Eileen has helped at the youth club for many years, and is proof that you don’t have to be young in years to have a heart for young people. Tonight was her last night serving sweets and drinks there and in honour of her many faithful years of service, she was given some flowers:

Eileen is affectionately known as ‘the Queen’ at church, and she certainly looks very regal here!

Our whole-hearted thanks go to her for her servant heart and faithfulness and we are so grateful to all we learn from her about loving and following Jesus.

Often, we feel that God is so high and mighty that He does not understand our suffering and what it means to be human. Ps 138:6 says, ‘Though the Lord is exalted, he looks kindly on the lowly.’ The fact of the Incarnation means that God does indeed understand what it is to be human. He knows what it is to be weary, to be rejected, to be hurt. He knows what it is to lose family and friends. He has wept at a graveside (John 11:35) He has known betrayal. He has suffered unjustly. There is nothing we can go through in His life that is beyond the compassion of our God.

Jeremy Camp lost his first wife to cancer when she was only twenty-one and he was twenty-three, just three and a half months into their marriage. In his memoir ‘I Still Believe’ (named after a song God gave him two weeks after his wife’s death), he writes of the pain and bewilderment of suffering and God’s grace to Him during that time. A new song ‘He Knows’ returns to the same theme, namely that God knows all about us and has walked the suffering too.

‘All the bitter weary ways,

The endless striving, day by day

You barely have the strength to pray,

In the valley low,

And how hard your fight has been,

How deep the pain within,

Wounds that no one else has seen,

Hurts too much to show.

All the doubt you’re standing in between,

And all the weight that brings you to your knees:

He knows, He knows

Every hurt and every sting;

He has walked the suffering.

He knows, He knows,

Let your burdens come undone.

Lift your eyes up to the One who knows.

We may faint and we may sink,

Feel the pain and near the brink,

But the dark begins to shrink

When you find the One who knows.

The chains of doubt that held you in between,

One by one are starting to break free.

Every time that you feel forsaken

Every time that you feel alone

He is near to the broken-hearted

Every tear He knows.’ (Jeremy Camp, ‘He Knows’)

The story behind the song

We had another birthday to celebrate last night!

We also had a super-hero in the congregation!

2 Cor 1:3-7 reminds us that God is the ‘Father of compassion and God of all comfort.’ Comfort means the easing of pain or constraint or the alleviation of distress or anguish. At different stages of our lives, it’s represented by different things: a dummy to a baby, a soft toy or comfort blanket to a toddler (think of Linus, Charlie Brown’s friend), painkillers when we’re in pain, comfort food when we are down.

God’s comfort is so much more than these things and is motivated by His heart of compassion. Compassion means to suffer with, to enter into the sufferings of another. Jesus is described as the Suffering Servant: ‘a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.’ (Is 53:3) Compassion is an integral part of His nature (Is 49:15-16, Ps 86:15, Neh 9:19) He redeems us and crowns us with love and compassion (Ps 103:4), is full of compassion (Ps 116:5) and His compassions never fail (Lam 3:22). He is both mother and father to us (Ps 103:13-14, Is 66:13). He knows our sorrows, for Jesus Himself has suffered (see Heb 2:10, 17-18) and He is therefore able to come alongside us in our suffering (the Holy Spirit is described as our Comforter): as the Message version of 2 Cor 1:4 says ‘He comes alongside us when we go through hard times.’ Sometimes the chief comfort (consolation, help) which God gives us is His very presence with us (see (Is 43:1-3), as the disciples found on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24.)

God’s comfort overflows into our lives so that we too are then able to comfort others with the same comfort we have received. Often, when we face trials and difficulties, we feel alone and isolated, bereft of any sense of God’s love or mercy, but others remind us of eternal truths and stand with us in practical ways, reminding us of the hope we have in Christ. The enemy wants us to despair and give up, but God uses others to come alongside us because we often need that personal demonstration of love and faithfulness. Though we go through many experiences in life we  would rather avoid, God uses these to give us empathy and compassion to help others in their distress. God will not let us be tempted beyond what we can bear (1 Cor 10:13), but gives us all the help and comfort we need.

God’s comfort is one reason we can rejoice (see Is 49:13). He will not let us fall, but will carry us through the trials and help us in every area of our lives.

Dave spoke this morning on the Transfiguration of Jesus (Mark 9:2-9). So many people seem to crave physical transformation these days through cosmetic surgery and Botox; Michael Jackson, for example, was transformed by plastic surgery, but in essence, this only deals with the outward appearance and cannot change the inner personality. Jesus’s transfiguration was not just about physical transformation (though his appearance was changed as he dazzled with light), but was more a case of his true nature shining through. The Transfiguration revealed His true glory and splendour and we all need to experience this in our lives; we need to experience God in ways that stretch our imagination and revolutionise our lives.

We can, if we are not careful, be like the young boy who was so thrilled by the circus parade that came to his home town that he failed to go to the circus itself, mistaking the preliminary excitements for the real thing. We need to experience the full glory of God, not just become used to mere ‘routines’ of prayer and praise. Whilst life cannot be lived entirely on the mountain top, we do need to yearn for God’s presence and seek His glory. Then, equipped by a renewed vision of G0d, we are able to go back to the valley and continue the work to be done there – work which, as Jesus reminded His disciples, included suffering and death.

We need always to remember that Jesus is both the Son of God and the Son of Man. Peter wanted the glory of the Transfiguration without the sacrifice of Calvary and that can never be the case. His view, like so many nowadays, was that ‘where the Messiah is, there’s no misery.’ The truth is that where there is misery, there we will find the Messiah. Glory never comes without sacrifice; triumph does not come without suffering. Jesus knew there was one more mountain to be climbed: the mount called Calvary. Glory and sacrifice are twin peaks in the Christian life: the one does not exist without the other. We have to learn from the glimpses of God’s glory on the mountain tops, but we must also learn to take those experiences into our daily lives in the valleys and walk with God in every moment of every day.

On Sunday, we had a birthday to celebrate: