Sermon 1st November 2009
Today our newly licenced Lay Reader, Adjoa Andoh Cunnell, preaches.
So a middle aged woman goes into an office to collect some items. Having collected them she is just about to leave when a beardy bloke in glasses waves a leaflet at her with the words “don't hit me, have a read of this and tell me what you think”. The woman takes the leaflet,as she leaves, glances through it briefly, raises her eyes skywards and says “ok that's my answer,
banged to rights. What now?”. Well that was four years ago and no prizes for guessing the identity of our main characters there. Middle aged woman, well that'll be me! Beardy bloke?, that'll be our vicar Cameron ,and the one giving the answer, that will be our heavenly Father. And the question? Well it was one that came upon me sometime after my forty first birthday when I started to wonder if this was it, if there might not be something more that God had in mind for me. It only started as an “I wonder”, that flitted in and out of my thoughts, between work and packed lunches and marriage; but as time passed it became much more insistent, until the day that Cameron waved the leaflet on 'Vocational Training', within the Church of England, at me. I didn't disappear off on a ship like Jonah, but my 'banged to rights' was hardly an enthusiastic immediate embracing of the notion of serving God through this 'vocational training'. Yet four years on as you heard in the official Licence and welcome, I'm here with my 'Reader just passed' plates on. What was my concern? I'm not up to this, I won't know enough, I'm not good
enough, are you sure God. All valuable thoughts, but as Psalm 46 says 'Be still and know that I am God'. We're not God, God is. We listen for His guidance, We do what we do in his strength and we leave the impossible to him. It's an enormously comforting thought, but only if we allow God that complete control of our lives... Some of you may remember Simon Guillebaud of the Great Lakes Outreach mission in Burundi who came to talk to us a few months back about his work, and where God has taken him in service. In the book of his experiences and insights 'For What its Worth' Simon writes, “God calls people to all sorts of vocations. He longs to harness the gifts he's given us for use in his service. The crucial factor is that he calls us all to full surrender, the letting go of our will for God's will.” This may seem like a hard thing to imagine doing, let alone actually putting in to practice. Let God make the decisions for my life? All of them?! For some of us who on charitable days may be called “ a bit bossy”, the notion of relinquishing control and giving God that full surrender remains a constant challenge. Perhaps Paul had people like us in mind when he wrote the part of his letter to the Romans we read together
in this mornings passage. If we don't fully follow God's will, surely it will be ok...doesn't Grace
mean he loves us anyway? If we sin, go against his will, we're still able to be forgiven..Chapter 11 verse 6, it's not 'by works' 'by what we do' that we earn God's gracious love and forgiveness, it's by faith, belief in Christ, God's grace in the flesh, who lived died and rose from the dead to life
eternal. Isn't that enough? It's the question Paul puts at verse 15 GN 'What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under God's grace?'
NIV
'What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace?'
The subtitle of Simon's Guillebaud's book is, 'A Call to No Holds Barred Discipleship.' Cast your minds back, well some of us can, to Saturday afternoon wrestling on ITV with likes of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. Although it was all tightly choreographed, there were certain holds or grips
that were not allowed, these holds were 'barred' . Perhaps in our serving God, we want some holds barred: God please don't hold me to that course of action, to that sort of behaviour;
Yet Paul says there is no ambivalent middle course. He answers the question of verse 15.
Either you are enslaved to the ways and morals of the world or you are enslaved to the ways of God. Life is 'no holds barred'. Paul says in Verse 16
GN
“...when you surrender yourselves as slaves to obey someone, you are in
fact slaves of the master you obey”
NIV
“...when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are
slaves to the one whom you obey..”
Whose no holds barred wrestling ring are we in, God's or the world's? The choice is ours.
Yet when Paul speaks of 'slavery' to the ways of God, my immediate understanding is of an enforced action not a choice made. Slavery, I recoil at the word. Is this really what serving God is? Slavery? I have recently been recording an audio book for the RNIB., on the Slave Trade. Called “The Book of Negroes”, it is based on a real document which you can see at Kew, where are listed the names and circumstances of all the Negro slaves who could prove they had served the British in the American war of Independence. As a reward for their service the slaves were offered freedom and free passage to a new life in Nova Scotia, some later travelling further to found the colony of Freetown, now the capital of Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The book is a fictionalised account of a female child, Aminata who watches her village burnt and her parents
murdered before being captured and sold into slavery in the late 1700's.
