My son and his wife have just bought a rabbit called Thumper. I’ve never had regular contact with rabbits before, and I’m smitten. Thumper is incredibly cute:

I’m becoming (so I’m told) something of a ‘Thumper bore.’ I can wax lyrical for hours about his pointy ears which swivel around when he’s listening alertly, his twitchy nose, his soft whiskers, his big, soulful dark eyes, his ability to hop and flop. I love to feed him cucumber and lettuce and hear his sharp teeth nibbling excitedly. I would never have believed I could find so much character in a rabbit, nor can I quite believe that any other rabbit is as lovely as this one.

When we’re in love, we are very aware of the reasons to adore. Lovers spend hours telling each other of all the things they love about each other; you only have to read the Song of Songs to see that (especially Song of Songs 4:1-15; 5:10-16). So what are the reasons we have to adore God?

• God is holy, pure, incapable of wrongdoing (Lev 11:44, Job 1:22).
• He is love, capable of unconditional love which is everlasting. (1 John 4:8, Jer 31:3)
• He is faithful, remaining true to His covenant even when people are faithless (Deut 7:9, 2 Tim 2:13).
• He is full of compassion and mercy (Ps 86:15, Ps 103:8, 13, Lam 3:22)
• He forgives our sins, removing them from us as far as the east is from the west (Ps 103:3, 9-12)
• He is in full control of the whole universe which He created; He is the author and finisher of faith and the One who sustains everything. (Gen 1, Heb 1:3, Heb 12:1-3, Rev 22:13)
• He is true and just in all He does. (Rev 15:3)
• He knows everything, including our innermost thoughts and feelings, and yet He loves us just the same. (Ps 139)
• He is good and all that He does is good. (Ps 119:68)
• He is gracious and merciful, bestowing good gifts on us even though we don’t deserve them and withholding the punishment and judgment we do deserve because by His grace and mercy, He has borne that punishment and judgment at Calvary (Jn 1:17, Ps 84:11, Deut 4:31, Rom 5:8)
• He is kind. (2 Sam 22:51, Jer 9:24)
• He is truth. (John 14:6)
• Life and light reside in Him. (Jn 1:3-4, 1 Jn 1:2, 5)

The reasons for adoration are bound up in the person of God Himself. He acts in complete accordance with His character, showing no duplicity or dissonance, always acting consistently and with integrity. When we pause even for a brief time to consider who God is, our list of reasons to adore Him fills the pages and we are left with thankful, grateful hearts.

I recently came upon this quote from Puritan writer Thomas Brooks on contemplating Jesus. He writes, ‘He is a jewel more worth than a thousand worlds, as all know who have him. Get him, and get all; miss him and miss all… The soul can crave nothing, nor wish for anything, but what is to be found in this Portion. He is light to enlighten the soul, wisdom to counsel the soul, power to support the sould, goodness to supply the soul, mercy to pardon the soul, beauty to delight the soul, glory to ravish the soul and fullness to fill the soul.’ (The Unsearchable Riches of Christ,’ P 263) Amen!

How adoration is expressed will vary from person to person, but the Bible shows us 4 common ways of expressing adoration when encountering God.

Removing Footwear

When God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush, He commanded Moses to ‘take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’ (Ex 3:5) When the commander of the army of the Lord appeared before Joshua in Joshua 5, Joshua’s response to the holiness of God was to fall facedown before him in reverence (Josh 5:14) and the commander’s reply was the same as to Moses: ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ (Joshua 5:15) Adoration is a response to the holiness of God, to the ‘otherness’ of God, to the fact that God is so different to us. Removing footwear was a sign of respect; bowing down in prostration is another sign of respect.

Falling Facedown

When God appeared to Abram, renewing the covenant He had made with him, Abram fell facedown (Gen 17:3). When David and his men looked up and saw the angel of the Lord standing between heaven and earth, with a drawn sword in his hand extended over Jerusalem, about to exact justice because of their sin, he repented and fell facedown (1 Chron 21:16). When Ezekiel first saw the glory of the Lord, he fell facedown (Ezek 1:28). When the disciples witnessed the transfiguration of Jesus and heard the voice of God from the cloud saying ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’, they fell facedown (Matt 17:5-6). When John encounters the risen Christ on the island of Patmos and has that vision of the Holy One described for us in Revelation 1:13-16, he falls on his face as though dead (Rev 1:17). God is so awesome and majestic, that when we encounter Him, we fall down in awe, in fear and trembling.

