I hadn’t been a Christian very long when I discovered surely one of the most revolutionary verses in the Bible. ‘Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ (Eph 5:19-20 TNIV)

I’m not renowned for my logic and I’ve been made very aware of that throughout the years through my contact with logical people. I became a Christian through the testimony of a very logical mathematician, made friends with mathematicians and physicists at university and married an engineer. All of these people have taught me a lot about reasoning and logical responses and I believe there is a place for intelligence, understanding and reason in our faith; I think apologetics (‘reasoned arguments or writings in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine’) are as desperately needed in this day and age as they have ever been. But funnily enough, I didn’t need anyone else to explain the logical conclusion of these verses to me. That little word ‘for’ in verse 20 meant that I could never legitimately respond to life with bitterness or resentment. The logical conclusion of my belief in God as all-sovereign and all-sufficient was that every single thing that happens to me has been filtered through His loving purposes and therefore my response can be one of thankfulness and praise. (I’m definitely not saying that God is the author of evil, but I did understand that thankfulness for everything was possible if we truly believe God is sovereign over all.)

I haven’t always managed to respond as I should, with thankfulness and praise. It’s a lot easier to give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thess 5:18 TNIV) than it is to give thanks for those circumstances, as my husband pointed out to me (I think this was the very first theological argument I ever won in our relationship, as a matter of fact, when for once he couldn’t fault my logic in saying that we needed to give thanks for everything, not just in everything!)

But I did learn at an early age, and have endeavoured to live by this principle, that God is worth praising all the time. Aaron Shust says of his new album ‘Morning Rises’, “What makes the story of Job so powerful is his decision to praise. Job’s response, in light of tragically horrific circumstances, was to praise… If we believe all we declare about God, what is next for us to do? We can begin by praising Him, despite our circumstances, because He is worthy of praise… Praising God is like pushing aside the clouds, allowing the Light of the Sun to pierce its way into my darkness.” (Aaron Shust) He says it more eloquently than I do, but I agree with that conclusion!

Praise and worship are life’s heartbeat. I’m not just talking about verbally giving thanks or singing, though these are powerful methods to express what’s in our hearts. Romans 12:1-2 TNIV talks about worship being the surrender of our whole lives; in the Message version it says ‘Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.’ Worship involves all we have and all we are.

Perhaps because I learnt this principle from Ephesians 5:19-20 TNIV, perhaps because I have always loved music and believe it to be God’s gift to us (‘Music is God’s gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven’ said Walter Savage Landor), I have always thought that music and singing in particular are great ways to express truth and thankfulness. Initially, I learnt that this literally did me good:

‘Sing your praise to the Lord
I could never tell you just how much good that it’s going to do you!’ (‘Sing Your Praise To the Lord’, Rich Mullins)
‘Sing Your Praise To the Lord’, Rich Mullins (who can’t like a song that takes Bach and turns his music into a contemporary worship song?!)

But then I began to understand that worship is about more than just putting a smile on my face or cheering me up. I learnt that ‘the choice to worship daily is to glimpse eternity, colour, glory, beauty. It is a choice to see heaven open, to be re-envisioned and to be re-energised; to be involved in Jesus’ building of His church on earth.” (Charlie Cleverly, ‘Epiphanies of the Ordinary’ P 210)

I’ve worshipped God with tears streaming down my face, almost broken beyond the ability to sing, and I have glimpsed not only beauty beyond compare but have come away from every one of these encounters transformed, re-envisioned and re-energised. Worship is the serious business of heaven. I’ve already talked about the importance of persistence and how practice makes perfect. Since we’re going to spend eternity worshipping God, I think it’s imperative that we start doing that here on earth: gazing at God, savouring His worth, understanding His grace and love for us and applying those to our everyday actions (see here for what I think this can look like.)

“And Lord, we stand amazed in Your presence,
Astounded by Your mercy and love.
Our hands are lifted high in surrender,
Your grace for me is always enough.
And there is no one higher than our God.
There is no one higher than You” (‘No One Higher’, Aaron Shust)
’ No One Higher’, Aaron Shust

“Together we worship
Together we cry
‘You are worthy, worthy.
You are worthy, worthy.
Hallelujah, hallelujah,
For the Lord God Almighty reigns.” (‘Great Is the Chorus’, Aaron Shust)
‘Great Is the Chorus’, Aaron Shust

In my family, I am well known for hyperbole: deliberate exaggeration for effect. “I’ve told you that a thousand times!” I say regularly. As a literary device, hyperbole (all three syllables of it: it’s a lovely word!) and its opposite, litotes, are often effective in getting a point across. There’s a lot to be said for being not literal!

