(All our songs this morning are from Singing the Faith (StF) numbers will be given where available)
Welcome to our Sunday Service, today shared on paper across our circuit and with the congregation at Thornton Methodist Church and led by Martin Bashforth one of our Circuit Local Preachers.
Click on the blue links to follow them for bible readings and associated links
Call to worship
Let us set aside time to be close to God. Let us sing his praise. Let us listen to His voice. And let us offer ourselves afresh to His love and service. Amen
Song – StF 110 – In the wonder of creation
Prayers
Creator God, we thank You for the beautiful world, which You made at the beginning of time and which You continue to make with every new day.
You truly are a wonderful God. But You are also a loving Father. You made each one of us and You love each one of us, as if there were no-one else in the world to love. What a privilege! How wonderful to know that we matter so much to You. Thank You, heavenly Father.
Thank You for bringing us together today, so that we can worship You as Your family. We may not be related to each other, but as Your children, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. How marvellous, and how enriching!
In our worship, may we be filled with wonder and be uplifted in spirit. Give us ears to hear Your truth, through the reading of scripture, through the words of the songs we sing and through our times of reflection. Speak to us, Lord, and draw us closer to each other and closer to You.
We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen
Song – StF 293 – All heaven declares
Reading
Song – StF 397 – The Spirit lives to set us free
Reading
Sermon “Since you are God’s dear children, you must try to be like him.” Ephesians 5: 1.
People tell me that the older I get, the more I get like my dad. In appearance I think I can agree…I can see it myself sometimes when I stand in front of the mirror to shave. But I think folk mean that in my ways I get like him. I suppose it’s in my genes.
I wish people said more often, that I’m getting more like my heavenly Father. After all – we are made in God’s image. His purpose is that as we grow as Christians, we should get more like Him.
There are some aspects of my Dad that, if I’m honest, I don’t really want to be like. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my dad a lot, and I have missed him since he died. I shall always be grateful to him for all that he did for me and taught me, as I grew up. He had strong opinions about most things, but unfortunately, his opinions were not always founded on rational thoughts or necessarily on the full facts. When you are a child, you take everything your parents say as gospel, and so you should, but as you develop your own understanding of life, you begin to see where your parents might have got it wrong. When I became an adult, and could understand and think things out for myself, I became quite aware that my Dad had many prejudices. So I hope, for one thing, I am not as prejudiced as he was. Also he desired to live in small circles. With close family links and relatively few friends. Whereas, I like to move in large circles, and I like to have lots of friends. So, although I admired my dad for many things, I hope I don’t grow to be exactly like him. On the other hand, there are no aspects of our heavenly Father’s character that I wouldn’t want to imitate. Especially His wisdom; His all-embracing love; His grace.
These days, with our greater understanding of genes and things genetic, I guess I realise that I can’t help being like my Dad to some extent. I have no choice in the matter. It has been my destiny from the moment I was conceived. It is, as they say, ‘in my genes’. But there is no such genetic link with God, our Father. I can choose to be like Him, or I can choose to be my own person and ignore all that God calls me to do. Only, now I know what God is like – through knowing Jesus – I do very much want to be like Him. And the Good News is: I have the means of becoming more like Him, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This morning, I want to think about the work of the Holy Spirit in making us more like Jesus.
Just as an aside, I am reminded of a story which was told by Sandy Millar, the Vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton. It was Pentecost Sunday and three boys had been asked to recite the Creed in church: One was to say: I believe in God the Father. Another: I believe in God the Son. And a third one: I believe in the Holy Spirit. On the day, the moment arrived in the service and the congregation heard: I believe in God the Father. I believe in God the Son. Then there was silence. After a pause one of the boys said: “Please sir, the person who believes in the Holy Spirit isn’t in church today.” I hope that isn’t true about our gathering here this morning.
I have brought with me a plaque that was given to me in California. It is a prayer which really struck me when I first heard it. We had friends who lived in San Diego, Joan and Ken, and we stayed with them a few times. Well, Tom, the minister at their church, used always to say this prayer before he preached his sermon. I have used it in services myself sometimes. Knowing that I like it, Joan and Ken had this written out in fancy writing and framed for me, so now I have it on the wall at home.
The prayer is as follows: “Come, Holy Spirit. Come with the fire and burn, come with the rain and cleanse, come with the light and reveal. Convict us, convert us, consecrate us – until we do something.”
