Garry spoke tonight from 1 Sam 13:11-14 about a heart aligned with God. Saul’s heart may have been aligned with God’s initially, but by this time, he did what he should not have done. He was facing a difficult situation with the Philistines coming against him and Samuel, the prophet, had not arrived. Something needed to be done as far as he was concerned; he wanted to offer a sacrifice to God to encourage the men and was not prepared to wait to do things in the prescribed way. He was, in effect, not prepared to trust God or do things His way.

Saul’s reasoning was perfectly natural and rational; he had a completely justifiable answer to give… but this does not mean he was right to do what he did. He was, in fact, completely wrong. What was actually required was a trusting heart which would acknowledge and work with God. This is what was seen in David, who was prepared to put his life on the line in the situation with Goliath, showing a disregard for the odds stacked against him because he was completely dependent on God. (1 Sam 17)

David learned to trust God way before his battle with Goliath, when he fought the lion and bear as a shepherd boy (1 Sam 17:37) There is no ‘quick fix’ to hearing God and obeying Him. Saul may have thought his solutions were perfectly rational, but he was paying lip service to God, for without faith, it is impossible to please God. (Heb 11:6) Faith factors God into our equation – and to walk with God, we need working faith and a heart that is aligned with God’s.

Not only do we need an aligned heart, we need also an undivided heart. Ezek 11:14-21 reminds us that we need an undivided heart; without this, we have split loyalties and split devotion. We may well understand that we have little personal control over life; there is also little organisational control (despite what governments may want us to believe!) God reminds us that we cannot serve two masters (Matt 6:24); we need to be whole-hearted in our devotion to God.To walk with Him, we need a heart aligned to His and a heart that is totally devoted to Him; anything else will bring failure. With a heart set apart for God alone, success is guaranteed and amazing things are possible – things that are far greater than we could ever expect without Him.

This morning, in continuing our series on ‘Questions’ (looking now at questions God asks us), we looked at the story of Jonah (Jonah 3:6-4:11). The story of the rebellious prophet Jonah is well known (especially when he ended up in the belly of a fish after going to Tarshish instead of Nineveh!), but we sometimes fail to see that even when he finally obeyed God, he was still not happy. Instead of being thrilled that the Ninevites listened to his message and repented and thus the Lord relented from sending calamity, to Jonah, this seemed wrong and he was angry (the Message version speaks of him being furious and yelling at God!) We might find such a response unusual (Luke 15:7,10 gives us the spiritual response to any one sinner who repents and speaks of celebration and rejoicing), but this highlights how our responses are often not what they should be. The Bible is nothing if not honest about God’s people!

Anger is not in itself wrong. God is described as being ‘slow to anger’ (Nahum 1:3, Ex 34:6, Numbers 14:18, Neh 9:17, Ps 103:8), but His anger is aroused by persistent sin and stubborn unbelief (see Ex 4:14, Ezek 7:3, Judges 2:12, Ps 78:21-22); His anger is righteous, caring for justice and fairness. Our anger so often is selfish, fuelled by personal prejudice, fear or unbelief, which is why Paul tells us not to sin in our anger (Eph 4:26) and why James comments, ‘human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.’ (James 1:20)

Jonah’s anger here is against God. Despite knowing God’s nature (‘I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.’ (Jonah 4:2)), this does not translate into his own actions. Grace and mercy may have rescued him from the fish, but he secretly longed for Nineveh to perish. He is so angry with God for who He is and how He acts that he wishes he were dead. (Jonah 4:3)

God’s question probes the morality of Jonah’s response, but at first Jonah is unwilling to face the deeper motivations of his heart. Anger clouds our objectivity and leaves us unable to see beyond the anger itself. Jonah goes to hide, welcoming the shade of a plant, secretly hoping Nineveh will still perish. When the plant is eaten by a worm and his shade removed, God repeats the question about anger and Jonah is forced into understanding that his anger is entirely fuelled by personal pique and selfishness.