In songs, we often use the hyperbolic ‘ten thousand years’ to convey the sense of eternity. ‘Amazing Grace’ talks about ‘ten thousand years’, a lyric picked up in ‘10,000 Reasons’. We know that time is totally irrelevant when we are talking about eternity, but our finite, time-bound minds can’t quite conceive that, so we like to pick a big number and use that for effect!

Phil Wickham has gone several noughts further! In his song ‘Tears of Joy’, which talks of the joy we will feel when we finally see Christ face to face, he writes:
“In a million years
We’ll have just begun
To explore Your heart
And Your boundless love,
Singing endless songs of praise
For who You are and what You’ve done.
In a million years
We’ll have just begun.” (‘Tears of Joy’, Phil Wickham)

Even this number is just hyperbole. But it captures perfectly that sense of wonder and awe we feel as we contemplate eternity.

I love watching little children. They worship God so enthusiastically; they approach life so positively; they have a gleam and a sparkle in their eyes that shines more brilliantly than the finest diamond. It doesn’t matter how mundane the thing seems to us, they have an endless capacity for joy, even in repetition. My son would spend hours switching lights on and off when he was a toddler; it was one of his favourite games. Lifted high by an adult, he revelled in the magic of seeing the light come on and go off at his command. Another favourite game was throwing his cap off when he was on the swings so that we would go and fetch it: he would chortle with happiness at that simple game. Or the game where we built huge towers with ‘knock bricks’, but the real joy came when he knocked those towers down, to immediately build them up again and repeat the exhilaration of knocking them down! I spent the best bus journey of my life with a two year old boy whose face would light up every time the bus stopped and the doors opened to let passengers on and off because the lights would then go on. He was utterly fascinated by this, clearly seeing the connection between the doors and the light but failing to understand how this worked. Watching a little child blow bubbles or dance uninhibitedly reminds me of the joy there is in simple things; as an adult, I often forget this.

When we are younger, we dream big dreams. Nothing seems impossible, because we live in a world of everyday miracles. Sometimes we don’t always know what to do with our dreams; sometimes we can seem arrogant or unthinking as we bounce through life (think of Joseph in the early days!) But we are sure that we can make a difference and we are sure that life is full of great promise.

Sadly, that child-like faith and enthusiasm often don’t last into adulthood. We become scarred by life’s experiences, let down by people and disappointed by events. Dreams so often die. Life then becomes nothing more than dull routine. We go to work to pay the bills; we get up in the morning because we need to go to work to pay the bills; we come home and eat because we have to in order to survive; we go to bed because we need the sleep. Life is dull, wearisome, boring, monotonous and humdrum. We no longer believe in magic.

Actually, I never did believe in magic. I think magic relies on illusion, which (in Brennan Manning’s words) is a denial of reality. But I do believe in dreams. I believe ‘imagination creates and calls forth new reality that has not yet come to birth.’ (Brennan Manning) I believe God wants us to live like little children (Matt 18:3 TNIV), full of awe and anticipation, not necessarily in our own abilities, but in His.

God is in the business of birthing dreams in the hearts of His children. Without these dreams, without aspiration, without hope, we live lives that are rather like robotic drones. The dreams will involve a lot of waiting, however: ‘But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.’ (Rom 8:25 TNIV) They will require us to engage with God and to live by faith and not by sight. We may have to lay down our dreams in order to take up His dreams. But I believe it’s important we understand that delay does not mean disappointment and that ‘though it linger, wait for it’ (Hab 2:2 TNIV). Joseph’s dream was fulfilled. Ours can be too.

A few years ago there was a lot of controversy again about politicians and their morality. John Major’s Back to Basics campaign backfired because of media focus on its moral aspects, where they exposed “sleaze” within the Conservative Party and, most damagingly, within the Cabinet itself. A number of ministers were then revealed to have committed sexual indiscretions, and Major was forced by media pressure to dismiss them. In September 2002 it was revealed that, prior to his promotion to the cabinet, Major had himself had a long-standing extramarital affair with a fellow MP, Edwina Currie. Some politicians defended their behaviour by saying that what they did in private had no bearing on their public office; in effect, there was no connection between their private morality and their competence to do their job.