Kneeling & Bowing Down

This is the common posture for prayer. When we encounter God in all His brilliance, majesty and might, we are instantly aware of His greatness and our insignificance in comparison. The psalmist captures our response when he says ‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?’ (Ps 8:3-4) Bowing down, kneeling down, falling facedown are responses to this might and majesty that acknowledge God’s greatness and our lowliness at the same time. Ps 95:6-7 says ‘Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.’ The Israelites were constantly warned of the danger of bowing down to false gods or idols (see Is 44:15, 17, 19; Is 46:6) because this is a way of showing respect and worship which idols don’t deserve!

The Wise Men brought gifts to Jesus and bowed down (Matt 2:11) and Satan himself knew the significance of bowing down, for he tempted Jesus with the words ‘“All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”’ (Matt 4:9) Nebuchadnezzar had issued similar orders to bow down to the statue of gold (see Dan 3:5-6) and Jesus Himself knelt down as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:41-44) and then fell with His face to the ground as He prayed for the cup to be removed from Him (Matt 26:38-39). He showed us that prayer involves our whole being, our body as well as our mind and words.

Adoration is something we need to cultivate every single day of our lives. As we grow in appreciation of all God is and all He has done, as we fix our eyes upon God and meditate on His love, His power, His wisdom, when we truly think about who God is and what He has done for us, we will be filled with love and will naturally adore Him. The only things which stop us adoring God are hearts that are cold, lifestyles that are too busy to pause in wonder, and indifference to who God is and what He has done. To all who are grateful for God’s mercy and grace, adoration is the natural response. We want nothing more than God. (‘Nothing More’, Aaron Shust)

Although we looked at the fact that God is the ‘Alpha and Omega’ of our faith, the main word we focussed on tonight was ADORE. To adore means ‘to love and respect someone deeply’, to worship, to venerate, to regard with respect or honour. The word itself in English is only found in the NIV version of the Bible in Song of Songs when the Bride says of the Bridegroom, ‘How right they are to adore you!’ (Song of Songs 1:4), but the sentiment of adoration is found in many different places in God’s Word.

Nowadays, we use the word ‘adore’ to simply mean that we really like or love something or someone: ‘I adore chocolate cake!’, ‘anyone can see she adores him!’, and we have to be careful to strip words of their modern meanings if we are to really understand the Biblical meanings of these words we use so casually these days. Adoring chocolate cake simply means we really like eating that particular food; we don’t really think the cake is worthy of worship or honour! To adore is a personal response to someone we deeply respect and honour as being greater than ourselves. The word itself comes from the Latin adōrātiō, meaning “to give homage or worship to someone or something”. When we think about adoration, we will always think about a response to One who is greater than ourselves, which is why we’ve talked about the eternal nature of God. God, being eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, holy and immortal, is definitely worthy of our adoration!

‘Adore’ tends to be a word we associate particularly with Christmas. We sing the carol ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ with its repeated refrain ‘O come, let us adore Him.’ We sing ‘Christ by highest heaven adored’. Chris Tomlin has just brought out a new album of Christmas songs, the title of which is ‘Adore’ and in that song he sings ‘Let all that is within us adore.’ Why should this be? What is it about Christmas that emphasises the need for adoration to us?

Christmas forces us to stop and pause, because we see in the manger the humility of God, how God wasn’t too proud or mighty to come to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, God who came in total vulnerability as a baby.

Paul tells us in Phil 2:6-11 that Jesus, even though He was God, didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped, to be used to His own advantage, but was willing to take the very nature of a servant. The Message version puts it like this: ‘he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.’

We expect God to be mighty and majestic, but the vulnerability of God as a baby or hanging on a cross shows us His love and compassion in ways that cause us to bow in adoration. Our God deserves to be adored!