Disturbingly several years ago I recorded a similar real life account written by a young Sudanese woman who had watched her village burnt down and parents shot before being captured and sold into slavery. She escaped from her owners in Shepherds Bush, only 8 years ago! Slavery is still continues today.
So the idea of choosing slavery as a way to live, is understandably one which can sit uncomfortably with us. In Paul's day the discomfort at the thought of slavery as a position of choice, would I imagine, have been much the same. Paul is writing to the church in Rome , in preparation for a visit he intended to make. The Roman empire was built on conquest and
slavery, so for the first century Romans reading this letter, enslavement would have been an everyday state of affairs. This analogy with slavery is deliberate. Paul wants the listener to 'sit up' and pay attention, then as now, as he explains in verse 19.
GN
'I use everyday language because of the weakness of your natural selves'.
NIV
'I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves.'
Paul wants us all to understand what surrendering ourselves either to God or the world really means. It's a simple but demanding concept and he wants us to 'get it'. But in Paul's notions of slavery we have a choice, since God created us to have free will. Being under the Grace of God means we are offered, as verse 23 says
GN
“.. God's free gift (is) eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord.”
NIV
“the gift of God (is) eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
The free gift? A gift from Grace.
In his book What's so Amazing about Grace Philip Yancey was speaking with his friend Gordon MacDonald who commented, “The world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.” In Jesus we see God's grace. All the so called worst people flocked to him, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the despised and unloved , they all came to him and he loved them , forgave them and transformed their lives. Philip Yancey' regards grace as 'the last best word' because he says 'every English usage...retains some of the glory of the original.” The saying of 'grace before a meal, a thankful prayer to God for what we are about to receive. Gratefulness, congratulations , gracious behaviour, leaving a gratuity or
tip for a waiter, receiving something gratis, free. Condemning unacceptable behaviour as a disgrace, being without grace. To live under God's grace or to live under the law of the world are the choices open to us . We surrender ourselves to one or the other.
Paul states unequivocally in Verse16,
GN
“Surely you know that , when you surrender yourselves as slaves to obey
someone, you are in fact the slaves of the master you obey – either of sin
which results in death, or of obedience which results in being put right
with God.”
NIV
“Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him
as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey – whether you are
slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to
righteousness?”
Being put right with God? Righteousness? What is the benefit of being put right with God?
Verse 23 the benefit?
GN
“God's free gift (gratis!) is eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord”
The alternative?
Verse 23 again
“Sin pays its wages – death.”
NIV
“the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
The alternative?
“..the wages of sin is death.”
We'll come back to that, but, what is this 'eternal life' and what does it mean for us? In his commentary on this passage, Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, asks us to consider eternal life in it's translation as 'the life of the age to come'. The Age to Come comes from the Jewish belief in the End Times when the Messiah would return bringing in the beginning of God's Kingdom on earth, the beginning of Gods rule and the end of the world's rule. Jews believe our present age, the world as it is now, to be filled with worldly living and wickedness. As Tom Wright explains, the achievement of Christ the Messiah, has been to bring 'the age to come' into 'the present age' and as Christ's followers we are called to live in the present in the light of that future, that future which has come to meet us in Jesus. And so the life eternal, the life of the age to come, can be ours now as God's kingdom comes to us when we meet with Jesus. And life transformed by this Godly age and no longer bound by the world, is the free gift offered to us.
This is the transformative power of Grace. It's a transformation wonderfully illustrated in the Life of John Newton, the writer of the hymn Amazing Grace. His story really brings together
slavery and grace. For many years Newton was a fantastically successful slave trader, making
vast profits and living a comfortable life on the back of the suffering and misery of Africans captured and sold into slavery. When he wrote 'Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me' he really did understand quite how wretched the life he had been living was. He understood how transformed his life was, when he accepted God's gracious love and forgiveness for the life he had lead. He became a new man. He made a choice to surrender his life fully to God. He never returned to the slave trade but became a minister, proclaiming the Gospel and joining William Wilberforce in the fight to end the Slave Trade.
