Each day becomes more surreal doesn’t it? Each day brings new challenges to overcome. Challenges never faced before. I hope this service, encourages you to carry on. I hope it encourages you to rest on him. I hope it encourages you to know and realise that God will use you, even when you're just feeling out of place
Let us come together and lift his name upon high as we sing: I Am A New Creation
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Time Of Prayer
We are all new creations in God and that can make us feel like strangers in this land. So let us pray. Let us wait on Him as we kneel before him in prayer.
Dear Lord, Your Word says that when we wait on You, You will renew our strength (Isaiah 40:31). Although my strength is depleted, I am choosing to rest and spend time in Your presence, recharging my battery. I refuse to run myself ragged, listening to the voice of the enemy that I should just try harder. I trust in Your infinite capacity of strength. It will never run out. Thank You for working in my weakness and pouring Your strength into me. Today I faced things that felt like too much for me. And tomorrow I’m going to face more of the same things and probably new challenges as well. I need Your strength. I need You to hold me up and stand next to me in life’s storms. Perhaps I never really understood how literal Your promises are to give us strength for the day. Maybe tomorrow could be my opportunity to learn what that means on a deeper level. But right now, I am praying for supernatural strength and healing to permeate every cell of my being so that I can find renewed strength beyond my natural ability. I know that this strength comes from You. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Please share with me in the Lord’s Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
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Through all life's difficulties, we know that; He Leadeth Me. Please sing with me
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Feeling Out Of Place
Have you ever felt out of place? A bit like an exile in a foreign land; like you don’t belong. We all feel that sometimes. Right at this very moment there are around 26 million refugees in the world today. In the 1970s there were about three million, that’s staggering. The richer we become, the more we know, the more things we discover that can benefit humanity, the worse it gets.
And people who aren’t displaced have a sense of being refugees sometimes, exiles in a foreign land. It seems somehow that we’re not connecting with the world around us, somehow, it’s like, we’re in the world but we don’t belong to it. It’s almost like refugees, like exiles, confronted with uncertainty, confronted with obstacles and challenges, and for so many people that feeling never, ever goes away. They’re like refugees in search of an identity that they never find.
The list of things that can worry us is about as long as our arms and then some. And that uncertainty so often leads to fear and that fear crosses all boundaries and all borders, and if you think about it, if there were no uncertainty there would be no need for faith. Look at what Peter writes almost two thousand years ago. It comes from his first letter, First Peter, chapter one verses 1 and 2:
Peter an Apostle of Jesus Christ to the exiles of the dispersion scattered through Pontus and Galatia and Cappadocia and Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Holy Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with His blood. May grace and peace be yours in abundance.
Let’s ask the question, who is he writing to? Well, he is writing to the exiles of the dispersion. These were the early believers, early Christians who were scattered to the four winds by persecution. So, what’s going on? We know that God has this great plan for us, then suddenly calamity strikes, as it did for these new Christians. But, because of that dispersion, because of Christians being scattered to the four corners of the world, the good news of Jesus was spread throughout the known world! Dare I say this, if it wasn’t for that persecution that sent the Christians to all parts of the know world at that time, you and I may not be here today, reading this .
The truth is, the persecution led to the dispersion. And the dispersion led to the world in hearing the word of God. New churches were planted. More and more people learned about Jesus. This was God’s plan, and it’s right there in the words of the Apostle Peter. Let’s read it again:
To the exiles of the dispersion scattered through Pontus and Galatia and Cappadocia and Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen and destined by God the Father.
In other words, the people who were exiles, the people who were being persecuted and scattered, were God’s chosen people. God foreknew them!
That’s an awesome thing. It applied to them then, and it applies to you and me now. Whatever we’re going through, we can still live and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus and live the hope that that He brings. Now the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Philippians writes in chapter 3 verse 20, that if we believe in Jesus our citizenship is in heaven and that we’re in fact exiles in a foreign land. You know something, it can be tough for exiles. But Jesus said exactly that when He prayed for you and me, just before He was crucified. You can read it in John chapter 17 – we’re in the world but we’re not of the world – Jesus specifically prayed:
‘Father I don’t ask you to take them out of the world but instead I ask you to protect them while they are here.’
We are exiles in a foreign land, but while we’re here God has a plan for us. Look at the Israelites, many centuries before what Peter was writing here when the Babylonians came and destroyed Jerusalem, they destroyed the Temple, the place where God lived, and so these Israelites were taken into captivity and slavery in Babylon. In Jeremiah chapter 29 beginning at verse 4:
This is what the Lord Almighty the God of Israel says to all those whom I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Notice the words, ‘whom God carried into exile from Jerusalem and Babylon’. Build houses and settle down, plant gardens, eat what they produce, marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons, give your daughters in marriage so that they to may have sons and daughters. Increase in number, don’t decrease, also seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.’ He says it again, it’s God’s plan. Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers you, you too will prosper, this is what the Lord says, ‘When seventy years are completed for Babylon I will come to you, I will fulfil my gracious promise to you to bring you back to Jerusalem, for I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and then you will come and pray to me and I’ll listen to you, you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.’ What all this means for us today is this: Whatever our exile looks like, whatever our uncertainty, whatever our fears are, whatever the things are that are coming against us, God knows them. God carried us here.
If you’re like me, sometimes you do stupid things, and we have to live out the consequences of those things. Those consequences are not from God, they come from us. God’s just there with us. Comforting and helping. Why is He there? Because He has a plan, a plan to prosper us, not hurt us. When we focus just on the uncertainty of everything, when we mull those silly decisions, we have made over and over again we will find it hard to function. But our Father God is saying in the middle of all that, “Look, you’re my child, you believe in my Son, I’ve got a plan for you, an eternal plan to bless you. We can’t get rid of uncertainty; we live in an uncertain world. But what I can do is do what Peter talks about in that short letter:
Have grace and peace in abundance when I focus on the goodness of God, the God who is in control of everything in my life and everything in your life too.
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Isaiah 53:3 says this
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Please sit with me as we listen to, When I survey
The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
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