So often we like to believe there is a nice divide between our characters and our behaviour, but the truth is that what we do is always the overflow of who we are and that character counts. Moreover, over the years I’ve come to see that God is really interested in who we are. It’s been said that our reputation is all we will take with us from this world. Our character really matters. God is interested in who we are. His goal (and it took me a long time to realise this, so if you are a young Christian, I hope you will realise this sooner rather than later!) is not to make us happy but to make us holy: His aim for every single one of us is that we become like Jesus: ‘those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.’ (Rom 8:28 TNIV) The Message version of that verse puts it like this: ‘He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son.’

The fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23 TNIV) is what Christian character really looks like. We need to spend time meditating on what Jesus is like, because He is our example and the litmus test for our faith.

These days, we’ve found countless ways to measure achievement. From National Curriculum levels and GCSE grades in schools through to performance reviews at work, from Kitemarks on products to regulatory bodies for anything and everything you can think of, we’ve become a nation of measurable outcomes. We can have all kinds of standards and achieve all kinds of goals, but it’s not quite so easy to measure character, is it?

For most of us as Christians, we aspire to hear the words ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’ when we meet with God, but sometimes we think that that is achieved through our hard work and achievements in God. How many prayer meetings have we attended? How many good works have we done? How much have we given to the poor? We measure our worth in exactly the same way that the world does.

God’s measuring weights are somewhat different, I think. To be sure, our actions will count (see Matt 25:31-46 TNIV, for example.) God has created us in Christ Jesus to do good works (Eph 2:10 TNIV). But He is as interested in motivation as outputs, as concerned about character as about achievements. And the chief thing He is interested in is (as I have mentioned before) how well we love. ‘We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other… this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.’ (1 John 3:14, 23 TNIV)

God is hugely interested in character, not just charisma, and one of the ways He works is by exalting the things that seem unimportant to us and bringing down things that seem all-important. He has a certain order for doing things and no matter how much we stamp our feet and go red in the face, He will not revoke His ways for our petty demands. Proverbs 18:12 TNIV says ‘Before a downfall the heart is haughty, but humility comes before honour.’ Humility matters to the One who didn’t count equality with God as something to be grasped or used to His own advantage, but who made Himself nothing, being willing to take on human flesh in order to secure our salvation. (Phil 2:5-11 TNIV) Our character has to reflect His.

Allow God to refine your character and what you do will then inevitably reflect Him.

Last night we also celebrated two forthcoming birthdays in the same family. It is always encouraging when we see faith passed on from one generation to the next – the baton being passed on to our children, children’s children and beyond.

Our best wishes go to both Grace and Beryl and we wish them God’s richest blessings on their birthdays and beyond.

Last night we concluded the series ‘Passing On the Baton’, looking at how we pass on this message of truth to every generation. The message of truth will not change over the years, but the methods we use to spread the word may well have to change. We have to be like Paul, who said ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.’ (1 Cor 9:22 TNIV). He learned to be versatile and flexible in the methods he used (becoming like a Jew to the Jews, like one not having the law to the Gentiles, like the weak when ministering to the weak and so on) and so must we.

There is no ‘magic formula’ for how we must pass on the baton of truth, despite what marketing men may have us believe! How we pass on the baton of truth to the next generation and to those all around us will vary. We can’t have any prescribed rules, any set formula, any fixed way of doing things. Our message must use methods that will be flexible enough to meet people’s needs where they are.

Often, we are resistant to change because it challenges us and because we like doing things a certain way. But we won’t demand that other people change first. We will understand that the responsibility lies with us to pass on truth and we won’t place unnecessary demands on people, expecting them to follow a set of rules and regulations when we are trying to convey to them the glory of the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ. There is such diversity within the body of Christ (see Romans 12) that there will always be multiple methods that are effective. What must be at the heart of every method we use, however, is the manner of love. Love and gentleness and kindness and humility are the means we use to achieve what we want to achieve. The world has a saying ‘The end justifies the means’, but that is not reflected in Bible teaching. 1 Corinthians 13:1-7 TNIV is our yardstick for ‘how’ we should think, act and speak. The people who have the most effect are the people who love God and who love us. Never underestimate the power of love!

Our character matters enormously to God and will influence the methods we use. Peter told people to respond to questions about the hope we have with ‘gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.’ (1 Pet 3:151-6). He urged people to grow in faith and character (2 Peter 1:3-9 TNIV), for these qualities not only keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of Jesus, they act as confirmations of the truths we are aiming to pass on and help to shape us into the image of Christ, so that when we are passing on truth, what people really see is not us, but Jesus.