Last night’s sermon continued the series ‘Growing Up In God’, looking at leaving childish ways behind. (1 Cor 13:11) One of the best ways we can learn maturity is to look at the opposite and learn from it! After all, there never has been any such thing as a ‘perfect church’, for churches are made up of sinful people saved by grace and this growing up is an ongoing process. Most of the New Testament was written to correct wrong thinking and wrong behaviour: Paul wrote to the Galatians because they were trying to add salvation by works to salvation by grace and he had heard that they wanted to walk by works rather than by faith. He wrote to the Corinthian church about problems they were having with people pleasers and fitting in with their culture and with sexual immorality and church discipline. He wrote to the Ephesians because they needed to get back to the basics of their first love and understand how their walk with God shaped their everyday actions. He wrote to the Thessalonians because they were getting a wrong idea about the Second Coming of the Lord and were just sitting back passively waiting for this to happen instead of understanding what they needed to be doing right now.  He wrote to the Romans about how God’s plans were worked out throughout all history for both Jews and Gentiles and also dealt with practical problems such as eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. He wrote to Timothy and Titus to help them know how to deal with problems in the church so that they could lead well. As Eugene Peterson says, “These churches were a mess and Paul wrote his letters to them to try to clear up the mess.”! (‘Practise Resurrection’ P 16)

Growing up is a process, a movement from the ‘pure spiritual milk’ we crave as newborns in Christ (1 Pet 2:2) to the solid food we need as we grow. (Heb 5:14) We will never reach the stage of maturity defined by the dictionary as ‘having reached the most advanced stage in a process’ until Christ comes (1 John 3:2) and so in some respects we are all at different stages of development. Our attitude to growth is often one of impatience and frustration: we can become impatient with ourselves and with other people. The only effective long-term solution to this attitude is love: ‘Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.’ (1 Peter 4:8) Love is like the throw over an old, stained sofa: it covers over the mistakes and problems and helps us to live in the real world, where people make mistakes and fail on a daily basis without giving up. If we are to grow up and leave childish ways behind us, we need to understand that real growth is a slow process that will always involve grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, not simply self-effort and legalistic rules.

The Sunday School had a great time tonight learning about Noah’s ark and making their own picture:

Even the helpers got rather messy!

It was worth it in the end, though!

Dave spoke this morning from Hebrews 11 and Ephesians 1:15-18, looking at the topic of who are saints. Often in our modern thinking, a saint is perceived  as one who has led a holy life, done great things for God (including miracles), suffered greatly… and who is (invariably) dead! The term is often used as ‘a posthumous reward for faithful service’, but this is certainly not the Biblical definition of the word. A saint, to the New Testament writers, is one set apart for God, one made holy by the blood of Jesus, not by their own merit, valour or faithfulness.

The term is used almost 50 times in the New Testament, first of all in Acts 9:13 and finally in Revelation 19:18. In Hebrews 11, many saints from the Old Testament are listed, but again, though these were people of faith, they were by no means perfect (the list includes Moses and David, who were murderers, Gideon who was a coward, Samson who was a womaniser and Rahab who was a prostitute!) It is not enough to consider a holy person to be one whose life is dedicated to God per se, for Saul of Tarsus is the classic example of one who was zealous for God but who persecuted the church! Only when he received the good news of Christ personally did he become a saint.

There are undoubtedly responsibilities placed on us as believers: to live our lives to glorify God and to be separated from the world, for example, but it is the presence of God within us by His Spirit which gives us the power to live this life. All of us are ‘ordinary’ in ourselves, but we become extraordinary through God’s work within us. God has chosen us to be saints before the creation of the world so that we can live holy and blameless lives (Eph 1:4) and His work in us has made us to be sons and daughters of the living God. (Gal 4:4) As we recognise our true identity in God, we can live as saints now, not waiting for a future canonisation! As the old hymn declares, ‘I want to be in that number, when the saints go marching in!’

Kutless (another favourite group of mine) is about to release a new album (on 11th February) called ‘Glory.’ Their last album ‘Believer’ was a great help to me during times of yearning and searching, so it is with great anticipation that I await this new offering. Amazingly, thanks to the ‘New Release Tuesday’ broadcast, I can listen in advance to the songs, as can you: ‘Glory’ by Kutless

I particularly like ‘Never Too Late’ (a great message of hope that it is never too late to cry out to God  – ‘all your mistakes are covered by grace’, thanks be to God!), ‘Restore Me’ (which reflects many of David’s prayers that God would search him and restore him – ‘pull me out of darkness for Your glory; let Your waves of mercy wash over me‘) and ‘We Will Worship’ (a song of declaration and determination to praise in all situations, even ‘when the sky turns dark and heartache falls’ ) But that’s just on the first hearing!

In reading N. T. Wright’s book ‘A Case for the Psalms’ (not that I ever needed a case making for the Psalms, finding them totally invaluable throughout my Christian life!), I came across a quote which articulated for me a long-held belief that the more we understand of God’s perspective on time, the easier we will find it to cope with waiting in our time.

“Make us to be people who know how to stand at the threshold of human time and God’s time, and there to learn both humility and hope. Our time is not worthless, but any worth it may possess will come from God’s goodness, not our control of our circumstances.” (N. T. Wright, ‘The Case for the Psalms’, P 38)

We are people who belong to eternity but who are, in Michael Card’s words, stranded in time. Aaron Shust says ‘there is only one desire in the heart of Your redeemed/ To step deeper in the place where earth and heaven meet.’ Learning to live in our time but seeing eternity from God’s perspective does wonders for how we view the drudgery and the waiting of our daily lives. So often, we feel helpless because we cannot control our circumstances or dictate when things will happen to us. Yet as we wait and hope (the two being inextricably linked together etymologically and in our experience), we learn that ‘there is a time for everything’ (Eccl 3:1); times are appointed by God (Gen 1:14) and He is Lord of all time. (Rev 1:8)

In all of my tentative forays into learning about websites and other computer-related things, I came across the idea of ’embedded systems’. An embedded system is a computer system with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. Embedding an image within a webpage or email means that the image is visible within the webpage or email without having to link to another source: in email, for example, this would mean that you can see the image when you open the email without having to click on a link to see it. The advantage is it’s quick and easily visible; the disadvantage is the file size!

Anyway, in all these musings on things embedded, I started musing about the word itself. ‘To embed’ has a number of meanings, as given below: