A local badminton group used to use the community hall when the Methodist church owned the building and have continued to use it since we took over the building. That, in turn, has prompted church members to play badminton regularly on Friday nights.

Here are some photos showing the competitive natures of some church members…

You can run, but you can’t hide, Tony!

Victory!


After praying for Chile, the ladies took their turn! (Apparently Debbie & Diane are affectionately known in badminton circles as ‘The Double Ds’…!)

The Women’s World Day of Prayer is an annual event held on the first Friday in March, uniting Christians from all denominations and all countries to pray for one country in particular each year. This year, it was Chile’s turn! Stretching from Peru to Antarctica, Chile is a narrow strip of land 2,640 miles long and 110 miles wide, also owning Easter Island in the Pacific.

Famous for its snow-covered Andes mountain range, the driest desert in the world (the Atacama) and a lovely Pacific coastline, Chile came to the world’s attention last year when 33 miners were trapped, and ultimately rescued, from one of the country’s mines. The whole world rejoiced as the miners were successfully brought to the surface and it was marvellous to hear the testimonies of the men about God’s presence and help in their difficult ordeal.

A number of churches in Goldthorpe celebrated the Women’s World Day of Prayer at the parish church. Local women dressed in native clothes and baked bread to underline the meeting’s theme ‘How Many Loaves Have You?’

We got to taste the bread at the end!

These women are in traditional Chilean dress, with the Chilean flag:

The service included Bible readings from 1 Kings 17 and Mark 6:30-44, information about life in Chile, a variety of songs (including some in Spanish!), prayers for that country and the rest of the world and a sermon which looked at the need for us to be thankful for God’s provision so that we can use what we have in our hands for His service. Children’s activities were also provided. An offering for projects run by Christian charities was taken and refreshments were very kindly served by the parish church afterwards.


Many thanks to all the local ladies who worked so hard at making this a really successful event.

The words of the man in this story in Mark 9 (“I believe; help my unbelief”) are reminiscent of where we often are in our relationship with God. Prior to this scene, Jesus had been transfigured, glowing with glory, talking with Moses and Elijah. God had spoken from the cloud, affirming Jesus’s identity and urging His disciples to listen to His beloved Son. On returning from the mountain, Jesus faced a dispute between the scribes and His disciples, in the midst of which there was a boy who needed healing and deliverance.

Jesus had commissioned His disciples previously and given them power to heal, but at this point, they must have felt like failures. When Jesus arrived on the scene, however, people were amazed. He spoke to them, calling them a ‘faithless generation’ (Mk 9:19) and asking the boy’s father who long he had been suffering like this (Mk 9:21). He asked the question so that others could understand the extent of the suffering and appreciate the miracle of healing. Jesus wanted to speak faith into the man’s life.

In Mk 9:23, Jesus assures the man that “everything is possible for one who believes.” It is this radical assertion which prompts the man’s response: “I believe; help my unbelief.” When Jesus steps in to situations, hopelessness is transformed. Doubt and unbelief so easily rob us of blessing. We need to pray with the same honesty and heartfelt integrity as the boy’s father and in doing so, we will see Jesus transform all our impossible situations.

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” (Eph 3:20-21)

We also celebrated another birthday!

“Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? ” (Mark 8:34-36)

A paradox is “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a truth.” There is always the element of contradiction in a paradox, something that just doesn’t seem to make sense. The paradox that Jesus teaches His disciples here is “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

Peter found it hard to accept Jesus’s teaching about His impending suffering and death (see Matt 16) and many of us continue to find God’s ways paradoxical and hard to accept. God’s way of working was at odds with the world’s way of working and it still is; Jesus is the stone that makes us stumble:
“The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.He will be a holy place; for both Israel and Judah he will be a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare. Many of them will stumble; they will fall and be broken, they will be snared and captured.” (Is 8:13-15)

We will never truly understand God (who is transcendent); His ways and thoughts are far above ours (Is 55). Nonetheless, Jesus has shown us how to live in the manner of a servant, putting the needs of others before His own.