So – it reminds us of three characteristics of the Holy Spirit and three works of the Holy Spirit. We are going to consider the works. The first one is: convict us. Convince us of our need of forgiveness – our need of God’s grace. You might think that it is self-evident; that when you know what sin is, you should be able to see your own guilt. But that is not always the case. Jesus said: It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. All of us lead a decent life. I assume so anyway! We are not criminals. But it is likely that all of us have something in our life which needs to be changed – to make us more holy. A blemish on our character. Maybe a heart which is hard against some people. Even though a person has gone to church all their life, there may be something that is holding them back from being the person God wants them to be. I remember a sermon preached by John Vincent, when he was President of the Methodist Conference. He preached at one of the Whit gatherings at Cliff College. It was about the rich young ruler, to whom Jesus said: “One more thing you need” in order to enter the kingdom of Heaven. In his case he needed to get rid of his wealth, and we know that he couldn’t. The thrust of the sermon was that, for each of us, there is ‘one more thing’ that we need, to enter the kingdom of heaven. For each of us it may be something completely different. The Holy Spirit, as we heard in our reading from John’s gospel, brings light to reveal to us the truth. It is He who can make us aware of our need. When the time is right, the light dawns on us. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit. To shed light. It is the same in bringing a person to know Jesus. You can’t argue a person into faith. The truth has to be revealed to them by the Holy Spirit. That’s worth remembering if we ever seek to witness to a non-Christian. The Holy Spirit may use a succession of events to bring a person to receive the truth. Our conversation, or our contribution, may be just one step along the way and may be a long way from the point of realisation. But we are here to sow seeds. We leave the watering and the nurturing to God.
In this context, we must also ask ourselves: When was it, and where was it, that I was convicted of my need of grace? We should be able to look back to a time. We may not have been brought to our knees, racked with guilt. But at that moment, it will have been clear to us that everything added up, and we knew why we needed Jesus in our life.
If you have not had that experience, then I suggest that you pray, and keep praying until you do have it: Come Holy Spirit, come with the light and reveal. Convict me.
Secondly, the prayer asks the Holy Spirit to convert us. Come with the rain and cleanse. Conversion means to bring about change. It is possible to think conversion happens only to people whose lives are right off the rails, or in the pits, when God breathes new life into them and they become changed in an instant. In the Bible, we think of St Paul, and Zaccheus, and others. Nearer to our own time, we can look at people like John Newton the slave trader, or Nicky Cruz, the New York gangster. They are marvellous stories we hear and read about them. But we mustn’t think that conversion only happens in such dramatic ways. We all of us need to be converted. It is the natural successor to conviction. For, having owned our need to change, we surely must want to change. We would desire to be washed clean of our old self – as symbolised by baptism. I think there is a lot to be said for the way the Baptists do their baptisms. Full immersion. The symbolism is powerful, as people go completely under the water, and emerge as new beings, cleansed and ready to begin a new life. Conversion which lasts for ever is the work of the Holy Spirit.
There is a wise saying, which I am sure you will know: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. If you are like me, you will find it difficult to sustain that enthusiasm which is often stirred up by challenging events or maybe a stirring sermon. How often have you been lifted by something like that? I can think back to special services I have experienced over the years – at our church and in the town: e.g. the first Lay Witness Weekend at St Andrew’s, when the testimonies kept the Sunday evening service going until 8 o’clock; the God in the Park missions in Peel Park; March for Jesus in Bradford and in Leeds; countless church weekends at Scarborough; the MAYC London weekends of years ago. And more recently, Easter People. Times when I got spiritually sky high – and then very quickly sank down again to the mundane. I’m hopeless. We are all hopeless, if we’re honest. As human beings we blow hot and cold. That’s why we need the Holy Spirit in our lives. In Ephesians Ch 5 v 18, Paul encourages his readers to “be filled with the Holy Spirit”. The Greek word he used, I am told, means to go on being filled, much like our petrol tanks need to keep being filled, the more we drive our cars. DL Moody, the American evangelist, once offended his congregation in the 19th century, because he told them that they needed to be filled with the Spirit. They said that they had been filled once; why did they need filling again? Moody said: “I need to be filled again and again, because I leak!” I guess that’s how we all are.
In his book, ‘When he is come’, A W Tozer gives an illustration, which I find really helpful, about being filled with the Holy Spirit. He says:
“Being filled with the fullness of God is like a bottle in the ocean. You take the cork out of the bottle and sink it in the ocean, and you have the bottle completely full of ocean. The bottle is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the bottle. The ocean contains the bottle, but the bottle contains only a little bit of the ocean. So it is with the Christian.” And he continues: We are filled with the fullness of God, but of course, we cannot contain all of God, because God contains us. But we can have all of God that we can contain.”
The work of conversion is a continuous process. We all need to pray: Come Holy Spirit, come with the rain and cleanse. Convert me.
