gave Jesus the use of the donkey on which he rode, but in doing so, he enabled Messianic prophecy to be fulfilled. When we place whatever we have at the disposal of Jesus – our talents, our presence in His house, our money, our service – they become the means whereby He receives the praise and the acclaim that is His due! The Kingdom of God grows; other people are blessed when we simply give Jesus what we claim as ours because, like this little donkey, our Lord has need of it. What is our ‘donkey’? What can we give?

3. We must love people as Jesus loved them. Luke 19:41 tells us that Jesus wept over Jerusalem; He loved the people and knew that many of them would reject Him and His plan to save the world, and so they would suffer the painful consequences. If we are to walk as He walked then we must not only know how much He loves us, but we must love people as He does. We must be as moved by their pain as God is. We must be moved to real tears by the pain of those around us who hurt because they have rejected God in their lives. We must be prepared to cry with them.

4. We must learn that Jesus’ way is the way of the Cross. The crowds on that first Palm Sunday did not understand the sacrificial nature of the Messiah, that He Himself would be the Passover Lamb. They were looking for a king who would conquer and kill, but instead they found One who walked the path of self-denial and urged His followers to do the same: “If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” Jesus requires all that would follow Him to choose between the way of the world and the way of the Cross.

I love spring flowers: the vibrancy of the different colours after the bleakness of winter, the perkiness of daffodils and tulips in particular.

Tulips have a tendency to droop, however, and I’ve discovered this is because they need a lot of water. Florists advise us to trim tulips by 3-5 cm and cut the stems at an angle to give as much surface area to drink from, to keep them away from direct sunlight and fruit and to change the water frequently in order to keep them perky!

We can be a bit like tulips: sometimes perky, but often droopy! Psalm 24 tells us twice, ‘Lift up your heads, you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.‘ (Ps 24:7, 9) Psalm 3:3 says, ‘But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high.‘ At the risk of repeating myself yet again, we need to come to God and drink from His river of delights if we are to lift up our heads. More than ever, we need to do this now, to set our hearts, our minds and our emotions on things above. (Col 3:1-3) Only then will we be lifted from despondency and despair to vibrancy and hope.

Perseverance is defined as ‘persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.’ It’s always been an unfashionable quality, for we are impatient people who prefer things to be accomplished quickly and with little to no effort. When my son started piano lessons, I was eager to learn the tricks of the trade from an expert. Not surprisingly, I discovered there were no tricks: just steady, regular practice, teaching the fingers of one hand to do something they were not used to doing, teaching the fingers of the other hand the same thing, and then putting the two things together. The first music book he had had 30 pieces of music to learn and I was shocked that he did not get to put both hands together until the very last piece! That was 30 weeks of lessons (over six months!) before he could play even one short piece which to me qualified as ‘playing the piano’!

Perseverance is necessary if we are to become masters of anything. Instead of giving up after one or two weeks, we need to learn to press on, to keep going, to persist. Children take months to learn to walk. They take years to learn to talk. Mastery of anything is difficult, but perseverance is the key element required. We simply must not give up.

I don’t know what you want to master this year. It may be a new hobby or skill. It may be losing weight or taking more exercise. It may be overcoming a particular temptation. It may be not giving up on a work situation or a relationship which seems hopeless. Most of us are wondering how long we will have to persevere with social isolation and the economic uncertainty facing us at this time.  Whatever the challenge, the answer will be found, in part at least, through perseverance.

Here are the links for the services on Palm Sunday (5th April 2020):

Morning service (Holy Communion) @ 10.30 a.m.

https://zoom.us/j/111518849

Meeting ID: 111 518 849

Evening service (Little Big Church) @ 6.00 p.m.

https://zoom.us/j/451293083

Meeting ID: 451 293 083

Once again, we’ll be attempting to gather via Zoom and Facebook Live.

When we launched our ‘Take Back The Streets’ prayer initiative in March, we never imagined that just weeks later the whole country would be in lockdown and our hour of exercise a day would be such a precious gift. We never imagined that we wouldn’t be able to gather in the church building to pray. But as the world has changed beyond our recognition, we are aware that some things haven’t changed. God is still the same and we can still pray. Prayer has never really depended on location or time; it is a spiritual weapon and the means of connecting invisible, spiritual truths.

So today is a call to prayer, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. (We’ll be decorating our kitchen, among other things!) Pray wherever you are. For those of you who will be out walking at some point in the day, please pray for the streets that you walk and for the people you know and don’t know. Pray with your eyes wide open, taking in the rainbow pictures on windows, noticing the people you can wave to but not come close to. Pray.

Pray for healing and wholeness, for economic regeneration, for the many families who are struggling to cope with all the implications of lockdown.

Pray for peace and love to reign, for harmony to rule in homes. Many people will be struggling with the 24/7 aspect of life in the same house with the same people at the moment. Pray that domestic abuse and violence will not have the last word, but that God will reveal Himself to people.

Pray for those who are fearful and anxious to find hope and peace in Christ. Pray for those who have lost loved ones (to whatever illness) and who are struggling with the loss this brings and also with the difficulties of arranging funerals at this time. Pray for ministers who are still conducting funerals to have compassion and empathy and to be Christ’s ambassadors. Pray for Alison, Jackie and Luke at the Salvation Army as they seek to minister to people through food parcels – pray for creativity and skill in helping others.

Pray for God’s Holy Spirit to move in our area and to bring revival. We don’t just want to ‘cope’ or ‘survive’. We want the abundant life Christ promised us to be evident in our towns and villages. Pray for the streets by name. Get hold of a map and pray. You might not be able to use Google Maps to find a holiday destination right now, but you can use it to explore the streets of Goldthorpe and pray. Yesterday I delivered an Easter parcel to a house on Railway Terrace, a street I had never, ever been to before in Goldthorpe. I will be praying for that street today and the people from the Parent & Toddler group who live there.

Let’s pray!