Paul speaks so clearly of the benefit of being slaves of righteousness, being put right with God, when in Romans, Chapter 8 verses 38/39 he implores us to choose God
GN
“ For I am certain (he writes) that nothing can separate us from his love: neither death nor life, neither the angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, neither the world above nor the world below – there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.”
NIV
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
How wonderful is that! Paul isn't setting out dusty, severe rules and regulations that we follow or else , it's more than that. He wants us to understand that living under God's Grace is what we are built for. What about that alternative? Death as the wages of sin? The 'wretch' that John Newton wrote of,
GN
those “..slaves to impurity and wickedness for wicked purposes..”
NIV
that “...slavery to impurity and ever increasing wickedness..”
as Paul has it at verse 19, we are those wretched slaves without God.
Perhaps Paul was reflecting not only on the circumstances of his Roman readers, but also on his own past life as a murderous persecutor of Christians. His past was every bit as disgraceful as John Newton's. We may think ,well come on, I have never been a slave trader, I've never
persecuted anyone. I'm pretty decent. I don't recognise the description of myself as a 'slave to impurity and wickedness,' I'm not involved in 'wicked purposes'... but the way the world works there is only one end, death at the end of our lives certainly, but also death of our God given joyful nature, whether through bitterness or disappointment or guilt or fear. When Christ died on the cross and then came back to life, God sent an unarguable message of life beyond death, life beyond the powers of the world. In Christ's rising God gave us an intimation of the power of his Kingdom. When we choose his mastery over the worlds mastery , we choose to live in the power of his Kingdom, we choose to reflect his Kingdom in the way we live. We choose forgiveness over revenge, we choose love over hate, we choose grace over law. We choose to live the life we were created for.
We were on holiday in Mallorca a few years back and having piled into the hire car we pulled into a garage to fill up the tank before driving north to our destination. We did so and map in hand headed up the motorway for Puerta Pollensa. We'd gone about 10 minutes when the car begin to
respond more and more sluggishly,to the point where I got frightened and pulled over. I couldn't work out what was wrong until with a heavy heart I went to check the fuel cap and realised that unthinkingly I had put diesel into what I now saw was a petrol engine. We weren't going any further in that car. And so most of the first day of our holiday was spent waiting for help by the side of a baking hot motorway.
When I think about the choice we make in our lives, God's way or the world's, I think about that holiday. Yancey writes of the author Stephen Brown's comment 'that a veterinarian can learn a lot about a dog owner he has never met just by observing the dog'.
Well my dog Millie digs holes in the lawn and eats everything, so I don't know what that says about me... but Yancey's question is, what does the world learn about God from observing those of us who call ourselves Christians. Is it clear which owner we are following? Are we purring like
the finely tuned engine God created us to be, fuelled by him, or are we struggling to get into second gear fuelled by a world that will eventually cause our engine to seize up and fail? To be in this purring life for God, to be, 'the slaves of righteousness for holy purposes' (holiness) means that we are in God's service, here to follow whatever 'holy purposes' God has in mind for us. Will the world glimpse God in us? Will the world sense God's grace through the way we live our lives?
WE can choose to let God's love into our lives, to let him wipe away our shameful past. We can choose that slave like obedience to his wisdom and guidance, to have that certainty that in all life's joys and struggles there is nothing in all creation that will ever separate us from the love of God which is ours though Christ ...or we can choose to go it alone, knowing the end is simply death. There is no fence sitting. It's like that old cliché about pregnancy you can't be a little bit pregnant, either you are or you're not. Either we choose the no holds barred surrender to a life with engines purring, God's grace manifest in the way we live, as we serve Him with whatever gifts he has given us, or the glory of God in us withers and we become absorbed into a dying world.
Today is all Saints Day and My hope for us this morning, is that we choose the freedom of God's Grace shown to us in the life , death and resurrection of Christ, that we choose to be loved and forgiven by our gracious God, that we choose to be those faithful Saints in Christ, slavishly living in the joy of his service, in the light of His Kingdom here on Earth until he calls us home.
