Paul is a great example to us of a person with a passion for God. Phil 3:3-14 shows us a man passionately in love with Jesus, totally committed to Him and not ashamed of the gospel. His consuming desire was to know Christ – despite his dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus and his many experiences with God, he was not content with this but wanted to press on further. He sought to know the power of the resurrection,  but this can only come as we ‘chase’ the person. Knowing Christ must come before knowing HIs power.

If we are to cultivate the same passion for Christ which Paul experienced and know the same spiritual fervour he possessed, we must take three steps and overcome three obstacles.

1. Have a dependence on Christ and put no confidence in the flesh. We have to have Christ at the centre of our lives and must not rely on our own abiities, talents and intelligence. Paul had much to commend him, being of good family stock, knowing the law inside out and being a man of moral integrity, but he chose instead to rely on Christ, not on these things. We can easily find out where our dependence is by how we manage the problems of life (is our initial reaction to try to solve the problems ourselves or to cast our burdens on Christ?) and how we make time for God. Discipleship involves discipline, with battles revealing to us the depth of our intimacy with God.
2. Have a determination to press on and do not allow complacency to take root. Paul was determined to press on. This required an act of the will and discipline of the mind; there is no room for half-heartedness if we want to know Christ as Paul did. In the last days, the love of many will grow cold (Matt 24:12). We need to refuse to let apathy affect us and must strive against complacency, for this so easily leads to criticism and complaint. If anyone had reason to be discouraged, disappointed or disillusioned, it was Paul, but he did not allow the trials of life to affect him. Someone has said that ‘spiritual fulfilment comes in the exact proportion to the intensity of our desire.’ The opposite of complacency is passion. We must have a zeal and passion for God and for His glory and honour.
3. Know deliverance from the past and be freed from the stumbling-block of condemnation. So many of us try to press on towards God while carrying burdens and guilt from the past like a ball and chain around our ankles. Past events, past hurts, disappontments and failures haunt us, affecting the present and the way we live. Our lives can be dominated by the words ‘if only…’ and we are filled with regret. The truth is that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1). Paul could well have lived under a cloud of condemnation, for he was one who had persecuted Christians and sought their deaths. He knew what it was to be forgiven by Jesus and in Phil 3:13 talks of forgetting all that lies behind in order to be focussed on Jesus and pressing on. We need to bring our pasts to Jesus, conffess our sins and then move on. (1 Jn 1:9) Only then can we run with perseverance the race marked out for us. (Heb 12:1)

Yan Hadley, our guest speaker, spoke on ‘the priority of a godly passion’ tonight, basing his sermon on Ps 37:4 which tells us to delight ourselves in the Lord and then He will give us the desires of our hearts. This verse reminds us of 3 key things:

1. Relationship is at the heart of everything; we are called to delight in God. Our relationship is not based on duty, obligation or a sense of responsibility; it is based on a thirst for God (Ps 42:1) and gladness (Ps 122:1). Joy and fellowship are key aspects of this relationship with God.
2. Responsibiity is involved, for we are told to ‘delight yourself.‘ No one else can do this for us; there is a DIY element to this! We may not always feel like attending church meetings or taking time to pray and read the Bible, but feelings are not the determiners here. We are required to take responsibility for our spiritual walk (Ps 16:8-9), doing what we know to be right, whatever our feelings say (Ps 34:1). We can’t rely on others, but must cultivate a wholehearted desire to please God if we are to grow spiritually.
3. Reassurance is the response God gives us. Ps 37:4 reminds us that He will give you the desires of your heart. God’s desire is to bless us and He is immensely generous. God cannot lie (Num 23:19), so we need to grasp something of the generosity and benevolence of God towards us and believe His promises. When we call, He answers! (Jer 33:3). There is so much more of God to experience (1 Cor 2:9-10).

God has good plans for us as individuals and as a church, but we need to hunger and thirst for righteousness and to seek God’s kingdom first if we are to see the breakthrough for which we long.

