September has arrived and as the new school year starts, so the shops start filling up with Christmas things already. Whilst I don’t want to think about that just yet, this provides a good opportunity to give you notice of things that will be happening in the area for the rest of the year… Diaries to the ready!

September

In September, we have our ‘Churches Together’ prayer meeting on 17th September at 10.30 a.m. at the Salvation Army and then the Macmillan Coffee Morning will be on Saturday 28th September at 10.30 a.m. at our church.

Saturday 28th September is also the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival, which will be at Astrea Academy Dearne on Goldthorpe Road in Goldthorpe from 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. This free arts’ festival gives the opportunity for local residents to showcase their talents and there’s a great range of exhibitions, performances, workshops and demonstrations happening all day.

October

On Wednesday 30th October, Dearne Churches Together will be hosting The Message Bus as part of our Family Fun Day. We will effectively be holding 3 sessions throughout the day in Thurnscoe, Goldthorpe and Bolton-on-Dearne. More details to follow, but this should be a great day as the bus is packed with activities for children and young people. We will also be hosting craft activities at different locations and will be serving free refreshments as usual.

November

We’ll be hosting another Advent trail, not with knitted sheep this time, but with knitted Nativity figures. Watch this space for more details.

On Monday 25th November, 4FrontTheatre will be back in Goldthorpe, visiting primary schools and giving an evening performance of ‘Back In Time For Christmas’, a show where Justin Time has finally completed his time machine and wants to go back 2000 years to the first Christmas so he can see it for himself and give baby Jesus a Christmas present of his own too…

December

Dearne Churches Together will be hosting a Christmas service on Saturday 14th December at 2 p.m. at Furlong Road Methodist Church in Bolton-on-Dearne and we’ll be holding our carol service on Sunday 22nd December at 6 p.m.

G. K. Chesterton once said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but has been found difficult and not tried.

Many of us like an idealised, unreal version of Christianity where God is our friend and does everything we want. This ignores the balanced reality that God is the centre of the universe, not mankind (and definitely not me!), and is our judge as well as our friend. We forget at our peril that God is holy and demands holiness from His people.

2 Cor 7:1 has vital, life-giving advice for us about how we should live. Paul urges the Corinthians (and us) to ‘purify’ themselves ‘from everything that contaminats body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.’ The Message version urges us to ‘make a clean break with everything that defiles or distracts us.’

That inclues anything which would defile us physically – meaning we need to look at all that goes into our bodies (including alcohol, tobacco, drugs and food) and all we do with our bodies (including the need for exercise.) It includes everything that affects us spiritually (including fear, anxiety, bitterness, unforgiveness, envy, jealousy, resentment, pride, greed and hatred.) It means having a view of our bodies as temples of God’s Spirit and working on a daily detox that removes all that is not healthy for us so that we can be holy and whole for God.

If you don’t find this difficult, you’ve not understood what God requires as far as I can see! This alternative lifesttyle is impossible in our own strength. It can only be achieved when God’s Spirit lives within us and changes us from the inside out. Change is indeed possible (everything is possible with God!), but change requires our devoted attention and whole-hearted commitment. Are we willing to do this?

Most of us think of the church building where we gather with other Christians as the house of God. We talk about ‘going to church’ and often spend a good deal of time, effort and money on the bricks, stones and mortar which allow us to gather at specific times and places.

Some of us recognise that the house of God is not confined to a building and that people make up the church. We are the house of God (Heb 3:6); we are the temple in which the Holy Spirit dwells. (1 Cor 6:19-20)

In the Old Testament we read about Jacob sleeping out in the open on his journey to Harran (Gen 28:11). It doesn’t sound a very comfortable experience: he used a stone as a pillow for his head. (Gen 28:11) But this turned out to be a hugely significant night for the wayward son of Isaac and Rebekah, for it was a night when he dreamt of a stairway between heaven and earth, when he saw angels ascending and descending and when he heard God speaking to him personally. (Gen 28:12-15) The result of this dream was that Jacob realised ‘surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it.’ (Gen 28:16) He understood, ‘this is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.’ (Gen 29:17)

There are many places where we may sense God’s presence more keenly (often referred to as ‘thin places’, where the boundaries between heaven and earth seem negligible.) But in truth, God’s house can be found anywhere and everywhere, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matt 3:2, Mark 1:15). God’s kingdom is near. God’s house, ultimately, is anywhere God is, and since God is everywhere, we can be in His house wherever we are.

This has tremendous implications for us, bringing sacredness to the ordinary and the divine presence into every aspect of our lives, no matter how boring, painful, exciting, tedious, joyful, sorrowful or mundane they may seem to us. The house of God for you today may be the kitchen sink, the workplace, the bus journeys you take; it may be the inside of a bathroom as illness keeps you pinned to the toilet or the noisy playgroup full of clamouring toddlers where it’s hard to hear yourself think, let alone God speak. It may be the boring meeting at work where people drone on or the anxious wait in a doctor’s surgery for news which may turn your life upside down. My prayer for each of us today is that we may wake up as Jacob did and realise ‘surely God is in this place and I was not aware of it.’ For as we realise God’s presence is with us everywhere, our lives are transformed.

I often wonder if the stone Jacob used as a pillow was one of the stones he used to build an altar in that place he named Bethel (‘house of God’). I often wonder how we, living stones, can actually be built together by God to become a spiritual house (1 Pet 2:5). I think this happens as we learn to see God everywhere and in everyone. We’re all made in the image of God. Maybe we can also find God not only in those special places but in ordinary places too and also in the ordinary faces of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

As the new school year is about to begin, tonight we looked at the subject of lifelong learning from the book of Proverbs. Learning doesn’t just happen in school – babies and toddlers are learning so many things every day and we can all learn new things throughout life. The book of Proverbs is full of wise sayings, ‘written down so we’ll know how to live well and right, to understand what life means and where it’s going; a manual for living, for learning what’s right and just and fair.’ (Prov 1:2-3, The Message) 

We looked at lots of ordinary proverbs (‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ and ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’, for example).

We also looked at 5 proverbs in the Bible:

1. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (Prov 1:7)  – teaching us that we need to put God first and learn to respect Him and honour Him if we want to be wise

2. The fear of human opinion disables – trusting in God protects you from that. (Prov 29:25) It’s easy to let other people influence us (this is often known as ‘peer pressure’), but if we trust in God we won’t be so bothered by what other people say or think because we’ll be more concerned in doing what He wants.

3. To learn, you must want to be taught. To refuse reproof is stupid. (Proverbs 12:1) We all need to be willing to learn and to accept that we don’t know everything. This also means we will need to be corrected at times and we will accept this in order to learn.

4. Pride goes before destruction and haughtiness before a fall. (Proverbs 16:18) Pride and haughtiness relate to a high position, and we all know that if we climb too high and without precautions, we risk falling! God wants us to be humble and to accept that we don’t know everything.

   

5. Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he’s the one who will keep you on track. (Proverbs 3:5-6) One version of the Bible says of this verse, ‘don’t lean on your own understanding.’ When you lean on something, you hope it’s going to be strong and steady, otherwise you’ll topple over. If we are leaning on what we know and understand or on what other people know and understand, eventually we’ll topple over and fall. But if we lean on God, we won’t go wrong, because He’s strong and can’t be moved!

Paul’s command to bless our enemy (Rom 12:14) is not something we can do in our own strength; to love those who hate us, persecute us and oppose us requires a completely new way of feeling and thinking. God has promised to give us a new heart of flesh (Ezek 11:19) and urges us to be made new in the attitudes of our mind. (Eph 4:22) It’s only when we are living in this newness of life offered to us by God that we receive the power to do this impossible task of loving as God loves.

Loving our enemy is not natural or instinctive, but God wants us not to be overcome by evil but to overcome evil with good. (Rom 12:21) We need to do the right thing, however difficult it is. This means training ourselves to do what is right and choosing to do what is right. Tommy Emmanuel, the guitarist, speaks of how he has trained his thumb to stay in positions it does not naturally wish to go to, speaking of the conversation between his thumb (‘I don’t want to do that’) and his will (‘yes, you will do it.’) We too have to put to death our sinful nature (which can come up with all sorts of reasons why obeying God is foolish) and obey, whether we feel like it or not. It’s only in surrender and obedience that we find the freedom that God promises to His children.

Love and Snow

Some people seem to be able to do things which to the majority of people are quite impossible. Contortionist Aleksei Goloborodko, for example, member of the Cirque du Soleil, can get his body into positions which most of us would simply be unable to do, as this video demonstrates. His flexibility and ability to move his body in ways ordinary people can’t are the result of many years of hard work (he started at the age of four) and many hours of practice per day. For him, this kind of activity is ‘normal’, but for most of us it would be impossible.

In Rom 12:14 we see a verse which commands us to do the impossible: ‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.‘ It’s such a revolutionary, counter-intuitive way of living that Paul goes on to expand on this idea in Rom 12:17-21, but this is not just Paul’s idea. Peter tells us ‘Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing’ (1 Pet 3:9) and both apostles were simply echoing the words of Jesus in Matt 5:44-45. To do these things is not normal; it goes agains all we are taught throughout life and all received wisdom, but this is how God wants His people to be.

Many of God’s commands to us seem to make sense (e.g. the commands to not steal, lie or get drunk – see Eph 4:28, Eph 4:24, Eph 5:18) and many of us have little difficulty in obeying these commands. But the command to love and bless our enemies goes beyond the natural and the normal. It requires us to live in a miraculous realm, where dependence on God is the only way we can fulfil His will.

Many of us struggle even to bless those we love, as the New Testament makes plain. Paul reminds us that we are called to put others before ourselves (Phil 2:3), which may well mean being trampled on or cheated (see 1 Cor 6:7). If we are to fully obey God in blessing our enemies, however, we need to surrender to God’s word and, when forced to choose between our feelings and desires and obedience, choose to obey. Jesus is our example of living out this ‘new normal’ (see 1 Pet 2:20-23) and if we want to do impossible things, it will mean going back to the start and practising daily living out God’s commandments in His strength and not in our own.