Tonight I had the privilege of seeing the Watoto Children’s Choir on their ‘Signs and Wonders’ tour, performing at Grimethorpe Pentecostal Church. The choir is part of Watoto Church in Uganda which seeks to help the vulnerable and orphaned and is a shining testimony of the transforming power of the Gospel. The children are sponsored in a similar fashion to Bedline with Compassion, with sponsorship providing education, health care and Bible teaching, and the children sang with gusto of their hope and love found in Jesus Christ.

In addition, they gave testimonies of the work God has done in their lives and videos were shown of the work being done in Uganda through this church. The Watoto Model is designed to provide vulnerable women and children in Africa with holistic care and to impact communities in the process. The model involves physical care, medical intervention including HIV/AIDS treatment, education – formal and vocational, counselling and emotional well being as well as moral and spiritual discipleship. Currently Watoto has projects in Kampala and Gulu, Uganda; and Juba, South Sudan.

It’s great to get a glimpse of the ‘bigger picture’ of what God is doing in the wider world and it’s also good to acknowledge the profound difference a little help can give children.

Today in England, it’s April Fools’ Day. It’s a day for practical jokes and foolish pranks. Some newspapers, magazines, and other published media report fake stories, which are usually explained the next day or below the news section in small letters. Other countries still celebrate the day in other ways: in France, for example, the day is known as the ‘fish day’, with paper fish attached to the victim’s back without being noticed. Such fish feature prominently on many late 19th- to early 20th-century French April Fools’ Day postcards.

Such antics are usually harmless, if a little bewildering to the serious amongst us, but there’s nothing wrong with having fun and a sense of humour is an indispensable aid to sanity, in my opinion!

Paul reminds us that the world will never understand people of faith fully and tells us that ‘the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.’ (1 Cor 1:18) We have to be prepared to be called fools for Christ and to be ridiculed and misunderstood as we seek to follow God. We are people who are now operating on God’s principles and seeking to live according to His ways. Take time to read 1 Cor 1:18-31 today and let the foolishness of God shape your thinking and actions.

Whilst we must often consciously and deliberately choose to forget the wrongs done to us, we must also consciously and deliberately choose to remember all God has done for us. Eugene Peterson says, ‘forgetfulness atrophies the muscles of faith and leaves them flabby and passive. Remembrance internalises a history of grace and strengthens praise into blessing, so that we act in a renewing way in our environment.’

Remembering means bringing to mind, choosing to dwell on those memories of God’s actions and character, focussing our attention on God. God’s people are consistently urged to remember what God has done (see Deut 8:2,18; Deut 15:15, Job 36:24, Ps 22:27, Ps 42:4,6). This is easy to do at certain times of celebration, but needs to be done on a daily basis if we are to avoid falling into the trap of forgetfulness and therefore indifference to God which easily leads to a complaining attitude.

Today’s challenge is to focus on something positive that God has done for you! He loves you. He provides for you. He guides you. He gives you breath to breathe. He surrounds you with mercy and grace. We need to be as concerned for our spiritual muscles as we are for our physical bodies. We all need remembrance workouts!

Some of us have little choice but to embrace forgetfulness as we get older and our memory brain cells just don’t seem to function the way they used to! This isn’t the kind of forgetfulness I mean, however… By embracing forgetfulness, what I mean is a willingness to emulate God who says ‘Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.’ (Heb 10:17, quoting Jer. 31:34).

God, being God, cannot actually forget anything (in the sense of ‘losing’ the memory the way we may do as we get older.) He does, however, choose not to remember our sins. This is enormously liberating for us, as Jeremy Camp’s song ‘We Must Remember’ makes plain, for we often have a tendency to wallow in our sins, finding it hard to accept God’s forgiveness. Easter makes it plain that ‘You are the God that bore our shame./ You are the taker of our pain.’

The concomitant of this, however, is that we are urged to forgive as God has forgiven us. (Eph 4:32, Matt 6:12, 14-15). The antidote to bitterness, broken relationships and high stress levels is to live each day with forgiveness in your heart. This is not always easy, because we are easily hurt and often hurt others. Nonetheless, as we choose not to remember wrongs done to us and freely offer forgiveness to others, we are set free from so many things which would trip us up.

To those who say they cannot forgive, I would urge a re-reading of the gospels, savouring the Passion story slowly. Forgiveness is at the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ. As we ponder His forgiveness, He is able to put within us a heart that forgives, as part of the transformative process His life in us brings.

I’ve recently had to take medication to avoid cholera when I go to India, and it struck me as I struggled to drink the sweet-tasting liquid that we tend to add flavours to drinks to make them more palatable. Those flavours are inevitably sweet, because we don’t like bitter tastes that much. ‘It’s a bitter pill to swallow’, we say of something unpleasant that must be endured.

Heb 12:14-15 says ‘Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.  See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.’ Bitterness inevitably will cause us problems. When we are bitter, holding on to grudges, refusing to forgive, we will find God’s grace to be insufficient for us. Only as we let go of these things can we have open hands to receive, and dispense, grace.

Bitterness within us takes time to grow. We have to be quick to root it out and then it’s easy to deal with. Left to put down tentacles, it will take over our life and sap spiritual vitality from us. How do we avoid it? We choose to fix our eyes on Jesus and refuse to let self-pity eat away at our peace of mind.

As part of the upgrade to the building involving fire safety, further yellow lines have been added to the car park, clearly marking where it is not legal to park:

We would ask that all who use the church car park respect this so as to allow clear exits from both fire exits in the case of an emergency and also to allow access to the building if the fire brigade is called.