Gary tried an alternative method of drumming this weekend in practice, which involved attaching the drum sticks to his feet.

Not sure it worked!

One day, we will leave time behind.
One day, we will leave this body and get a new one.
One day, we will walk with Jesus… maybe He’ll explain to us the mysteries of life.
One day, death will be abolished and sin will have no mastery any longer.
One day, there’ll be no more death, no more sorrow, no more suffering, no more tears.
One day, we’ll get a new name, known to God alone.

That day wasn’t 21st May 2011 as some had predicted. No one knows when that day will be, except God. But just because that day wasn’t when some people falsely predicted doesn’t mean that that day won’t come.

But when that day does come, time as we know it will be no more. Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 talks about there being a time for all things – the word ‘time’ mentioned 30 times in 8 verses in the NKJV – and it’s hard for us to imagine a world without time. In other words, it’s very hard for us to grasp the concept of eternity. Yet God inhabits eternity; He lives forever (Is 57:15). He had no beginning; He will have no end.

We live in a world governed by time: we have to get up at certain times, eat at certain times, do certain jobs by certain times. Yet in eternity there will not be the same time constraints we face here on earth. There will be no day and night in heaven: the Lord will be the light we need (Rev 22:5). Incredibly, God has set eternity in the hearts of men (Eccl 3:11): He has given us the choice also as to where we spend eternity.

How we spend our earthly lives determines how we spend eternity and whether we spend eternity with God or not. Paul urges us to redeem the time and tells us not to waste the time we have here on earth (Eph 5:15-17). After all, our soul and the things we do on earth are the only things we can take with us as a testimony to heaven. We need to understand that the question of where we will spend eternity matters more than all the other things we spend all our time on and give our attention to eternal matters.

Aaron Shust’s song ‘One Day’ talks also about this walk with Jesus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5GcZC46VX4

Continuing the series on the ‘Celebration of Discipline’, we looked today at the corporate disciplines of confession and guidance.

Confession means admitting to something and is usually understood to be an acknowledging of wrongdoing or sin. Society today is very averse to admitting to wrongdoing; all the current rows on court injunctions and super-injunctions show how we don’t like to admit to our mistakes! Moreover, many in Protestant churches dislike the idea of confessing sins to other people because they feel somehow this diminishes the role of Jesus in forgiving our sins.

Whilst we acknowledge that only God can forgive sins and that we need to confess primarily to Him (see 1 John 1:9), we also have to deal with James’s command:“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” (James 5:16) As the Book of Common Prayer reminds us, confession can be a part of our corporate services. as we acknowledge our sin and need of God:

“Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against thee
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved thee with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we earnestly repent.
For the sake of thy Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in thy will,
and walk in thy ways,
to the glory of thy Name. Amen.”

Confession in a corporate setting strips pride from us and stops us from pretending. So often we like to pretend that we’re superhuman, hiding our real selves from others for fear that they will reject us if they see us as we really are. Church needs to be a place where there is real authenticity and real acceptance, accepting each other as Christ accepts us, acknowledging our utter dependence on and need of God.

Guidance is also needed in life because so often we don’t know the paths we should take! Just as the Israelites were guided in their wilderness wanderings (Ex 15:13; Neh 9:15-17), so too Jesus showed us how to live a life that was guided by God, doing only what He saw His Father doing (John 5:19-20). The God who is our shepherd and guide (Ps 23) and who has promised to be our guide forever (Ps 48:14) has promised us the help of the Holy Spirit (John 16:33),and, as our studies in Romans have shown, those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Rom 8:14).

Believing that God is not only capable of, but also willing to, guide us is one thing. Working out what this looks like in everyday life, where we don’t have the pillar of cloud or pillar of fire to guide us, can be difficult! There is no formulaic ABC of guidance that can ultimately help us; this is because God is interested in developing our relationship with Himself rather than simply giving us rules to follow. When we were children, our parents told us what to do and often did things for us; as we grow up, this changes, and rightly so. God is interested in us becoming “fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ” (Eph 4:13). This means that we have to spend time seeking God, as individuals and as a church, in order to know His will and to know His guidance.

As we grow, therefore, we accept that this narrow way involves our vigorous attention and we determine to be people who have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church so that we may live as God wants us to live and grow up into the people He wants us to be.

And we commit ourselves to each other, to the church, that we may journey together as God has intended, for we are a body with Christ our Head. I need you. You need me. We need each other and we all need God. And God isn’t finished with us yet!

Romans 8 could be called the chapter of the Spirit. Out of the 31 references to the Spirit in Romans, 15 of them occur in this chapter. The Spirit heralds a new way of living, giving us the power to live in a different way, the power to choose God’s way above the way of sin and death which dominated Romans 7.

