We also had another birthday to celebrate at the weekend:

It’s funny how themes recur in our lines and how we find God saying the same thing to us more than once (largely because we are dull of hearing and even duller of heart, I expect.)

Over two years ago, I wrote a post called ‘Bass lines. I’d just attended a marvellous concert by ‘The King’s Singers’ and had been pondering how all those beautiful harmonies blend together to form a piece of music that is sublime to listen to. I’d also realised that life inevitably involves what to us seems like dull repetition (aka the bass line of most pieces of music) which actually is just as important to life as those soaring melodies.

The daughter of a friend of mine has just written an article for Open Doors Youth (you can read it here.) Nell plays the trumpet and she has a friend who is a cellist. Their opinions on a certain piece of music (Pachelbel’s Canon, one of my favourites too!) differed, largely because the cellist plays eight repeating notes throughout the entire piece and was therefore bored by it!

She talks about contentment being the ‘bass line’ of the Christian life, saying ‘And so, stop, think for a minute, and listen to the bass line of your life. Strain your ears past the melody of your day to day emotions, and listen to what underpins all that you do. If the melody were to change, or to stop completely, would the bass line still be music to your ears? Would you still want to listen to the song of your life, even if the embellishments quieted and the excitement stopped? If your bass line springs from the One who brings peace and fulfilment to all who know Him, then it will continue even when any other music fades. And that is true contentment.’

Many of us prefer melodies, with their beautiful variations, interesting intervals and singable tunes. We prefer life to be exciting, interesting, entertaining and diverse. We think of the bass line as boring, repetitive, mundane and humdrum and we hate it when our lives are like this. But God weaves both bass lines and melodies together to make a richer whole and in the same way He works every aspect of our lives into a whole which can glorify Him. Whether we’re on the mountain top or in the valley, experiencing dazzling visions of God or feeling bereft of His presence, He is there, underpinning our lives, working faithfulness, patience, endurance and contentment into us.

Dave spoke from John 8:48-59 on the deity and pre-incarnate nature of Christ. The difference between orthodox faith and cults or between Christianity and other religions has always been focussed on the person of Jesus Christ. Other monotheistic religions do not understand how Christians believe in one God in Three Persons: Father, Son and Spirit. Clearly, the Jews of Jesus’s time also struggled to understand this and He was crucified because they asserted that He claimed to be God (which was blasphemous in their eyes.)

Jesus often engaged in debate with the Pharisees who were astounded at His words. By referring to the divine name ‘I am’ (the name by which God revealed Himself to Moses in Exodus 3), Jesus showed that His existence did not begin with His birth at Bethlehem. Rather, He knew glory with the Father before the world began (John 17:5) and was loved by God before the creation of the world. (John 17:24) John 1:1-3 makes it clear that Jesus is the creator of the world and the Word of God, co-eternal with the Father, without beginning or ending of days. 2 Cor 8:9 reminds us that He exchanged all the riches of heaven for poverty on earth: He knew the riches of love, fellowship, harmony and immeasurable resources, but chose to take on human flesh so that He could save us from our sins. He did not cease to be God when He took on flesh, but the Incarnation was the only way that man could be saved:

‘He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksom House of mortal Clay.’ (John Milton)

Christ appeared in theophanies in the Old Testament (eg at the burning bush) and there seems to be some reference to this in the passage in John 8, for God’s promises to Abraham found their fulfilment in Jesus. Heb 2:14-15 shows us why angels could not bring our salvation. Instead, Jesus shared in our humanity in order to bring salvation to us, being both God and Man, truly the means of our salvation!

This morning’s service at Cherry Tree Court  looked at the theme of thankfulness (see 1 Thess 5:18 and Eph 5:20). The book Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter tackles this topic, showing how Pollyanna learnt to play the ‘glad game‘ from her father, looking at reasons for thankfulness in all circumstances. Often, we find it easy to be thankful when circumstances are favourable and we feel happy, but because God is working all things together for good and is in complete control of our lives, we can give thanks even when circumstances are not so good.

The Israelites were faced with challenging circumstances at times, such as when their land was invaded by the Babylonians and they were taken away into exile. They kept hoping they could soon go home. They didn’t want to be in Babylon. They were homesick. They were so upset that they said ‘By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion’ (Ps 137:1) and they cried ‘How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?  If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.’ (Ps 137:4-5) For them, their whole lives were defined by this one event: how could they be God’s people when they were no longer living in God’s land? How could they be glad when there was nothing to be glad about?

Jeremiah’s message of hope (Jer 29:4-14) didn’t initially seem particularly encouraging, for, contrary to what they wanted, he urged them to settled down in Babylon, build houses and gardens, get married and carry on as normal, telling them that this exile would last seventy years. These were hard facts to face, but God deals with reality and does not sugar coat truth. ‘The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible – to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Run With The Horses’ P 150) Reality might well be facing we are ill and aren’t going to get better; it might mean facing that the person we love no longer loves us or has died and therefore isn’t there to love us anymore; it might mean facing we don’t have as much money as we used to have or we can’t live where we used to live. When God tells us to give thanks in all circumstances and for everything, He’s not saying the circumstances are always rosy or the situations are always good.

What God does want us to do is to live for today with grateful hearts. Jeremiah urged the people to live for today, accepting that God was there in the everyday and the mundane, in the ordinary, accepting that even though things hadn’t worked out the way they wanted them to work out, that wasn’t the end of the story. Our circumstances are not the end of the story; they’re only part of the story. Every day, we are faced with a choice as to how we will live. ‘Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?’ (ibid. P 150)

Jeremiah reminded the people that that God had good plans for them: ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ (Jer 29:11) He told them that if they would seek God with all their hearts, they would find Him. (Jer 29:12-14)  We can give thanks in all circumstances and rejoice like Pollyanna did, not just because we have a sunny disposition or are optimists by nature, but because we have a good God who never leaves us or forsakes us and who is actively working all things together for good in our lives. Let’s choose to live for today with thankfulness and grateful hearts because we are never alone, even in exile, and we’re never without hope, for we have a God of hope who fills us with joy and peace as we trust in Him so that we can overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

The term ‘thin place’ occurs in Celtic writings and refers to a ‘sacred place’ where the presence of God is felt keenly, a place where ‘the boundary between heaven and earth seems especially thin’, where we sense God’s presence more easily. There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places the distance is even smaller! The poet Sharlands Sledge writes:

‘“Thin places,” the Celts call this space,
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between the world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy.’ (quoted here)

We have probably all experienced places we have visited where we have sensed God’s presence: the grandeur of a mountain scene, the beauty of the sea lapping in to shore, the stillness of a forest glade. In the Bible, there are plenty of holy places where God’s presence transformed the ordinary: Mount Sinai where God appeared to Moses and  Bethel where God appeared to Jacob in a dream and Jacob woke saying ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.‘ (Gen 28:16), for example. The New York times ran a feature about these kinds of places, calling them ‘places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again.’ Phil Wickham’s song ‘Heaven and Earth’ touches on this theme, saying:

This is the line we’re choosing now to cross
Between heaven and earth, heaven and earth’ (Phil Wickham, ‘Heaven and Earth’)

In his song ‘The Ascension‘, which looks at the pilgrims’ journey to Jerusalem as they sang the Psalms of Ascent (Ps 120-134), he sings ‘This is the start of something amazing, a moment when heaven touches earth.’ All of us need those moments, when heaven touches earth and our eyes are opened afresh to the wonder and grace of God.

Gabriella Llewellyn, in a series of blog posts entitled ‘The Thin Places’, says that ‘Thinness is breathable and transparent. It’s vulnerable and weak. Like dough overstretched, Thin Places are areas of defenselessness. And then sometimes, they’re places of sheer and breezy beauty.’ She goes on to identify moments of thinness when we feel vulnerable, weak, ill-equipped but acutely aware of God’s presence: moments of failure, of forgiveness, of service, of misunderstanding, of struggle. As Paul remarked, ‘when I am weak, then I am strong.‘ (2 Cor 12:10) Thin places remind us of paradox and breathtaking, unearned, undeserved mercy and grace. They are places filled with awe and a sense of the holiness of God.

Next Saturday (20th September) will be the next ‘Churches Together’ meeting, starting at 7 p.m. at GPCC. We have really enjoyed getting together with other local churches on several occasions throughout 2014 and are sure that God will bless this time again, so do come along if you can. We will be exploring the theme of ‘whole-life discipleship’ and there will be time for prayer, worship, teaching and fellowship, as well as refreshments and other fun activities. God is interested in every part of our lives and wants us to be a transforming influence on our world, so come along to find out more.