On Saturday 28th September, we will be hosting a Macmillan Coffee Morning, with all proceeds from this going towards the cancer charity.

Do come along if you can to this event, which will be from 10 a.m. until 12 noon in the community hall. We hold a coffee morning every Saturday morning, but this Saturday will be a special event in that we are raising money for Macmillan nurses, who do such a great job of caring for those suffering from cancer. There are currently 2 million people living with cancer in the UK and the charity provides medical, emotional, practical and financial support, pushing for a better cancer care system. If you want to know more about the work of the Macmillan charity, check out their website.

A good week lies ahead for praise and worship albums, as both Matt Redman’s album ‘Your Grace Finds Me’ and Phil Wickham’s album ‘The Ascension’ are released on Tuesday! To whet your appetites, here are two of the songs from these albums, both interestingly focussing on the grace of God.

‘Your Grace Finds Me’, Matt Redman
‘This is Amazing Grace’, Phil Wickham

Garry finished his series from 2 Peter 1:3-8 TNIV this morning, looking at the last item mentioned on Peter’s list of things which we should add to our faith, namely love. He has previously talked about brotherly kindness (or mutual affection), but here, he is talking about agape, God’s love. We need all these qualities if our faith is to be built on something solid! Peter says that we are participating in God’s divine nature, nature being what makes something what it is, and since love is a key part of God’s nature, it needs to be part of ours too.

God wants us to reflect the family likeness, and since He is love, love has to be evident in our lives. John tells us that God is love (1 John 4:8 TNIV) and is, therefore, an integral, intrinsic part of who God is. Love is part of all God is all He does always. We need to grasp that His love does not fail and never gives up. His love is a fact. Situations often test us and cause us to doubt His love (‘If God is love, why has this happened?’), but we need this solid foundation of fact on which to build. God’s love never fails (1 Cor 3:8 TNIV).

Unless we grasp hold of God’s love, we can easily become bitter or hardened or even fall away from the faith. We can’t always answer people’s questions or explain all that happens, but we rest on the fact of God’s love. Love is an identifier of God. He is defined by love, and therefore we too must be defined by love.

God’s love was the motivator to His actions (John 3:16 TNIV). Often, we can be motivated by other things (frustration, anger, road rage, shame, guilt, duty and so on), but God was not motivated by any of these things, only by love. This is a risky strategy. It’s easy to motivate people to do things out of guilt or shame, but since God’s love was the factor which motivated Him to send His Son, we must only be motivated by love. We reach out to others because of God’s love, not simply out of duty or guilty. Love is a risky strategy becasue there is no guarantee that others will respond, but we have to be motivated by the same things that motivate God (including a desire for righteousness and holiness.)

1 Corinthians 13 talks extensively about love. We are reminded in 1 Cor 13:13 TNIV that the greatest of all the things is love. Just as James tells us that faith without works is dead, so John reminds us that faith without love is dead. We need to add love to our faith if we are to mature and be effective in our lives for God.

Last night instead of just holding the prayer meeting inside the church building, we went out to walk the streets of Goldthorpe. This month, we are praying particularly about regeneration in the area, including economic regeneration, so we concentrated on praying for local businesses and also prayed on the barren wastelands which have been earmarked by Barnsley M.B.C. as the site for the new primary school.

Goldthorpe has an industrial estate on Commercial Road, constructed between 1977 and 1994, made up of a detached industrial unit benefitting from its own secure yard and parking area. It houses a number of businesss, including Speed Frame, Home Choose Blinds, Sea Scooter UK Ltd, a firm dealing with hydroponics and other businesses. At the far end of the area, the supermarket Aldi is building a distribution centre. All of these businesses can help bring economic prosperity to the area and provide job opportunities for local people. Other industrial areas are found in different parts of the town and there are many local shops and businesses (lots of take-aways were open at night!) which need our prayers. We prayed for God’s blessing on these businesses and for employers and employees to work honestly and to know the presence of God in the area.

Goldthorpe Industrial Estate

Two verses have particularly come to mind whenever we pray for the area to flourish economically and spiritually. The first is Isaiah 58:12 TNIV (“Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.”) and the second Isaiah 43:18-19 TNIV (“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”) Parts of Goldthorpe still look like the wilderness or the wasteland: derelict buildings, graffiti on buildings, vandalism and overgrown areas of weeds, untended and uncared for. But as we pray, we are looking for God to move in this area and to bring forth new life, economically and spiritually. We believe that God has good plans for this place and we long to see hope manifested in every aspect of our community’s life.

An analogy is a comparison made to show a similarity. It’s a useful means of helping us to see something in a different light. It’s not the whole picture, but it can often shed light on it or help us to perceive something differently.

