Paul urges us to ‘pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.’ (Eph 6:18) This implies that prayer can be varied in form and that we need to pray always as well as underlining that prayer is a spiritual activity. It’s not something we can necessarily explain or even understand, but when we connect with God through prayer, His power is unleased into our situations and our world.

We have two opportunities this week to join with other Christians in praying. Today is the World Day of Prayer, and a service will be held at the Parish Church in Goldthorpe, starting at 11.15 a.m. This service started in 1887, when Mary Ellen Fairchild James, wife of Darwin Rush James from Brooklyn, New York, called for a day of prayer for home missions, and Methodist women called for a week of prayer and self-denial for foreign missions. This international movement now gathers Christians from all over the world to pray on a particular theme on the first Friday in March. This year’s service has been written by Christians from Zimbabwe and calls us to pray for justice, love and reconciliation throughout our world. After the service, there will be the opportunity to join with Goldthorpe Parish Church in their ‘Lent lunches’ – an opportunity for fellowship as well as nourishment!

Tomorrow (Saturday 7th March) will be the first of our ‘Take Back The Streets’ prayer meetings, when we will be gathering to pray specifically for our local community and for revival. We’ll be meeting in church at 10 a.m. and those who are not physically very mobile will stay in the church building to pray whilst others will go out onto the streets and pray, asking God to speak into lives and situations and praying for the breath of His Spirit to come on our community. Join with us tomorrow until 12 p.m. as we pray in the Spirit with all kinds of prayers and requests!

We can pray with a formal liturgy (as at the World Day of Prayer) or more spontaneously (as we will be doing tomorrow), but what matters is not so much how we pray as that we pray. Prayer is so important; it’s our means of connection to the Almighty God!

The rise in suicides shows us clearly the despair many feel in the world; they feel that life is not worth living. Many face situations which they cannot resolve and see no way out of the bottomless pits into which they have fallen. A breakdown in relationships, bereavement, poverty and hopelessness are often keys to the despair many feel. Despair can be defined as the absence of hope and without hope we all struggle to find meaning in life.

For the Christian, however, we know that despair does not have the last word. Easter is very much a time of despair: betrayal, injustice, pain, loss and sorrow are with us as we travel through the last week of Jesus’s life on earth. Yet we persist in remembering the day of Jesus’s crucifixion as ‘Good Friday’: not because we celebrate the victory of men over an innocent man, but because we know Jesus gave Himself willingly as a sacrifice for sin and that Good Friday is not the end of the story. The reason we can eschew despair is because Jesus rose from the dead and is alive forevermore and therefore we have hope in even the darkest situations.

I find one of the most difficult things in the Christian life is challenging wrong thinking. It’s not only changing our thinking which is required; the first step is actually recognising that our thinking is wrong.

We live in a culture full of ideas and preconceptions, all of which we absorb (often unconsciously) from a young age. The Jews had absorbed centuries of teaching about being God’s chosen people, which was true… but they had also absorbed the notion that everyone else was excluded from God’s family, which was not. Separating true thinking from false thinking is the first step to change.

How do we do this? We need the word of God to show us truth and the Spirit of God to make the connections for us to understand how this applies in our situation. Often, this does not seem like rocket science to an outsider, but it can be difficult for us to do. Jesus was once questioned by a group of Sadducees about the resurrection. They had preconceptions about the resurrection based on a firm belief it couldn’t happen and were trying to prove to Jesus their point of view through a ridiculous question based on improbably circumstances. (Mark 12:18-23) Jesus pointed out the error of their views through Scripture. (Mark 12:24-27)

The first step is, therefore, to know the truth and this can only happen as we allow the word of God and the Spirit of God to rule in our hearts. The next step is harder, though: we have to accept that truth only frees us if we do what it says. We have to submit ourselves to God’s word. When our attitudes and actions contradict the truth we find in God’s word, we have to let go of those attitudes and actions. Most of us stumble at this point, because we are sinners. We don’t like admitting we’re wrong and we prefer our sinful choices to the painful admission that God is right and we are wrong.

But if we actually choose to believe God over our own feelings and ideas, revolutionary change can happen. Gentiles and Jews can co-exist in God’s family. Slaves can be set free. People can be treated with respect and honour because they’re people made in God’s image, not because they’re rich or white or belong to the right family. Children can be welcomed and loved, even if the circumstances of their conception were not ideal. Murderers can be forgiven. Men and women can live in harmony instead of in competition. We can change the world… not because we have the power in ourselves to do that, but because we are aligned with the all-powerful God.

All of this starts with our thinking. We see Christianity as a global movement today precisely because Peter and the first Jews were willing to change their thinking. Are we?

