Dave preached tonight from Mark 5:21-43, looking at Jairus and the woman with the issue of blood. As he pointed out, things can be going along quite smoothly when suddenly we are confronted by a ‘great dose of reality’: none of us are immune to emergencies and though we prefer life when “the world’s all as it should be”, there are often times when we are on the “road marked with suffering” instead and need to know where God is in all of this.

Jairus and the unnamed woman were very different: Jairus was a synagogue leader, probably quite an influential and respected man. The unnamed woman, suffering from illness for twelve years (the entire length of the life of Jairus’s daughter), was now classed as unclean, and any wealth or status she had ever had had gone by this time. She had spent all her money on doctors who had not been able to heal her. The crowd may have parted to let Jairus through, but they were not about to part for her.

Nonetheless, both Jairus and the woman had one thing in common: they needed Jesus. They were both facing personal tragedies: Jairus’s beloved daughter was dying; the woman was facing a debilitating and ongoing illness. Their approach to Jesus was different: Jairus approached him verbally, pleading earnestly for his help, whilst the woman approached him silently, not daring to speak, but with faith in her heart that one touch could heal her. The common element in both their lives was faith.

When the woman manages to touch Jesus, she knows she is healed and Jesus knows power has gone from him. He stops to question ‘Who touched me?’ and now there is no room for hiding. But for Jairus, this interruption, not on his schedule, is desperate, for in the waiting, he is told that his daughter has died. It is too late now.

We often think it is too late. As a result of this interruption, Jairus’s need has turned to tragedy. But Jesus encourages him to keep on believing: “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” (vs 36). This word speaks to all of us when we are waiting; when circumstances seem inauspicious; when hope is gone.

The walk to Jairus’s house must have been a long one for him. By the time they arrive, the professional mourners are there, but Jesus dismisses them. This is not the time to listen to the dirge of unbelief but to listen to the stimulating voice of Jesus which generates faith. In the midst of all the turmoil and interruptions, Jairus witnesses the miracle of his daughter’s restoration.

We find it hard to welcome interruptions into our daily lives. But Jesus is with us, even in the interruptions and we need to focus our faith on Him and keep our attention firmly fixed on Him, for then we see how interruptions are actually His gift to us.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY INTERRUPTIONS…

Our days, planned with military precision, unfold before us:
Lists, jobs, tasks, measurable goals lie before us,
Neatly packaged, highlighted, shaded, underlined.
And then come interruptions…
Telephone calls, e-mails, unexpected jobs,
Requests not anticipated, crises unplanned,
Diverting, distracting, drawing us away from
The military list of precise practices we so primly wished to accomplish.
At the end of the day, with frustration coursing through us,
With our beautiful lists untouched,
Dejection seeps through us, failure licking
Our hearts with its insidious message of inadequacy.

But in the quiet of the morning,
As we wait before the Holy One,
Your Spirit reminds us of the futility of our planning
And of the joy of interruptions.
By the swiftness of circumstances,
The suddenness of ‘chance’,
We understand that Your hand directs our paths,
Giving new directions to our plans.
The friend who needs a listening ear…
The kindness offered to a colleague in need…
The diversion giving way to the unexpectedly beautiful panorama…
These interruptions are to be cherished, not avoided,
Carefully nurtured, not shunned.

For in the unexpectedness of interruptions
Comes God’s still, small voice,
Upturning our schedules,
Wrecking our best-laid plans,
Ransacking our tidied sock drawer that we may have ‘beautiful feet’ telling the Good News,
Like paint trickling down a canvas to create new hues.

Interruptions are the daily reminder that
Life belongs to God and not to us alone.
Life is the gift He gives,
Interruptions the means He uses to attract our attention
Away from our obsession with control,
Bringing us to the place where surrender allows diversity,
Obedience fosters delight
And contentment with godliness brings great gain.

As a child clamours for attention,
Refusing to be sidelined,
Understanding the need for relationship
Above the mundane tasks of nurture,
So God uses interruptions
To tap on our shoulders,
Reminding us of His abiding presence,
So quickly forgotten in the rush of the day:
His touch, fleeting at first,
Persistent if ignored,
Reminds us our Father longs more than anything
For the fellowship of togetherness,
The intimacy of conversation,
The joy of sharing.

To shun Him is to lose out on the wonder of relationship;
To plough ahead with our pre-packaged plans
An insult both to omniscience and loving care.
As we lay down our lists,
We relinquish control,
Surrendering to the One who runs the universe
With never a hitch.

Interruptions are our friend,
The daily reminder of God’s involvement in our lives.

