Qualifications in God’s Kingdom
When we compose a C. V. or job application, we expect to list our achievements and accomplishments; we aim to impress potential employers with our past prowess. When a person dies, an obituary tends to focus on achievements and accomplishments, defining a person’s worth and value by these things. It comes as something of a shock, then, to realise that God’s recommendations are very different and the job specifications in His kingdom tend to focus less on our prowess and more on our heart attitudes.
When the kings of Israel and Judah were debating wars, Jehoshaphat stopped to ask if there was a prophet of the Lord through whom they could seek God’s will and mind. (2 Kings 3:11) He was told, ‘Ellisha son of Shaphat is here. He used to pour water on the hands of Elijah.’ (2 Kings 3:11)
We know Elisha to be a prophet of God, mightily used by God in a host of miracles. To hear him described as the one ‘who used to pour water on the hands of Elijah’ is not the recommendation we would have expected (or given.) It’s a qualification for wisdom and godliness which seems odd to us. After all, what has pouring water on a man’s hands – the menial task of a servant – got to do with hearing God’s voice and proclaiming His will to kings?
The job was a servant’s. It implied closeness, yes (and Elijah was probably the greatest prophet in Israel after Moses), but there are plenty of servants mentioned in the Bible who were not qualified for their master’s role simply by propinquity. Nonetheless, Elisha’s job description in this instance perfectly marked him out for his role as Elijah’s successor.
Because servanthood is at the very heart of greatness in God’s kingdom. Jesus said that whoever wants to be great in God’s kingdom has to become as a lowly child (Matt 18:4), has to become a servant of all. (Mark 9:35) He demonstrated the principle of serving when He washed His disciples’ feet (John 13), and made it plain that even He did not come to be served, but to serve. (Mark 10:45) The ‘qualification’ for a disciple of Jesus is not how much theology we know or how many miracles we have performed. It is the mark of loving service.
I’m sure most of us would have resented this description of Elisha if it had been applied to us. We don’t really want to be known simply as ‘the one who made cups of tea at church’ or ‘the one who smiles at people when they come in.’ Such descriptions seem insignificant. We don’t value servants and never have.
But God does.
We do ultimately remember Elisha for far more than his role as Elijah’s servant. His words to the kings and their fulfilment in 2 Kings 3 show his closeness to God and how God was able to use him in miraculous ways. But it all starts with a servant’s heart, where no job is too lowly, where personal aggrandisment is simply not a part of our mindset. If we want to be great, we must learn to serve.
Living The Wise Life
Garry spoke tonight about living a wise life (see Eph 5:15-17). It’s easy enough to live like the world, but to go against the flow is much harder, yet this is what is required of believers, because the world is at odds with God. 1 John 5:4 in the Message version says, ‘every God-begotten person conquers the world’s ways’, but this can only be done as we carefully consider God’s ways. Just as we ought to read the small print in contracts before signing, we need to examine God’s ways so that we can learn how to live wisely.
Wisdom is not simply knowledge or experience; it’s what we do with those things. We can learn from others, but ultimately, we must learn from God, developing flexibility in how we adapt what we know to given situations. The Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-12) show us God’s ways and these remind us that the attitudes we need to adopt are radically different to the world’s norms.
God calls us to be peacemakers and to value peace (see Matt 5:9, Rom 12:18, Matt 5:38-42). We are called to love even our enemies (Luke 6:27-30). To do what God wants is not hard to understand – it’s just hard to put into practice! To be godly, though, we must do things God’s way and grow in wisdom (see Luke 2:52). We need to depend upon the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in situations (1 Cor 12:8, James 1:5). God wants us to grow and develop and mature, which includes growing in wisdom, whether that is the wisdom gained from studying God’s word or the wisdom given as a gift of the Spirit, dropped into situations unexpectedly.
A Lady And A Leader
Dave spoke this morning from Luke 13:10-17, the account of Jesus healing a woman crippled for 18 years and the backlash this provoked because the healing was carried out on the Sabbath. The woman in the incident is not named; in fact, she is defined for us by her disability. We feel that she was acutely aware of her infirmity and did not feel like a ‘normal’ person, a bitter reminder that we often label people according to how we see them (and how we see only the visible, not the heart.)
The woman’s disability meant she was bent over, unable to straighten up, able only to look downwards. C. H. Spurgeon says of her, ‘she lived in a posture of forced humility’, and Luke makes it clear that she was ‘bound by Satan.’ Not all infirmity and disability comes directly from the devil, but the despair these things breed in us is typical of his tactics. In this encounter with the Lord, the lifting love of Jesus transforms her situation. She met Jesus in the synagogue (demonstrating a persistent faith even though she was disabled) and was set free by Him. We do not know if he crouched down to speak to her, but we do know that he gave this nameless woman a new identity, calling her a ‘daughter of Abraham.‘ She was no longer a victim, but was to be a blessing, and must have felt like the psalmist in Ps 40:1-3!
The leader in this story was outwardly physically whole, but his attitude was as bent and crooked as the woman’s spine. He had a legalistic bent, living by the rules, and was outraged that Jesus chose to heal the woman on the Sabbath. Jesus’s words to him showed him that God’s love has a greater purpose: if the Pharisees could care for animals on the Sabbath, this woman deserved to be loosed too. In a similar incident in Mark 2:27-28, we see that Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, and not the other way around.
This incident shows us that we all have a tendency to get bent. Familiarity with God’s law can easily lead to indifference. Traditions become more important than the things they symbolise and we can be cut off from the life of God by our very religiosity. Humility is needed if we are to encounter Jesus. We must let go of the things that keep us bound and bent, be that worry and anxiety, or abuse, or shame or poverty or grief or heartache. We all need God’s loosing, so that we can stand tall.
