Autumn Term begins >
Well I do hope you have had a good summer break and have returned rested and restored physically, emotionally and spiritually? In my August blog I left you with two questions to ponder over, and one request:
1) How can we combine a responsible attitude to church life with a genuine openness to the unpredictable work of the Holy Spirit - who is a person, not an experience?
2) How can we encourage each other to leave our comfort zones and do something risky for God?
And the request was to encourage you to spend 15 mins in God's presence listening to Him, and deepening your relationship with Him. I would be very interested to receive any thoughts to the two questions, and to hear if my 'encouragement' has born fruit!
Last night at the 6.30 pm service we started our preaching series on Nehemiah and looked at Chapter 1 and Nehemiah's prayer - v.4 'when I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of Heaven'. One of the main themes running through the Book of Nehemiah is prayer. He was a man full of compassion, who was moved to tears and to prayer - he was totally dependent on God, and came to Him in prayer with the needs of a broken Jerusalem. His own heart broken, he prays with honesty, intensity, and vulnerability; he prays with perseverance and sacrificially - for days & without food; he prays with praise, thanksgiving, repentance, remembrance, & faithfulness on his lips, and with great confidence. A man moved by the needs of others didn't just pray, he was moved also into action. Perhaps because he was so close to God in prayer, he was open to the unpredictable work of the Holy Spirit, and therefore able to leave his prestigious, safe job, and his home, and go and do something risky for God? Throughout the Book of Nehemiah before he took action, before he talked with others, before anything else... he prayed.
How might our lives be different if our natural response to all the challenges we faced, and the needs of others that we heard, and saw, was one of prayer? Do the needs of today's broken world (no different from the mid-fifth century BC) cause us to weep, mourn, fast and pray to the mighty God of Heaven and Earth, and lead us into action? The needs may be in a far and distant land, as they were for Nehemiah, and are for many today. But they might be on our very own doorsteps, where people are sick, disadvantaged, elderly, immobile, lonely, disabled, deprived, poor, unemployed, and drawn to addictions. We too in our own parish have 'people who are in great trouble and shame: and where walls have been broken down, and the equivalent of Jerusalem's gates been burnt (Nehemiah Ch. v. 3).
As we gather together for 24hrs in prayer at 5 pm Friday 30th Sept to 5pm Sat 1st Oct to listen to God for His Vision for St. Mark's, and as we gather together for the Parish weekend to continue to discern God's voice, and as we daily spend time with Him, I pray that we will ask God to open our eyes to the needs around us. I pray that we will be God's people who take the initiative like Nehemiah, who do not flee from the challenge, but allow the Holy Spirit to break our hearts with what breaks God's, leading us to pray with compassion, perseverance, repentance, reverence, and with confidence. And as we pray may we be open to the unpredictable work of the Holy Spirit who may well ask of us to leave our comfort zones, and do something risky for God - love in action we never dreamt of - all for the glory, blessing and honour of our Lord God of heaven and of earth.
A last thought - using Nehemiah's prayer in Chapter one, take a moment to write a prayer in response to an area of challenge you may be facing: 'O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God...................
God bless,
Hennie
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