You can ead the full text of David’s very encouraging sermon last Sunday (10th May) about the love of God here.

A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church building on Sunday 17 May.  The service was simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.  For the next four weeks you can catch up here.

 The Bible passage was John 17:1-11, and David led the service and preached. The sermon, about Jesus prayer to his Father in the presence of his disciples the night before his death, was vivid and powerful.  We will publish the full text of the sermon here soon.

 David described accounts of God coming down in the Old Testament: God’s glory came to the Tabernacle, the tent which accompanied the Jewish people in the desert; God came to the Temple which Solomon constructed in Jerusalem when they were settled.  And then there’s Ezekiel’s tragic vision of God’s reluctant withdrawal from the Temple because it had been defiled.  Would God ever return?

 But then a child was born, the Messiah, the Son of God, Jesus: God came among the human race as a human being, thoroughly human, yet thoroughly God, the splendour concealed,  though at times it could break through.

And then, in his prayer Jesus asks for his disciples and for those who would believe in future ‘that they may be one as we are one.’  (John 17:11) In other words, the God who was in the Tabernacle, in the Temple, who was at the heart of Jesus’ identity is now with us, and in us as believers in him.  We are tabernacles, temples. Our bodies house God, while not in any way limiting God.

David vividly described the unity within God – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, aspects of God totally at one, existing in utter love, participating in a divine dance of love.

And it’s a dance into which we, with all our flaws, and all our disagreements are invited to enter. To live in love, and to express practical love for one another.  David shared words attributed to Mother Teresa: ‘Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.’

 John writes:

One thing which struck me in David’s sermon was his mention of that vision of God’s presence being withdrawn from the Temple.  I think there are times when we feel more conscious of God’s absence than of the divine presence.  Perhaps we see ourselves as failures, perhaps we feel that we have messed up so badly that we have driven God away, perhaps we are depressed and troubled.  It was this kind of thinking which led William Cowper to write his famous hymn, ‘Oh for a closer walk with God.’  See below.

It is good, as Cowper says, to examine ourselves to see if we’re acting or thinking in ways which don’t reflect God and so numb us to God’s presence. And if there are such things, we should address them.   But often there will be nothing we can think of to account for the felt absence of God. I think it’s helpful to remember that God will never leave us, never forsake us. God loves us with an everlasting love which will not let us go.  And that includes people who are neurotic depressives like Cowper was.

Cowper prays for help to identify things which might be blocking his sense of God so that he can do something about it.  He thinks the fault is his, and if he can only address it the sense of God will flood back. 

But perhaps a better approach is to be still, to smile with a wry humour at the absence of the sense of God, to recognise that it’s not our fault, to look back on times when God we knew God was alive and real within us, and to proceed on the basis that we are loved with an everlasting love, and that we are called to do small, or not so small things, with a big love.

And sometime – later today, tomorrow, this week, next month, next year, that sense of God will return to us and we’ll be able to know ourselves once again caught up in the dance at the heart of God.

Oh! for a closer walk with God,
     A calm and heavenly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
     That leads me to the Lamb!

Where is the blessedness I knew
    When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
     Of Jesus and his word?

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
     How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void,
     The world can never fill.

 Return, O holy Dove, return!
     Sweet the messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made thee mourn
     And drove thee from my breast.

 The dearest idol I have known,
     Whate’er that idol be,
Help me to tear it from thy throne,
     And worship only thee.

 So shall my walk be close with God,
     Calm and serene my frame;
So purer light shall mark the road
     That leads me to the Lamb.