Tony Brown preached from Isaiah 29:13-14 last night, talking about how to honour God with our lives as well as with our lips. He talked about the wrong attitudes we can have towards God and in particular looked at how living in a routine can encourage complacency in us and how focussing on traditions and rituals can lead us into pride and self-righteousness.

Routines are a necessary part of everyday life, bringing structure and organisation into our lives. But the danger of a routine is that it leads us to live life on ‘autopilot’. The Israelites, with their regular, twice-daily habit of offering sacrifices for sin, could easily forget why they were doing what they were doing. Religion can easily become routine. We can be doing all the right outward things, such as Bible study, prayer, attending church meetings and so on, but can still be neglectful of that intimate, personal relationship with God which we all need.

God has given His only Son for us. He has given the ultimate sacrifice. How, then, can we be satisfied with half-hearted service? Revelation 3:15-16 warns of the dangers of being lukewarm. We need God to breathe life into all we do and we need to be prepared to vary our routines so that we do not become complacent in our worship.

One other danger is traditionalism, where we pay more attention to traditions (even those originally designed to honour God) than we do to God Himself. If we focus more on the tradition than on the God the tradition is aimed to serve, we are in trouble. The Pharisees were like this, inventing more and more rules for people to follow, but failing to honour God in their hearts. They rebuked Jesus because of hand-washing issues, but His reply was that their traditions had led to self-righteousness and pride (see Mark 7:1-15, where Jesus quotes from Is 29:13).

When we rely on traditions for our self-righteousness, rather than trusting in Christ’s perfect sacrifice and understanding that our only boasting should be in the Lord, we can end up with a prideful heart or a judgmental heart. The prideful heart stops us depending on God and makes us believe that it’s our own achievements and accomplishments which satisfy God. We lose any sense of reverence, gratitude and awe and start thinking it’s all down to us.

When we allow ourselves to feel superior to others, we quickly fall into the sin of judging others. Instead of showing compassion and love to those who do not believe, we condemn them. Again, the Pharisees showed this attitude towards Jesus becasue He ate with sinners (see Matt 9:9-13). We need to love sinners as Jesus did, learning what He meant by ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Matt 9:13, quoting Hosea 6:6), rather than believing ourselves superior to them. We are all in need of God’s grace. When we realise this, there is no room for pride or judgmental attitudes and we will learn to honour God through every part of our living.

Stephen continued his series through Genesis this morning, looking at Genesis 13. Here, we meet Abram and Lot as they leave Egypt, in a position of wealth, owning many possessions. They retrace their steps, going back to where they started from before they went to Egypt. If we leave our walk with God, we have to go back to where we were with God before. Abram had tried to go it alone, sorting out his own solutions, and now he had to go back to where he had previously built an altar.

Here, Abram ‘called on the name of the Lord.’ (Gen 13:4). He returned to that place of humble penitence and dependence on God. Can we be humble enough to realise when we have strayed and left God’s side? Can we once again leave our lives in God’s hand, waiting for His guidance?

In Genesis 13:5-13, we see problems developing between Abram’s and Lot’s herdsmen. Quarrels and disputes arise. Abram has learnt enough to let Lot choose which way he would prefer to go, looking to his relative’s needs before his own. Lot chooses according to what he can see with his earthly eyes. He decides to go for the ‘green plain’, the land that looks good. Abram is left with apparently the poorer choice, but he is now back in the place of surrender to God and here, he once more hears God’s promises to him (Gen 13:14-17).

It’s only when we are in that place of promise that we can receive God’s word. Abram is promised a good land, full of abundance and joy. He is promised descendants who can’t be counted. We need to see life with spiritual eyes, not looking at things from an earthly perspective as Lot did.

Things might not look so rosy for us. We may be facing difficult situations and circumstances and it might look as if nothing is happening, or God is not working. Are we looking with earthly eyes or spiritual eyes? God can lead us to a place of abundance and joy. Abram’s response is once again to build an altar to God. (Gen 13:18). Is God fully involved in leading and guiding us? Are we willing to surrender our whole lives to Him and wait for His leading?

