The snow has finally arrived in Goldthorpe and with it a whole range of viruses and illnesses. Added to that a variety of circumstances, and numbers were down this morning. But for those of us present, we heard so much that challenges and reassures us.

The songs we sing influence us more than perhaps many of us realise. This morning, the songs we sang reminded us of great truths and expressed heartfelt prayers:
“So, Spirit, come, put strength in every stride
Give grace for every hurdle
That we may run with faith to win the prize
Of a servant good and faithful
As saints of old still line the way
Retelling triumphs of His grace
We hear their calls and hunger for the day
When with Christ we stand in glory”
(‘O, Church, Arise’ by Keith Getty & Stuart Townend)

“Your grace is enough” (by Matt Maher and Chris Tomlin) reminds us that no matter what circumstances we go through, God’s grace is sufficient for us (see 2 Cor 12:9). Matt Redman’s “Blessed Be Your Name” reminds us that no matter what circumstances we go through, we can choose to bless His name. “Living Under the Shadow of His Wing” (David Hadden, Bob Silvester) reminds us that that is the only place where we will find the security we crave. And finally, Stuart Townend’s “How Deep The Father’s Love for us” takes us back to the cross where we can reflect again on God’s love, mercy and the supreme sacrifice of Christ:

“Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom.”

Mark then spoke from Matthew 6:25-34 about the futility of worry. Some of us worry far more than others, but the fact remains, no matter what our temperament, worry does not achieve for us anything other than heartache. Worry cannot help us to grow taller or add years to our lives (quite the contrary, probably!) It reflects a desire to control our own destinies and a lack of trust in God’s loving care and provision. Jesus shows us how the Father cares even for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, so His children need not fear that He is incapable or unwilling to look after them. The key remains with us: our part is to ‘seek first the kingdom of God’ or, as Psalm 55:22 puts it, “Cast your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous fall.”

For some people, this is a simple truth and easily put into practice. For myself (and I can only speak for myself), this is a lifelong lesson that does not seem to get easier as I get older. I find it so very hard to leave worry with God. I am so practised at worry, so good at it, that unbelief is easier than faith. I’m particularly good at worrying about hypothetical situations, projecting into ‘tomorrow’ all the things I can’t solve today, without fully grasping that God’s grace, this all-sufficient grace we sing about so heartily, actually is for the now and covers us no matter what situation we face. “Each day has enough trouble of its own,” Matthew 6:34 tells us. For years I read that in the KJV and had no clue what “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” meant, beyond the fact that it sounded grandiose. But if I am honest, what I think it means is that today’s problems are enough to take on, without adding tomorrow’s to the pile as well! God’s grace is there for us today, and He urges us to leave our cares and worries with Him. “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” (1 Pet 5:7)

My prayer for us all is that we allow the Spirit to put strength in every stride and give grace for every hurdle. That way, if we will leave our anxieties and worries with God, we will begin to experience the all-empowering grace we need to live according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh.

Last Thursday, we looked at the second part of Romans 1, which paints a bleak picture of mankind without God. His wrath is coming (Rom 1:18) and will not be avoided. “God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth.”

Truth is being suppressed in so many different ways. The propaganda of the world tells us that this life is all there is; that we’re all good really; that we’re all equal and that money is all we need. These lies can so easily influence us.

We looked at the difficult questions of our actions and the consequences of these actions and how without God there is no steady improvement (as evolution declares) but a downward path. Sinful desires, sexual impurity, shameful lusts and depraved minds are all the consequences of abandoning right thinking and an acknowledgment of God. Man is without excuse, however, for God has revealed Himself; He has shown us enough to give us the opportunity to find Him (see Ps 19:1-2, Ps 111:6-7)

We all have a need for righteousness that we cannot meet in ourselves. The rest of Romans goes on to point us to a righteousness through Christ by faith. If we don’t really understand the severity of our position, however, there will always be a temptation to think we don’t really need a Saviour. We need to see how bad things are before we can appreciate the wonders God has done in rescuing us from this ‘body of death’.

Dave preached last night from Romans 5:1-8, looking at the peace with God we now have through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans can be a difficult book to understand at times, but there are some wonderful truths in it. We are encouraged by the fact that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1) and that we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Romans 8:37). Most of all, though, we are encouraged by the fact that while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6).

We were all separated from God because of sin and as a result of this, man has a fundamental need for peace with God. Isaiah 57 says:

“But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. “There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.” ” (Is 57:20-21)

The sea is always moving and restless; moving because of the forces of the moon and the gravity pulling it this way and that. In the same way, people dimly recognise the original purpose for which they were made, aware through conscience that God has made us for great things, yet also aware of the pull of sin. Man is never satisfied, always seeking escape from the restlessness within. Peace is the need of all men – both those who are near and those who are far away (Eph 2:17) That peace is available through Jesus – who came into the world, as Paul reminds us in 1 Timothy 1:15, to save sinners.

Christ alone has opened the way to the Father. He bore our sins in His body on the cross (1 Pet 2:24) and gives us His peace (John 14:27). This peace passes all understanding and guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus (Phil 4:7)

It’s taken me a little while to sort out photos recently – apologies for the delay. Here are our birthday people for November!

