Garry spoke tonight about the power of the word of God. God acts by speaking; in the beginning, He spoke creation into being (Gen 1:1-3) and so often, Jesus healed and calmed the storm through His words (see Mark 4:38-39, Mark 9:25-27). We need to be careful not to limit the power of God in any way, either through sin (Is 59:1-2) or unbelief (Matt 13:53-58).

What we should do is allow God’s word room in our lives (see John 8:37). We need to give the prime spot to the word of God, as demonstrated by the Parable of the Sower (Matt 13:1-23; Mark 4:1-20; Luke 8:4-14). In Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts, two different words for ‘choked’ are used. To the people, Jesus talked about the generic word ‘choked’, whereas when explaining the parable to His disciples, He talked about the word being choked by many things, all vying for our attention. So often, many other things compete for our attention and we can end up limiting and restricting the power of God’s word because we see it as one thing among many.

Is God’s word just one thing among many or does it have pre-eminence in our lives?

Col 3:16 tells us to let the message of Christ dwell in us richly; this is not what we do, but what we allow God’s word to do in our lives. Then we need to put into action what God says (Matt 7:24-25). James reminds us we need not only to listen to the word of God, but to do what it says. (James 1:22). God’s word requires more than mere mental assent (‘That’s a good idea’; ‘That makes sense’). God speaks to us to generate faith (Rom 10:17) and we need to be disciplined in our receiving and acting upon on God’s words, as swimmers get up early to train and musicians practise for hours to perform well. What are we prepared to sacrifice to progress with God?

Each day, the word of God has competition from good things and bad things: from the worries, cares and distractions of the world. The effect of these things is to stunt growth and to prevent us from fulfilling our potential in God. We need to allow God’s word the room it needs in our lives and to be prepared to obey Him, no matter what He says.

Roger spoke this morning at Cherry Tree Court about the need to be naked before God – not literally, but to approach Him with purity of heart and the confidence that He accepts us through Jesus Christ. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were naked and felt no shame (Gen 2:25), but when sin entered the world through their rebellion against God, they became aware of their nakedness and hid from God. (Gen 3:10) Most of us now carry that sense of embarrassment and shame related to nakedness, though it becomes the ultimate sign of intimacy in a marriage and children reflect the innocence once known by all humanity when they have no hang-ups about nakedness. Nakedness symbolises our dependence on God and the fact that He sees us and knows us through and through. (Eccl 5:15)

Spiritually speaking, the nakedness God wants from us is related to purity of heart. If we harbour sin in our hearts, we cannot approach a holy God, but through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, we can come before God with clean hands and a pure heart. (Ps 24:4) Sincerity, love and purity effectively act as a spiritual nakedness (see Prov 22:11, 1 Tim 1:5, 2 Tim 2:22, Heb 10:22). God asks us to leave everything and follow Him, to go and make disciples of all nations and to live a life of daily repentance and faith. Then we can approach God humbly, like children, with pure hearts. We don’t need to be dressed in our ‘Sunday best’ to come to God. As we prepare ourselves through personal and corporate prayer, forgive others, repent and are filled with the Spirit, we can live a life of freedom from shame.

Our first ‘Take Back The Streets’ prayer meeting took place yesterday, with a good number of people coming to pray either in church or on the streets:

Two groups went out to pray on the main road through Goldthorpe, praying for our local shops, primary school, local library and Cherry Tree Court, among other things:

We gave thanks for the regeneration that has already taken place on the Goldthorpe Railway Cuttings site, which was an eyesore for many years as the former mining railway line was a place for fly-tipping. Now, thanks to volunteers from the community, it is a beautiful green space (we’ll be holding our next Family Fun Day there on 15th April).

However, there are still many areas where fly-tipping and litter are spoiling our community, and we pray that we will be able to make Goldthorpe physically beautiful as well as praying for spiritual growth and revival. The gas canisters abandoned at the bottom of Beever Street indicate the needs people have and the wrong solutions they employ to meet those needs.

Our thanks to all who have taken the call to prayer to heart; our next meeting will be on Saturday 4th April.

The pessimist sees the glass as half-empty and can be guaranteed to bring gloom and despondency to any situation. It’s second nature to a pessimist to see the worst in any situation and to believe that the worst will always happen.

I struggle with pessimism on a daily basis, so I know that changing one’s mindset is not achieved overnight. I used to work with an eternal optimist and it always amused me how we could see the same situation so differently. I learned a lot from his enthusiasm and optimism and gradually came to see that the middle way of realism with faith is the way forward. At times, he had to learn caution and not to rush in heedlessly where angels fear to tread; more often, I had to learn to see the positives and opportunities in situations instead of always fearing the worst. Letting go of that instinctive bias towards the pessimistic is not easy, but with God, nothing is impossible.

Man’s inhumanity to man (and to animals and pretty much everything else) is well catalogued throughout history. The cruelty we can often display to others is not only seen in dictators and megalomaniacs. We often display it in many more subtle ways: the toddler who pushes a baby out of the way because the baby is interfering in its self-centred play, the sarcastic comments towards someone who does not share our views, the bullying which goes on in many schools and workplaces. Cruelty may well be a defence mechanism or a means of asserting one’s importance, but it is something we need to eschew. People are more fragile than we realise; we all need to be ‘handled with care’!

Instead of cruelty, let’s find ways to be kind and gentle, to care about other people and to put others before ourselves. In this way, we reflect God’s nature and show others there’s a different way to live.

The World Day of Prayer service in Goldthorpe was held at Goldthorpe Parish Church this morning. The service was prepared by Christians from Zimbabwe:

The service looked at John 5:2-9 and the healing of a paralysed man. The man had been ill for 38 years and probably felt powerless, hence Jesus’s question ‘Do you want to be made well?’ We have to be willing to believe that God can intervene in our hopeless situations. Zimbabwe has faced many years of political unrest and injustice, but Christians are called to pray for love, peace and reconciliation, no matter how difficult situations may look.

Jesus told the man to ‘rise! Take your mat and walk!‘ The dialogue between Jesus and the man take us beyond the realm of physical healing and remind us that we should not be afraid to act on the word of God. God offers us the steps for personal and social transformation.

Our thanks to the ladies from Goldthorpe Parish Church for hosting the event, to Ann Crooks for playing the piano and to all who attended and gave £55.05 to the work of WWDP.