January is a month for new beginnings and in true ‘Sound of Music’ style, we began tonight’s sermon starting at the very beginning, singing ‘Do Re Mi’! Our new sermon series is on ‘The A-Z of Christian Faith’, looking at essential ingredients of our faith. The beginning is always a good place to start and God is, after all, the Beginning of everything; He is ‘the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ (Rev 22:13) God actually has no beginning; He always was, always is and always will be (as Aaron Shust’s song ‘Always Will Be’ says!) Ps 90:2 says ‘Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God’, and although it’s difficult for us to conceive of God having no beginning or ending, His eternal nature is just one aspect that makes Him wholly different to us! God is eternal; He exists outside of time, and the Bible simply tells us that at the beginning of time, there God was, creating: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ (Gen 1:1) ‘In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.’ (Ps 102:25) 

We may not be able to fully understand this truth, but it’s a crucial one to grasp, because it’s fundamental to our understanding that God is far above mankind; He is transcendent; He is completely different to us in so many respects. The fact of the eternal nature of God means He is unrestricted by time; He does not face the restrictions of time or place that affect us and constrain us in so many ways.To Moses, He revealed Himself as ‘I AM’, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (see Ex 3:11-15), and we see, as Job did, that ‘the number of His years is unsearchable’ (Job 36:26)

If we’re to start at the very beginning, we will always encounter God; Jesus is described as the ‘author and finisher’, the ‘pioneer and perfecter’ of our faith (see Heb 12:1-2). He is also the One who will bring all things to completion (see Phil 1:6). Jesus really is both the A and the Z of our faith!

Armed with a ‘Relentless’ energy drink (such as he uses to keep alert during the long night-drive to Cornwall) as a visual aid, Stephen spoke this morning on the subject of perseverance from James 1:2-12.

Life can be tough at times and is not all plain sailing, but James urges us to ‘consider it pure joy’ whenever we face trials and difficulties. When something comes against us, our response needs to be to choose joy, rather than simply grumble or complain or lose hope. We must not let anger, frustration or pain govern our response to trials and temptations. Instead, we must respond with the joy of the Lord which becomes our strength.

Faith is like an energy drink; it becomes the means of sustenance through difficulties and feeds us, allowing us to persevere through these. As we learn to ask God for what we need (including wisdom during those times when we don’t know what to do), He supplies all we need; the alternative is to give up, which means we lose direction and focus and stability and joy will disappear.

God wants our daily lives to reflect His glory. Trials and temptations are inevitable, but joy and thankfulness are the way to deal with them. Our reward for perseverance, James tells us, is a crown of life (Js 1:12), therefore we need to be ‘joyful in hope, patient in affliction and faithful in prayer.’ (Rom 12:12) Heb 12:2-3 reminds us to fix our eyes on Jesus, who Himself knew joy even as He faced the trials of the cross, because He could see God’s eternal purposes being worked out.

Prayer is warfare. Paul makes this explicitly clear in Eph 6:10-20, but so often, we pray halfheartedly, not fully realising the power of prayer. A recent film from America called ‘War Room’ shows very clearly that prayer is a battle. The film focuses on the problems faced by one couple who, despite apparently having all they could wish for, are in a marriage which has become more like a war zone than a place of harmony and love. It takes the wisdom of an older prayer warrior, Miss Clara, to reveal to them the transformative power of prayer.

As we continue to pray for salvation to come, longing for Acts 2:47 to be repeated in our day (‘And the Lord added daily to their number those who were being saved’), let’s understand that our intercession for people to be saved is crucial and cannot be done halfheartedly or with no commitment. We are called to be like Solomon’s mighty warriors, ‘experienced in battle, each with our sword at our sides, prepared for the terrors of the night.’ (Song of Songs 3:7-8) We are called to pray for the Holy Spirit to convict people of sin, righteousness and judgment (John 16:8), to open blind eyes (2 Cor 4:4-6), to confirm the proclamation of the Gospel with signs and wonders. (Rom 15:18-19) We are called to pray using the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, to pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests, to be alert and keep on praying for all God’s people so that there can be a fearless proclamation of the Gospel in our country. (Eph 6:18-19).

Let’s pray this month especially for:

• the outreach ministries our church is involved in to yield spiritual fruit (Monday night youth group, Friday morning Parent & Toddler group, Friday night badminton, Saturday coffee morning)
• opportunities to share the gospel with people who come to these outreaches and with people who hire the building (Slimming World, autism group, Dearne Stay Fit and other occasional hire)
• people to ‘cross the corridor’ from the community hall to the worship room, to come to meetings on Sundays and be saved
• opportunities to ‘gossip the Gospel’ with our family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues and all our acquaintances