This morning we reached the end of our ‘Songs of Ascent’ series, a series looking at Psalms 120-134. Ps 134 is only a short psalm of 3 verses, but it’s a psalm of praise and blessing.

Every year, Jews would travel to Jerusalem to worship God for the three main celebrations: Passover (commemorating God’s deliverance from Egypt), the Festival of Weeks (Pentecost) and the Festival of Tabernacles (harvest.) During the journey, they would sing these songs of pilgrimage to remind them of God’s help, provision, protection and deliverance. Imagine their joy and relief when they finally reached Jerusalem!

There is no sense of anticlimax in Ps 134. So often, when we reach a destination after much travelling, there can be a sense of anticlimax: I remember arriving in Vienna on a cold December day in 1988 and getting on a tram that took us into a rather dilapidated part of the city, nothing at all like I was expecting! Eventually, we found the stunning centre we were expecting, but that ‘first view’ was disappointing to say the least!

Many Christians secretly harbour a fear that that same sense of disappointment will sweep over us when we finally see God face to face. Nothing could be further from the truth. The revolutionary truth which needs to grip our minds, hearts and souls is that God is enough for us. We don’t need anything else; His grace is sufficient for us. (2 Cor 12:9). As Chris Tomlin sings

‘All of You is more than enough for all of me, for every thirst and every need.

You satisfy me with Your love

And all I have in You is more than enough.’ (‘Enough’, Chris Tomlin)

Not only will there be no sense of anticlimax or disappointment at journey’s end, we can also know the satisfaction God brings during the journey itself. Only God can satisfy!

‘There is a joy in the journey.

There’s a light we can love on the way.

There is a wonder and wildness to life

And freedom for those who obey. (‘Joy In the Journey’, Michael Card)

Matt Redman once said, ‘Worship is the ultimate reality check.’ (see here) So often, we view worship as escapism or something that’s a required but rather boring part of a Sunday service. We may even feel, as C. S. Lewis once did, that the repeated commands to praise God are proof He’s a bit of an arrogant big-head really! In worship, however, we focus on the ultimate reality that God will always be on His throne, He is always watching over us and cares about us. No matter what we are facing in life, in worship we ‘check in’ with the Rock of Ages and realign our focus with the King of Kings, reminding ourselves of His power, His provision and His protection.

Many people feel that the best worship is found in the songs of victory we sing when God has done something amazing and triumphant. Those songs are indeed fantastic testimonies and tremendously uplifting. But I actually think that the ability to worship God in the night, during times of tragedy and turbulence, when we have no idea whatsoever what God is doing or why He is allowing certain things to happen, is a greater testimony. Matt Redman goes on to talk of the nightingale, that bird which sings in the night, and of the evergreen tree, which is still green even in the barrenness of winter. That’s the kind of worshipper I long to be.

Kutless’ song ‘I’m Still Yours’ never fails to challenge me, because it asks hard questions:

‘When my life is not what I expected
The plans I made have failed
When there’s nothing left to steal me away
Will You be enough for me?
Will my broken heart still sing?’ (‘I’m Still Yours’, Kutless)

I believe that worship enables us to sing, to hope, to carry on, no matter what our eyes see or our hearts feel. I believe it’s the ultimate reality check because it firmly places God at the centre of everything, where He needs to be. So often, our egocentric thinking believes it’s all about us. Worship reminds us that this is not the case, that God is the centre and that at the centre there is a throne and on the throne is a Lamb, slain for us. (Rev 5:6)

Take the time to draw near to God today. Matt Redman says, ‘I can’t promise your circumstances will change, but I can promise something inside of you can change when you worship God.’ We are transformed as we worship. (2 Cor 3:17-18)

I’m the kind of person who likes to plan ahead (rather obsessively so, I’m afraid…!), but even I found it rather strange to be making tomato and apple chutney for the Christmas Market on a rather hot day in August!

What is perhaps even more astonishing, however, is Eph 1:4, which says God ‘chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.‘ Now that’s planning ahead!

Sadly, the summer holidays are drawing to a close and the new term will be starting shortly. Before then, we are having a cleaning day at church (tidying the stage area and cleaning the toys, ready for the re-start of the Monday Night Youth Club on 5th September and the Parent & Toddler Group on 9th September) on Friday 2nd September at 2.30 p.m. Please note the change of time.

