Lorraine concluded the family service by talking about prayer as a conversation between friends.

Prayer is important because…

1. it’s communication with God (1 Thess 5:17). Talking is good; God wants us to be communicating continually with Him.
2. it’s a way to give thanks (2 Cor 4:15-16)
3. it’s a way to intercede for others (2 Cor 1:11)
4. it’s a way of giving praise for who God is (not just for what He has done) (Ps 86:12)
5. it’s a way to confess our sins and thus leads to forgiveness (Prov 28:13)
6. it’s a way to ask for help (Matt 21:22). Jesus reminded us to ask and it will be given to us.
7. it’s a way to receive salvation (Rom 10)

God calls us to pray; our part is to find a time and stick to it and rejoice in all God is and all He has done. (Ps 150)

We also had a birthday to celebrate in advance:

Tonight’s family service took the theme ‘God’s Not Deaf!‘ and featured a game which needed careful attention to instructions, since the participants were blindfolded.

Stephen spoke about the importance of prayer, emphasising:

1. our position (Is 59:12) Our sins are the only thing that separate us from God and stop Him listening to us, but even then, His ears are attentive to our cries for help and Jesus has prayed for our protection from the evil one. (Jn 17:15)
2. our reaction (Phil 4:6-7). Our response to anxiety and worry has to be bring our petitions before God.
3. our power (Js 5:16) Prayer is powerful; James reminds us that the prayers of those made right by God are powerful and effective.
4. our path (1 Pet 3:12) God is attentive to our cries and guides us in paths of righteousness.
5. our voice (Matt 6:7-15) Jesus reminds us that we do not need to keep babbling in prayer; we can pray according to the model He has given us. Our repentance and humility will receive His response (2 Chron 7:14).

Often, we feel God is too busy to hear us when we pray or that we need a special ‘formula’ to know how to pray. We tend to think more words or louder prayers will do the trick (rather like our tendency to shout at foreigners to make ourselves understood, even though the language barrier is the problem there, not the volume!) We have no need to shout at God, though, for He has excellent hearing and can even hear our thoughts! (see Ps 139). God hears us all the time, hearing our quietest whispers and our loudest screams, hearing our fears, anger, sadness, desperation, happiness and joy.

Sometimes God’s answers to our prayers are not recognised, however, like the man in the joke who drowned because he refused the help of the boat and helicopter sent to rescue him. We need to learn to recognise and accept God’s answers to prayer.

William Barclay said, “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”

Ps 129 reminds us that though oppression and suffering come into our lives, God is able to make all grace abound to us at all times: ‘And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.’ (2 Cor 9:8) The psalmist’s cry is that despite oppression, ‘the Lord is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.’ (Ps 129:4) History abounds with testimonies of how God delivers from oppression and sustains with joy even during oppression.

Richard Wurmbrand was a Romanian pastor who lived under Communist persecution in the 1940s and 1950s and who suffered greatly for his faith, being placed in solitary confinement in prison for three years and being imprisoned in total for over 10 years. When he was in solitary confinement, he was in a cell twelve feet underground, with no lights or windows. There was no sound because even the guards wore felt on the soles of their shoes. He later recounted that he maintained his sanity by sleeping during the day, staying awake at night, and exercising his mind and soul by composing and then delivering a sermon each night. Due to his extraordinary memory, he was able to recall more than 350 of those, a selection of which he included in his book “With God in Solitary Confinement,” which was first published in 1969. During part of this time, he communicated with other inmates by tapping out Morse code on the wall. In this way he continued to “be sunlight” to fellow inmates rather than dwell on the lack of physical light.[1] He wrote about how the joy of the Lord sustained Him during this time, to the extent that at times he would dance with delight in the cell. This is the kind of testimony that so many of God’s people have recounted, how the Lord frees them from the cords of the wicked, how the oppressors ultimately do not have the final word. (Think also of French atheist philosopher Voltaire who declared that the Bible would be obsolete within a hundred years and whose house was used by the French Bible Society after his death to sell Bibles!)

Far from being something sour-faced or stoical, perseverance which is fuelled by the hope we have in Christ enables God’s people to say ‘they have not gained the victory over me.’ (Ps 129:2) The first martyr, Stephen, died with joy, looking up and seeing Jesus in heaven, waiting to receive him. (Acts 7:56) Perseverance to the end is not grim endurance, but this ability indeed not only to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory, for God is a God who arms us with strength (Ps 18:23) and give songs in the night. (Job 35:10)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wurmbrand

Psalm 129 is a psalm which talks of tough times and tough faith (mentioning oppression, persecution and difficulties), but which also reminds us of God’s righteousness and the way He develops perseverance in us.

Christians are not exempt from life’s suffering. The sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous, indeed, but the rain rains on both too! (Matt 5:45) Disasters don’t only happen to ‘great sinners’, as Jesus made clear when He was talking about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices or the Gentiles who had been killed by the tower of Siloam falling on them. (Luke 13:1-5) Suffering is real and present and can strike any one of us at any time (as the book of Job makes clear), and although it can be used for good by God, we cannot escape from oppression (see 2 Tim 3:12, 1 Pet 4:12, Jn 16:33).

Our initial response to suffering is often anger and impatience. The psalm reminds us that we can be honest with God, bringing those emotions to Him (Ps 129:5-7), reminding us that the psalms are honest in recording the raw emotion often felt in situations that are far from helpful; they are real prayers prayed by real people. All emotions can be expressed to God; anger, resentment and bitterness may not be the ‘right’ response to situations, but God is able to sift us and remove from us all that is offensive to Him, leaving behind only that which can be refined.