And thirdly we pray: Come with the fire and burn. Consecrate us. This is the process, after being convicted and converted, of being made more like Jesus. ‘Purify my heart,’ we sing, ‘let me be as gold.’ Our faith, like gold, is purified by fire. One thing I need to drive me on to becoming more like Jesus is fire. Fire in my heart. Fire in my soul. I pray that I might be like Jeremiah, who had a message from God which he couldn’t keep to himself. It was bad news for the people, and he loathed giving it, because it made him unpopular. But he said: It’s like a fire burning within me and I cannot keep it in. The message I have isn’t one that I loathe. But I do pray for passion, that my message may be given with more urgency. I am reminded of the old hymn: “O light the flame within my heart, and I will love Thee more and more, until I see Thee as Thou art.” Every four years, a few months before the Olympic Games are due to take place, the Olympic flame is lit at Mt Olympus in Greece and carried to the venue for that year’s games. In 2022, the flame had a very rocky journey, as people used the occasion to protest about the actions of the Chinese government. Nevertheless, it kept on its way, and in August 2022, it reached Beijing. And in the opening ceremony, as the flame in the arena was lit from the travelling torch, an oath was spoken on behalf of all athletes. It was a commitment to the spirit of the Olympic Games – you know – the one which says that taking part in the Games with integrity and friendship, is as important as winning. The flame burns throughout the Games, and is a symbol of that Olympic spirit, continuing throughout.
I think that, what is missing from many churches today, is the fire of the Holy Spirit. There is a story told of a church which was struck by lightning one night and it caught fire. The villagers all came out and rallied round to throw buckets of water over the flame. In the bucket chain, the vicar found himself standing next to the village rogue, who naturally wasn’t a regular church attender. The vicar couldn’t resist the temptation to say to him: “It isn’t often we see you at church.” To which, quick as a flash, the man replied: “I haven’t seen it on fire before.” The church will only be on fire, if the members of its congregation are on fire.
It is the Holy Spirit who lights and keeps ablaze the flame within our hearts. It is his work. We need His fire to purify us and set us ablaze. We need to pray: Come Holy Spirit, come with the fire and burn. Consecrate me.
To sum up then:- The Christian journey has a beginning, a continuation and an end. The end is to become like Jesus and eventually to be with Him in glory.
If your journey hasn’t properly begun yet, because you haven’t yet experienced the conviction of your need for forgiveness, and your need of God’s grace, then pray: Come with the light and reveal. Convict me. God WILL answer you.
On the other hand, if your journey has begun, but you don’t seem any different – either from how you were before, or from those non-Christians you meet as you go about your daily life – then you need to change. To get rid of the things in your life which are preventing you from growing. Pray: Come with the rain and cleanse. Convert me. God WILL answer you.
And finally, if your journey isn’t making you more like Jesus – which is the purpose of salvation – then pray: Come Holy Spirit, come with the fire and burn. Consecrate me. And in His abundant grace and mercy, God WILL answer you. And people will see the difference! Amen
Song – StF 382 – Holy Spirit, come, confirm us
Intercessions Gracious God, thank you for the life you have given us and for the love you have placed in our hearts. Grant us the help of your Holy Spirit, as we pray for the needs of the world.
God of peace, we hold before you all parts of the world, where people are suffering from violence. We pray for the situation in the Middle East, especially in Gaza, where innocent people are suffering from bombardment and a lack of food, water and health care. We pray also for the people of Ukraine, who continue to suffer oppression and bombardment. Lord, please encourage the nations of the world to put pressure on the warring countries to seek peaceful solutions, so that the suffering can be brought to an end.
Lord, we pray for people in our own country who are anxious about the rising cost of living, and many who are struggling to pay for food and energy. Give to our Government wisdom and compassion to take measures which will help everyone to get through these trying times. We pray for the foodbanks, which are running out of food to pass on to people, that the coming season of harvest festivals, in churches and schools, will help them to replenish their stocks.
[Include here any recent events across the world which require our prayers, which may have occurred since these notes were written.]
And finally, Lord, we bring to mind friends and families of members of our church, and others, known to us, who have special needs at this time, and for whom we wish to pray. And so, in silence now, we can each offer our own prayers, for those about whom we are concerned. Let us pray together …. .SILENCE
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayers and deal graciously with them. Comfort those who suffer and those who mourn; and bring your healing to the sick. We ask all our prayers, in and through the name of Jesus, our living Lord and Saviour, who taught us, when we pray together, to say…… Our Father, who art in heaven…….
Song – StF 391 – O breath of life, come sweeping
Benediction
May the blessing of God our Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, rest upon us and upon those we love, this day and for evermore. Amen
