“In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for special purposes and some for common use. Those who cleanse themselves from the latter will be instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.” (2 Tim 2:20-21)

In a large house there are definitely articles which are functional, useful, essential but not attractive, and the boiler is probably one of these! So we decided to hide the boiler away from everyday sight:

The start of the project (the unseemly boiler…):

Building a door:

The framework and the door:

Now you see it…

Now you don’t!

This remains to be painted, but our thanks go to the two Daves who helped with this work.

Just in case any of you were worrying about the whereabouts of Igor, he has been out and about today, having a look at Ampleforth Abbey in North Yorkshire:

Trips out wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the tea rooms…

… or two…

Ampleforth Abbey is the home of Benedictine monks who settled there in the 19th century. The buildings have been developed considerably in recent years:

I particularly liked the new windows, obviously reflecting the Christian traditions of the whole abbey and college:

They are set in 2000 acres of land:

There will be no midweek meeting this week on Thursday, due to the Spring Bank holiday week.

Next Sunday (2nd June) will be the family service at 6.00 p.m.

June’s prayer focus is for those who are no longer walking closely with God.

Pray that God will:

• draw back the people who used to come to church
• impact their lives again and integrate them into church
• help us to remember to pray for them by name
• bring back members of our own families to know Him
• bring back friends who once knew Him
• cause people who once knew Him to be called back to Him in all churches in the Dearne Valley
• give us words of wisdom to say to these people and wisdom in how to pray for them

“Remember this: whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.” (James 5:20)

We can do this by lifting them up in prayer and pleading with God on their behalf.

Dave continued his series on Ephesians 2:1-7 last night, looking in particular at verse 6: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms with Christ Jesus.”

The first thing to notice here is that God has already done this: the verbs are in the past tense, indicating a completed action, not something that is awaiting us in the future. ‘Heavenly realms’ (a term also used in Ephesians 1:3 and 2 Cor 12:2) indicates the place where God dwells in glory. In this passage in Ephesians, we see a contrast between what is no longer true of Christians and what is currently true.

We no longer…
1)…belong to the world
Even though we live in the world, we are no longer citizens of earth. Heb 11:13 and 1 Peter 2:11 use the phrase ‘aliens and strangers’. At one time we belonged to the world and were subject to sin, but that is no longer the case.

2) …live under Satan’s rule
Ephesians 2:2 reminds us that we used to follow Satan’s rule. The world may mock the notion of the devil, but the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor 4:4). Christians have been turned from darkness to light and Satan no longer has power over our lives. We have been given the power to resist him.

3) …live under God’s wrath
God has forgiven us and we are free from His judgment; we have passed from condemnation to life.

Now that God has rescued us, we…
1) …belong to God’s kingdom
Our citizenship is in heaven, not on earth (Phil 3:20)

2) …live under the control of the Holy Spirit
We are ‘under new management’! Rom 8:14 reminds us that those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

3) …are near to God
The ‘heavenly realms’ indicate the place where God manifests His presence and glory. Hebrews 4:16 and Hebrews 10:19-22 remind us that we have access to His presence. Hebrews 12:22-24 reminds us that we can ‘come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.’

Jesus is seated at the right hand of God (Heb 1:3, Heb 10:12). To be seated indicates authority and completion. While a man is working, he does not sit down and rest. Being seated indicates the work is finished and is a sign that Jesus has won the victory. Our redemption is complete, our salvation eternally safe. We can rejoice in this and rest in the victory God has provided for us or we can continue to strive as if we need to do something more to secure our salvation. Which shall it be?

In continuing our studies on Abraham’s journey of faith, today we looked at the three Rs of faith: no, not reading, writing and ‘rithmetic (it has always struck me as amusingly ironic that the three Rs didn’t actually begin with R!), but faith received, faith rationalised and faith realised.

Faith Received
Faith is a gift from God (Eph 2:8-9). When we start out on this journey of faith, we do so because we have heard the word of God and it has created faith within us, so that we are responding to something that God has already done. Paul tells the Romans: “faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.” (Rom 10:17) Jesus told His disciples that “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.” (John 15:16) As Matt Redman says in ‘King of Wonders’, ‘You reveal and we respond.’

Abraham receives ongoing revelations of God which deepen his faith. The original calling in Genesis 12:1-3 is supplemented by further revelations in Genesis 15 and Genesis 17. When we receive these visions and deepening revelations of who God is and what He wants to do in our lives, we are changed. ‘Abram’ – exalted father – became ‘Abraham’ – father of many nations.