Saturday 17th September will be the next ‘Churches Together’ meeting at Market Street. Come along at 6 p.m. to think about thanksgiving, to give thanks and to join with Christians from other local churches for worship, prayer, Bible study and fun activities. Refreshments will be served after the service.

On Saturday 24th September we’ll be holding our Macmillan Coffee Morning from 10 a.m. until 12 noon. Come along to support this worthy cause and enjoy time out from the busyness. Also on 24th September (time to be confirmed), there will be a men’s DVD & takeaway evening at church. A great opportunity for men to invite their friends over and spend time relaxing together.

Forgive me for hating statistics. I know they are useful at times, but as someone who struggles with numbers and who faces a week of staring at these numbers representing the sum total of people’s work over at least two years (GCSE results come out on Thursday), I am particularly averse to them at the moment. One mark separates one grade boundary from another (and sometimes this represents ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in terms of what a pupil can do next.) Numbers are coldly clinical. They do not tell an employer if a pupil has worked or shirked; they do not indicate the struggles behind a particular subject or even the joy a pupil has found in a subject. They are translated into charts: line graphs plotting where you are in relation to someone else, bar charts which can be coloured to show where the school stands in comparison to other schools, pie charts which indicate percentages of A* grades and so on. But these charts, beautiful in their visual representation of numbers, do not capture joy or heartache, nor do they actually explain the numbers. They simply sit there, capable of multiple interpretations, depending on one’s perspective.

Some love the coldly clinical fact of numbers. Statistics don’t lie, they say. 2 plus 2 will always be 4. You know where you are with numbers. They don’t lie.

I beg to differ. Oh, not from the mathematical point of view. I agree that 2 + 2 =4 and I even acknowledge that there is something rather reassuring about maths. But not when it comes to defining people or measuring worth.

That’s not what maths, what numbers, are designed to do. But in our society, that’s what we want them to do.

Teachers are judged on the numbers. This year, schools will be ‘measured’ by the Government by a complex formula known as ‘Attainment 8’ and ‘Progress 8’, adding up points and using algorithms and formulae to decide who has made sufficient ‘progress’ to determine a school’s funding. Pupils will be judged according to their grades (which are about to be re-jigged in examination reform, leaving next year’s pupils to wonder what their numbers rather than letters mean!) Young people will experience elation or despair (some even believing that suicide is preferable to failure) based on statistics which measure a particular written response on particular days.

I think this is a sad misuse of numbers. And I long for young people, teachers, managers, employers and Government officials to realise that people are not quantifiable in the same way that a machine can be measured. We are more than the sum total of our exam results.

People cannot be measured by such things. We cannot be identified by numbers, no matter how many of these things we are assigned (National insurance numbers, NHS numbers, pension numbers, bank account numbers and so on.) We can only be identified by our humanity in relation to God: ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps 139:14), made in God’s image (Gen 1:27), chosen and loved before the foundation of the world. (Eph 1:4-5)

Your exam days may well be long behind you. But whatever your age or status, numbers will be there to try to identify you. Blood test results. Hospital test results. Bank balance figures. The number on the bottom of your wage slip. When the numbers look good, we are tempted to believe life is good because of our health, our wealth or our business acumen. When the numbers don’t look so good, we are tempted to believe we are worthless, because that’s what the numbers say.

Let’s refuse to be identified by the numbers and let’s choose to step into our identity as God’s children: loved, chosen, special, equipped, valued and precious because God says so. No matter what the numbers say. Let’s measure success or failure in a different way and know that neither success nor failure can separate us from God’s love.

1 Cor 12 and Romans 12 remind us that the body of Christ is made up of different members, each individual forming an important part of the whole. People come, as they say, in all shapes and sizes.

So do parsnips!

This was Stephen’s first attempt at growing parsnips, and certainly did not look like the conventionally sized, uniformly shaped parsnips supermarkets churn out. But I can confirm that it tasted like a parsnip and was perfectly edible!

It’s good to remember that God values us all as individuals and doesn’t make us conform to a particular mould. J. B. Phillips paraphrases Rom 12:2 in this way: ‘Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.‘

There is room in God’s kingdom for all kinds of people, all different personalities, shapes, sizes and giftings. We may look askance at some people because they look ‘different’ or because they act in ways we personally don’t understand, but God has put each part of the body where He wants it (1 Cor 12:18). Let’s be welcoming to all and considerate of all.