This evening, Stephen spoke from Matthew 6:9-15. The Lord’s prayer is a template for us to follow in how to pray (communicating with God verbally and spiritually), but this also forms a pattern for living. It starts by setting the King in glory in our lives (‘our Father in heaven, hallowed by Your name’), for knowing the difference our heavenly Father makes and accepting the difference that this makes is crucial to our wellbeing.

Often, we have recited the Lord’s prayer collectively, but this prayer is important in answering key questions in life to do with our purpose and identity.  As we pray ‘Your kingdom, Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’, we come to understand that our purpose is to honour God and advance His kingdom through who we are and in everything that we do through our cooperation with God’s Spirit who is at work in each and every one of us. We grow to the point where what we want is aligned with what God wants so that we think, speak, act and relate to people in a Christ-like way. We are inwardly connected to Jesus (see John 15:1-8) and can then live our lives pursuing the interests of God’s kingdom.

Often, we want to know our specific, individual purpose with certainty, wanting to know our unique purpose in life . Sometimes, perhaps, our search for the specific is misguided and our need for certainty may reflect our addiction to control. God wants to teach us to trust Him, rather like when we learn to abseil and have to lean back and lean out and ultimately let go! Focussing on God will centre us squarely in God’s plan for our lives.

We also had two birthdays to celebrate:

This morning saw us hold the first service from our church at Cherry Tree Court in Highgate. This is a residential complex for older people and we were privileged to be able to take a church service there. We sang some hymns and Dave brought a short word from Luke 13:10-17, looking at the crippled woman whom Jesus healed. This woman had been crippled for eighteen years and is not even named in this account; she must have felt discouraged and depressed and had low self-esteem as a result of her many problems, but the encounter with Jesus restored her to health and wholeness, reminding her of her true identity as a ‘daughter of Abraham.’ Jesus is able to meet our every need and to care for us, no matter what situations weigh us down. He is the One who has the power to break every chain in our lives.

It was good to see old friends reunited:

After the service, we enjoyed a drink in the lovely restaurant and chatted with residents:

In future, we will hold a service at Cherry Tree Court on the 2nd Sunday morning of each month, starting at 10:30 a.m. The next meeting will be on 13th April.

At the concert, Michael Card sang (at times with his daughter, Maggie) a range of his 423 songs on a variety of themes, playing both piano, guitar and banjo. You can click on some of the links to listen to some of these.

The songs were:

1. Could It Be?
2. Love Crucified Arose
3. God’s Own Fool
4. That’s What Faith Must Be
5. Soul Anchor
6. Come Lift Up Your Sorrow (his own personal favourite from all the songs he has written)
7. Tennyson Poem
8. A King In a Cattle Trough
9. A Better Freedom
10. Jubilee
11. El Shaddai
12. The Things We Leave Behind
13. Why?
14. Never Will I Leave You
15. The Sunrise of Your Smile
16. I Will Not Walk Away
17. Shut Your Lamps (an Irish lullaby, the term meaning ‘close your eyes’!)
18. Galilee (instrumental, from his new album ‘The Penultimate Question’ on Matthew’s Gospel)
19. Lost in the temple (instrumental)
20. Sea of Souls
21. Born in the flesh (title may be different from the opening line)
22. This Is Who You Are (from his new album ‘The Penultimate Question’ on Matthew’s Gospel)
23. In Memory of Her Love
24. Immanuel
25. The Basin and the Towel
26. Benediction

If you are interested, Michael Card will be performing at Maltby Full Life AoG church on Wednesday 12th March at 7:30 p.m. Tickets (costing £10) are available online here.

Yesterday we went to a seminar on Matthew’s Gospel led by Michael Card and then attended a concert given by him at Holy Trinity Church in Hinckley. One of the things he talked about was the joy of becoming a grandfather for the first time eighteen weeks ago and how this had rekindled in him the need to write lullabies (though he said the difference was, as a parent you write lullabies to get your children to go to sleep, whereas as a grandfather, he wanted to write them to wake up the baby so he could play!) I have been listening to Michael Card’s music for thirty years now and it occurred to me that my son has listened to it for his entire life; we included one of the original lullabies (from the album ‘Sleep Sound in Jesus’) at his dedication service when he was eight weeks old!

