I am in the middle of house renovations, a process that is deeply disrupting, and I am discovering the importance of preparation to any job. Before the builders came in, we had to clear the house of many of its possessions (stored kindly for us by family and friends) and prepare surfaces, covering all our remaining belongings with tarpaulins, curtains and sheets to protect them from dust and plaster. Builders arrived and had to prepare before they could progress – this process seemed essentially destructive, tearing out old kitchen cupboards, ripping off plaster, getting back to the brickwork and so on. A painter has just decorated a bedroom, and we had to strip wallpaper off the walls and paint over new plaster with PVA glue before she could start work. All these preparations take time and, of course, are then unseen once the work is finished!

In the same way, as the church prepares to be involved in outreach to our community, we have to be involved with preparations. The Good Friday Church Crawl (Friday 30th March, 10.30 a.m. until 5 p.m.) is an event unlike any I’ve ever participated in as all the local churches join together to explore our Christian traditions about Good Friday and try to explain to others why this day is so crucially important to Christians. In preparation for this event, we have arranged two sessions to make the yellow sashes we will all wear on the March of Hope from church to church:

• Thursday 8th February, 5-7 p.m. at the Renaissance Centre on Priory Road in Bolton-on-Dearne where we will be cutting the material into strips and ironing the hems in readiness for sewing (no sewing experience required for this session)
• Saturday 10th February, 10 a.m. until 12 noon at the Renaissance Centre on Priory Road in Bolton-on-Dearne, where experienced sewers are required to hem the sashes and prepare them

If you can help with either (or both!) of these things, please let us know as soon as possible. Our thanks go to Janet and Marria from Our Shed Dearne and the Pins & Needles Sewing Class who are facilitating this preparation.

The second area of preparation is providing us with small wrapped Easter eggs to give out during the March of Hope. Please bring these in to church over the coming weeks so that we can give these out, along with daffodils and Christian literature, as we proclaim the truth that Jesus died for our sins and is now alive forevermore! We believe we have great opportunities to share our faith in the days to come, but as Zig Ziglar remarks, ‘success occurs when opportunity meets preparation.’ Let’s be prepared!

We all prefer message which are encouraging and uplifting, but the gospel deals with, and explains, the reality of a world that is full of darkness. ‘The dark side’ is a reality which we cannot ignore. Jesus is the Light of the world (Jn 8:12), but in this life, death and the grave have an enormous influence on life. Job 17:13-15 talks of how we can easily lose hope in the midst of adversity. Life is rather like a coin – we can live with Jesus in the light, but it is all too easy to live without Him in the dark.

The psalmists frequently acknowledge the fact that among the dead, no one proclaims God’s name. (Ps 6:5) Graveyards are generally silent, solemn places. For many, death is seen as the end, and there is no hope of life after death. It matters enormously which side we choose, whether to live in God’s light or to continue in the darkness of the world. For those who belong to God, we have assurance that even though we walk through the darkest valley, we need fear no evil, for God is with us. (Ps 23:4) That assurance needs to be our daily hope and sustenance.

We do not live with Christ fully yet, but still dwell in a world torn by pain, sin, suffering and grief. Jesus gives us purpose and a path to follow, but we have a choice whether we live wholly for Him or whether we will allow the grave and darkness to have the last word in our lives. The grave has power to separate us from loved ones and can easily dominate our lives, but if our lives are hidden with God, we have a helper at our side who promises to hold us up and shines His light into our darkness.

Jesus went to the cross so that we can be liberated from the grave’s power and the fear of death. Death will come to us all and we have no control over the timing of this. We can, however, choose to live in the constancy of the life of Christ and therefore face death with hope and confidence. In Christ, the constant is life, but without Him, death has the last word. The choice is ours. God wants us to choose Christ and to choose life.

Eph 1:3-14 is a marvellous list of all the spiritual blessings God has already freely given to His people. So often, we struggle to believe God wants to bless us, partly because we have wrong ideas about blessing (assuming these must be only material blessings or finding it hard to believe in blessing if we are in the middle of battles and suffering.) Nonetheless, these verses talk of 10 spiritual blessings which God has bestowed on us – blessings we need to take hold of and unwrap. We are children of the King and heirs of God, yet we can so often live in spiritual poverty, like Oliver in ‘Oliver Twist’ or Mephibosheth in the Old Testament (see 2 Sam 9).

God’s blessings include:

1. Being chosen in God before the creation of the world to be holy & blameless in His sight – given a purpose and destiny in life. (Eph 1:4, 11)
2. Loved by God (‘focus of His love’, ‘pleasure & will’, Eph 1:5)
3. Predestined us for adoption to sonship (Eph 1:5, 11), again reminding us that we are now part of God’s family through His choice.
4. Given us glorious grace in Christ, the One he loves/ lavished grace upon us (Eph 1:6-8). Our whole relationship with God is based on His free grace (see Eph 2:6-9).
5. Redemption through the blood of Christ (Eph 1:7, 14) – being bought back when we were dead in transgressions and sins.
6. The forgiveness of sins (Eph 1:7) – allowing us to live lives free from condemnation, able to approach God’s grace with confidence.
7. Divine Mysteries revealed (Eph 1:11-12)
8. Included in Christ (Eph 1:13) – and therefore able to access all the blessings Paul talks of which are available through Him.
9. Marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit (Eph 1:14), giving us assurance about the future.
10. Guaranteed inheritance (Eph 1:14), which will not perish or spoil like earthly wealth (see 1 Pet 1:3-5)

The consequences of these blessings, when properly applied to our everyday lives, is to give us confidence, hope, assurance and security. We can live our lives for God instead of for ourselves, because we know He is looking after us and working all things together for our good. We can have hope even in adversity because we are confident of His love, favour, grace and power. We can persevere and endure through our present sufferings because of the assurance He has given us. We can say with the psalmist, ‘blessed is the people whose God is the Lord.’ (Ps 145:15)

Psalm 22 tackles the question of the mystery of suffering as the psalmist cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’ (Ps 22:1) Constant crying out initially seems to produce no answer (Ps 22:2); the psalm tackles that sense of abandonment and alienation which seems to be part of the spiritual journey.

Suffering – and where God is in our suffering – is a stumbling-block to many (‘if God is so loving, why…?’ is a common question), and it can be extremely painful to be in that place of deep loneliness and heartache. Keeping a right perspective as we wrestle with God in these times is not easy, but ‘what’s true in the light is still true in the dark’ (‘Weep With Me’, Rend Collective) and Ps 22 gives us strategies to survive in these dark times.

The first thing we have to do is hold on to who God is (‘Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises.’ Ps 22:3) The psalmist continues to talk with God, even when he feels abandoned. We are free to ask God the difficult questions (see also Job 13:24, Ps 10:1), even the ‘why’ questions. We may not get the answers we want or can understand, but we must not withdraw from God in the hard times, even if we feel He has withdrawn from us. (Is 45:15)

Secondly, we have to have a good memory! (Ps 22:4-5) We have to remember all God has done in the past (for us and for others) and because God is unchanging (Mal 3:6), we can be confident that He will continue to act in righteous, loving ways. One of the chief ploys of the enemy is to cast doubt on who God is, and in periods of darkness, his insidious lies can seem incredibly plausible. We need to be so soaked in Scripture that we can refute these lies with the truth: ‘it is also written…’  This is one of the benefits of the psalms as songs. Sing the truth about God at every opportunity (whether you feel like it or not, whether it seems true or not!) There is much value in conjunctions, those little words which link sentences and can turn situations around (‘yet’, ‘but’, ‘because’ and so on!) The Bible is full of these. Ps 22 may start in despair and abandonment, but it does not end there (the second half from verse 22 is full of confidence because God ‘has done it!’ Ps 22:32)

Thirdly, we have to understand the Biblical principle that suffering precedes glory. Jesus had to go through the Crucifixion before the Resurrection (see John 12:24-26, Heb 12:2-3, Heb 5:7-10). We cannot expect to know the power of the resurrection if we are not prepared to share in Christ’s suffering. (Phil 3:10-11) We need to have an eternal perspective which sees this world’s troubles as ‘light and momentary’ in the light of eternity (2 Cor 4:17-18), secure in the fact that God is working all things together for good (Rom 8:28), even if we currently do not see that. Waiting for God is never easy. But it is surely worth it!

The Messianic psalms, written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus Christ, foretell many aspects of His birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection with startling clarity. As with most prophecy, there may well be different layers of meaning (some applicable to the writer, some applicable only to Christ), but these psalms helped to arouse expectation and keep hope alive for the Jewish people for centuries and serve to affirm to us nowadays the foreknowledge and omniscience of God, not to mention His providential love, grace, mercy and power.

Several psalms affirm that the Messiah would come from the line of David (see Ps 89:3-4, 19-37; Ps 110; Ps 132:11-12), echoing Nathan’s prophecy to the king (see 2 Sam 7:11-16). Matthew 1:1 affirms that this prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, which is significant in ascribing to Christ the Messianic role which the title ‘son of David’ had come to signify as well as affirming His humanity (see also Rom 1:3).

The close relationship between the Messiah and God the Father is also affirmed in the Psalms (see Ps 22:9-10), a relationship which goes beyond time (see Jesus’s words of affirmation ‘You loved me from before the creation of the world’, in John 17:24).

Perhaps one of the most startling prophetic psalms is Ps 22, quoted by Jesus as He hung on the cross (Matt 27:46, Mark 15:34). This psalm gives us probably the most graphic picture of the crucifixion in the whole Bible, all the more remarkable when we realise that this form of execution was not known to the writer at the time. From the scorn and humiliation of public execution (see Ps 22:6-8 and Matt 27:39, Luke 23:35) to the agony of dehydration (Ps 22:15, Jn 29:28) and pain (Ps 22:14), not to mention the despair of the weight of sin which left Christ separated from the Father (see 2 Cor 5:21), the psalm uses poetic imagery (describing enemies as bulls and roaring lions, for example) to take us deep into the mystery of the sacrificial death of the Messiah. The psalm is in two distinct halves, and the triumphant conclusion of Ps 22 (‘He has done it!’) is echoed in Jesus’s last words (‘It is finished!’ Jn 19:30) We can be profoundly glad of all that Christ suffered to deliver us from the penalty of sin.

In the 1960s, the pop group ‘the Batchelors’ had more top ten hits than the Beatles, one of which was the song ‘I Believe’. The lyrics of that song show how people can believe all kinds of different things; in the Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan, India, more than 25,000 black rats are venerated as gods and people believe that to eat food touched by the rats will result in spiritual blessing. Belief can be very subjective; some people feel that they can believe anything they want whilst others adopt a syncretic approach (amalgamating different beliefs from different religions into a very personal belief which can be confusing to others.)

As Christians, we need to be careful about what we believe and why we believe. If a belief is true and real, it will have an effect on our behaviour and lives. Rom 12:1 reminds us that belief in a God who gave Himself for us is reasonable (‘logikos’), but few people are actually won over to Christ through reason alone. 2 Pet 1:16 reminds us of the personal nature of belief: Peter describes himself as an eyewitness of God’s majesty, and it is true that God wants us to witness to others through the power of our story, as with the demoniac who was delivered by Jesus and told to return home to tell others how much God had done for him (see Luke 8:23-39). We are called to be witnesses to all that God has done for us (Acts 1:8); we need to practise telling our story and explaining our beliefs.

Belief will inevitably spill over into actions (see James 2:14-18). If it does not, then it is not genuine faith. We see how belief has the power to transform individuals, communities and the whole world; there is much historical evidence to point to the transforming power of the gospel. Not all beliefs are equal, for true faith must rest on truth (Jn 14:6 reminds us that Jesus is the only way to God, for example), and whilst there is power in all faith, the real power comes when faith is based on truth, because then it is allied to the power of God. (1 Cor 2:5)