“We must be prepared to have God interrupt us”
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

The snow has finally arrived in Goldthorpe and with it a whole range of viruses and illnesses. Added to that a variety of circumstances, and numbers were down this morning. But for those of us present, we heard so much that challenges and reassures us.

The songs we sing influence us more than perhaps many of us realise. This morning, the songs we sang reminded us of great truths and expressed heartfelt prayers:
“So, Spirit, come, put strength in every stride
Give grace for every hurdle
That we may run with faith to win the prize
Of a servant good and faithful
As saints of old still line the way
Retelling triumphs of His grace
We hear their calls and hunger for the day
When with Christ we stand in glory”
(‘O, Church, Arise’ by Keith Getty & Stuart Townend)

“Your grace is enough” (by Matt Maher and Chris Tomlin) reminds us that no matter what circumstances we go through, God’s grace is sufficient for us (see 2 Cor 12:9). Matt Redman’s “Blessed Be Your Name” reminds us that no matter what circumstances we go through, we can choose to bless His name. “Living Under the Shadow of His Wing” (David Hadden, Bob Silvester) reminds us that that is the only place where we will find the security we crave. And finally, Stuart Townend’s “How Deep The Father’s Love for us” takes us back to the cross where we can reflect again on God’s love, mercy and the supreme sacrifice of Christ:

“Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom.”

Mark then spoke from Matthew 6:25-34 about the futility of worry. Some of us worry far more than others, but the fact remains, no matter what our temperament, worry does not achieve for us anything other than heartache. Worry cannot help us to grow taller or add years to our lives (quite the contrary, probably!) It reflects a desire to control our own destinies and a lack of trust in God’s loving care and provision. Jesus shows us how the Father cares even for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, so His children need not fear that He is incapable or unwilling to look after them. The key remains with us: our part is to ‘seek first the kingdom of God’ or, as Psalm 55:22 puts it, “Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous fall.”

For some people, this is a simple truth and easily put into practice. For myself (and I can only speak for myself), this is a lifelong lesson that does not seem to get easier as I get older. I find it so very hard to leave worry with God. I am so practised at worry, so good at it, that unbelief is easier than faith. I’m particularly good at worrying about hypothetical situations, projecting into ‘tomorrow’ all the things I can’t solve today, without fully grasping that God’s grace, this all-sufficient grace we sing about so heartily, actually is for the now and covers us no matter what situation we face. “Each day has enough trouble of its own,” Matthew 6:34 tells us. For years I read that in the KJV and had no clue what “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” meant, beyond the fact that it sounded grandiose. But if I am honest, what I think it means is that today’s problems are enough to take on, without adding tomorrow’s to the pile as well! God’s grace is there for us today, and He urges us to leave our cares and worries with Him. “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” (1 Pet 5:7)

My prayer for us all is that we allow the Spirit to put strength in every stride and give grace for every hurdle. That way, if we will leave our anxieties and worries with God, we will begin to experience the all-empowering grace we need to live according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh.

Last Thursday, we looked at the second part of Romans 1, which paints a bleak picture of mankind without God. His wrath is coming (Rom 1:18) and will not be avoided. “God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth.”

Truth is being suppressed in so many different ways. The propaganda of the world tells us that this life is all there is; that we’re all good really; that we’re all equal and that money is all we need. These lies can so easily influence us.

We looked at the difficult questions of our actions and the consequences of these actions and how without God there is no steady improvement (as evolution declares) but a downward path. Sinful desires, sexual impurity, shameful lusts and depraved minds are all the consequences of abandoning right thinking and an acknowledgment of God. Man is without excuse, however, for God has revealed Himself; He has shown us enough to give us the opportunity to find Him (see Ps 19:1-2, Ps 111:6-7)

We all have a need for righteousness that we cannot meet in ourselves. The rest of Romans goes on to point us to a righteousness through Christ by faith. If we don’t really understand the severity of our position, however, there will always be a temptation to think we don’t really need a Saviour. We need to see how bad things are before we can appreciate the wonders God has done in rescuing us from this ‘body of death’.

Dave preached last night from Romans 5:1-8, looking at the peace with God we now have through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans can be a difficult book to understand at times, but there are some wonderful truths in it. We are encouraged by the fact that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1) and that we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Romans 8:37). Most of all, though, we are encouraged by the fact that while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6).

