My life interestingly has become involved with mosaics. I am involved with a mosaic project as part of the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival as we aim to make a community mosaic involving local residents and community groups from the area to exhibit at the festival on 28th September.

I have no artistic or practical experience with mosaics and so the logistics of this project are both daunting and challenging to me. I want the tile pieces to form a coherent picture, not just a random mish-mash of colour, and so I’m having to consult artists whose design skills and flair for this type of thing are far greater than mine. I’m not especially dextrous or fond of mess, so there is a large part of the practical aspect of this project which repels and terrifies me. I’m well out of my comfort zone here and the distance between the vision I have of a perfected mosaic reflecting the individual logos of different groups incorporated into a unified whole and the pile of resources heaped onto a table seems to me too far to be bridged in a matter of weeks!

Yet as I ponder these things, I’m aware that a mosaic is a parable of God’s work in our lives. Mostly our lives seem to us to be a mess. We may start off whole enough, but life, with all its misfortune, tragedy and diffcult circumstances,soon leaves us feeling like broken tiles, smashed into different pieces with jagged edges and rough surfaces with a picture that no amount of sticking pieces together seems to recreate.

Yet just as a mosaic picture in the hands of an artist tells a bigger picture through a variety of broken tile pieces, so God is building His church out of flawed, broken, sinful people, fitting us together with perfect purpose and unity We don’ see the finished picture yet, and at times it’s hard for us to fathom why He allows X or Y to happen to us. We are broken and bewildered, yet He has not finished with us yet.

So I believe my mosaic project, with all its daunting demands, is a valuable reminder to me of the bigger picture God wants to recreated through broken people.

And if you’d like to be involved with the mosaic project, the launch session is on Saturday 1st June (10 a.m. – 1 p.m.) at our church!

Just as we would all think carefully about what we were going to say if we were going to testify in a court of law, we should think carefully about how to give our testimony and how to talk to people about Jesus. The question ‘How did you become a Christian?‘ is one we should have an answer for, for only we can give that answer! (see 1 Peter 3:15)

For some of us, we were  brought up in a Christian home and taught the way of faith from a young age. This doesn’t mean we don’t have a personal testimony. We can still talk about God’s goodness and how we came to believe this truth for ourselves.

Others had no Christian background and perhaps no interest in God or spiritual matters at all, so they can talk about what piqued their interest and how God got their attention. I came from a family where faith seemed to have been forgotten (my paternal grandparents were devout Christians and my parents attended church until their marriage, but they seemed to have ‘grown away’ from faith by the time I was born.) Then my youngest aunt went away to teacher training college in Leeds and found Jesus in a very real way. Her testimony affected my maternal family very much, leading my grandmother, mother, uncle and his wife to faith. For me, though, fond of her as I was, this had no real impact other than to make me mildly curious.

It was only when I saw young people my own age talking about Jesus and being passionate for God that I started to wonder if I had written off this spiritual talk too quickly. God provided people who were willing to talk about God both intellectually and experientially and so I found myself on a journey that led to me realising I was a sinner in need of God’s forgiveness. Then I was able to talk to my Mum about this and to pray with her to receive forgiveness and new life.

In a court of law, one answer often leads to another question, and it’s the same with testimonies! We might perhaps be asked why we believe. It’s good to have thought about that as well! Questions are not always hostile; people are genuinely curious. We need to be able to explain that our faith is based on historical fact and that the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus are crucial to our belief.

We need to be people who tell our story, who share our faith with others. Think about how you can do this, what you can say… and then ask God for opportunities to do this!

A testimony is a written or spoken statement giving evidence about something. We often talk of witnesses testifying in a court of law about what they have seen.

Jesus’s disciples are called to give testimony about Him. John the Baptist saw and testified that Jesus was God’s Chosen One. (John 1:34) Andrew heard his testimony and believed it. He in turn went to his brother, Simon, and said, “We have found the Messiah.” (John 1:41) Andrew’s testimony brought Simon to Jesus… and the rest, as they say, is history!

John himself gave testimony throughout his life about the ‘word of life’ (1 John 1:1-2). His testimony has all the hallmarks of an eyewitness (“we have seen with our eyes… looked at… we have heard… our hands have touched…” (1 John 1:1))

The role of every Christian is to give testimony about Jesus, to be a witness to all He has done. Acts 1:8 tells us that when the Holy Spirit came, He would give us the power to be witnesses to Jesus wherever we go. The Holy Spirit has come!

A witness simply reports what He has seen. We who follow Christ have seen something of His love, power and actions in our lives. It should be the most natural thing in the world to speak of Jesus. We can say, as Jesus said to those first followers, ‘come and you will see.’ (John 1:39)

Sometimes in court, ‘expert witnesses’ (usually forensic experts or those with a particular knowledge of a relevant subject) are called in. We can be diffident witnesses, feeling that testimony about Jesus is best left to ‘expert witnesses’, professionals whose job it is to speak of Jesus (often known as ‘the clergy’!) The truth is, though, that the ordinary testimony of ordinary people who are filled by the Spirit of God can have extraordinary results. Andrew, Simon, John, Philip and Nathanael were all ordinary peopole who came to faith through other people’s testimonies and who learned firsthand about the ‘domino effect’ of evangelism. Personal testimony and personal evangelism are still the most effective ways to bring people to Jesus. One testimony, one ‘aptly spoken word’, can be all that’s needed to point someone in the direction of Jesus. Let’s testify about Him to all we meet!

Chemistry was the only science subject I really enjoyed at school. I was terrified of my biology teacher, whose eccentricity and rigid rules left me afraid to explore and ask questions, and the maths involved in physics left me cold. Chemistry, however, was taught by a friendly woman who may have been eccentric but whose passion and enthusiasm for her subject gradually drew me in.

I remember learning a list of the chemical properties of metals, a list I can remember to this day:

1. Metals are malleable and ductile

2. Metals usually have high density

3. Metals can form alloys with other metals and non-metals

4. Metals are generally good conductors of heat and electricity (lead being an exception)

5. Metals are generally solids at room temperature (mercury being an exception)

The list was actually much longer than that, but since this is not a chemistry revision blog, I’d better stop there!

The linguist in me loved the first bullet point most, because it introduced two new words to my thirteen-year-old vocabulary: ‘malleable’ and ‘ductile’. Malleable means the ability to be hammered or pressed into shape without breaking or cracking – pliant, pliable, workable, able to be moulded. Ductile means being able to be drawn out into a thin wire, ‘the ability to be deformed without losing toughness, not brittle.’

I could see these were useful characteristics, particularly as I pondered gold and silver jewellery. The malleability of metals seemed especially useful and practical to me.

As I grew up, I saw that some people seemed malleable like metals. They changed their shape according to the company they kept. Sometimes they were solicitous and kind; on other occasions, they could be snappy and waspish. They could be polite and deferential to my face, but in private, behind my back, could mock and laugh at me. Somehow, malleability in people did not seem so laudable.

When I became a Christian, I discovered people liked to treat God as malleable as well. We like to squeeze Him into our image, to press Him into our moulds, to take one attribute and focus entirely on that, to the exclusion of everything else.

A metal’s ability to change shape does not apply to God, however. He does not change. (Mal 3:6) He’s not like us, chameleon-like in qualities, appearing to one person as loving and to another as mean. All the attributes of God are held in perfect balance, however contradictory they may seem to us.

As I grew up, I learnt a lot about the characteristis of God in much the same way I learnt about the characteristics of metals at school. (I’m a list person!) God is love. He is faithful, good, kind, compassionate, forgiving, merciful, just, jealous, righteous, holy, slow to anger, a consuming fire… the list is much longer than the metals’ one! Some of these attributes (the things that make God who He is) seem contradictory to us and baffling, so we try to persuade ourselves that He’s malleable, able to be squeezed into whatever God-shape we fancy at the time. One attribute God does not possess, however, is malleability. He is, instead, immutable. He doesn’t change. He is who He is. He won’t change for us. We need to accept the reality of who He is, otherwise we are simply worshipping a false god.

Fairness is at the heart of our belief system. We live by the balancing scales. We believe wrongs should be righted. We long for justice and right to triumph.

But this desire for fairness, however praiseworthy, leads us into a cul-de-sac of misery, for there is no way out. We want fairness, but we deserve punishment, for no one has done right, not even one (Rom 3:10). The ‘right thing’ would be to receive judgment and punishment – not only for the criminal, but for us.

What we need, therefore, is something other than fairness. We need the extravagance of grace and mercy. We need the slate wiping clean through forgiveness. We need to find a way out of this impasse!

God offers us this exit. He lavishes grace and love on us. We don’t deserve this. We can’t earn it through the good works we attempt, but it’s poured out liberally in Christ Jesus, so we don’t have to earn it! God lavishes mercy on us, not treating us as our sins deserve, letting us go scot-free. (Ps 103:10)

Mercy and grace are God’s blessing to us, poured out liberally and generously into our lives. We can either receive them freely – as the Prodigal Son did, putting on a lovely coat and feasting on a barbecue of choice meat – or we can spurn them, clinging onto fairness as our modus operandi – as the older son did, frustrated and offended by his father’s generosity.

To us, these are either/ or options. We feel we can’t have fairness and grace. We feel we have to choose between the two. But in God’s world, the paradox is we serve a God of mercy, grace, forgiveness, love, compassion and justice. We don’t understand how this can be. We don’t see how the scales can ever balance. But that’s God. He is above all our understanding. His ways we can’t fathom. But we can rest secure, knowing He will resolve all the tensions and work out all the irreconciliable differences we can’t fathom.

Don’t mis out on grace and mercy because you’re clinging onto a need for justice. Let go of limitations to embrace a God far greater than we can imagine, a God who will see that right is done and who offers us a way out of our man-made tensions.

J-P spoke tonight on Psalm 121, a favourite psalm of his (and many other people!) This psalm was written in the flyleaf of his first Bible by his grandmother and was particularly relevant to him during childhood hikes in the Drakensberg mountains in his native South Africa (mountains which, at 3482 m above sea level, are considerably higher than anything in the UK!) On such occasions, the majesty and awesome power of God the Creator are evident to us and this psalm reminds us that God is our helper and protector.

In ancient times, the mountains were often thought to be the dwelling-place of the gods, and in Ex 19:16-19 we see how God appeared to His people on Mount Sinai. Ultimately, however, our help does not come from mountains, but from God Himself. The psalm reminds us that our helper is not just a person, but God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth. He is the creator of all we see: the magnificence of the mountains, the grandeur of the oceans, the beauty of our world all reflect God’s power.

God not only helps us, but also protects us. He watches over us and looks after us – not for him the post-prandial Sunday afternoon snooze so many of us experience each week! This psalm gives us assurance that God protects us; He provides shade for us during the heat and enables us to live without fear or superstition. His protection is not temporary, but forever. He has our back!

This psalm may seem to some to be naive or simplistic, but actually it encourages child-like trust which should be the goal of all of us (didn’t Jesus tell us that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such children? – Matt 18:3) It’s so easy to get distracted, but we need child-like faith because we are children of God.