Ps 129 reminds us of the need for perseverance and the fact that ultimately it is God who keeps us going and who will continue to keep us going. God’s people may know all about people who oppress them, but they also declare ‘they have not gained the victory over me.’ (Ps 129:2) When a person is ploughing, they hitch up the animals and ploughs and begin cutting long furrows in the soil (or, in this metaphor, in the back of Israel.) The animals and plough go back and forth, working the hard soil until it is churned up enough to receive the seed. It’s hard work for all concerned; for a person on the receiving end of this treatment, however, this would mean pain upon pain: raw wounds, blood, excruciating pain. Then, suddenly, the harness cords which connect the plough to the oxen have been severed. The oxen may continue to walk up and down, but the persecution is no longer having the effect of breaking and demoralising the person. Those intent on persecuting God’s people are often dismayed – and frustrated – that in essence, they don’t have the last word. We have no reason to fear those who oppose God and His people in our modern society, because we know ultimately that God has the last word. God Himself gives us the endurance and encouragement we need to persevere (Rom 15:4-5), and perseverance works character in us (see Js 1:1-5; Rom 5:3).

We are urged to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus: ‘Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.’ (Heb 12:3) In the Message version, this reads ‘When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he ploughed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!’  

We can continue in the face of adversity and persecution because God is righteous; He has done all that is necessary to establish a personal relationship with us and He sticks with it and with us through thick and thin. Eugene Peterson reminds us that ‘Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.’ (‘The Journey’, P 118)

‘God is light; in Him, there is no darkness at all,’ we read in 1 John 1:5, but for many people, darkness is a very present reality. The ‘dark night of the soul’ is not something we like to talk about, but I have been reading through the book of Job recently and it’s clear that suffering, anguish, confusion, disappointment and darkness are not topics that are glossed over in the Bible, and therefore should not be glossed over by us, however much it may cause us discomfiture to uncover these.

The ‘dark night of the soul’ (a term coined by John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish monk) is that sense of the absence of God which causes us confusion and pain. Is  54:7 says ‘For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with a deep compassion I will bring you back’; Song of Songs 5:1-11 speaks of the Bride’s plight when she is slow to open the door for her loved one and then cannot find him. It is a sense of abandonment and absence which causes us anguish and yearning and longing, an aching that is almost physical in its intensity. The psalmists frequently express this feeling (Ps 10:1, Ps 13:1, Ps 27:9, Ps 44:24, Ps 69:17, Ps 88:14) and Isaiah even speaks of God as One who ‘hides himself’ (Is 45:15).

Yet even in the darkness, God calls us to trust Him; we are called to live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7), and one of the most valuable lessons in life is learned when we steadfastly continue to trust God even though we feel abandoned by Him.

Charlie Cleverly, in commenting on Song of Songs 5, writes ‘While we may have a simple plan for our life – to be happy, prosperous, successful and at peace – what God wants is for us to learn to trust Him deeply against the odds.‘ (‘The Song of Songs’, P 180) So often, as Joseph found, our plans seem to be in direct conflict with God’s, and we learn, often with a jolt of shock, that God is stronger than we are and His plans will prevail over ours. We may have learnt as children to manipulate our parents and bend them to our wills; we may have learnt as adults to manipulate our spouse, colleagues, friends and family and get our own way, but we cannot manipulate and control God.

Job shows us that it is possible to still walk with God even when we suffer, even when we don’t understand. ‘It is good when we decide not to be offended with God, not to accuse him of not knowing what he is doing, not to resist going down his path for us, but instead to trust him,’ Charlie Cleverly continues. That is a choice. We would not willingly choose darkness; it takes great faith to say, as John of the Cross did,  ‘glad night… more lovely than the dawn!‘, but it is a choice we can make. John 1:5 reminds us that darkness can never overcome light; Ps 112:4 assures us ‘Even in darkness light dawns for the upright, for those who are gracious and compassionate and righteous.’ Even in darkness, we can choose to walk with God.

Those of us of a certain age may well remember the Cadbury’s Caramel advert which featured a rather seductive female bunny who urged the vigorous, hard-working beaver to ‘take it easy with Cadbury’s Caramel.’

I don’t think God looks anything like that bunny, but I do think sometimes He wants us to learn to lean on Him and relax. (Matt 11:28-30) Maybe this is the kind of thing He wants to say to us:

‘Relax!

You’re not running the universe.

I am.

People baffle you.

The darkness in their hearts wounds you.

You long for lasting change,

But are frustrated by the ‘same old..’

Your own propensity to sin,

Coupled with the deceitfulness of the heart,

Lead you to walk with slumped shoulders and furrowed brow:

Frowning, instead of rejoicing,

Trudging, instead of skipping.

Where is this ‘lightness of spirit’?

You walk with the cares of the world on your shoulders:

Atlas, struggling with a deadweight

Heavier than you were meant to bear.

Let go!

Cumbered with a load of care?

Give it up, then.

Drop the burden at the cross.

Let Me carry you.

It’s not your responsibility.

All I want is for you to learn

The unforced rhythms of grace.

Learn to skip.

Learn to smile.

Learn to relax.

The joy of the Lord is your strength.

I’ve got it all in hand.

You don’t have to work it out.

You don’t have to understand.

You don’t have to solve it.

You don’t have to fix it.

You just have to walk with Me.’