The law could instruct us and show us right from wrong, but that was the extent of its reach, rather like we might shout out warnings to someone walking too near the edge of a cliff but from a distance can’t actually prevent them from falling. God’s Spirit, living in us, making us children of God (Rom 8:9,14, gives us the power to live according to the Spirit. Our obligation is now not to the flesh, not to the sinful way of living, but to God’s way, since we were bought at a price and are not our own (1 Cor 6:19-20). There has to be cooperation with the Spirit: “if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.” (Rom 8:13) The old saying ‘God helps those who help themselves’ will ultimately lead us into wrong thinking, believing that there are things we can do to save ourselves. Even the saying ‘Let go and let God’ only has elements of truth in it, for we need to work with the Spirit in these matters: we are the ones who ‘put to death the misdeeds of the body’, but we do so ‘by the Spirit’, not in our own strength.

Christ’s sinless life condemns us, for it shows us that it was possible to live in perfect submission and obedience to the Father. But His death and resurrection show us that God has made a way for us to know freedom from judgment and condemnation. We are free now to live according to the Spirit, free to choose rightly, and we can know also the sure hope of the resurrection of our mortal bodies because of the hope that the resurrection of Christ brings (Rom 8:11).

As a result of all that Christ has done, we are brought into this new relationship of adopted children of God where we also, amazingly by God’s grace, become heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ (Rom 8:17). That spirit of sonship does not lead us into the yoke of slavery but gives us a new relationship and standing. Praise be to God!

Stephen preached from 1 John 4:7-19 last night, a famous passage about love. Now love today has been misinterpreted and misconstrued; it’s not all about red love hearts and romantic love, as the card industry would perhaps have us believe. This passage talks about ‘perfect love’ and also tells us that ‘God is love’ (twice, in verses 8 and 16.)

From this passage, we learn that love ultimately comes from God. It’s ‘more than a feeling’ and involves a relationship between us and God. Love will always involve actions (God sent His Son) and God’s love is something we can both know and rely on (1 John 4:16), for God’s love brings security into our lives. So often, we have lost love in life and become, as a result, fearful, wary, mistrusting, but God’s love is perfect and, we are told, is the thing that can drive out fear.

God’s love reveals security, gives us peace within and helps us to have confidence (vs 17.) It can cast out the fear in our lives which makes us insecure (vs 18.) It prompts a response from us, to love God and to love others. God’s love can make the difference in our lives.

The challenge we then face is asking ourselves “Am I allowing God’s love to transform me so I do not fear?” Fear is a pervasive part of our lives, from phobias to that general anxiety that stops us from really trusting people and God. But God’s perfect love can drive out fear and enable us to be transformed.

For further reflection, listen to Matt Redman’s song ‘This Is How We Know’, taken from this passage in 1 John 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRF378KqX5g

Failure is not a popular word. In our success-soaked society, failure is feared and shunned. There are so many things we are afraid of failing: exams, driving tests, failing in our careers, failing financially, failing in our marriages and as parents, failing to gain other people’s respect and perhaps, most worryingly of all, we fear failing God.

Failure is, however, something that will happen to us all at some point in our lives and we need to know how to get over our failures.

Mark looked at some of the causes of failure:
1) lack of effort
2) over-reaching, trying to do something which is actually always going to be beyond us
3) trying to do something which we should never have attempted in the first place, often resulting from disobedience
4) becoming distracted from what God has called us to do.

He reminded us that we have all sinned and fall short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23), so we need to come to terms with failure. It’s not something we can avoid or hide from. Moreoever, we need to understand God’s faithfulness: He will never fail us or forsake us (1 Chron 28:20) but even if we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown Himself (2 Tim 2:13). God’s love for us is never going to change, no matter what our failures.

When we fail, our tendency is to hide away. We hide from God, as Adam did in the Garden of Eden, that first failure in obedient living. We hide from each other. We stop reading the Bible and we will pray about anything except the thing we ought to bring to God in prayer! What we should do is draw near to God (James 4:8), secure in the fact that He will draw near to us.

We need also to read His Word, for there we learn the comforting truth that we are not the first to fail. The Bible is full of stories of people who have failed God… but that’s not the end of the story. There, in God’s Word (written “so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom 15:4)), we find examples of awesome men of God who failed Him (Abraham, David, Peter) and who yet learned to succeed. We need to bring things out in the open in prayer, lifting our eyes up to God (Ps 121:1-2), for He is our help.

God knows both how and when we will fail Him, but He loves us nonetheless. We can’t hide from His love anymore. He doesn’t want us to dwell in failure, but to draw near to Him so that we can move on. In some ways, God is so much more willing to forgive our failures than we are! May we learn to draw close to Him and bring all our fears and failures to Him.