We continue to believe that prayer fuels every activity of the church and that without God’s Spirit breathing life into every activity, nothing of lasting value will be achieved. Throughout February, we will be praying in particular for outreach: the outreaches in which the church is directly involved and our own personal outreach.

Our church is involved in children’s and youth work (with the Parent & Toddler group meeting on Friday mornings and the children’s/ youth meeting on a Monday evening) and we also host badminton on Friday evenings and a coffee morning on Saturday mornings. These are ways to connect with different parts of the community and get to know people in informal settings. Pray that God will bless all these outreaches, protecting all who help and attend and that He will pour out His Spirit, giving us words to speak to people and share the good news of God’s love. Our prayer is that we might be people who reflect God: ambassadors who represent His heart to the people of Goldthorpe.

Outreach is never simply an organised church activity, however. We are Christ’s ambassadors; we are the light of the world; we are salt in this world. God makes His appeal to the world through us! (2 Cor 5:20) That is a mind-blowing thought. Every day, God will bring people across our paths who do not yet know Him and our task is to be sensitive enough to the voice of His Spirit to know how He wants to make that appeal through us. Pray for our personal witness to friends, family, neighbours, work colleagues and even to the casual acquaintances who may cross our paths! Outreach and ‘mission’ are not things that are restricted to church buildings, set times or organised events. Rather, let’s pray that each one of us will be given words to speak and actions to match so that many, many people’s lives are touched by God and they are drawn into His family. Paul’s request for prayer should be ours also: ‘Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel.’ (Eph 6:19) ( or ‘Pray that I’ll know what to say and have the courage to say it at the right time, telling the mystery to one and all,’ as the Message version puts it.)

My favourite animal is the hippopotamus. After the elephant and rhinoceros, the hippopotamus is the third-largest type of land mammal, and I suspect my love of this animal has much to do with its ungainliness on land compared to its grace in water.

I think I probably identify with the hippo because most of the time I feel slow, ungainly, unwieldy, inelegant and (for most of my life) downright fat. But just as this is a fair description of a hippo on land, when I watch hippos swim, there is a completely different picture presented for me: not for nothing does its name come from the Greek for ‘river horse’!

In water, the hippo is transformed, swimming elegantly (despite its size) and apparently effortlessly, frolicking at times with other hippos, completely at ease in water whereas on land, it looks uncomfortable, lumbering and totally lazy!

For me, this is a parable of grace. Our lives are spent mainly on terra firma, where we learn to work, to strive, to make every effort to live well. That kind of living – by self-effort and sheer work – places huge responsibilities on our shoulders and becomes wearisome and burdensome. Everything depends on us and we walk around like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. We are the ones who have to fix the world’s problems, care for the needy, sort out the mess we find ourselves in. It’s an impossible situation.

God did not intend us to live like that. He operates in an entirely different medium, that of grace. Unmerited favour. Undeserved blessing. Love lavished on us simply because that is His nature. He is the One working all things together for good, weaving His plans into our history and our history into His plans. Anyone who has ever learnt to swim knows there are moments of abject terror when self-preservation reasons that this liquid cannot possibly support our weight or keep us buoyant. But while we fight the medium, we splutter and cough and sink; it’s only when we learn to trust the water that we float and swim. And the feelings we get when we are carried along by the water are (in my opinion) far better than when we are trudging through land! In water, we feel weightless, free, carried along by something greater than ourselves, just as the hippo seems to be in its element in water compared to on dry land.

People were meant to live in the medium of God’s grace. That means abdicating our own efforts and trusting in His. When put as baldly as that, the choice seems ridiculously simple. And it is. But ‘grace is an insubstantial, invisible reality that permeates all that we are, think, speak, and do. But we are not used to living by invisibles.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Practise Resurrection’, P 94) Just as it requires courage to trust that the water will be miraculously buoyant when learning to swim, it takes courage and great faith to live by grace, rather than by our own efforts. ‘Faith in Christ is a plunge into grace,’ Eugene Peterson continues. It’s a plunge I recommend.

Mark’s sermon last night on prayer faced the fact that there are times, of course, when the promises in Luke 11:9-13 do not seem to be very real to us. Obviously, if we are demanding things from God, we may well be disappointed with His answers, for He is able to refuse our requests when He knows these will not serve to further our spiritual growth. Just as every parent knows it is unwise to give a child everything it asks for, so too God may well withhold things from us which we think are perfectly desirable and needful! Mark looked at other obstacles to receiving answers to prayer, however, looking at 1 John 3:21-22 and how our hearts condemn us when there is sin in our lives which separates us from God and prevents us from entering His presence confidently and freely.

When there is sin in our lives, our prayer life is inevitably affected, for we feel guilty. We know that God knows our sin, even if we manage to deceive other people. As a result, we lose our confidence before God and we feel awkward in His presence, with the result that we tend to spend less time with Him. God wants us, though, to ‘come anyway. Confess your sin and I will remove it from you. Let me forgive you and renew the relationship we have.’ When this happens, we are able to approach the throne of grace again with confidence and can ask, seek and knock with full assurance of faith.