We were all separated from God because of sin and as a result of this, man has a fundamental need for peace with God. Isaiah 57 says:

“But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. “There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.” ” (Is 57:20-21)

The sea is always moving and restless; moving because of the forces of the moon and the gravity pulling it this way and that. In the same way, people dimly recognise the original purpose for which they were made, aware through conscience that God has made us for great things, yet also aware of the pull of sin. Man is never satisfied, always seeking escape from the restlessness within. Peace is the need of all men – both those who are near and those who are far away (Eph 2:17) That peace is available through Jesus – who came into the world, as Paul reminds us in 1 Timothy 1:15, to save sinners.

Christ alone has opened the way to the Father. He bore our sins in His body on the cross (1 Pet 2:24) and gives us His peace (John 14:27). This peace passes all understanding and guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus (Phil 4:7)

It’s taken me a little while to sort out photos recently – apologies for the delay. Here are our birthday people for November!

And here are some belated photos from Bonfire Night: (just to prove there are embarrassing photos of me out there as well!)

This morning, we looked at John 11, the famous passage dealing with the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. As we worked through the story, looking at the different characters and their responses, we saw that there are times when Jesus does not appear to do what we would expect Him to do and when He does not appear to answer all our questions. When informed of Lazarus’s illness, He did not come immediately to help him. By the time He did arrive, Lazarus had been dead for four days. There must have been tremendous confusion, regret, pain and bewilderment in that household.

Both Martha and Mary express the view “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They cannot see beyond the fact that Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’s death. They are still looking at hypothetical situations – what would have happened if Jesus had been there – rather than at what will happen now that Jesus is here.

We are like that so often. We spend our time looking back. We can live in a world of regrets. We may lament opportunities missed in the past. We may be sad at things we have done wrong. But we need to move on from hypothetical situations to where we are right now and understand that right now, Jesus is with us and that can make a difference and does make a difference.

The fact that Jesus is moved by the grief of others reminds us that we have a high priest who is able to empathise with us in every situation we face. (Hebrews 4:15-16) When we go through sorrow, the Man of Sorrows will never drive us away. But for some with Martha and Mary, His compassion and grief did not help the situation. The Message version translates John 11:37 as “Well, if he loved him so much, why didn’t he do something to keep him from dying? After all, he opened the eyes of a blind man.”

That can be our position so often. We can be very demanding in our attitude to God. We say He is Lord, but we think that means He must do everything we want Him to. We say we believe He answers prayer, but we usually mean by that that He has done what we wanted Him to do in a specific situation. It is difficult for us to admit that we walk a narrow path and that the way to life is actually through death. We don’t like this truth.

At this point in the story, we can go in different directions. We can decide that God doesn’t really love us that much, or He would spare us this suffering. We can decide that God does love us, but we don’t want to go any further if this is the path we have to tread because it’s too painful. Or we can decide that God loves us and even though we don’t understand, we will continue to trust and believe.

By trusting and believing, Martha and Mary witness a miracle that is greater than the miracle of ‘ordinary’ healing, if there is such a thing. They see that Jesus really is the Master. Not even death can get in the way of what He does. He will prove that in even more dramatic ways later on in the story John tells, when even His own death cannot be the end of the story, when the fact that He is the Resurrection and the Life means He will rise from the dead and break the devil’s hold on death.

But before we reach the climax of the raising of Lazarus, we learn the difficult lesson that belief has to precede understanding: as Anselm said, ‘credo ut intelligam’ (I believe in order that I may understand). Belief, faith, actually facilitate understanding, rather than understanding actually leading to faith. There is a bigger question than not having all the answers. Perhaps the bigger question is what do we do with all our unanswered questions? Do we weep uncontrollably like Mary? Does grief paralyse us, rendering us incapable of doing anything? Do we attempt to carry on like Martha, with an unassuaged ache in our hearts? Do we allow cynicism to make us bitter towards God, saying, in effect, ‘If You love us so much, why don’t You do something then?’ – or, as the sons of Korah put it in Psalm 44:

“Get up, GOD! Are you going to sleep all day?
Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?
Why do you bury your face in the pillow?
Why pretend things are just fine with us?
And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt,
held down with a boot on our necks.
Get up and come to our rescue.
If you love us so much, help us!” (Ps 44: 23-26)

There is a way forward in God that rests in Him even when we don’t understand, that trusts in who God is even when all evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. As Tim Hughes says, in his song ‘When the Tears Fall’, ‘I’ve had questions, without answers’. We all have. But as the song goes on to say,

“When hope is lost, I’ll call You Saviour
When pain surrounds, I’ll call You healer
When silence falls, You’ll be the song within my heart

I will praise You, I will praise You
When the tears fall, still I will sing to You
I will praise You, Jesus, praise You
Through the suffering, still I will sing”
(Tim Hughes, ‘When the Tears Fall’)

The song says it far better than I can. Listen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWUimGv_xrU