The Cross is perhaps the place where we see the paradoxical nature of God’s plans most evidently. To the human eye, the Cross was the place of failure and weakness, but in actual fact, Jesus’s ‘secret ambition’ was to ‘give His life away’ (Michael W. Smith, ‘Secret Ambition’); He knew the principle that death precedes life:
“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:24-25)

The Cross, as Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 1, shows us the difference between God and man: “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor 1:25)

We need to understand the divine principles of surrender and obedience, that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9), that it doesn’t depend on our human reasoning and understanding but on God’s grace. As we learn to respond to God as Abraham did when asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, we learn to ‘live to lose’ (Aaron Shust) and find that things are not always as they appear to be. We save our lives by losing them; we find life by walking on the narrow road, not on the wide road; we win by losing. The challenge is to surrender and believe.

“Come lose your life for a carpenter’s son
For a madman who died for a dream
Then you’ll have the faith His first followers had
And you’ll feel the weight of the beam
So surrender the hunger to say you must know
Have the courage to say, “I believe”
For the power of paradox opens your eyes
And blinds those who say they can see.

When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
So we follow God’s own Fool
For only the foolish can tell
Believe the unbelievable
Come be a fool as well.”
(‘God’s Own Fool’, Micahel Card)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvejyvnEidY

So what reasons did we come up with, then?

We can rejoice in God because He is:
* faithful
* loving
* forgiving
* kind
* life-giving
* in complete control, working all things together for good
* just and fair
* omnipresent & always with us, never leaving us or forsaking us
* omniscient (yet loves us, even though He knows everything about us!)
* merciful
* compassionate
* unchanging
* slow to anger
* tender-hearted
* both transcendent and immanent (above all and yet close!)
* Saviour
* Healer
* Provider
* Protector
* the Creator
* our Shepherd & guide
* patient
* not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance
* peace & the bringer of peace
* relational (the triune nature of God reflects His heart for relationships)
* personal
* righteous
* the One who brings reconciliation
* our Defender
* preparing a place for us
* working in our lives to conform us to the image of Christ
* our Father

There are so many reasons to praise God and it’s good to list them, to remind ourselves of them, to have objective reasons for praise. That way, no matter what our mood or circumstance, we can give thanks continually for everything (see Eph 5:20 and 1 Thess 5:18)

One of my current favourite songs is Aaron Shust’s ‘Long Live the King’ which has the lines:
“There are always days when I don’t feel like singing
There are always days when I don’t care at all,
But I know the King of all Creation reigns completely
Over every moment, great and small.

Long live the One who gives us life and peace and hope for tomorrow.
He’s given everything we needed from the palm of His hand
I’ll give my everything to the One who pledged to cancel my sorrow,
All I have is Yours – Long live the King!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElHMMxoz3iQ

We are not progressing very quickly through Romans 5, but maybe that’s because we are finding so much in the chapter! Yesterday, we still only made it to verse 11, and we certainly lingered on that verse!

“We also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” (Rom 5:11)

Garry encouraged us to list reasons that we can boast (or rejoice) in God. Firstly, we made lists of all that God has done for us (yes, that’s why it’s taking us so long!) and then we also listed all that God is, before looking at how our experience of God matches up with the Bible’s revelation of God.

So often, God works in our lives in a particular way and that reminds us of a particular attribute of God. For example, when we moved into St Mark’s, that was, for us as a congregation, a definite reminder of God’s faithfulness to keep His promises. We already knew that God is a faithful God from His word, but we saw that afresh in our experience.

There are times, however, when our experience may lead us into places where we feel we are NOT experiencing God in the way the Bible leads us to expect. There are times when we may feel forsaken, rejected, abandoned or lost. All the more reason, therefore, that we root ourselves in what we know to be true about God and can declare, like the psalmists, the truth about God, even if our hearts don’t seem to be experiencing that truth.

We looked at various psalms which give us good reason to find that God is our joy and our delight (Ps 43:4), but also at psalms of lament (eg Ps 10, Ps 13) where the psalmist may start from a position of desolation and loneliness, but ends by declaring – by faith; it’s all by faith, not by sight! – truth about God. We can trust in God’s unfailing love, even if we may feel forgotten (see Ps 13:1, 5). Rejoicing in God is a choice that we make.