How do we define joy? What do we think of when we hear the word? For some people, they may think of a perfume:

Others may think of happiness, that good feeling when something goes right (your team wins at football, you go on holiday, you watch the latest Doctor Who episode, you win a prize…) We even talk about ‘jumping for joy’ to capture that sense of elation and well-being:

Garry preached on the subject of joy this morning, looking at what the Bible teaches us about this subject. That ‘jump for joy’ word in Greek is agaillaio, meaning ‘to exult, rejoice exceedingly, be exceedingly glad’, giving us the idea of a spring of water gushing up and shooting out.

Nehemiah 8:10 tells us that ‘the joy of the Lord is your strength’.

John 16:16-23 also looks at the promise Jesus gave His disciples that they would rejoice and no one would be able to take away that joy. God wants us to rejoice because He is joyful (Zeph 3:17 tells us that God rejoices over us with singing). Jesus was well acquainted with sorrow (Isaiah 53 calls Him the ‘man of sorrows’) and grief, but Hebrews 12:1-3 shows us that it was for the joy set before Him that gave Him the motivation to endure all He suffered on the cross. Jesus valued us so much that our salvation outweighed all the suffering. In the same way, He urged His disciples to ‘rejoice and be glad’ even when they faced persection, insults and slander (Matthew 5:11-12). We can only do this as we learn the value of what will be (see Hebrews 10:32-35).

What do we rejoice in? Jesus told us not to rejoice in the suffering of our enemies but to love them. He also told us to rejoice not in power or authority but in the fact that our names are written in heaven (Luke 10:17-20). We rejoice in our salvation, purchased by God, in the fact that we have a new birth, a living hope and an inheritance that will never perish, spoil or fade:

“In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” (1 Pet 1: 3-6)

We rejoice ultimately because of the revelation that we have of God and in the fact that any happenings we face are God-happenings, only allowed into our lives to shape us into the image of Christ.

After that sermon, you just wanted to sing about joy! – the song ‘Set Free’ starts with the line ‘Joy, joy, unspeakable joy’, which sums up all Garry had to say!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARiwN-iqQmU

It seems I can’t escape building work anywhere… my house is still in utter chaos and now the builders have been working at church to brick up various doors and windows and do all kinds of jobs which were previously unfinished.

These were our willing workers:


Bricking up a former window from the outside:


Working on the kitchen door:




And from the inside:



Working on the back door:

Many thanks to the willing workers and volunteers who have helped in this next stage of the development of the building.

“The plenitude of God, not the penury of the human condition, undergirds intercession.” (Eugene Peterson)

Have you ever finished praying and felt worse than when you started?! There have been times when I’ve been praying for someone, either personally or corporately, and I’ve felt so overwhelmed by their need, and my helplessness to do anything about that need, that I’ve wondered if prayer really does any good at all. I’ve prayed because I know God can work and because I know I’m helpless to do anything about that particular situation, but in truth, all I’ve really done is make yet another list of intractable problems with no real faith that there are any solutions to them. (I’m not quite sure why I think God needs a list of the problems to solve them, since He knows everything, but somehow that’s how I often think of prayer, as yet another ‘to do’ list, just this one is for God, not me!)

Have you ever read prayers in the Bible and thought that they sounded great but didn’t really look anything like your prayers? They seem so waffly and vague, never mentioning specific situations so you can never actually know how God answered those prayers. Paul’s prayers in Ephesians often used to strike me in that category: lofty, amazing, asking for so much and yet I used to wonder how on earth you could tell if God had actually done all those things, filling people with discernment, hope, love and knowledge.

The more I pray and meditate on Scripture, however, the more I realise that the difference between the prayers I read there and my own prayers are based in this idea of the plenitude of God and the penury of the human condition. Plenitude means fullness, an ample amount, an abundance. It captures this idea that God really is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph 3:2). Penury is the opposite, meaning extreme poverty or destitution. The human condition is such that often we have no power to do anything about the situations we are praying about and feel overwhelmed by our own sense of desperation and helplessness. Intercession, however, is more than simply identifying with someone’s needs, with entering in to their suffering and hurt. Undergirding means supporting or strengthening from underneath and when we intercede for others, we are really realising that God is the only one who can do anything about those situations. We can therefore pray with confidence and hope rather than despair, because God is far bigger and more powerful than even the worst circumstance we can imagine. He is not helpless or limited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing and utterly able to act!