God’s final question (Jonah 4:10-11) exposes Jonah’s selfishness, giving him the opportunity to move from selfish anger and a theologically correct but barren understanding of God to a real passion for the lost. God is not only interested in us. We are not the be-all and end-all of everything in life. It’s crucial we know we are important, loved, valued and cared for by God, but that is the launchpad to life, not the final destination. For Jonah’s understanding of God as ‘a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity’ (Jonah 4:2) to be effective, he has to reflect God’s nature. He has to be gracious and compassionate. He has to be slow to anger and abounding in love. He has to be glad that God has relented from sending calamity, because he has to be glad that the 120,000 people in Nineveh now have the same access as he does to God. We need a passion that others have the same access to God’s love that we now enjoy; we need to have God’s heart for the lost.

We don’t know what Jonah’s response to these questions was, just as we don’t know if the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son ever accepted his father’s generosity and joined in the celebrations. I think the reason these stories end like this is because the ending is still being written by our responses as well as by the responses of the protagonists. We are drawn into these stories and invited to look at them through different eyes as we hear God’s questions. ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ (Jonah 4:4) This is a question not only to Jonah, and not only about anger. God is constantly questioning our responses, not because He doesn’t know the answers, but because so often we don’t. Emotions will always affect our actions, whereas in this question, God is bringing us back to basics, back to His right and wrong. Identifying how we feel is one thing; it’s the start of the path to emotional intelligence. But there will always be a moral foundation to our actions and feelings. Is it right for us to react to this situation, whatever ‘this’ is, in the light of who God is and who we are as children of God? Society tells us we can feel whatever we want to feel and act however we want to act, but this is not what we are called to as Christians. We are called to be conformed to the image of Christ (Rom 8:29), to actually be God-reflectors. Is it right for us to doubt God’s goodness and justice? Is it right for us to appropriate grace and mercy for ourselves and deny it to everyone else? Is it right to hoard the treasures of God, or should we be seeking to share these with others? Is it right to do God’s will grudgingly and to blame God when things don’t go our way? Only we can answer the piercing questions God asks us. What will our response be?

As the summer holidays draw to a close and the new academic year begins, here’s an update on what is happening at church in September.

Midweek meetings resume on Thursday 2nd September when we will be meeting for prayer at 7.30 p.m. Every church activity must be rooted in prayer, so we would encourage as many people as possible to make this a priority and join with us to pray!

Our Parent & Toddler group resumes on Friday 3rd September between 9.30 a.m. and 11.00 a.m. We’re looking forward to welcoming families back after the summer and hope to see new families joining us! It’s a great place to meet other parents and to let your children learn vital social interaction in an informal and friendly setting. at 50 p per session, it’s a bargain!

Our monthly prayer-as-we-walk meeting (‘Take Back The Streets’) will be on Saturday 4th September, leaving church at 10 a.m. Those who can walk will walk the streets and pray; those who are not able to walk so far can stay in the building to pray!

On Saturday 4th September from 11 a.m., we’ll be having a cleaning and maintenance day. It’s important to keep the building and grounds looking good and we need as many people as possible to come along so we can make sure everything is ready for the new term!

The ‘Churches Together’ prayer meeting will be on Wednesday 8th September at 10.45 a.m. at Sacred Heart RC Church on Lockwood Road and on Facebook live.

The Dearne Community Arts’ Festival is on Saturday 25th September between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. at Astrea Academy Dearne in Goldthorpe. This is a great opportunity to see what talent there is in our local area as the festival aims to champion creativity and celebrate community. Exhibitions, workshops, demonstrations and performances will be happening. Why not pop in to see what’s going on in the area?

Dave spoke last Sunday on 2 Timothy 1:12, where Paul declared that he was not ashamed, even though he was suffering for the gospel’s sake. This letter was probably one of the last he wrote and is a shining example that even though he was in prison as he wrote and knew he was facing imminent death, he had confidence because of his hope in God. He knew how to master life rather than be mastered by it, and this is something we too need to learn. If we want to master life, then we need to know the true nature of the gospel.