As part of the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival’s mission to champion creativity and celebrate community, we will be hosting a ‘mosaic workshop’ on Saturday 1st June between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (The picture below is illustrative only – the mosaic will be personalised and designed by the community.)

The idea is for the community to be involved in creating a tile mosaic which can be exhibited at the arts’ festival on Saturday 28th September at Astrea Academy Dearne (the new name for the secondary school in Goldthorpe!) This mosaic, which will be started at GPCC, will tour other community groups until it’s completed.

As I’ve been thinking about mosaics, I see more and more how mosaics are rather illustrative of our lives. A mosaic is usually made from broken tile pieces which are fitted together through the skill of the designers to form a beautiful picture. Our lives often feel like they are made up of broken pieces. Life has a habit of shattering our hopes, dashing our dreams and leaving us with sharp, jagged edges which don’t feel at all beautiful. We wonder what God is doing with these disparate pieces and how He can create anything meaningful or beautiful from them. But He is the master artist, the One who assembles ‘all our broken, shattered pieces/ More beautiful than I had ever known.’ (‘Long Live The King’, Aaron Shust) Or, as Rend Collective puts it, ‘though I’m broken, I am running into the arms of love,.’ (‘Joy’, Rend Collective)

Come along to the mosaic workshop in June and have fun adding pieces to this community mosaic… but remember also that God is making a beautiful mosaic picture out of your life and even the raggedy tiny broken pieces of your life can be fitted into His beautiful picture, into the Bride of Christ.

We are a Pentecostal church and as such, we believe in the person, ministry and gifts of the Holy Spirit as one of the blessings God wants to give to every one of His children. It’s one thing to believe in these things, though, and another to experience them.

As we study the book of Acts on Thursday evenings, we see that the key to effective witnessing and effective Christian living is the Holy Spirit’s presence and power among His people. God wants to pour out His Holy Spirit on all of us and wants us to be filled with the Spirit every day. We need His gifts (gifts of tongues, of interpretation, of prophecy, specific words of wisdom and knowledge and the discerning of spirits; the gift of faith for specific things, working miracles and healings) among us. This blessing of the Holy Spirit is for each one of us, whether we are young, middle-aged or old; whether we’ve been on the Christian journey a short time or a long time. Every single one of us needs to be filled with the Spirit – not just once, but on a daily basis. It was only when the Holy Spirit came on the believers on the Day of Pentecost that the church was born. (Acts 2:1-39) We cannot hope to see people come to faith unless we are people who are filled with the Spirit. We cannot hope to overcome sin and temptation unless we are people filled with the Spirit. We cannot hope to have an impact on our communities unless we are people filled with the Spirit.

On Saturday 2nd March at 4 p.m. we are having a meeting to discuss the way forward as a church. We will be looking at our personal relationship with God, at the need for evangelism, at prayer and Bible study (the ‘building blocks’ of faith), and we want to hear people’s ideas and suggestions and look at what God is saying to us as a group of His children. Paul makes it clear in Eph 5:10 that we need to find out what pleases the Lord and then do it. He urged the Ephesians not to be foolish, but to understand what the Lord’s will is. (Eph 5:17) The task before us as we seek to be with God in the community and with God for the community is immense, but the Holy Spirit working in the lives of those first believers was able to turn the world upside down. As He fills each one of us and we walk daily in the overflow of His life, He will do things which astound and astonish us. Come along on Saturday to talk and pray, knowing that as we see more of the Holy Spirit in our lives and church services, we can be filled with boldness and equipped to do the works God has prepared in advance for us to do. (Eph 2:10)

Paul wants us to be wise and not unwise (Eph 5:15). He names areas where wisdom needs to be seen: in our attitudes to time and to what we actually spend our time doing. He urges us to ‘make the most of every opportunity’ (Eph 5:17), which older translations translate as ‘redeeming the time.’  Time is valuable and God wants us to make the most of our time. We live in the day of salvation, in the time of God’s favour (2 Cor 6:2), at a time when the days are evil (Eph 5:16), but there are still many opportunities to share God’s truth with people. We need to look at time and see how we can use the time we have wisely to serve God, for all of us have the same amount of time each day; it’s a question of how we choose to use it. Stephen Covey said, ‘The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.’  This means we need to schedule time to be with God, with our families and with our spiritual family.