The Bible is adamant that God is building one church. The unity of the church is of paramount importance to God and has to overcome all our cultural, racial and gender preconceptions. Most of us are comfortable with people who are similar to us and there are many who advocate churches gathering along cultural or racial lines. There is even a principle espoused by the Church Growth movement, “the homogeneous unit” principle, which states that people are attracted to churches that have “their kind of people,” and advocates that we should be targeting a certain segment of the society (e.g. Generation Xers or ‘Baby Boomers’). I’m not comfortable with that, because I believe God is building a church ‘from every tribe and language and people and nation.’ (Rev 5:9) God is the one who chooses the people and He is wanting salvation to touch every age group and racial group without discrimination.

Steven J. Cole says that ‘the church should be as racially diverse as the local population,’ and I think this is true. The church needs people of all ages and races, because it is the family of God. The acceptance of Gentiles into the church in the same way as Jews (described in Acts 10 and 11 and elaborated by Paul in Ephesians 2 and 3) shows us clearly that we don’t get to pick and choose whom God chooses or how He works. Our wrong thinking has to be transformed; our minds have to be renewed. (Rom 12:1-2) One of the greatest testimonies to the power of God is to see people of all ages, temperaments, races and backgrounds working together for God’s glory, united in the love of God and serving His purposes for their locality and generation. May He work in us to bring together people and build His church.

Acts 11:1-18 shows us the ramifications of God’s miraculous work in both Peter and Cornelius. You would think that the message of salvation for the Gentiles would be warmly received since it is further evidence of God’s mercy, love and grace, but unfortunately since we are all people tainted by sin, we don’t always respond to God’s workings with as much enthusiasm as we should! Peter was roundly criticised by people who felt that being Jewish was the only way to approach God. The implications of what happened to Cornelius and his family – namely that the Holy Spirit fell on them just as He had on the Jews on the Day of Pentecost, demonstrating that God had granted repentance even to Gentiles without any need for circumcision or other rituals – meant a radical shift in beliefs which had uncomfortable ramifications for many people.

Peter needed God’s explicit instructions to go with Gentiles to Cornelius’s house and to let go of decades of living according to Jewish laws. Others needed to hear of the miraculous way in which God led all parties to accept the Gentiles as fellow believers rather than as the despised enemy. We face similar situations today, whether that it is accepting people of other races or beliefs or letting go of decades of prejudice and taboos. If there is anything which stops us reaching out to people (our cultural baggage, so to speak, including spiritual cultural baggage!), we need to let go of those things, for there is nothing more important than our obedience to Jesus’s Great Commission.

Acts 10 and 11 introduce to us one of the most radical changes in history, and not surprisingly, many Jews found this difficult to accept. Centuries of religious belief had led Jews to believe they were God’s chosen people and that the world would be saved and blessed through them. They were not averse to others becoming Jews, but this meant an adoption of all things Jewish, including circumcision (the visible sign of Jewishness for men) and dietary laws. For Gentiles to be accepted into the church without having to go through this initiation ritual or follow these food laws was a revolutionary concept.

Peter is forced to explain himself when members of the circumcision group asked why he had gone into the house of Gentiles and eaten with them. (Acts 11:2-3) His story (Acts 11:4-17) recounts the visions given to him and to Cornelius and what actually happened to persuade him to go there, as well as how the Holy Spirit fell on the group even as he was speaking. He remembered Jesus’s words to the apostles (Acts 1:5) and realised he was witnessing what Jesus had prophesied. How then could he stand in God’s way?

This explanation pacified the circumcision group at the time (though this became a recurring theme, as Acts 15 and Galatians 2 demonstrate.) We might feel impatient with the church’s difficulties in accepting Gentile believers with the benefit of almost two thousand years of history, but we do need to remember, as Tom Wright says, that we are all ‘more conditioned than we sometimes realise by the swirling currents of political, social and cultural pressures.’ (Tom Wright, ‘Acts For Everyone Pt 1’, P 175) Change is always difficult to accept because it challenges our preconceptions and our prior beliefs. Not all change is good and of God, so we need (like Peter) to be open to the Holy Spirit, rooted in God’s word and possessing a humility to accept that we do not have all the answers and may need to change. Peter later found it all too easy to revert back to the familiar (see Gal 2:11-12); often, this is the case with us too. Radical change will shake us, but God shakes us ‘so that what cannot be shaken may remain.’ (Heb 12:27) We personally benefit from this change – maybe there are others out there who will benefit from further changes if we are brave enough to listen to the Holy Spirit and move forward.