Lets pray
Liturgy prayer
Almighty and everlasting God,
By whose Spirit the whole church is sanctified;
hear our prayer which we offer for all your faithful people
that each in their vocation and ministry
may serve you in holiness and truth
to the glory of your name
through our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ
Amen
So a middle aged woman goes into an office to collect some items. Having collected them she is just about to leave when a beardy bloke in glasses waves a leaflet at her with the words “don't hit me, have a read of this and tell me what you think”. The woman takes the leaflet,as she leaves, glances through it briefly, raises her eyes skywards and says “ok that's my answer,
banged to rights. What now?”. Well that was four years ago and no prizes for guessing the identity of our main characters there. Middle aged woman, well that'll be me! Beardy bloke?, that'll be our vicar Cameron ,and the one giving the answer, that will be our heavenly Father. And the question? Well it was one that came upon me sometime after my forty first birthday when I started to wonder if this was it, if there might not be something more that God had in mind for me. It only started as an “I wonder”, that flitted in and out of my thoughts, between work and packed lunches and marriage; but as time passed it became much more insistent, until the day that Cameron waved the leaflet on 'Vocational Training', within the Church of England, at me. I didn't disappear off on a ship like Jonah, but my 'banged to rights' was hardly an enthusiastic immediate embracing of the notion of serving God through this 'vocational training'. Yet four years on as you heard in the official Licence and welcome, I'm here with my 'Reader just passed' plates on. What was my concern? I'm not up to this, I won't know enough, I'm not good
enough, are you sure God. All valuable thoughts, but as Psalm 46 says 'Be still and know that I am God'. We're not God, God is. We listen for His guidance, We do what we do in his strength and we leave the impossible to him. It's an enormously comforting thought, but only if we allow God that complete control of our lives... Some of you may remember Simon Guillebaud of the Great Lakes Outreach mission in Burundi who came to talk to us a few months back about his work, and where God has taken him in service. In the book of his experiences and insights 'For What its Worth' Simon writes, “God calls people to all sorts of vocations. He longs to harness the gifts he's given us for use in his service. The crucial factor is that he calls us all to full surrender, the letting go of our will for God's will.” This may seem like a hard thing to imagine doing, let alone actually putting in to practice. Let God make the decisions for my life? All of them?! For some of us who on charitable days may be called “ a bit bossy”, the notion of relinquishing control and giving God that full surrender remains a constant challenge. Perhaps Paul had people like us in mind when he wrote the part of his letter to the Romans we read together
in this mornings passage. If we don't fully follow God's will, surely it will be ok...doesn't Grace
mean he loves us anyway? If we sin, go against his will, we're still able to be forgiven..Chapter 11 verse 6, it's not 'by works' 'by what we do' that we earn God's gracious love and forgiveness, it's by faith, belief in Christ, God's grace in the flesh, who lived died and rose from the dead to life
eternal. Isn't that enough? It's the question Paul puts at verse 15 GN 'What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under God's grace?'
NIV
'What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace?'
The subtitle of Simon's Guillebaud's book is, 'A Call to No Holds Barred Discipleship.' Cast your minds back, well some of us can, to Saturday afternoon wrestling on ITV with likes of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. Although it was all tightly choreographed, there were certain holds or grips
that were not allowed, these holds were 'barred' . Perhaps in our serving God, we want some holds barred: God please don't hold me to that course of action, to that sort of behaviour;
Yet Paul says there is no ambivalent middle course. He answers the question of verse 15.
Either you are enslaved to the ways and morals of the world or you are enslaved to the ways of God. Life is 'no holds barred'. Paul says in Verse 16
GN
“...when you surrender yourselves as slaves to obey someone, you are in
fact slaves of the master you obey”
NIV
“...when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are
slaves to the one whom you obey..”
Whose no holds barred wrestling ring are we in, God's or the world's? The choice is ours.
Yet when Paul speaks of 'slavery' to the ways of God, my immediate understanding is of an enforced action not a choice made. Slavery, I recoil at the word. Is this really what serving God is? Slavery? I have recently been recording an audio book for the RNIB., on the Slave Trade. Called “The Book of Negroes”, it is based on a real document which you can see at Kew, where are listed the names and circumstances of all the Negro slaves who could prove they had served the British in the American war of Independence. As a reward for their service the slaves were offered freedom and free passage to a new life in Nova Scotia, some later travelling further to found the colony of Freetown, now the capital of Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The book is a fictionalised account of a female child, Aminata who watches her village burnt and her parents
murdered before being captured and sold into slavery in the late 1700's.