We need wisdom also in what we actually do, in our actions. Paul urges us not to get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. (Eph 5:18) There’s nothing wrong with pleasurable activities or relaxation per se, but we have to be careful not to take things to excess. Debauchery is defined as ‘excessive indulgence in sex, alcohol, or drugs.’ One thing so easily leads to another, and there is no place in the Christian life for this kind of excessive indulgence. Instead of seeking to fill the emptiness in our lives through these things, we need to be filled with the Spirit – not just as a one-off event, but as a continuing, daily process.

When the Holy Spirit fills us, there will be spiritual talk; there will be music; there will be songs; there will be a love for God’s word; there will be thankfulness. These spiritual blessings flow from the blessing of the Holy Spirit. (Eph 5:18-20) When the Holy Spirit fills us, we are filled with boldness. The early apostles were able to speak the word of God boldly after they were filled (Acts 4:31), as was Saul (Acts 9:28). One of the characteristics of the early church was this boldness, which came from the power of the Spirit: ‘So Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there, speaking boldly for the Lord, who confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to perform signs and wonders’ (Acts 14:3), we are told.

The key to knowing the fulness of the blessing of the Holy Spirit is to keep in step with the Spirit (Gal 5:25). We must neither run ahead nor lag behind, but recognise our dependence on Him daily.

This morning we continued the series ‘Battles & Blessings’, looking at Eph 5:1-20 and the blessing of the Holy Spirit, God’s precious gift to us. In this chapter, Paul reminds the Ephesians that the new life they have received in Jesus Christ needs to be reflected in their own everyday lives.(see Eph 4:17, Eph 5:3-4, 11). He says that sexual immorality, impurity and greed are ‘improper for God’s people’ (Eph 5:3) – such things are not part of this new set of clothes we have been given. Our new identity is as ‘God’s holy people’ (Eph 5:3). Obscenity, foolish talk and coarse joking have no place in the lives of God’s people. Such things are ‘fruitless’, and God wants us to be people who bear much fruit. (John 15:5) One of the ways we reflect God’s nature is to bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, to have evidence of this fruit in how we live. (Gal 5:22-23)

We are called to live out our new identity as children of God, children of the light (see John 1:4-5, 1 John 1:5, 1 Thess 5:5-8). The spiritual fruit which the Holy Spirit grows in our lives reflects God’s nature. God is good (Ps 119:68); He is righteous (Ps 48:10, Ps 116:5); He is the truth. (John 14:6) Jesus is the Prince of Peace (Is 9:6) God is patient, being slow to anger and rich in mercy. (2 Pet 3:9, Ps 103:8) He is kind (Rom 2:4). He is faithful and gentle with His people, remembering that we’re only made from dust, not snuffing out the smouldering wick or crushing the bruised reed. (Ps 103:13-14, Is 42:3) We are being called to grow fruit that’s entirely in keeping with God’s nature and character. The family resemblance is meant to be outworked in our lives so that this spiritual fruit is seen as evidence of our true identity as children of the light, children reflecting what our Father in heaven is like.

This is not done through self-effort or human endeavour; God gives freely of His Spirit to us and Paul urges us to be filled with the Spirit (Eph 5:18). This blessing is available to all of God’s children; it is God’s express desire and purpose that we are all filled with the Spirit. Paul has made it clear that all Christians have the Spirit of God (Eph 1:13, Rom 8:9) The question is, how much of us does the Holy Spirit have? Are we completely surrendered to Him? Do we rely on Him to guide and lead us or are we busy living independent lives? Luke 11:9-13 makes it plain that our responsibility is to ask, seek and knock. We have a heavenly Father who longs to give freely of His Spirit. Without this blessing, we will become discouraged and demotivated, but we can be confident that as we ask, seek and knock, God will open the floodgates of heaven and pour out His Spirit on us.