My granddaughter has an excellent book about trains called ‘Terrific Trains’ which seeks to teach young children about trains using rhymes to do so. When I first read the book to her, one page in particular captured her attention:  “When a train meets a mountain, it doesn’t have to stop. It travels through a tunnel and your ears go ‘pop!'”

I don’t know which part of this page – the alliteration, the rhyme, the word ‘pop!‘ or the engaging pictures – so captured her attention, but for weeks, this was the only page she wanted me to read, and so it became a parable to me.

A mountain is an impregnable obstacle to a train journey. A mountain stands majestic, but cannot be ignored. Life is full of metaphorical mountains, full of obstacles which are far greater than our ability to circumnavigate!

For the train journey not to simply end when the train meets the mountain, engineers and builders have to make tunnels. It’s a long, laborious process, requiring skilled knowledge and machinery, but the result is indeed that when a train meets a mountain, it doesn’t have to stop. The journey can continue.

Jesus spoke about faith as small as a mustard seeing having the power to move mountains (Matt 17:20). Sometimes we face situations that are impossible for us to overcome. What we need in those life situations is faith in God, the God of the impossible who has delivered us and will continue to do so. (2 Cor 1:10)

Sometimes the obstacle will be removed. The fault-finding, critical, hostile boss will move on to another job, freeing us to work in harmony again. The bullying, aggressive pupil will be gone, leaving us to enjoy learning again. Butat other times, God makes a tunnel. He enables us to bear a situation which was unbearable. He enables us to carry on when we feel like giving up. He rescues us in less obvious, unexpected ways.

Whether the mountain is removed or we learn to scale it (one weary step after another) or go through it (thanks to a ‘tunnel’ God provides) is irrelevant. When we meet the mountain, we don’t have to stop. We can continue to press on in God. We keep going, thanks to His unfailing love and ever-present help. Our ears may not go ‘pop!’, but our hearts swell with gratitude and wonder as we recognise the Lord helps us to continue our journey in faith and hope.

I am praying for ropes, tunnels and other miracles today to change situations and make the impossible possible with our God.

Gideon is one of my heroes because his diffident faith reminds me so much of myself. For many Christians, he’s nobody special, a bit of a wimp. Judges 6, which tells of his calling to rescue Israel from the hands of the Midianites, seems to many to be an object lesson in obfuscation and doubt. They are scornful of his questions and constant ‘bargaining’ with God, with his fear (he built an altar to the Lord at night because he was afraid of his family and the townspeople, we read in Judges 6:27) and with his sheer uncertainty. It is these characteristics, however, which offer me hope, because I see this shyness and uncertainty as arising from his lack of self-confidence. Gideon reminds me that God doesn’t only use confident, assertive people. He uses wimps, cowards, doubters and fearful people as well! – and therefore there’s hope for me too!

Gideon asks many of the hard questions we’d prefer to ignore (‘if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all the wonders that our ancestors told us about…?’ Judges 6:13) His conclusions may be flawed (as ours often are, believing the Lord has abandoned us in times of testing, even though the very conversation he was having with the angel of the Lord was actually proof that this was not the case), but his raw honesty is something I believe we should emulate, not hiding our confusion beneath pious platitudes but being real with God.

It’s perhaps in his need for reassurance and affirmation that I most identify with Gideon. He seeks reassurance and confirmation from God by making an offering to Him and putting fleeces out so God can demonstrate His awesome power (Judges 6:17-23, 36-40). Some may feel this is putting God to the test, but I believe Gideon’s reported politeness (‘pardon me, sir‘) and humility (‘do not be angry with me‘) indicate a fearful heart, not an unbelieving one. God’s graciousness to Gideon (offering him hope and the revelation ‘the Lord is peace’ (Judges 6:24)) goes a long way to mitigating my fears and offering me reassurance.

We like our heroes to be tough, dynamic and fearless, but Gideon – named in Hebrews 11, that chapter listing heroes of the faith – reminds us what makes a hero is not a person’s flawed personality but the presence of God with them, a lesson from which we can all take comfort and reassurance.

Tonight’s evening service looked back on the Team Building Day, with the children giving us their decorated hearts as a symbol of the love we are all called to have for each other.

Then Jeanette sent us on a hunt for lost sheep, which the children were very good at finding!

In the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-7), Jesus told a story about a shepherd who went looking for one lost sheep, even though, out of a flock of 100, this might not seem to have made much sense. Surely he could stand the loss of one sheep? But the shepherd cared enough to go and find the lost sheep.

Having found the sheep, the shepherd returned to great celebrations – so we got instruments out to celebrate with music!

God’s love for each one of us is so great that He goes looking for every person who does not know Him and there is great rejoicing in heaven when one person returns to Him. That’s a massive party! – and a massive incentive to us all to demonstrate the caring, searching heart of the shepherd to those around us who do not yet know the good Shepherd.

All of us have different styles of learning. In general, the seven most popular learning styles are:

• Visual (spatial): You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.

• Aural (auditory-musical): You prefer using sound and music.

• Verbal (linguistic): You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.

• Physical (kinesthetic): You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.

• Logical (mathematical): You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.

• Social (interpersonal): You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.

• Solitary (intrapersonal): You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

Preaching is usually done verbally through one person speaking to a group of people. This suits some people, but others respond better to visual stimuli (which is why we may use PowerPoints to illustrate sermon points, to help those who learn that way) and others respond better to physical means (moving around and doing things like crafts and puzzles to reinforce truth.) We need to pay careful attention to what we have heard and been taught (see Heb 2:1), because if we do not, it’s all too easy to let God’s word slip through our fingers without retaining it.

John urges us to see that what we have heard from the beginning remains in us. (1 John 2:24) We have to make a conscious effort to remember what we have received and heard and hold it fast. (Rev 3:3) As Casting Crowns sing, it’s so easy to lose our ‘follow through’ between the altar and the door (‘The Altar & The Door’, Casting Crowns): we may be moved intensely during a church service, but how much do these truths affect us once we leave the building? God’s word has the power to shape us and mould us, but only as we respond in faith and obedience to what God says to us through His word.

In the 18th and 19th centuries there was an explosion in the field of engineering: names like James Watt, Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel became famous for their work on bridges and locomotives. It was at this period that understanding of metals became more refined, with people understanding more about the strength of metals both in tensile and compressive loads and predicting how much material was needed to do a job without it failing and without using too much material. Eventually, engineers came to understand that unexpected failures occurred due to metal fatigue, when small cracks led to more catastrophic failures as metals were bent and stressed.

Knowledge is a vitally important part of our lives, but knowledge is not the be-all and end-all of a life of faith. In Hos 4:1-6, we read how God’s people were destroyed from lack of knowledge, how they rejected knowledge. Nonetheless, we can be always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth (see 2 Tim 3:6-7). For most of us, knowing about the Industrial Revolution and thisknowledge about metal fatigue doesn’t have much impact on our daily lives. What we need is life-changing knowledge, and a knowledge of the truth has the potential to do this.

The aim of preaching is to educate, illuminate, remind and to give understanding and instruction (see Neh 8:9); God’s word is preached ultimately so that our lives are changed. We need to understand that listening is not a spectator sport. We need to take what is preached and check it out against God’s word (see Acts 17:11-12); we need to learn to differentiate between fact and opinion. Ultimately, Heb 4:2 reminds us that the message the Israelites heard was of no value to them because they did not mix what they heard with faith. Just as cement is no use to the builder unless it’s mixed with water, so our listening to God’s word doesn’t do us any good unless we mix it with faith and obedience (James 1:22). It’s not enough to let the word go in one ear and straight out of the other! We need instead to act on what we hear; we need to put into practice what we have learned. (Phil 4:9)

How do we retain God’s word? This might mean taking notes from a sermon or reading the church blog afterwards or listening again to the sermon via the church website. It might mean learning God’s word off by heart so that we can hide His word in our hearts. Paul told Timothy to keep what he had heard as the pattern of sound teaching and guard this (2 Tim 1:13-14). ‘To keep’ in this context means to hold in the sense of wearing. It’s no good holding a life jacket; if it’s going to do any good, we have to wear it! In the same way, we need to ‘wear’ God’s truth, knowing that the Holy Spirit helps us to guard truth.

We have a great responsibility when we listen to God’s word. God doesn’t waste words and we need to examine, retain and believe what we hear from Him, because as we hold it, it will hold us.

The Bible has much to say about hearing. A repeated phrase in Revelation is ‘whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’ (Rev 2:7, 11, 17, 29; Rev 3:6, 13,22). That may seem an odd phrase to us, for there are very few people without ears. What it’s really talking about is not the physical anatomy of ears, but if we are actually listening and hearing what God is saying. The Message version talks about our ears being awake.

At the moment, Garry is having trouble hearing in his left ear because of a build-up of wax. He’s deaf in that ear. This morning, I was downstairs when his alarm clock went off and instead of him turning it off, the noise of the alarm continued, getting louder and louder and more insistent. I had to go upstairs to wake him, astonished that he wasn’t disturbed by the noise. He was lying next to it, oblivious, while I was disturbed by it a relatively long way away! He couldn’t hear it because of the wax blockage in his ear.

We can be like that when God speaks to us. We simply don’t hear Him. Our ears are clogged up with the noise from the world, deafened by our own sin and by the culture all around us.

We need God to open our ears so we can listen. (Ps 40:6) The Hebrew word here is ‘dug out’. We need God to unclog our ears, to dig out the wax, to open the channels again so we can hear Him speak.

How does this happen? The chief way, it seems to me, is actually stopping to listen. We are adept at multi-tasking, but this creates half-hearted listening. To truly listen to God, we have to slow down and give Him our undivided attention. Jeremy Camp sings, ‘I need to stop so I can hear You speak’ (‘Slow Down Time’, Jeremy Camp) and this seems to me to be the first step. Instead of being proud of our ability to multi-task, we need to understand that we need to stop and spend time with God, with no other item on our agenda, that we need to listen in this time and not just talk.

Secondly, for us to hear God, we have to soften our hearts. Just as Garry needs ear drops to soften the wax which is the blockage preventing his hearing, hard hearts don’t hear God well. We have to allow God in if we’re going to hear Him. Every time we hear His voice and ignore Him (‘it wasn’t really God; it’s not convenient to do that; I don’t want to forgive X or give to Y’), we are actually making it harder to hear Him again.

Thirdly, hearing (listening) is allied to doing. (James 1:22-23) If we hear God and don’t do what He says, we’ll find it harder to hear Him next time. When God speaks, it’s not usually “information only.” He speaks to us to shape us, mould us and transform us. He speaks to us so we can be involved in His transformation of society. We need to get used to hearing and obeying.