Disturbingly several years ago I recorded a similar real life account written by a young Sudanese woman who had watched her village burnt down and parents shot before being captured and sold into slavery. She escaped from her owners in Shepherds Bush, only 8 years ago! Slavery is still continues today.
So the idea of choosing slavery as a way to live, is understandably one which can sit uncomfortably with us. In Paul's day the discomfort at the thought of slavery as a position of choice, would I imagine, have been much the same. Paul is writing to the church in Rome , in preparation for a visit he intended to make. The Roman empire was built on conquest and
slavery, so for the first century Romans reading this letter, enslavement would have been an everyday state of affairs. This analogy with slavery is deliberate. Paul wants the listener to 'sit up' and pay attention, then as now, as he explains in verse 19.
GN
'I use everyday language because of the weakness of your natural selves'.
NIV
'I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves.'
Paul wants us all to understand what surrendering ourselves either to God or the world really means. It's a simple but demanding concept and he wants us to 'get it'. But in Paul's notions of slavery we have a choice, since God created us to have free will. Being under the Grace of God means we are offered, as verse 23 says
GN
“.. God's free gift (is) eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord.”
NIV
“the gift of God (is) eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
The free gift? A gift from Grace.
In his book What's so Amazing about Grace Philip Yancey was speaking with his friend Gordon MacDonald who commented, “The world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.” In Jesus we see God's grace. All the so called worst people flocked to him, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the despised and unloved , they all came to him and he loved them , forgave them and transformed their lives. Philip Yancey' regards grace as 'the last best word' because he says 'every English usage...retains some of the glory of the original.” The saying of 'grace before a meal, a thankful prayer to God for what we are about to receive. Gratefulness, congratulations , gracious behaviour, leaving a gratuity or
tip for a waiter, receiving something gratis, free. Condemning unacceptable behaviour as a disgrace, being without grace. To live under God's grace or to live under the law of the world are the choices open to us . We surrender ourselves to one or the other.
Paul states unequivocally in Verse16,
GN
“Surely you know that , when you surrender yourselves as slaves to obey
someone, you are in fact the slaves of the master you obey – either of sin
which results in death, or of obedience which results in being put right
with God.”
NIV
“Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him
as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey – whether you are
slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to
righteousness?”
Being put right with God? Righteousness? What is the benefit of being put right with God?
Verse 23 the benefit?
GN
“God's free gift (gratis!) is eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord”
The alternative?
Verse 23 again
“Sin pays its wages – death.”
NIV
“the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
The alternative?
“..the wages of sin is death.”
We'll come back to that, but, what is this 'eternal life' and what does it mean for us? In his commentary on this passage, Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, asks us to consider eternal life in it's translation as 'the life of the age to come'. The Age to Come comes from the Jewish belief in the End Times when the Messiah would return bringing in the beginning of God's Kingdom on earth, the beginning of Gods rule and the end of the world's rule. Jews believe our present age, the world as it is now, to be filled with worldly living and wickedness. As Tom Wright explains, the achievement of Christ the Messiah, has been to bring 'the age to come' into 'the present age' and as Christ's followers we are called to live in the present in the light of that future, that future which has come to meet us in Jesus. And so the life eternal, the life of the age to come, can be ours now as God's kingdom comes to us when we meet with Jesus. And life transformed by this Godly age and no longer bound by the world, is the free gift offered to us.
This is the transformative power of Grace. It's a transformation wonderfully illustrated in the Life of John Newton, the writer of the hymn Amazing Grace. His story really brings together
slavery and grace. For many years Newton was a fantastically successful slave trader, making
vast profits and living a comfortable life on the back of the suffering and misery of Africans captured and sold into slavery. When he wrote 'Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me' he really did understand quite how wretched the life he had been living was. He understood how transformed his life was, when he accepted God's gracious love and forgiveness for the life he had lead. He became a new man. He made a choice to surrender his life fully to God. He never returned to the slave trade but became a minister, proclaiming the Gospel and joining William Wilberforce in the fight to end the Slave Trade.
