Sometimes we have to talk to ourselves. The call to worship at times has to come from within. We have to stir ourselves and, in the words of Rend Collective, say ‘Come on, my soul!’

The psalmist knew the truth of this, saying ‘Awake, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn.’ (Ps 57:8) He knew that there are times when we are downcast and we have to stir ourselves to worship: ‘Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God,for I will yet praise him,my Saviour and my God.’ (Ps 42:5, 11) There are times when our hearts are already ready for worship (‘My heart says of you, “Seek his face! Your face, Lord, I will seek.‘ Ps 27:8). but there are many other occasions when we have to stir ourselves to worship, regardless of how we feel. We choose to worship. We choose to ‘let down the walls.’ We choose to believe in God’s goodness and repeat Scriptural truths, whether we feel like it or not. Worship is a choice, an everyday choice we have to make.

So as we gather in collective worship on a Sunday, let’s go prepared, having talked to our own souls before we join together. Let’s go ready to worship, eager to worship, prepared to worship, for Jesus is worthy of all our praise.

On Sunday we celebrated a number of birthdays past, present and future:

Barnsley Youth Choir have just won a gold medal at the World Choir Games in Latvia in the ‘Popular Choral Categ0ry’ and only just missed out on the gold medal in the ‘Gospel Category’- you can read about it here.

It’s great to have things to celebrate about where we live and as someone who taught one of the choir members, I’m immensely proud of their achievements! Well done to them all!

Despite the abundance of evidence that God is good and has good plans for His children, many of us still feel uncertain about God’s nature and doubt His goodness to us. The brokenness of life causes us to question God’s goodness; we have ‘ruined foundations’ that tend to lead us down paths of negative reactions such as shame, fear and wrongful control and must, therefore, daily make the choice to accept that ‘God is for us.’ To do this, we have to follow 3 principles:

1. Accept that God has the final word.
2. Accept that blessing is God’s natural inclination
3. Taste & see that the Lord is good

1. God has the final word.

It is mutually exclusive to believe that God is good and that He acts in a way that is maliciously harmful to us, so we must learn (as Mary did, when faced with the stupendous news that she would be the mother of Jesus) to agree with God: ‘Let it be to me as you have said.’ (Luke 1:38) God cannot lie, we are told, and so if we accept that He has the final word and is good and true in all His ways, we have to believe that that is the case even when we cannot see how that can be. This is not the same as casuistry (being deceptive in our reasoning) or sophistry (a superficially plausible but generally fallacious method of reasoning). It’s simply saying that we lack the perspective, wisdom or knowledge to reconcile the appearance of events with God’s nature and therefore we will believe what God says about His nature above what we see or feel. Just as Job and Joseph had to trust God through severe trials even though their perspective was limited, we have to hold on to what we know is true of God’s nature. In any battle between feelings and faith, faith has to win!

2. Blessing is God’s natural inclination

Psalm 1 shows us a world where God is in total control and His natural inclination is to bless. Blessing doesn’t have to be tied to material prosperity (as the Sermon on the Mount makes clear), but Ps 67 makes it evident that God blesses us in order to be a blessing (see also Gen 12:3) and Romans 8 reminds us of all God’s blessings which will not be thwarted.

3. Taste & see that the Lord is good

Eugene Peterson says that ‘the anticipation of being blessed works changes in us that make us capable of being blessed.’ (‘Answering God’, P 25) As we read God’s Word, a true picture of who God is is revealed to us and our ideas about Him have to come into line with this revelation of Himself as we begin to see that He is a God who wants to bless us and is able to bless us. Our hearts are therefore stirred and encouraged to believe that God is good and we start to put our weight on that truth. We do as Peter has suggested and we taste and see that the Lord is good. We read that ‘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) and instead of being filled with fear and foreboding, faith and hope arise in our hearts and we are able to trust in the trials of life.

Numbers 6:22-27 gives us the priestly blessing, which forms the basis of the song ‘Benediction’ (Matt Redman). God is more eager to bless than we are to receive!

Tonight’s sermon continued the series on ‘Everyday Church’ by looking at the topic of God’s benevolence: God is good all the time! Taking Ps 67 as the text, we looked at how the topic of God’s goodness can be hard for us to accept, depending on our temperaments. For the ‘Tiggers’ amongst us, optimists who always see the glass as half-full, this doctrine is perhaps easy to grasp.

But for those of us who are more like Eeyore in temperament, pessimists who struggle to hold onto positive truths about God’s nature, it can be difficult to believe that God is always good and always wanting to do good to His people.

Charlie Cleverly asserts that ‘we have an unassailable future in the benevolent plans of God’ (‘Epiphanies of the Ordinary’ P 130), reflecting Jeremiah’s promise that God’s plan for us are good, giving us hope and a future. (Jer 29:11) God’s goodness is part of who He is (see Ps 119:68, Ps 86:5, Ps 100:5, Ps 106:1, Ps 107:1, Ps 118:29, repeated throughout Ps 136 & Ps 135:3)and results in Him doing good to us (see Ps 84:11, Ps 85:12, Ps 103:5, Ps 104:28, Ps 107:9, Ps 116:7, Ps 145:9, James 1:17, 1 Pet 2:3).

One word in Hebrew which reflects God’s goodness is chesed. It appears over 250 times in the Old Testament and is translated by many different English words (loving-kindness or unfailing love or mercy, for example – see Is 54:10). The prevalence of these references in the Old Testament reflect the fact that God does not change (Mal 3:6) and His loving-kindness and goodness towards mankind are as evident in the Old Testament as they are in the New. God is good and we can build our lives on this fact, even when we face difficult circumstances and trials.

Mark continued his series on Joseph this morning, looking at Gen 41:55-57 and then also looking at Gen 42:1-6. We left Joseph with a new name (Zaphenath-Paneah), a wife and two sons whose names (Manasseh & Ephraim) reflected the fact that he had not forgotten God, despite spending so many years as a slave or in prison. Now he is elevated to the position of second-in-command to Pharaoh and is in charge of food distribution during the seven years of famine. All who came to Pharaoh for help were directed to Joseph, showing the importance he held in the country. (Gen 41:55)

Joseph was in this position of responsibility because Pharaoh had seen the faithfulness of God in bringing about the fulfilment of the interpretation of his dream through Joseph. At times of crisis, people need to be able to turn to God’s people because they recognise God’s power and faithfulness through our lives. Our lives are fashioned in the furnace of adversity and testing. Joseph was by now at least forty years old. He had been waiting for the fulfilment of his dream for well over twenty years. We do not know if he was still hoping and praying for the dream to be fulfilled, but we know he was working faithfully in the place in which God had placed him and was still loyal to his God. It was a time of great famine, not only in Egypt but all over the world, but Joseph was able to help those in need because of his close walk with God.

At the beginning of Gen 42, the story shifts back to Joseph’s family. They too were affected by the famine, and so came to Egypt to look for grain. God was moving all the pieces of His plan into place. In Gen 42:6 we read one of the most poignant verses in this narrative: ‘So when Joseph’s brothers arrived, they bowed down to him with their faces to the ground.’ How Joseph must have remembered the dream (Gen 37:6-11) at this point. Truly nothing had been able to stop God’s plan or separate him from God’s love. (see Rom 8:35-39) We need to hold on to the dreams God has placed in our hearts, for when the time is right, God is able to bring all things to pass. He is Sovereign over all.