And here are some belated photos from Bonfire Night: (just to prove there are embarrassing photos of me out there as well!)

This morning, we looked at John 11, the famous passage dealing with the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. As we worked through the story, looking at the different characters and their responses, we saw that there are times when Jesus does not appear to do what we would expect Him to do and when He does not appear to answer all our questions. When informed of Lazarus’s illness, He did not come immediately to help him. By the time He did arrive, Lazarus had been dead for four days. There must have been tremendous confusion, regret, pain and bewilderment in that household.

Both Martha and Mary express the view “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They cannot see beyond the fact that Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’s death. They are still looking at hypothetical situations – what would have happened if Jesus had been there – rather than at what will happen now that Jesus is here.

We are like that so often. We spend our time looking back. We can live in a world of regrets. We may lament opportunities missed in the past. We may be sad at things we have done wrong. But we need to move on from hypothetical situations to where we are right now and understand that right now, Jesus is with us and that can make a difference and does make a difference.

The fact that Jesus is moved by the grief of others reminds us that we have a high priest who is able to empathise with us in every situation we face. (Hebrews 4:15-16) When we go through sorrow, the Man of Sorrows will never drive us away. But for some with Martha and Mary, His compassion and grief did not help the situation. The Message version translates John 11:37 as “Well, if he loved him so much, why didn’t he do something to keep him from dying? After all, he opened the eyes of a blind man.”

That can be our position so often. We can be very demanding in our attitude to God. We say He is Lord, but we think that means He must do everything we want Him to. We say we believe He answers prayer, but we usually mean by that that He has done what we wanted Him to do in a specific situation. It is difficult for us to admit that we walk a narrow path and that the way to life is actually through death. We don’t like this truth.

At this point in the story, we can go in different directions. We can decide that God doesn’t really love us that much, or He would spare us this suffering. We can decide that God does love us, but we don’t want to go any further if this is the path we have to tread because it’s too painful. Or we can decide that God loves us and even though we don’t understand, we will continue to trust and believe.

By trusting and believing, Martha and Mary witness a miracle that is greater than the miracle of ‘ordinary’ healing, if there is such a thing. They see that Jesus really is the Master. Not even death can get in the way of what He does. He will prove that in even more dramatic ways later on in the story John tells, when even His own death cannot be the end of the story, when the fact that He is the Resurrection and the Life means He will rise from the dead and break the devil’s hold on death.

But before we reach the climax of the raising of Lazarus, we learn the difficult lesson that belief has to precede understanding: as Anselm said, ‘credo ut intelligam’ (I believe in order that I may understand). Belief, faith, actually facilitate understanding, rather than understanding actually leading to faith. There is a bigger question than not having all the answers. Perhaps the bigger question is what do we do with all our unanswered questions? Do we weep uncontrollably like Mary? Does grief paralyse us, rendering us incapable of doing anything? Do we attempt to carry on like Martha, with an unassuaged ache in our hearts? Do we allow cynicism to make us bitter towards God, saying, in effect, ‘If You love us so much, why don’t You do something then?’ – or, as the sons of Korah put it in Psalm 44:

“Get up, GOD! Are you going to sleep all day?
Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?
Why do you bury your face in the pillow?
Why pretend things are just fine with us?
And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt,
held down with a boot on our necks.
Get up and come to our rescue.
If you love us so much, help us!” (Ps 44: 23-26)

There is a way forward in God that rests in Him even when we don’t understand, that trusts in who God is even when all evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. As Tim Hughes says, in his song ‘When the Tears Fall’, ‘I’ve had questions, without answers’. We all have. But as the song goes on to say,

“When hope is lost, I’ll call You Saviour
When pain surrounds, I’ll call You healer
When silence falls, You’ll be the song within my heart

I will praise You, I will praise You
When the tears fall, still I will sing to You
I will praise You, Jesus, praise You
Through the suffering, still I will sing”
(Tim Hughes, ‘When the Tears Fall’)

The song says it far better than I can. Listen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWUimGv_xrU

This week’s Bible study looked at the first part of Romans 1. In the introduction, Paul introduces himself and writes about the dual lineage of Jesus Christ, who is both a ‘descendant of David’ and ‘Son of God’. In discussing verse 4, we saw that the word ‘appointed’ acknowledged what was already true: Jesus did not become the Son of God at His resurrection, but His resurrection confirmed His identity.

The faith of the Roman church was being reported all over the world (vs 8) – a reflection of Jesus’s words in Luke 11:33 – “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light.” We are called to be different, not for the sake of it, but to be who God created us to be.

Christians are God’s ambassadors (2 Cor 5:18-21) and Peter urges us to always be prepared to give an answer for the hope we have when asked (1 Pet 3:15). We are all called to be witnesses to what God has done for us.

Romans 1:11 talks about the impartation of spiritual gifts, so we spent time discussing these (looking also at Acts 1:4, 2:28, 1 Cor 1:7, Romans 12:6-8 and 2 Cor 9:14-15).

In conclusion, we read that Paul was “not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). That kind of boldness and faith in the power of the gospel is what we all need to have.