Paul’s prayers are not, therefore, irrelevant to real life. They are prayers that see beyond the visible and understand the key issues far better than we often do when we simply name the visible problems before God. So he prays for wisdom and discernment and revelation to know God better (Eph 1:17), especially that they may know the hope to which God has called them, their inheritance in Christ and God’s power towards believers (Eph 1:18). He prays that Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith (Eph 3:17) and that they may truly grasp the extravagant measure of Christ’s love (Eph 3:18), so that “you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph 3:19)

When I read that verse, I get a glimpse of the plenitude of God in prayer and after reading that, I definitely don’t feel worse than when I started! My eyes are lifted beyond the problems. I see God as He is, lifted high, all-powerful, well able to do more than I can ever possibly ask Him, and I am then encouraged to pray more, understanding that as I pray, God really does do so much more than I am able to understand!

We generally don’t like things to be broken. Something that’s broken is useless, unfit for purpose, no longer useful, redundant, obsolete. Fit only to be thrown out.

I can remember my son, years ago, throwing a toy in a temper tantrum and the toy breaking. He was devastated. It hadn’t been his intention to break it and he was probably even more upset after the event than before it, because it was his first brush with the awful truth that Dad couldn’t fix everything. The toy remained broken. It had been loved; now it was marred.

As we grow up, we face the fact that things get broken and, more importantly, that people get broken too. Hurt comes along; illness happens; we can’t always recover easily or readily. Our bodies show the scars; there are invisible scars inside too that reflect the pain and sorrow of life.

Although our natural instinct is to fix things, some things are beyond our ability to fix. Although our natural instinct is not to break things if at all possible, we still need to learn the truth that “the LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps 34:18) and that “a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Ps 51:17)

Louie Giglio recently remarked, “Don’t try to hide your scars, they’re stories for a hurting world of wounds only Jesus can heal.” It’s true that we are broken people, but the greater truth is that God doesn’t throw out broken people. Instead:

“You restore our lives even though we don’t deserve it
And You’ve given us a love that’s not our own
You assemble all our broken, shattered pieces:
More beautiful than I had ever known” (Aaron Shust, ‘Long Live the King’)

Our brokenness is being woven into a beautiful picture by God. We may not like the process of being broken; we may feel that God is the One who is doing the breaking (rather like Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord). But just as Jeremiah watched the potter make something new from something that was marred (“But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” Jer 18:4), so too we can know that our brokenness will not result in our being ‘thrown away’ by God. Instead, He will redeem every hurt, every sorrow, every tragedy and bring forth something beautiful instead.

Tony Brown preached from Isaiah 30:1-5 last night, talking about the human tendency to find its own solutions rather than depending on God. In this passage, Judah was faced with the threat of invasion from Assyria and Hezekiah, the king, sought to form an alliance with Egypt, looking for protection from that country rather than looking to God. So often, we do the same, seeking advice and help from other people instead of coming first to God and being prepared to wait on the Lord.

God is our protection, shelter and refuge (Ps 91:1-2), our fortress in times of trouble. Yet it is all too easy to fall into the age-old sin of self-reliance and independence, since we like to be in control. We who are created are not wiser than the One who created us, but all too often we fail to understand that God has a masterplan for our lives (Jer 29:11).

If we are to avoid the sin that Judah committed, we need to:
(1) turn to God and seek Him first
Jesus issued an invitation to come to Him and to exchange our heavy yoke of burdens for His light yoke (Matt 11:28-30). He told us to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness and promised that if we put things in the right order, God would take care of our earthly needs (Matt 6:31-34). Our priority has to be God; our focus has to be on Him.

(2) understand how big God is
We need a vision of the bigness of God, an understanding of who He is, that He is all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful and well able to deal with all of our problems. When we see God as He is, our problems are put into their proper size, instead of us having a small God and huge problems. We need faith to see God as He is, but so often believe that our faith is too small to be any use. Instead, as in Matthew 17, we need to see that small faith can do big things when it’s faith in a big God.

(3) Patience is a virtue
We are impatient people and so often problems arise when we feel we’ve waited long enough for God to act and take things into our own hands (as Abraham and Sarah did when Sarah suggested solving the problem of her barrenness through her maidservant, Hagar, with the result that Ishmael was born, not the son of promise that God had intended.) It is absolutely vital that we learn to wait upon the Lord, for God does not need us to help Him; instead, He requires obedience in waiting for Him. God’s timing is always right and perfect, but we need to understand that as we seek God, He will provide for us and will work all things together for good in our lives.

We are having some building work done at church, bricking up the old windows in the main hall from the outside (the inside work being done quite a while ago.) The builder left some stuff outside which was transformed into artwork! (All you need is love?!)

A number of people are away on holiday at the moment and others are about to go, so we did some advance birthday slots this Sunday for those who won’t actually be in church on their birthdays.