‘In Your loving arms we lay

This wordless one so new

The incarnation of our love,

We dedicate to You.’ (‘Wordless One’, Michael Card)

More recently, Michael Card has been writing books and songs based on the gospels and yesterday’s seminar looked at Matthew’s Gospel. Each gospel throws a different light on Jesus. In Mark, He is seen as something of a disturbing presence, speaking and acting with absolute authority and the people are both drawn to Him and afraid of Him. In Luke, the marginalised and oppressed are the one who are drawn to Jesus and there is always a contrast between the religious people (who ought to have understood Jesus’s message but who so often failed to understand it or receive it) and the poor (who embraced it gladly.) In John (which includes many stories not included in the other gospels), Jesus is portrayed as the Wisdom of God. Matthew could be seen as the ‘gospel of identity’, showing the Jewish Christians who were undergoing persecution at the time who Jesus is and therefore who they are. The gospel has different themes running through it, including:

1. the enemy’s attempts to kill Jesus (starting with the Slaughter of the Innocents, only recorded in Matthew’s Gospel and going on through numerous attempts to thwart God’s plans by killing Jesus)
2. the importance of dreams in this gospel
3. the ‘fulfilment formula’ (how Matthew links what happened to the Old Testament Scriptures)
4. the importance of Galilee in the life of Jesus
5. identity (how my identity is seen through Christ’s identity, for ‘all self-disclosure is Christological’)
6. long blocks of the teaching of Jesus (largely omitted in Mark, where the emphasis is more on what Jesus did than on what He said)
7. the tension between the old and the new (especially seen in Matthew 13)
8. the importance of hesed (mercy, grace, loving kindness) in God’s workings with mankind (how we do not deserve anything from God, but He gives us everything).

Don’t forget the local Women’s World Day of Prayer meeting will be held on Friday 7th March at 6 p.m. at Furlong Road Methodist Church in Bolton-on-Dearne. All are welcome to attend (you don’t have to be a woman to pray and all are welcome!) The service has been written by Christians from Egypt on the theme ‘Streams in the Desert.’ Please bring tinned food for the local food banks if you are able to; an offering will be taken in the service for the Women’s World Day of Prayer movement which distributes these gifts to a variety of Christian charities and other organisations.

Refreshments will be served after the meeting.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and asked the staff there what dish they recommend? Sometimes this intimate knowledge of the menu can open up opportunities to try a new dish you would otherwise have ignored or been reluctant to try.

Or have you ever had a friend recommend an author or a film or a new place to you? Based on your trust in that person’s judgment, have you followed their recommendation and been pleasantly delighted to discover a new friend you might otherwise have ignored? This has happened to me so many times and it remains a source of unexpected joy to find new allies in exploring life…

Recommendations are only really helpful if you trust the person making them and that person knows you, for the things recommended can be highly personal and tastes vary enormously. It is not that there is anything wrong with some authors or films or places, but they may not be to our taste, and disappointment will come when recommendations fail to deliver the promise they suggest. However, the joy that results from recommendations which delight and which open for us new vistas cannot really be underestimated!

I have been meditating on John 1:35-51 for most of this year and I see this as one of the classic descriptions of evangelism that is accessible to us all. People who met Jesus essentially recommended Him to others: to their family, friends and acquaintances. Andrew, one of the first people to follow Jesus, told Peter: ‘the first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah.”‘ (John 1:41) Later, Philip found Nathanael and told him, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ (John 1:45) Nathanael’s response was sceptical, but Philip’s reply was ‘Come and see.’ (John 1:46)

Essentially, evangelism involves recommending Jesus to people around us. We cannot force them to accept Him: salvation is a spiritual work of the Holy Spirit and will involve their response to God’s personal invitation. But our role is to recommend Jesus, for we know that in Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Col 2:3) Just as many of our friends’ recommendations to us enrich our lives beyond words, this ultimate recommendation will lead to other people’s joy and salvation. Let’s not be shy in recommending Jesus!