Garry continued looking at psalms of thanksgiving tonight, focussing on Psalm 103. Like so many psalms, this begins and ends with an exhortation to praise the Lord. This time, however, it begins with self-encouragement: ‘praise the Lord, O my soul’. Sometimes we have to exhort ourselves to praise God (see 1 Sam 30, where David, when faced with loss and an army of followers who now wanted to stone him, found strength in God as he encouraged himself in the Lord.)

Psalms give us reasons to praise God, reasons which focus on the nature and actions of God. This gives us stability, for even when our personal circumstances may be tragic and difficult, God’s unchanging nature gives us reasons for praise. All of us have a tendency to be short-sighted when it comes to troubles: the troubles loom larger in our vision than God! We have to make a conscious effort and choice to focus on God who is forgiving (Ps 103:3, 11-12), compassionate (Ps 103:4, 13-14), healing (Ps 103:3), slow to anger and rich in love (Ps 103:8, 17). The past illuminates an insecure, uncertain future for us, because God does not change.

God’s love and compassion literally encircle our lives and we are ‘stuffed full’ by a God of abundance who satisfies our desires with good things. Just as an eagle’s feathers are continually renewed to enable the eagle to fly well, so too God renews and refreshes us. His laws are good and we can have hope in justice and righteousness becuase of His just and righteous nature. As we dwell on these many things, David encourages us all to praise God – angels, heavenly hosts, all God’s works, as well as his own soul.

Heb 12:14 says ‘Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.’ Holiness is a much misunderstood concept, but being holy is at the heart of the Christian faith because it is at the heart of God. We are urged to be holy because God is holy (1 Pet 1:16), and this has the idea of being set apart for God, whole and reflecting the divine image within us. Holiness is God’s nature and character and people and things are said to be holy by their relation to God, as they are offered by Him or to Him or before Him. We often have a negative view of holiness as dourness, a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude of recrimination and blame, but true holiness, whilst awe-inspiring and daunting, is not something which is dull; as C. S. Lewis says, it is irresistible, for it draws us to the otherness of God.

Holiness speaks of purity and single-minded pursuit of God, and as such, we all need to grow in holiness. There has to be a difference between how we live and how the world lives. The Christian message is counter-cultural. It transforms our ways of thinking, our attitudes, our behaviour… and if the world does not see this transformation, it will accuse us of hypocrisy and lose interest in the words we speak.

I have a bad habit of making a cup of coffee and then starting to do something else, only realising when the coffee is lukewarm that I’ve not had my drink. I hate lukewarm coffee, so I have the choice then of abandoning the drink and making another or reheating it.

It’s very easy for us in our Christian lives to ‘go off the boil.’ The passion of our first love gets dulled with time. The cares of the world and the anxieties and sorrows of everyday life can easily diminish our zeal and passion, reducing faith to the fairly ordinary and inconsequential, to a duty rather than a delight.

Jesus had stern words to the church at Ephesus, rebuking them for the loss of their first love (Rev 2:4-5) and even sterner words to the church at Laodicea, whom He accused of being lukewarm (Rev 3:14-22) Being lukewarm may be undesirable in a cup of coffee; it’s certainly undesirable in God’s eyes in a life of faith.

I usually solve my coffee problem by reheating it in a microwave oven. To reignite faith, I need to seek God and ask Him to rekindle the fire that once burned bright within me. Tepid followers of Christ won’t change the world. We need the fire of God in our lives to be effective witnesses.

‘Every morning I lay out the pieces of my life  on your altar and watch for fire to descend.’ (Ps 5:3, The Message)

Closely linked to showing appreciation is the need to encourage others. To encourage is to give support, hope, confidence (even courage!) to someone. Encouragement also fortifies people against doubt and worry. In the Bible, we read about a man called Joseph, who was given the name Barnabas because he was so good at encouraging others! (Acts 4:36) Barnabas, the ‘son of encouragement’, was one of the first people to accept Saul as a brother in the faith. (Acts 9:27) He went to Antioch to encourage the Christians there (Acts 11:19-24) and worked with Mark when Paul felt he had blown his chances. (Acts 15:36-40) He must have been a great inspiration to many.

