Mark encouraged us all to make visual reminders of God’s loyal love, decorating hearts with Bible verses to remind us of truths about God’s love.

The children enjoyed decorating their hearts:

Tonight’s family service looked at the theme of ‘God’s Loyal Love.’ Lamentations 3:22-24 reminds us that ‘God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning. How great your faithfulness!I’m sticking with God (I say it over and over). He’s all I’ve got left.‘ As J-P reminded us, the book of Lamentations in other languages is known as ‘complaining songs’, and much of the tone of them is negative, for they were written at a time of great sorrow and distress after Israel were taken into captivity and it seemed that God had abandoned His people. Jeremiah, traditionally held to be the author of the book, reminds us that despite the distress and sorrow experienced, God was actually still present with them, just as the ‘Footprints’ poem reminds us that at the difficult times of life, when we can only see one set of footprints, it was there that God carried us. His loyal love never leaves us.

Another example of God’s fervent, passionate, constant love for His people is found in the book of Hosea, a book which amply demonstrates the truth of the words that love is ‘more than a feeling’ (as the song goes!) So often, people give the reason for the breakdown of a relationship as being because ‘I don’t love X anymore; the feelings just aren’t there anymore.’ In this book, God asks His servant Hosea to marry an unfaithful woman, to marry someone who will hurt him and deceive him, as a parable for the way Israel has treated God. Hosea was to act out the constancy and faithfulness of God’s love in real life. God’s love is not fickle. He wants us to love people with the same love He has (see Hos 3:1), a love that is reliable, dependable, unchainging, consistent, steadfast and determined. People are notoriously fickle, but God wants us to be dogged and determined, sticking to love with a tenacity which reflects His character. 1 Cor 13:4-8 gives us the perfect picture of God’s love which never fails, but our challenge is to love in the same way God loves. God’s loyal love provides us with the model and the motivation for love; He also supplies the power and persistence we need. Ps 89:2 in the Message version says, ‘Your love has always been our lives’ foundation, your fidelity has been the roof over our world.‘ God’s love shows us what loyal love looks like; now we have to ‘go and do likewise.’

Just before Christmas, we looked at some of our favourite psalms in the Bible study, and Dave chose to expand on one of his favourites today (Psalm 8). David is the author of this psalm, and whilst we do not know if he wrote this whilst a shepherd boy gazing on the stars at night or later in life as a king sitting out on a balcony, the sense of awe and wonder in the psalm is unmistakeable. David writes of the transcendence of God and the insignificance of mankind in relation to God, but in all of this, he acknowledges the real and personal relationship with can have with God (‘LORD, our Lord’).

Rom 1:20 reminds us that a knowledge of God is available to all through the wonder of creation. David’s knowledge is more personal (thanks to the revelation of who God is given to Moses in Ex 3:14 and an awareness of God as master, ruler and owner of all). He glimpses something of the wide-ranging reach of God’s majesty and power when he talks of ‘in all the earth‘, a commission to be fulfilled by the church as Mark 16:15-16 makes plain. God’s majesty, power and glory are more wonderful than the greatest of created beings. He’s in a class of His own!

God uses the weakest of His creatures to sing His praise (see also 1 Cor 1:18-25) and there should always be room for all of God’s creatures in His kingdom. David meditates on how God has created order and stability in the universe, with even the moon and stars serving mankind (in navigation, for example.) Teh fact that God even bothers with us is amazing, but to give us dominion over the earth is almost more than we can imagine. Gen 1:28 gives us this mandate (repeated after the flood in Genesis 9), but with authority also comes responsibility to care for God’s creation and steward it wisely). Heb 2:6-10 makes it plain that this psalm has a Messianic reference, demonstrating that Jesus has total power and dominion, being greater than the angelic beings through all He suffered.

Ps 8 ends as it began, with praise and awe. We know that the earth has been honoured by the prsence of the Redeemer, living and walking on earth. There can be no greater demonstration of God’s care for us than giving His only Son as a sacrifice for our sins.

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)