The community hall has been completely re-wired, new sockets and new lights fitted.

The old lights:

The new lights:

New sockets:

The new fuse box:

Over the past week, building work has been going on, firstly in the kitchen and then in the community hall, mainly to do with electrics. This is the old cooker, which worked via various gas points and switches in the cupboards which required a fair deal of dexterity to reach!

A new electric cooker has been fitted, making it much easier to control!

Underneath the cooker is a plinth heater, to help with heating problems in the kitchen.

The sockets have also been updated in the kitchen:

The question of ownership is often disputed in law and can be the source of much heartache. However hard it is to work out to whom possessions belong, it’s infinitely harder to think about ownership when we are considering people! Yet God clearly has the right to such ownership of our lives.

In the Old Testament we read about slaves who voluntarily gave themselves to serve their masters, even after they were technically free to leave. “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.“But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’ then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life.” (Ex 21:1-6) That is a picture of our relationship with God. When we realise the price that has been paid for our salvation, our response should be to willingly surrender our whole lives to God.

The song below (‘Lay Me Down’) explores this theme.

I lay me down

I’m not my own

I belong to You alone

Lay me down, lay me down.

Hand on my heart, this much is true:

There’s no life apart from You.

Lay me down, lay me down.(‘Lay Me Down’, Chris Tomlin & Matt Redman)

‘Lay Me Down’, Chris Tomlin & Matt Redman

After all, if everything comes from God and belongs to God anyway, what right have we to claim ownership ourselves?! “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies.” (1 Cor 6:19-20). As Kutless sing, ‘It’s all Yours anyway/ You gave me life to give it away.’

In R.E. exams at school, you have questions worth varying marks. The ‘easy’ questions usually involve a definition of a theological word and are worth two marks. Providing you have learnt the definition, these are considered ‘easy marks’.

Two of these words are ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’. Transcendence means ‘a state of being or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience’. When referring to God, it means that God is above and beyond the world, independent from the universe as we know it. One of God’s names is ‘God Most High’ (Ps 97:9). He sits enthroned on high (Ps 113:5). You only have to read Isaiah 40 to grasp something of the mightiness and transcendence of God. God is far above us, completely unlike us in holiness, majesty and power. Aristotle believed that God was transcendent, the ‘prime mover’ in the world, but not of the world.

Immanence is the opposite, ‘existing or remaining within’ and from a theological point of view refers to God’s presence and action within the world. According to the World Book Dictionary, the definition of immanence in a theological sense is ‘the pervading presence of God in His creation’ (seen, for example, in Ps 65:9-13).

The two attributes are opposite but complimentary, and need to be kept in the proper balance to understand God. He is both superior to, and absent from, His creation and yet very present and active within the universe. It’s relatively easy to give a definition of these words, much harder to grasp the mystery that is part of the divine revelation of the Godhead!

In exams, the questions worth more marks are those where pupils have to give longer, extended answers, often tackling some of these mysteries and giving their thoughts and understanding of Scripture. In the same way, we can understand definitions of God without really appreciating that these are meant to have a direct impact on our everyday living. Theology is not simply abstract knowledge or philosophical meditation. Our understanding of who God is and what He is like shapes our own thinking, reactions, values and way of life far more than we perhaps understand.

The fact of God’s immanence shows us that He is near to us (see Job 33:4, Phil 4:5), a tremendous encouragement to us when we feel alone and vulnerable. But we also need to know that God is unlike us (Is 55:8-9) and has all power and knowledge and wisdom if we are to live with confidence and without fear in a world where heartache can hit like a hurricane and all that seems secure can crumble in seconds. Eugene Peterson calls angels ‘witnesses to transcendence’. We need to have a balanced view of God’s transcendence and His immanence if we are to live confident, secure, trusting lives… which is of much greater value than any number of exam marks!