Faith Rationalised
Abraham didn’t always get it right, however. We looked at three occasions when he rationalised his faith: Genesis 12:10-20, when he lied about Sarai to the leaders,Genesis 16, when he listened to his wife’s advice about how to get a son, and Genesis 20, when he again lied about his relationship to Sarai to Abimelek.

Fear is one of the biggest obstacles to faith. Abraham lied to the leaders about his relationship with Sarah because he feared for his own life – despite God’s promises! Abraham tried to work things out in his own strength, using his own strategies. These may well have seemed logical and sensible and even rational to him. But they were not God’s strategies.

When Abraham listened to Sarah’s suggestion to have a son through her servant, Hagar, he was again following cultural precedents and the voice of ‘sensible logic’ rather than living by faith. God had a plan for Abraham and Sarah that did not need their intervention to make the promise come true. He was perfectly capable of doing the impossible and of bringing life from their barren bodies. But they looked at things from the natural, visible point of view and did not look with the eyes of faith, and so all they could see were impossibilities. That’s why they chose to act as they did. However they rationalised their actions, however much they blamed the culture around them, at the end of the day, what they did was sinful, because it failed to put God into the equation of their lives. They were trying to work out something spiritual with natural means and it just doesn’t work. Promises that have their origin in God will have their fulfilment in God as well – the God who does thing in an upside-down way as far as we are concerned (1 Cor 1: 27-29).

Faith Realised
In Genesis 21, we see faith realised. We see the fulfilment of the promise. We see the son of promise born to Abraham, just as God said. ‘The Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.’ ‘Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.’ Faith, when it has been received and after it’s been rationalised, is realised.

“When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do…Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, “It’s hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child.” Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of infertility and give up. He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously sceptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That’s why it is said, “Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right.” But it’s not just Abraham; it’s also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.” (Rom 4:18-25, The Message)

Hebrews 10:35-39 urges us to hold on to God’s promises with perseverance and tenacity. If we persevere and do the will of God, we will receive what He has promised.

Last night we looked at the short letter to Philemon, seeking to understand the application behind Paul’s appeal to Philemon to accept back his slave, Onesimus, as a brother in Christ.

“I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear about your love for all his holy people and your faith in the Lord Jesus. I pray that your partnership with us in the faith may be effective in deepening your understanding of every good thing we share for the sake of Christ.” (v4-6)

What Paul asked Philemon to do was revolutionary. The culture of Rome (and those countries occupied by Rome) was steeped in slavery. Those who fought against Rome knew that they could be sent to the slave market if taken as a prisoner-of-war. A slave was a non-person (in a story by Plutarch, the slave does not even have a name!), useful for providing labour or to add to their owners’ social standing, but without rights of their own. Slavery was a brutal, violent and dehumanising instituttion, but it was the accepted norm. A slave was thought of as another possession belonging to the one who had paid the price; a slave was required to come to his owner’s aid if attacked. Some owners were kinder than others, but the example of Vedius Pollio, who ordered a slave to be thrown into a pond as food for the fish (because he had taken a goblet), was by no means unusual at this time.

Paul’s request that Philemon accept his ‘useless’ slave back as ‘useful’ (a play on the name ‘Onesimus’) was truly radical and counter-cultural. Philemon was being asked to stand out as different. What kind of precedent would this be?!

We live in two worlds simultaneously. The kingdom of God and the culture in which we live are intersecting worlds, and the level of the intersection will determine to some extent how we live. If the two cultures apparently overlap, there is not much conflict, but as the two cultures separate, there is a visible distance between them which often results in the church being persecuted because it is clearly perceived as being at odds with the prevailing culture.

God has called His people to be salt and light in the cultures in which they live. A little bit of salt affects a meal radically. This idea that God’s people will have more influence than their numbers warrant (see Lev 26:6-8 and Josh 23:9-10, where a hundred will chase ten thousand or one of you routs a thousand ‘because the Lord your God fights for you’) is seen throughout the whole Bible. Jesus has called us to live according to His kingdom rules, which are very different from the accepted norms of our present-day culture. He has called us to think about the culture in which we are soaked and live according to His principles rather than follow the ideals and principles of the world without thought, simply because they are there. Just as Philemon was challenged to do something that was culturally different to how slave owners behaved, we are called to be ‘in the world, but not of the world’ and to ‘let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.’ (Matt 5:16)