Hi Everyone, I want to start by saying thank you to you all for the welcome that we have received since our move back up to Cumbria, it has been truly amazing and a real blessing, helping us all to feel really loved and appreciated.
Thank you all for praying for Annie at the end of last year, I know that a number of people have asked when we have seen folks around town how she is doing and we are really pleased to say that she is doing really, really well. We believe that God healed her and restored her to full health so thank you for praying for her.
I hope that many of you will be able to join us later for lunch, which I know that my boy Caleb is really looking forward to. I really hope to be able to get to meet as many of you as possible not just today but over the coming weeks. But I know that some of you will be wanting to get to know a bit about us.
Annie and I will have been married for 12 years in October, she is a primary teacher by trade she loves music and plays both the piano and violin. Caleb is 9 and is mad about football he sometimes changes his allegiance to the club that he follows but I am trying to convince him that he should follow his home town team Hull City, which has become more appealing to him since they got promoted back to the premiership this season he also loves to play guitar and piano, Talitha is 7 and also loves the piano but is also really crafty and really enjoys getting stuck into things in the kitchen, she is a people person and will talk your ear off if you let her.
As for me I became a Christian when I was 14, I am very proud to call myself a Yorkshire man and Doncaster is my home town, I have worked with young people for about 18 years in both church and secular contexts. I enjoy all the usual sort of pass times reading, films, spending time with the family and stuff like that, but my big other passion in life aside from Jesus is American Football, which I used to play and coach up until a few years ago when a knee injury put an end to that so now I am a long suffering Miami Dolphins fan. To put a bit of context into following the Dolphins, I like to think of it kinda like being a Liverpool fan, they were Awesome in the 70’s and 80’s but since the 90’s they’ve really struggled to be anything other than mediocre. As for English football I am a nominal Hull City fan, I used to play both codes of rugby and like to see Sale winning in Union and Hull KR in League. So that’s a bit of a taster about me and my family, we really do feel so blessed to be coming into such a loving and welcoming church family and we cannot wait to find out what God has in store for us all.
Now let’s have a look at this passage of Scripture.
It really has been great to tell people that I would be coming to join you here St Thomas’. Believe it or not you guys have a great reputation, I could not tell you how many people I have told that I am coming to St Thomas’ Kendal and they’ve gone “ohhh that’s a great church”. Usually this is followed up by statements about how you’ve reached into your community, how you’ve helped people out, how you’ve welcomed folks in the past, how you’ve seen folks come to faith. You see people have heard about you, they know about you, they know that you have done a lot of great things for the Kingdom. It really has made me even more excited about joining in with this awesome church.
And this is where we find the writer of Hebrews, he’s kinda doing the same thing. In the previous few chapters we track with the writer the history of the Hebrew people, he walks his readers through the great patriarchs of the faith from Adam, to Noah, to Abraham , Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses, he draws their attention to the great generals of Gideon, Samson , Barak and Jephthah, he reminds them of their greatest king in David and the prophets like Samuel, the writer of Hebrews reals this list off for one reason only, he wants us to see that these giants of the faith although amazing people they are not the pinnacle of the faith, in fact in the verse previous to where our reading started today the writer says that God has provided something better for us.
Lets think about that for a moment shall we. We have access to better promises than Abraham had access to, we can experience more of the presence of God than Moses experienced, he who’s face shone because the presence of God was so strong on him, we can have better victories than Gideon had and a closer relationship than David had with God, whom God even describes as a man after my own heart.
So we pick up this reading at this point. With the promise that it is ok to look back on our pasts, in fact we should do it but what matters is what we do with it.
Is it too early to talk about the English football team yet? Who here was full of hope on Monday I mean come on we were playing Iceland, a country that as Alan Shearer pointed out has more volcano’s than professional footballers. As a nation we thought that it was going to be a walk in the park we even took the lead. But then we played the worst game of football that any England team has played in decades and as a nation we are left to lament the spirit of 66 again. In fact in the office on Tuesday when Rob, Damian, George and I were talking about the game, I think that it was Rob who said that he just hates that it’s been 50 years since we’ve done anything in a major tournament and it’s a joke. The anchor that we hold too as a footballing nation is fifty years old now, the collective memory of winning anything is getting older and is slowly disappearing. How many times did we hear before the start of the Euro’s that this team will embody the “spirit of 66” and now since being dumped out how they’ve let that same spirit down, how they couldn’t cope with the pressure how they have betrayed the footballing heritage of our nation and how they will be forever tarnished with this failure.
This is the attitude that the writer of the Hebrews is appealing to when they bring up the hero’s of the past, they want to remind the people they are writing to about their heritage but they want to move them past that legacy into something greater.
This is kind of what it feels like coming here, that there is this amazing history of what this church has done, that you’ve seen wonderful things happen, that you’ve seen people come to faith, that you’ve had encounter with God, that you’ve seen victories won, you’ve heard the voice of God and you’ve walked faithfully with Him.
But the question is what do we do with the legacy that we have here at St Thomas’, are we standing on the shoulders of giants or are we held back by a fear of letting down the legacy that we have inherited. Now I am brand new and I don‘t know the answer to this. However what I can say with confidence is that we find ourselves in the same place as the original readers of this letter in that we have a promise that God has provided something better for us today than we have experienced before. Whatever it is that we are journeying through at this time we have the promise that as sons and daughters of God that what he has in store for us today is better than what was experienced in the past.