Jesus took the initiative with this woman. He called her to come to Him. He lavished His love and mercy on her (see 1 John 3:1). We too can know the call and mercy of God, but we need faith to believe that God rewards those who earnestly seek Him. (Heb 11:6) The lady emerged from this encounter whole and able to go forth in blessing; the leader remained bound by prejudice and legalism. Will we heed the call of Jesus and be set free by Him?
Missionary Updates
At GPCC we support the work of Fredrick and Reeba in Bangalore, India, and we also support three children (Bedline in Haiti, Innocent in Uganda and Amshika in India.)
Fredrick has sent us photos of two other pastors whose building work their church supports. We are so pleased to get these regular updates and to know that our support helps other churches in India too.
Bedline’s latest photo shows how much she has grown! She is 14 now, and we are praying for her as she continues in school. We support her through the charity Compassion, which helps to pay for her schooling, healthcare and church support.
Please continue to pray for these people and support financially where you can.
The God Of Hope
I spend a lot of time writing funding applications and feeling frustrated that I am not rich enough to pay for all the things I want to do! As a Christian, I’m called to live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7), but I’m also called to be responsible and not reckless. God often gives me ideas for projects, and I work on the basis that if it’s His idea, it’s His responsibility (not mine) to fund it. He is Jehovah Jireh, the great provider, and I have seen His miraculous provision often enough to know that He never lets us down.
But, of course, that’s easy to say when He has provided, and not always easy to believe when you’re in that waiting period when you’re not 100% sure that this ‘idea’ is God’s and not yours. Jeremy Camp’s song ‘Ready Now’ is one I really identify with:
‘Three, am I really gonna do this?
Are You gonna carry me through this?
Two, is it really something You want?
Should I maybe get a parachute on?
One, can I find the nerve?
Is it gonna work?
Is it gonna hurt?
God, just say the word.’
A long time ago I felt God tell me that He wanted to give beauty for ashes to Goldthorpe and I’ve been heavily involved in community art projects ever since then as my way of involvement in this aim. One such project is to paint positive, colourful messages of hope all over the place. For me, this is as much about a spiritual statement asserting that God is the God of hope (Rom 15:13) as it is about art.
I wanted to start with a statement in our own church yard, on the wall. I wanted to have the line from Rend Collective’s anthem ‘Build Your Kingdom Here’ on the wall: ‘come, set our hearts ablaze with hope!’ – a prayer I pray on a regular basis.
Last year (November 2023) a funding stream called Pride of Place asked for artistic applications and I thought of this project. I found out about costings for having the wall rendered (and gulped at the prices) and submitted an application. Projects needed to be spent by March 2024. Not a great time to be rendering a wall in winter, but hey…if God’s in it…
I heard nothing back. Ah well. Wait and see. I do that a lot. I don’t enjoy it, but I’ve learned that God isn’t always in the same hurry that I am! I didn’t forget about the project. I would look wistfully at the drab grey wall frequently and yearn for colour and hope, but that was as far as I could go by myself, and so I simply had to wait and see.
The subject of hope (and its enemy, despair) has been on my mind a lot lately. There seems plenty to despair about both locally, nationally and internationally. I’m reaching the end of the school year where I need funding for the Parent and Toddler group and the arts’ festival’s approaching, so I need money for that as well, and I don’t really do well at these times. Each year I can feel anxiety fluttering within, and it takes determination and faith to keep holding on to God. The practical demands chafe against the faith element on a daily basis.
This morning I received a notification from an artist I admire called Hannah Dunnett. She has a new card for sale focussing on Romans 15:13: ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ I felt God’s nudge within: ‘Are you going to overflow with hope or wallow in despair?‘ It was time to think about hope again!
Ouch. That sharp scalpel point of God’s word piercing again.
“O.K. I get the point. I’m going to hope.”
I walked into the church yard this morning and looked at the wall again. Hope. “I haven’t forgotten the project, God.”
It turns out neither had God.
Because when I got home, I had an email full of apologies saying that our application for funding had been successful but they had forgotten to notify us. Even though the deadline had passed, they hoped they could still be involved with this project.
Now if you are involved with funding applications, you know this rarely happens. Deadlines are deadlines, after all. But when we bought the church building on Market Street, we saw not only one miracle (getting a grant for £160,000 to buy the building) but two (we had to give the grant back because of timescales… and then were given it again!) So God is definitely the one sorting things out with funding!
It looks like my crazy idea was from God after all. And so let me encourage you, wherever you are and whatever you are waiting for in God, to hope against hope, just like Abraham, even when there seems no reason to hope, even when it’s so much easier to despair. Because the God of hope can do things we can’t, and therefore we really do have hope.
Holding On To God’s Promises
This evening, guest speaker Joy Gascoigne spoke about holding on to the promises of God. She spoke about her friend, Barbara, who as a child was left in the unenviable position of having to look after her brother when her mother was taken into hospital. She was invited to church and went because she had aspirations to be a singer; there, she found not only solace but practical help. One night before Christmas, she prayed that if God loved her, He would give her the presents she so desired but knew she could never have because of her family circumstances. The next day, there was a knock on her door and three girls from her church brought her the presents she had asked God for. This evidence of God’s reality and faithfulness led her to Christ and she remained His servant all her life.
What God did for Barbara, He can do for each one of us. We need to take hold of His promises and believe His word. His word is living and active (Heb 4:12), God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16) and shows us where we go wrong and how to do right.
Taking hold of God’s promises will involve prayer; like the apostles in Acts, we need to be devoted to prayer and to pray continually until we see the breakthrough for which we long. We must prepare for God to do amazing things, which may well mean being generous in our giving, not focussing on ourselves like the rich fool but trusting God to provide for us. God can work through unlikely people in unlikely ways, changing hearts and attitudes as He brings about all that He has promised.