When I was a child, I was encouraged to ‘say grace’ before a meal, a short prayer of thanksgiving for the food on the table. I found this odd, as I could not see how God had provided the meal when I’d watched my father go shopping for the provisions and my mother cook the food. What did God have to do with that?!

Over time, I learned more about God’s provision, including how He gave my parents the strength to earn money to buy the food and the skill to prepare it, as well as being the source of all that we find in the earth. I learned to pray ‘give us today our daily bread’ (Matt 6:11) and about God’s provision of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16).

One of my favourite stories of God’s provision is in 1 Kings 17, when Elijah, having predicted a great drought, sees God provide food and drink for him through the ravens and a widow at Zarephath. All she had was a little flour and a small jug of oil: not exactly a vast amount! But just as the boy who gave his loaves and fish to Jesus found that these could go much further than he had imagined, so too this widow found that the flour and oil lasted much longer than was humanly possible. Elijah prophesied to her “For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land” (1 Kings 17:14) and so she discovered that God’s provision could outlast her supplies!

A similar story is told in 2 Kings 4, when a woman is told by Elisha to get every jug and jar available from her neighbours and to pour her little jug of oil into all of them as a means of paying off her debts!

I find that these stories not only encourage me to trust God to provide for all my needs (Phil 4:19), but I am reminded that oil is often a symbol of the Holy Spirit. We are encouraged to pray for daily bread; the Israelites collected manna on a daily basis (except for the Sabbath), not being required to hoard food, but to trust God to supply it. In the same way, Paul urges us to keep on being filled by the Spirit (Eph 5:18). We need the oil of God’s Spirit every day, to anoint us, to equip us, to give us strength for the tasks ahead. We need fresh oil. It’s not enough to live on past blessings. Just as bread easily becomes stale and is then unfit to eat, so too our lives can become stale if we do not come before God every day for His infilling and refreshing. And just as I learned that it was God who helped my parents to put the food on our table, so too we need God to help us in the ‘everyday’ things, the ordinary, mundane things:  our ‘sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life.‘

Some clothes are very tight-fitting; others are made from fabrics which have more ‘give’ or ‘stretch in them.

The difference in such clothes is often down to the cut of the material and the actual fabric itself. Some fabrics are more stretchy or elastic than others. Elasticity is defined as ‘the ability of an object or material to resume its normal shape after being stretched or compressed‘ with a secondary meaning of ‘the ability to change and adapt.’

All of us need this secondary meaning if we are to survive the storms and trials of life. We can’t afford to be rigid and brittle or we will easily break when circumstances become difficult. We need flexibility: ‘the quality of bending easily without breaking’, like the tree which, though battered by storms, will bend and then resume its normal shape:

The boughs and branches of a tree learn to bow low so they can bounce back to their original position. The key to being elastic or flexible is to learn to bow down before God. As we humble ourselves before God, His word promises that He will lift us up. (1 Pet 5:6, James 4:10). Bowing down signifies submission and reverence, an acknowledgment that God is God and we are not. It signifies that though we may be cast down and in great distress (Ps 57:6, Ps 38:6), we are trusting in God rather than in our resourcefulness and skill.

Novak Djokovic, the famous tennis player, was asked what his hobbies were and his wife, before he could reply, responded, ‘Stretching. Whenever Novak has a spare moment, that’s what he likes to do.’ Stretching is an essential part of becoming flexible. God often brings circumstances into our lives which we would rather He didn’t, but the purpose of these challenges is to stretch us and teach us to grow (see James 1:1-5). God promises us that these trials will not break us (1 Cor 10:13): ‘he’ll never let you be pushed past your limit; he’ll always be there to help you come through it’, as the Message version puts it.

‘When my heart is torn asunder

And my world just falls apart,

Lord, You put me back together

And lift me up to where You are.’ (‘When My Heart Is Torn Asunder’, Phil Wickham)

Stephen spoke this evening about God’s wonderful provision. So often in life we run out of things (food, money, things to watch on TV, friends, to name but a few!), and our reaction to that situation is often to moan, just as the Israelites did during their wilderness wanderings. God’s wonderful provision was available to them in the form of manna, quail and water in the desert, but still they hankered after the cucumber, garlic, leeks and meats of Egypt, never being satisfied with the wonderful things God provided for them.

The fact is that God is able to provide for all our needs, often in miraculous ways, as the feeding of the five thousand demonstrated: the 5 loaves and 2 fish fed all those people with plenty of leftovers! God provides good things for us, but so often we fall into the pitfall of complaining or constantly nagging Him to do more.

When Jesus came to earth, many wonderful things happened, and God is still able to meet our every need. Jesus is the Bread of Life (see Jn 6:35-41) and it is only as we realise all satisfaction is in Jesus that we can learn gratitude and sufficiency, rather than constant complaining. God is both the Provider and the provision; He is the Manna which will never cease. If we feel discontented or that God’s provision for us isn’t enough, we need to realise that He is able to supply our every need. The Israelites did not initially know what manna was; they did not recognise it as God’s answer. We are often dissatisfied with life, but need to realise that God’s answer is freely given to us. We just need eyes to see and hearts that will be thankful rather than complaining and moaning.

Dave spoke this morning from Mk 2:1-12, which tells us more about Jesus’ amazing ministry to people. He had already driven out evil spirits from a man in the synagogue at Capernaum, He had healed Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever, and He had made a man with leprosy whole again. When Jesus met these needs, He was doing more than healing physical hurts; He was restoring wholeness to the lives of people and giving back to them an opportunity to live a normal life. Word spread all around about His great power to perform miracles and about His preaching. So when He returned to Capernaum, everyone knew it. They rushed to the home He was staying in to hear and see this man. The people crowded to Him. They filled the small house, and they gathered around the doors and windows until there was no more room.

The friends of a man desperately in need of healing were not put off by this, however, using the roof as a means of getting the paralysed man to Jesus. Jesus, seeing their faith, surprised everyone by initially talking about sins forgiven, which He then went on to demonstrate through physical healing. All must have been amazed and stunned by this miracle, and we can take great comfort from the fact that Jesus is still in the business of forgiving sins and healing our infirmities. So often, we judge or condemn people for their conditions (like the scribes and the Pharisees), but what we really need are good friends who will bring us to Jesus, who will see beyond our conditions to love us as God does.

The  man himself was helpless to help himself, but he placed his faith in Jesus. He braved the humiliation of the crowd. He gave up any pride that was left and allowed his friends to carry him to Jesus.

His friends were faithful, determined, ingenious and flexible enough not to be put off by adverse circumstances. We need to be friends like that, for the world is full of people who are desperate and in need of the unconditional love and help of Jesus.

Nineteen of us gathered last night to watch ‘The Jungle Book’ and enjoy chip butties and cake after the film!

Our thanks to Alex at Fishfella’s for supplying the chips and for those who helped throughout the day and evening.

One of the metaphors for Christians in the Bible is that we are pilgrims ‘on a journey to reach our home’ (‘Children of God’, Phil Wickham). We had pilgrim footprints leading to different places in the church building so that we could find the answers to a variety of questions about our particular church.

From this, people found out that the first meeting of our church on Market Street was on 6th June 2010, with the official opening being on 3rd July 2010. They learned that the date on the stone outside the building is 1960 and counted the number of windows in the community room and the number of crosses in the Worship Room. We also learned that the parish church is celebrating its centenary this year and that the next ‘Churches Together’ meeting will be on 17th September at our church!