So what are we charged to do - since we have this great cloud of witness… which St Thomas’ does… since we have this great clouds of witness let us cast off every weight and sin that clings so closely to us, or as the NLT puts it, let us strip off every weight that slows us down especially the sin that so easily trips us up. I love how that is phrased. Lets strip off everything that weighs us down. I remember when I was at school playing rugby for the school team and we were playing away at this school on the outskirts of Rotherham. It was a particularly grotty day, and the field was an absolute quagmire at the end of the game everybody was soaked to the bone and caked in mud. It was so difficult to take off our rugby shirts as they clung tight to our skin that you had to ask a mate to help you pull it over your head, I think that I was still pulling mud out of my ears for days afterwards despite how much I showered and washed.
You see sometimes it’s like that when we are confronting the sin that is in our lives we think that we can never get it off, it’s too caked on, it’s kinda shrunk to fit tight around our very selves and become a second skin. But that is the beauty of a place like this, a place that is family where this great cloud of witnesses continues to strive for all that is possible because there are people here who can and will help us strip off the sin that weighs us down. That will walk next too us and help us avoid those things that will trip us up. And when we discover more dirt stuck deep down inside, do you know what, it’s not about feeling shame wondering if people will think you were never clean to start off with. This is the place where we can root it out where in love we can help one another be clean through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This verse goes on “let us run with endurance the race that God has laid before us”. There is a common phrase “life’s a marathon not a sprint”. You see I wasn’t built for endurance, even at my fittest it was all about explosive strength and short quick bursts not the continual battering and pounding of endurance running. Running a race over long distance can be nothing but pain has anyone heard of Petra Majdic from Slovenia? Petra is a cross country skier who at the Vancouver Olympics was on her way to the qualifying round of her race which is a 10km sprint, on her way she fell down a unprotected 10ft ditch sustaining 5 broken ribs. She convinced medical staff to get her to the start line and despite agony she qualified for the semi-final a few hours later, she raced again and during this race one of her broken ribs shifted and punctured her lung, making breathing incredibly difficult. Again she finished the race and qualified for the final. Against all recommendations she raced and she finished with a bronze medal and was immediately rushed to hospital where she had a tube fitted into her lung to relieve which she still had fitted when she collected her medal.
Sometimes we think that the Christian life is just going to be easy and we are shocked when this world throws things at us and throws it hard but we are told to run with endurance to push through the pain because the prize is so worth it. We are son and daughters of the most high and even in the painful moments we can know that what God has in store for us is better than we could ever imagine. How do we know this, because we are told to keep our eyes on Jesus the champion who initiates our faith.
You are Jesus’ prize, you were won by him when he defeated sin and the devil on the cross. When we fix our eyes on Jesus when we hold him front and centre in everything that we do in every part of our journey we too win. Child of God, brother and sister of Christ, this is the identity that we own from the moment that we placed our trust in him. When we fix our eyes on Jesus and walk in the knowledge that he endured everything that we deserve in order for us to receive our inheritance from the Father, we will know that what God has in store for us is significantly better then what has gone before us, it is significantly better than the highs that we’ve experienced and it is certainly abundantly more sufficient than the lows we have endured. When we look at Jesus, really look at him we can do nothing but move towards him, as we move towards him we encounter his presence and his power in our lives and this can do no other thing than spill out into the lives of those that we do life with.
My first impressions of being here at St Thomas’ is that we are at a cross roads – we can either sit at where we are, look back on days gone past and think wow didn’t we do a great job, wasn’t it amazing when the Lord showed up and did what he did or we can push on down a road forging a new path, when we strike new ground sometimes it feels harder because it is unfamiliar or a little bit scary because we feel out of our depth but here we have a call to endurance, to perseverance, to follow the example of Christ who struck new ground who won the victory, we have the promise ringing in our ears that the things that the Father has in store for us is better and greater than he had in store for Abraham, Moses, David and the hero’s of the faith that we read about in Scripture. It is better than what we have experienced in the past. We can look back at all that has been achieved in this place and think WOW that is amazing I cannot wait to see how God is going to better this.
So how do we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus? I want to give you some real simple practical steps that you can take in order to keep fixed on Christ and therefore see what he is doing in our lives and where he is calling us to go.
Talk Jesus – talk Jesus to your friends, your family, your workmates…. This isn’t particularly about evangelism but just telling people about what God has been doing in our life. Offer to pray for and with people, tell stories to one another about what God is doing in your life. Brag about Jesus and his goodness. This isn’t bragging about you, so its not pride, its bragging about the Lords favour. Talk Jesus
Sing Jesus – most of you will have a favourite song or hymn. Sing it to yourself as your walking around the house, sing it quietly as you’re doing your food shopping, belt it out in the shower or the bath. Sing Jesus
Read Jesus – I am amazed by the resource that you have here at STK the library is full of amazing books, not just hard-core theology, but devotional, contemplative works that will stir the soul, there are also bags of blogs and articles on the web that you can read in a 10 min break – Read Jesus
We have to be intentional, we have to be determined to run our race with endurance to build endurance we have to train, train ourselves to act and be different. But most of all we need to rest in our identity as sons and daughters of God. We need to be reminded every day that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead is at work in you and me today, we need to ask God every day for a fresh outpouring, a new encounter with him through Holy Spirit so that what we receive everyday builds on and is better than what was experienced yesterday.