Paul speaks so clearly of the benefit of being slaves of righteousness, being put right with God, when in Romans, Chapter 8 verses 38/39 he implores us to choose God
GN
“ For I am certain (he writes) that nothing can separate us from his love: neither death nor life, neither the angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, neither the world above nor the world below – there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.”
NIV
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
How wonderful is that! Paul isn't setting out dusty, severe rules and regulations that we follow or else , it's more than that. He wants us to understand that living under God's Grace is what we are built for. What about that alternative? Death as the wages of sin? The 'wretch' that John Newton wrote of,
GN
those “..slaves to impurity and wickedness for wicked purposes..”
NIV
that “...slavery to impurity and ever increasing wickedness..”
as Paul has it at verse 19, we are those wretched slaves without God.
Perhaps Paul was reflecting not only on the circumstances of his Roman readers, but also on his own past life as a murderous persecutor of Christians. His past was every bit as disgraceful as John Newton's. We may think ,well come on, I have never been a slave trader, I've never
persecuted anyone. I'm pretty decent. I don't recognise the description of myself as a 'slave to impurity and wickedness,' I'm not involved in 'wicked purposes'... but the way the world works there is only one end, death at the end of our lives certainly, but also death of our God given joyful nature, whether through bitterness or disappointment or guilt or fear. When Christ died on the cross and then came back to life, God sent an unarguable message of life beyond death, life beyond the powers of the world. In Christ's rising God gave us an intimation of the power of his Kingdom. When we choose his mastery over the worlds mastery , we choose to live in the power of his Kingdom, we choose to reflect his Kingdom in the way we live. We choose forgiveness over revenge, we choose love over hate, we choose grace over law. We choose to live the life we were created for.
We were on holiday in Mallorca a few years back and having piled into the hire car we pulled into a garage to fill up the tank before driving north to our destination. We did so and map in hand headed up the motorway for Puerta Pollensa. We'd gone about 10 minutes when the car begin to
respond more and more sluggishly,to the point where I got frightened and pulled over. I couldn't work out what was wrong until with a heavy heart I went to check the fuel cap and realised that unthinkingly I had put diesel into what I now saw was a petrol engine. We weren't going any further in that car. And so most of the first day of our holiday was spent waiting for help by the side of a baking hot motorway.
When I think about the choice we make in our lives, God's way or the world's, I think about that holiday. Yancey writes of the author Stephen Brown's comment 'that a veterinarian can learn a lot about a dog owner he has never met just by observing the dog'.
Well my dog Millie digs holes in the lawn and eats everything, so I don't know what that says about me... but Yancey's question is, what does the world learn about God from observing those of us who call ourselves Christians. Is it clear which owner we are following? Are we purring like
the finely tuned engine God created us to be, fuelled by him, or are we struggling to get into second gear fuelled by a world that will eventually cause our engine to seize up and fail? To be in this purring life for God, to be, 'the slaves of righteousness for holy purposes' (holiness) means that we are in God's service, here to follow whatever 'holy purposes' God has in mind for us. Will the world glimpse God in us? Will the world sense God's grace through the way we live our lives?
WE can choose to let God's love into our lives, to let him wipe away our shameful past. We can choose that slave like obedience to his wisdom and guidance, to have that certainty that in all life's joys and struggles there is nothing in all creation that will ever separate us from the love of God which is ours though Christ ...or we can choose to go it alone, knowing the end is simply death. There is no fence sitting. It's like that old cliché about pregnancy you can't be a little bit pregnant, either you are or you're not. Either we choose the no holds barred surrender to a life with engines purring, God's grace manifest in the way we live, as we serve Him with whatever gifts he has given us, or the glory of God in us withers and we become absorbed into a dying world.
Today is all Saints Day and My hope for us this morning, is that we choose the freedom of God's Grace shown to us in the life , death and resurrection of Christ, that we choose to be loved and forgiven by our gracious God, that we choose to be those faithful Saints in Christ, slavishly living in the joy of his service, in the light of His Kingdom here on Earth until he calls us home.
Lets pray
Liturgy prayer
Almighty and everlasting God,
By whose Spirit the whole church is sanctified;
hear our prayer which we offer for all your faithful people
that each in their vocation and ministry
may serve you in holiness and truth
to the glory of your name
through our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ
Amen
posted by Parish Administrator at 12:18 pm
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