In my musings on God’s sovereignty as I watch Him unfold His plans in my life, I have thought of various analogies. These are limited, but in trying to fathom God’s ways, there will always be limitations!

The analogy of a tapestry has always been helpful to me.

Here, I see God weaving together His story with our lives becoming part of that picture. Often, it feels like I can only see the ‘wrong side’ of the tapestry, with all its knots and crossed threads, but on the right side, all is beautiful and picturesque.

Or I think of the analogy of a game of chess.

Here, in this game of strategy, God is moving all the pieces according to a masterplan which often seems baffling to the uninitiated. Then, several moves down the line, all becomes clear. I can’t think far enough ahead to appreciate chess properly and in the same way, I’m often locked into the ‘now’, failing to see how having to wait or how this current ‘disaster’ (whatever it may be), can actually bring good. Joseph is the story I come back to when I think of this analogy. His life shows me purpose even though this is usually only visible with hindsight.

Another analogy is that of a jigsaw puzzle.

Again, the idea of a finished picture, broken into oddly shaped fragments so that it’s not clear where the pieces fit into the overall picture, is the theme of this analogy. Life often seems to me like a jigsaw puzzle where we’ve lost the picture on the lid and don’t even know what the picture’s supposed to look like!

Then there are puzzles like Rubik’s cubes, which require mathematical skills I definitely don’t possess! My son can do these with such speed that I’m baffled, but he tells me it’s all about patterns and seeing the bigger picture.

He can see several steps ahead so that the mishmash of colours doesn’t put him off, because he knows exactly where to move these to end up with each face having its own colour.

All these analogies remind us that:
1) God knows the end from the beginning. He can see the final picture, the finished cube! Often, we can’t. It requires faith to believe that life isn’t just a pile of jigsaw pieces or a messed-up Rubik’s cube. Many today believe that life is just random chance and has no meaning. Christianity teaches that God has a plan for each one of us which belongs to His great master plan and that He is working all things together for good.

2) God is the master strategist. He can think so far ahead, it blows our mind! He loved us and chose us before the creation of the world. Salvation was no afterthought. The devil thought that the crucifixion was the end of God’s plan, but this was actually woven into the tapestry from the start! (see Acts 2:23 TNIV)

3) God’s will and plans will not be thwarted. It often looks as though things are not going the right way, in the same way that when I watch my son do a Rubik’s cube, his actions seem random and frankly meaningless. Then, with a few swift movements, the puzzle is solved and I’m in awe. I often feel that with God. “So that’s what it all meant!” Quite often with jigsaw puzzles, I try to force pieces into place, only to find they don’t. When they are in the right place, they fit. It works a bit like that with us and God. When we try to do His will for Him, the results are disastrous. When He works, everything slots into place and the end results are spectacular.

Just recently, a pupil asked me to give him some examples of French phrases which are used in everyday English, phrases that have crossed the language boundaries, so to speak, and become an accepted part of another language. English is full of these words and phrases: café, for example (the French word means coffee and by association came to mean also the place in which the beverage is drunk), not to mention words from other languages such as sombrero from Spanish, banana from African origin and my personal favourite Schadenfreude, ‘pleasure at another’s misfortune’, even if the meaning is obviously not as pleasant as the sound of the word!

I suggested to the pupil that in order to answer him, we would have to have a tête-à-tête after the lesson (literally head-to-head, this phrase has come to mean a private conversation between two people.) But the phrase which his conversation and recent events triggered in me is actually fait accompli.

Literally, this phrase means an accomplished fact. It’s defined in the English dictionary as ‘something already done and beyond alteration.’ A done deal. Fixed in stone, as it were. Something that has already happened, even if we might not always realise it.

“May it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) reminds me vividly of this phrase. In a recent sermon Agreeing with God, I talked about how God speaks to us of His sovereign plans and we agree with Him, speaking the ‘Amen’ to His ‘Yes’ and thereby seeing the promise by faith before we can actually see it in this visible world.

Isaiah 25:1 TNIV says “O Lord, You are my God; I will exalt You and praise Your name, for in perfect faithfulness You have done marvellous things, things planned long ago.” God, who dwells outside of time, has plans to prosper us and give us hope and a future (Jer 29:11 TNIV) and works all situations together to make these plans come to pass (Rom 8:28 TNIV). As we agree with God, we come to see that, in ways that don’t negate our free will, we are actually mysteriously participating in a fait accompli – accomplished by God, realised through faith, and definitely worth praising Him for when we actually get to ‘possess by faith what we could not earn’ (Graham Kendrick).