Paul wrote to Timothy, a young man who may well have been daunted and even depressed by what he saw happening around him, with confidence and hope. He was not daunted by suffering, writing that suffering shapes us and develops perseverance in us (Rom 5:1-3). Nor can we simply attribute his confidence to his optimistic personality; elsewhere he wrote of both external conflicts and fears within (see 2 Cor 7:5). He was confident because of the truths of the gospel and because faith enabled him to see beyond his present circumstances to the eternal reward that awaits all who believe. In 2 Tim 2:8, he wrote ‘Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David – this is my gospel.’ He urged Timothy to keep his gaze and focus on Jesus Christ, and this is what we must do too. We have to see that Almighty God loved us so much that He sent His Son to save us, and that as a result of this decisive intervention in human history, we have nothing to fear and can stand on a solid foundation that will not change. Acts 16:31 sums up the gospel in simple clarity: ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.’

That is the total secret to being more than a conqueror. That is the only way that anyone can successfully live in this challenging world, in this world that trusts in man and laughs at God. Take the gospel to heart, believe the Christian message, and put all of your trust in Jesus Christ.

The whole situation with Abram, Sarai and Hagar reminds us that doing God’s will our way rarely leads to satisfactory conclusions. God had promised Abram and Sarai a son as heir, but they had been waiting a long time and Sarah’s infertility was not helping the situation. Instead of trusting God’s miraculous power, the couple hatched a plan to get a child using Hagar. They knew God wanted them to have a son and perhaps supposed that it didn’t matter how this happened, but God was not part of their manipulative scheme which took no account of Hagar’s feelings.

God does not need our help to do the impossible; He is the God for whom nothing is impossible. (Matt 19:26) We must learn to stop interfering in God’s plans, however praiseworthy our motives may be, and learn to live by faith and not by sight. (2 Cor 5:7) The truth is that in coming up with this plan, both Abram and Sarai showed little regard for God; they were effectively saying that He could not do what He had promised and that He needed their help. We are privileged to be invited to be part of God’s work, but the truth is that He does not need our suggestions and solutions to accomplish His will. He needs surrender, faith and obedience – and if that means waiting what seems a very long time for Him to act, so be it. They had been living in Canaan ten years (Gen 16:3); that’s a long time. But we must learn to wait for God, because the alternative is to create additional problems that have long-term consequences: their impatience actually made a difficult situation much worse.

In our series on ‘Questions’, looking now at questions God asks us, we looked tonight at Hagar and the question the angel of the Lord asked her: ‘Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’ (Genesis 16:8) God’s questions can find us wherever we are, even when we are in despair and running away from difficult situations, as Hagar was, and they have the power to transform us and enable us not only to face the difficult circumstances which have shaped and scarred us, but to move on, transformed and enabled because of God’s presence with us.

The question comes to Hagar personally, using her given name, not only her status as Sarai’s slave. God speaks to each one of us personally. He loves us personally. We are known to Him by name. Jesus made it plain to His disciples that they were individually important to God. ‘Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’ (Luke 12:6-7) No matter how insignificant or unimportant we may feel, God knows us and loves us.

When God asks where we have come from, the question encompasses our past and all that has shaped us into who we are. Hagar was an Egyptian slave. We don’t know much about her background, but she was not free to do as she pleased or to live as she wanted to. We may well have baggage from our pasts which needs to be dealt with, but we can be sure that the God who loves us can help us to be set free from anything which would seek to limit us and hold us back.

Rom 6:17-18 and Rom 8:1-4 remind us we have a new future now that we are no longer slaves to sin because of what Christ has done for us. In Jesus, God has done something about the grip of sin; He has taken on human flesh and Jesus has offered Himself as a sacrifice for sin. We don’t have to live the way we used to anymore. There is a new way of living: God’s way. We don’t have to be defined by our past; we can live in the freedom Jesus has purchased for us.

God’s plans for us are not to harm us but to give us hope and a future. (Jer 29:11) Even if you are currently in situations that are far from ideal, facing issues that are insurmountable to you, God is able to work in your life to deliver you from all evil and to work for good in everything. (Rom 8:28) This is the hope we have.