Do you believe that God has a particular message for you at a particular time?
Or do you simply think that while God does speak its all in the book so whatever he says to you today is simply whatever you randomly choose to read?
I believe in a way that both these things are true. You can pick up the bible anywhere and if you are willing and ready God will speak to you. But I also think that there are particular messages he wants to convey at specific times. Every picture of God's intervention in the world shows that he has exactly the right word for the right moment.
Quite a lot of the time I have no idea what God is saying to me. I am lost behind a wall of doubt, fear, distraction and indifference (sorry about that). But the good news is that God can break through all of this incredibly easily if only I give a little bit of thanks and exercise a mustard seed of faith.
Today I do think I have an idea about what God is saying. Here's how I've picked up what I think it is. I was at a wedding the other week for my friend Chris - who by the way once worked very hard with me all through a summer digging a foundation at the old Bear building when we knocked the wall down to make the hall bigger. He was there when I dropped a bible verse chiseled onto a block of wood into the foundations as they set. He was also there when I realized that I had put in the wrong bible verse - one that prophesied doom. But we are not superstitious so move on...
Chris' pastor from Manchester preached at the wedding and said that the biggest tip he would give a newly-married couple was to remember what there love felt like at first. Whenever things get stale, he said, try to re-visit those feelings and experiences.
He gave this Bible verse from Revelations: 'Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.'
This is part of a message God is giving to the church in Ephesus, a church that has started to grow up. Oddly rather than telling them to get better at growing up, to move on, to stop behaving like children, he tells them to return and do the things they did when they first came to know Jesus.
We are at a time now in the life of the Bear where many people will have felt not a little regret when they think back over the early life of our church. We have just lost the building in which we invested so much time, love and hope. Some of us will remember prayer walking around it, listening to prophesies about it, growing up in it. meeting our lovely spouses in it. We thought it would be the place from which we built our church for the long-term. As I began to think about things I did in the Bear nearly ten years ago when I was getting a youth work going and helping out as Jamie Reynolds set up a café and Julia first set up the gallery I think 'I was so young! We go so much so wrong and what has become of it now?'
The reality though is that I remember that what I had the courage to do all those years ago was exercise some faith, free from the fear of failure. I thought then that next year would be different for Deptford. God wants us to have new faith in that again. He wants us to be full of the hope and the faith we were full of the first time we walked into a church or walked to the front of a meeting to choose Jesus as our personal Saviour.
How is that possible you ask? So much has changed, we have been through so much. It is a reasonable point. Since those days I look back on a decade of triumphs and disasters, of expectations crushed and hope diminished and not a little personal tragedy. And yet, and yet, I feel something nagging in my gut telling me that I am not today the sum total of disappointment and failure, nor am I the sum of my success (because after all our church has grown since those days considerably).
There is something inside me that is offering me hope and it is is not my experiences. That thing of course is the Holy Spirit. Something extraordinary happens when the kingdom of God comes into our lives. We start to have hope where there should not empirically be hope. We start to believe in things almost as if we were children, taking emotional risks to believe in people that our world-wearied-selves would never take.
In short we start to believe that it is possible to see change even though we haven't yet seen evidence of that change. This is faith breaking through into our hearts. As we learn in Hebrews 11: ''By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.'
Well I don't really know where we are going either but I do know that the way we will get therw is by returning to do the things we did at the beginning. There is never never any shame for Christians in starting again at the beginning - its what you get to do when you are a new creation.