Mark organised a range of activities for the family service, with the promise of a variety of prizes:

Teams had to answer True or False questions about (apparently) foolish things and also get involved in food tasting ‘fools’ with a difference!

These ‘fools’ contained coffee, pickled onions, grapes and a host of other interesting tastes!

We also had a birthday to celebrate:

Tonight’s family service looked at the subject of ‘fools for Christ’ (bearing in mind 1st April in the UK is known as April Fools’ Day, a chance to play practical jokes on people up to 12 noon!)

Dave spoke from 1 Cor 1:18-25, reminding us that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but is the power of God to those who are being saved. Corinth was a cosmopolitan, wealthy, materialistic city which valued learning and philosophy and which was used to debating about religion. To hear about a God who came to earth as a humble carpenter and who was arrested, tortured and crucified made no sense to the Corinthians… but then it makes no sense to anyone! Only by faith can we accept that this is the way of salvation.

The cross is really a scandal, a stumbling-block to many, for Jesus is either who He claimed to be or He is a liar or a madman. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6) and we can only be saved through this apparently foolish way of the cross. We’ve all experienced embarrassment, moments when we wish the floor would open up and swallow us! For us to be saved, however, we have to be willing to rock the boat for Christ, to be counted as a fool. The reward is eternal life. It’s worth it.

Thornton Wilder said ‘Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them…‘

As someone who is pessimistic by nature and who finds it all too easy to ’embrace the ills’ my vivid imagination can conceive, it has taken me a long time to realise the truths of this statement. Essentially, I have to choose between hope and despair on a daily basis, which largely means learning to train my imagination to meditate on truth and believe what God says, rather than dwelling on what my gloomy outlook can readily embellish.

Despair feels rather like being out of your depth and panicking that you will drown. But once you’ve learned to swim, being out of your depth doesn’t necessarily lead to drowning! Even if you’re tired and weary, you can tread water until you find a second wind; you don’t automatically glug down to the bottom and die…

You can’t just ‘hope’ to order. But by focussing attention on who God is (rather than on who we are, who other people are, on situations beyond our control), we can learn to hope in God. The best way I’ve found to do this is to meditate on who God says He is.

The revelation we have in Ps 130 focuses on key characteristics of God:

God’s unfailing love:

• Save me because of your unfailing love. (Ps 6:4)
• …for I have always been mindful of your unfailing love and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness (Ps 26:3)
• The Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him. (Ps 32:10)
• The earth is full of his unfailing love. (Ps 33:5)
• How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! (Ps 36:7)
• Rescue us because of your unfailing love. (Ps 44:26)
• Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. (Ps 51:1)
• Show us your unfailing love, Lord, and grant us your salvation. (Ps 85:7)

God as our Redeemer:

• I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. (Job 19:25)
• Do not be afraid, you worm Jacob, little Israel, do not fear, for I myself will help you,” declares the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. (Is 41:14)
• Our Redeemer—the Lord Almighty is his name— is the Holy One of Israel. (Is 47:14)
• For your Maker is your husband— the Lord Almighty is his name— the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. (Is 54:4)
• For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. (1 Pet 1:18-19)

God’s forgiveness:

• God forgives all our sins (Ps 103:2)
• Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? (Micah 7:18)
• God has come to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins (Luke 1:77)
• In Christ we have redemption through the forgiveness of sins (Col 1:14)

As we dwell on these things, we find despair dissipates, because we know that nothing can now separate us from God’s love (see Rom 8:38-39).

Ps 130 is a psalm which talks of hoping and waiting. It begins ‘out of the depths I cry to you, Lord’ (Ps 130:1), and there will always be times when we feel out of our depth and in danger of despairing. The key in these times is to keep the channels of communication with God open, aware that He is always listening and is attentive to us (Ps 130:2) and is both merciful and forgiving, even if we feel abandoned and forsaken by Him (see Ps 77:7-9).

Learning to trust God in the difficult times is rather like treading water when we are out of our depth. We have to hold on to all we know to be true of God’s character; in this psalm, mercy, unfailing love, forgiveness and redemption are all mentioned. God is the God of second chances who picks us up from failures and forgives our sins. His love does not end or fail (see Ps 32:10, Ps 44:26, Ps 33:5). The challenge for us is to hold on to our knowledge of God’s character even when we feel we are alone, for as Eugene Peterson says, ‘Suffering can never be ultimate. It can never constitute the bottom line. God is at the foundation and God is at the boundaries. God seeks the hurt, maimed, wandering and lost. God woos the rebellious and confused. Because of who God is, we stand in confident awe before Him, not in terrorised despair.’ (‘The Journey’,  P 127)

Our response is to hope and wait, words which are from the Hebrew qavah, meaning ‘to bind together strands as in making a rope.’ Making a rope involves taking several strands and binding them into something which is strong and tough:

As we learn to wait and hope in God, our faith is strengthened, for we see that ‘our place in the depths is not out of bounds from God.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘The Journey, P 131)  and ‘hope fortifies faith.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Praying With the Psalms’). Waiting is not a waste of time; hoping is an act of faith.

Polarity is defined as having to do with the poles (e.g. the North Pole and South Pole), is often connected with the direction of a magnetic or electric field and has a derived meaning from these: ‘the state of having two opposite or contradictory tendencies, opinions, or aspects.’

Living at either the North or South Pole is not easy; the North Pole is located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean amid waters that are almost permanently covered with constantly shifting sea ice, whereas the South Pole sits atop a featureless, barren, windswept and icy plateau. Yet in metaphorical terms, it seems we are drawn to live at extremes, rather than in the middle. We hover around the excitement of religious experience or believe only the monotony of mundane routine is available to us; as Eugene Peterson puts it, ‘we flutter like butterflies around the pole of charisma, or congeal soddenly around the pole of routine.’ (‘Reversed Thunder’, P xi) There is the tendency either to flit from church to church seeking spiritual highs… or a lack of faith, trudging along in the same old routines without ever really expecting God to do anything much at all (‘He’s saved us, that’ll have to do for now...’)

Max Weber says that ‘the religious life is placed between the poles of charisma and routine, between spontaneous, excited outpouring of new life in the spirit and the dogged institutionalization of truth in everyday responsibilities.’ (Quoted by Eugene Peterson in ‘Reversed Thunder’, P x-x1) The mature life of faith ‘is lived between the poles, not around either of them’ (ibid., P x1) Just as it’s virtually impossible to live at the North or South Poles, it’s not healthy to think we can live permanently on the highs of the mountain-top experience or in the depths of the valleys. We need to find a healthy balance between constantly seeking new experiences and never expecting God to speak to us; we need to know what Casting Crowns describe as ‘reckless abandon wrapped in common sense.’ (‘Somewhere In The Middle’)

There is more to life than our daily routines, but we cannot escape the repetition and routine that God has put into His creation. There are moments when God steps into those routines decisively and we’re never the same again: those PPI moments (pivotal point incidents) when God speaks and acts in ways that change everything for us, yet the Bible makes it clear that these moments are not happening every single day. The life of faith involves the balance of ‘both…and‘, rather than the extremes of ‘either…or’ in so many ways.

Ralph reminded us on Sunday night of an alternative verse to ‘Happy Birthday’ which goes:

‘Happy Birthday to you,

Only one will not do.

Take the gift of salvation,

And then you’ll have two!’

It was good to celebrate his birthday:

However, as he pointed out, all of us can have a second birthday: the day when we are born again! That second birthday gives us access to dual citizenship (Phil 3:20). We are no longer simply citizens of earth (and there is much discussion about nationality and identity at the moment in the UK as the debate about the EU referendum continues), but also citizens of heaven. This dual citizenship will at times create tension, but as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, our allegiance is not only to our earthly country but to our heavenly King.