Encouragement doesn’t require any special training, and people who are encouragers often don’t think of that as a calling or ministry. Yet we’re all called to encourage each other and build each other up (1 Thess 5:11) and encouragement is listed as a spiritual gift in Rom 12:8. God is a God of endurance and encouragement (Rom 15:5) and encouragement is one of the ways we can really help others who are struggling and disheartened. (1 Thess 5:14)

When we encourage others, we bring a different perspective to their lives. ‘I can’t do much for God. I’m stuck in my house through illness, unable to go out. What good am I?’ the housebound elderly may say. We can encourage them to persevere in their ministry of prayer, which fuels and undergirds those who may be more visibly active in Christian service and remind them that their wisdom and practical experience in the past helps us in the present. ‘I’m no good at preaching or playing music,’ another may lament, but their help in making teas and coffees and washing up is just as needed as preaching or playing music! ‘I’m not sure what God is doing in my life‘, we cry, but an encourager gives us clarity to see the bigger picture. It’s very hard for us to be objective about ourselves and there is often a tendency to see our negatives more clearly than our positives. When we encourage people, we restore a balanced perspective to their vision and perhaps also help them to discover positives they failed to recognise themselves (because ‘that’s just the way I am’…)

Make it your goal to encourage someone today!

It’s very easy to doubt God, especially when life is not going the way we think it should! Often, we identify with the psalmist who envied the arrogant when he saw the prosperity of the wicked (see Ps 73) or with Habakkuk, who was frankly baffled when God told him that he was going to use a wicked nation to discipline Israel (see Hab 1-2). We feel like John McEnroe when he would rant at umpires, ‘You cannot be serious!’ We wonder if God really knows what He’s doing and easily flounder when we can’t see the end from the beginning.

Doubt is not the same as unbelief, since it usually implies uncertainty rather than a steadfast refusal to believe. Often, it’s linked with apprehension and fear: a sense of ‘what if God doesn’t come through?’ or ‘where is God in all of this?’ Nonetheless, Jesus’s words to Thomas remain a challenge for us all: ‘Stop doubting and believe!’ (Jn 20:27)

I think doubt is up there with worry regarding things I ought to give up permanently, not just for Lent! Giving up doubt is not as easy as it sounds, but there are definite principles we can follow when giving up any wrong learned pattern of thinking and behaving. The first thing is to fix our mind, thoughts and will on God’s word. As we soak ourselves in what God says, over and above what our anxious hearts tell us and over and above what other people may urge us to think, we will have an anchor point that is not easily moved. We have to replace the anxious, doubting thoughts (all those ‘what ifs?’!) with ‘God says’. We focus on God’s promises which are ‘Yes and amen’ in Christ Jesus (see 2 Cor 1:20), so that we have a solid launching point for faith. We ask God for his help, like the father who cried out, ‘I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!’ (Mk 9:24) We choose ultimately to believe God over and above our feelings and our natural sight. (‘It doesn’t matter what I see’, ‘Deliver Me’, Aaron Shust)

One of our favourite TV shows is ‘Outnumbered’, a series which looks at family life through the eyes of two parents and three children. Karen, the youngest daughter, is ruthlessly honest in her appraisal of situations and can spot double talk and hypocrisy a mile off. She is intensely logical in her understanding of cold callers and her scene with the nurse is immensely practical! We laugh at such scenes because we recognise the double standards adults so often use in talking to children, but we need to understand that God doesn’t want us to be people of double standards. He wants us to be people of character, people who will live well and right and who will pass on to the next generation God’s standards by living these out in plain view, day by day. We won’t get it right all the time, but that’s where honesty and humility come into play, because we have to be big enough to admit our faults and failings and ask for forgiveness from each other as well as from God.

Proverbs 1:7 says ‘Start with God—the first step in learning is bowing down to God.’ We need to pass on an awareness that God is the central reality of life and that He matters.

1 John 3:11 summarises the message we’ve heard from the beginning, that we should ‘love one another’. We need to pass on an awareness that people matter. No matter what our IQ, our ability to work hard and earn money, where we live, what we do for a living, we need to let the next generation know that people matter because they are made in God’s image and are loved by God, and that life isn’t about what we own or possess but about how well we love.

The parable of the Sower talks about the different kinds of soil there are and how these represent different responses to God’s Word. The shallow soil, where there is no soil of character, means that God’s life can’t grow well. (Matt 13:1-25) We need to pass on the fact that character matters. Character, reputation, who we really are is ultimately all we have to pass on to the next generation. Prov 22:1 says ‘a good name is more desirable than great riches.’ If we can teach what Christian character really looks like by living this out in our own lives, people will see and believe and have a good grasp on reality.

In all these things, however, we acknowledge our inability to do any of this in our own strength and our reliance on God. We can’t live God’s life in our own strength. The good news is that we don’t have to. Instead, God binds Himself to us in a never-failing covenant and pours out His life, His goodness, His breath, His power into our lives. We live under grace, not the law. We have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. (Rom 6:18) We have hope because of all that God is and all He has done and continues to do. The legacy we pass on to the next generation can, as a result of this, be positive, powerful and permanent.

Our prayers are with Stephen and Stacey as they seek to pass on these truths to Esther.

We also had a birthday to celebrate: