Garry continued speaking on being productive in our faith, continuing to look at the importance of prayer in our lives. Last time, he had talked about the need to pray in the Spirit and develop sensitivity to the Spirit’s leading as we pray. Today, he looked at the topic of worship in prayer.

Because we are all different personalities, we all come to God in different ways; we can approach him with enthusiasm and confidence at times (as in Psalm 23), and at other times feel that God is remote or approach Him with diffidence and feeling downcast (as in Psalm 22). Psalm 100 reminds us that we are to approach God with gladness and 1 Thess 5:16-18 gives us fundamental principles: we are to rejoice always, pray continually and give thanks in all circumstances (something Paul himself did, as Acts 16:25 reflects.) Nonetheless, there is still further for us to progress in prayer, for Eph 5:18-20 reminds us that we are to be filled with the Spirit and give thanks for everything.

This may well seem impossible to us, but is where ‘the theological rubber hits the road.‘ Do we believe God is in control of our lives? Do we believe He only allows into our lives the things which can ultimately benefit us? Joseph is testimony that even what others mean for evil can be turned to good in God’s purposes (Gen 50:20) and therefore it is possible to give thanks for all things even if we cannot reconcile God’s goodness with our circumstances. When our son was ill with laryngitis as a small child, he refused to eat for several days because it hurt to swallow food. Garry knew that this was ultimately harmful to him and fed him ice-cream, all the while listening to his son telling him he was a ‘wicked, evil, cruel Daddy!’ Many of us feel that way about God when difficult circumstances come into our lives, but the fact remains that God loves us and never allows us to face more than we can bear by His grace.

Psalm 145 looks at two of the themes which form the basis for our worship in prayer. We praise God for who He is and for what He does. In prayer, we need to spend time dwelling on God, looking at different aspects of His nature (He is love, He is great, perfect, good, wise, holy, true, faithful, righteous, eternal, just, magnificent, compassionate, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, gracious and unchanging, for example.) We praise God for what He does, for His ‘mighty acts’ (Ps 145:17) and how He watches over all who love Him and acts on their behalf. We can use music to aid us in praise and worship; we can use the gift of tongues when we run out of our own words (see Col 3:16) and need to appreciate that worship and praise bring us into God’s presence and are powerful weapons, piercing the darkness and bringing us into the place of victory (see Psalm 149.) It needs to be routine to worship God in prayer, whether privately or corporately, for this is an essential part of our everyday life in Christ.

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.