The chief obstacles to prayer, therefore, are:

1) Are we asking for the right things? (see James 4:3)

2) Is there something in our lives stopping God’s blessing?

If we can be sure that these obstacles have been overcome, we can be confident in God’s goodness as a loving Father in answering prayer.

Mark spoke on the subject of prayer last night from Luke 11:9-13. He started by talking about the X Factor, saying that many of us feel you need to have a certain level of goodness before you can come to God, just like the contestants on the X Factor need to have a certain level of talent to succeed (though many, sadly, don’t, as this Mitch Benn song indicates!)

God sees the X factor in all of us, however. If God were on the judging panel, we would all get through because it does not depend on our talent or our virtue, but on His mercy and grace. He delights in giving us all a chance. We have all fallen short of His glory and all need salvation (Rom 3:23), but we do not have to reach a state of sinless perfection before we come to God in prayer! He loves us just as much now as He did before we knew Him and asks us to come to Him in prayer, seeking His help and being confident that we can approach Him boldly (Heb 4:16) because in Him we will find mercy and grace.

This awareness that we approach God boldly (with confidence and candour and cheerful courage) means we do not have to come cowering and in fear. God’s promises are to answer us and tell us great and unsearchable things (Jer 33:3), for He is our Provider. However, the promises in these verses from Luke 11:9-13 are not a blanket promise to give us all our selfish desires, as the Janis Joplin song would like! We ask God, not demand from Him, and the promise is that God will give us the Holy Spirit, not necessarily all the belongings we would like to acquire! Spiritual gifts are what we really need in this life and as we see God for His direction for our lives, He will open doors of opportunity for us and lead and direct us.

Garry spoke this morning from 2 Peter 1:3-8, looking at how God’s plan is for us to be productive. Gal 5:22-24 lists the fruit of the Spirit which God wants to develop in our characters. For this fruit to grow, however, we have to crucify the old nature, which is never a pleasant process! Jesus is the Gardener (John 15:1-8) and leaves have to be lifted out of the shadows into the light for us to be able to grow more. We have to work in partnership with God. All things can be used, but we need to learn the lessons or we keep coming back to the same things! God even uses suffering to help us to grow (and if Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered, as we read in Heb 5:7-8, we will certainly have to learn this way too!)

There is often pain involved with our growth, for the scalpel hurts just as much as the dagger, but we have to remember that there is a different intent behind the hand which wields these implements. God’s intention, even when He cuts us, is to heal us. ‘Sometimes all we have to hold onto is what we know is true of who You are,’ Kutless sing (‘Even If’) and we have to learn to trust God even when everything around us feels like no good can come from it! (Job 13:15, Matt 27:46) We always have to remember ‘there’s an aim behind the pain.’

The church is God’s idea and needs to be involved in worship, in encouraging itself and in reaching out to the world. We need church to be:

1) A safe place, where we care for each other and look out for each other. (1 Cor 12:21-26). God wants us to encourage and build each other up (1 Thess 5:11), giving support and comfort to each other so that we can encourage the disheartened and help the weak. (1 Thess 5:13-18). This means, however, that we need to really know each other and let down our guards enough to allow others to see our weaknesses. Then we can come alongside each other to strengthen and support, rather like the trellis put up to help runner beans grow:

2) A place of demonstration, where we set examples to each other (1 Cor 11:1) so that we demonstrate how to handle life’s difficulties and messiness. Bill Lane, who was a mentor to Michael Card, told him when he was diagnosed with cancer ‘I have shown you how a Christian lives; now I will show you how a Christian dies.’ We need people to be an example to us of how the Christian life works in the everyday, and we need to set that example to others too.

3) A place to learn and grow, where we can be involved in activities together. Jesus modelled how to disciple others, by urging His disciples to come and watch Him, then allowing them to work alongside Him and finally sending them out to do it themselves. We need to have the freedom to fail, for no one gets it right all the time, and we need the ongoing challenge to grow. Church is where we practise what God wants and the world is where we produce. No one is excluded, for we all have a role to play. To be productive, we need to be part of a church, engaged with the family of God.

Unity is a great thing and we are thankful to be able to work with different churches in our local area. Tonight, we all met at the Salvation Army church in Goldthorpe for the first ‘Churches Together’ meeting of 2014. It was great to worship and pray together and to engage in activities which demonstrated unity, such as making bookmarks out of different threads and linking chains to show how the local churches are committed to one another.

After the meeting, we enjoyed cakes and buns and fellowship as we chatted together.

The next ‘Churches Together’ will be on Saturday 29th March at 6 p.m. at Goldthorpe Pentecostal Community Church, so we hope this will be another opportunity to pray and praise together!