Transcript

Thank you. Good morning.
We’re on Genesis again, Genesis 35.
I first prepared to speak this message way back when it snowed.
We’ve learned to take everything as from God.
So you prepare a message and then it snows and we cancel the church,
and you think, well, what’s my life all about then if I can’t preach?
But take it as from God, and I believe that this is the message God has for us.
So we are hurtling, hurtling through Genesis towards the conclusion,
but buckle up because there’s plenty still to come.
And you will, if you, one of those people that goes ahead to read the chapters ahead,
you’ll know there’s going to be some interesting and challenging ones in the next few weeks.
But we’re on Genesis 35, and the title I’ve got is Spiritual Renewal.
And the passage is set against the background of the passage that Johnny spoke about way back.
We were away, and it was back in November. That was the last time we were in Genesis.
And he talked about where Dinah, Jacob’s daughter,
had been raped and abused by some of the men that lived in the area there.
And Simeon and Levi, Jacob’s sons, had gone and wreaked a revenge on these men.
And it was just an absolute brutal mess.
Jacob, you can imagine how he felt. He was 97 years old at this time.
74 years earlier, at the age of 23, he had deceived his brother into giving up his birthright
and taking the blessing from his father.
74 years, and he’s thinking, I’m sure no doubt he’s thinking,
well, okay, if this is the blessing, I don’t really want to live under the curse,
because this doesn’t look great.
He must have looked on all of these tragic turn of events and wonder, what is this all about?
His response at the end is one of desperation.
Simeon and Levi have done all of this. They’ve taken revenge. This is at the end of chapter 34.
Afterward, Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, you have ruined me.
You’ve made me stink among all the people of this land, among all the Canaanites and Perizzites.
We are so few that they will join forces and crush us.
I will be ruined, and my entire household will be wiped out.
And then they simply said, but why should we let him treat our sister like a prostitute?
They retorted angrily. And that’s the state that this family had got into.
His response appears to be like that of a father,
taking his head in his hands and wondering, what is it all about?
What has come out? 97 years old. This has happened to my daughter.
My sons have lost control. We’ve been completely ruined in the eyes of the people we live in.
We’re going to be crushed. We are finished. We are going to be wiped out.
We are the blessed family, people and the blessing of God, and yet we are going to be wiped out.
You have ruined me. You have made me stink among all the people of this land.
They were all living their own way, far from the foundations that were laid in their lives.
The encounters with God their father had, they all seemed to mean nothing.
Now they were just, the circumstances had overtaken them, instincts had overtaken them.
They were just living according to how they felt. This happened, so we’re going to do that.
Why should this happen? Why shouldn’t we do this? And it just seems to be it’s like the wheels have
come off. They don’t look like a family that is a family of destiny. They look more like a family
that is being governed by the circumstances that happened to them. 74 years after their uncle Esau
had said, what use is a blessing to me if I’m hungry? And he sold his birthright for a bowl of
soup. This family now were in danger of letting go of all that God had put in them, all that God
had said to them, all that God had blessed them with, and they were being thrown around as if in
a washing machine from one disaster to another. And the chapter ends abruptly with that
sense of desperation and hopelessness. There’s nothing more said. You have ruined me. You have
made me stink, and now we’re going to be wiped out. And they simply said, why should we let him
treat our sister like a prostitute? End of chapter. Nothing else to be said.
Nothing that had happened to them up to this point was actually going to help them, was going to
increase their blessing. It was actually going to contribute to their decline. And then we move into
35. Don’t ever be tempted to separate these chapters out as standalone things.
These chapters and verses obviously are an invention that have come in over the years and
over the generations to help us, and they do help us because we wouldn’t know where to start, would
we? If I’d said we’re going to just go to there, we wouldn’t know what page to go to or whatever.
But here we are in Genesis 35, but the link cannot be missed. It ended, it was just left hanging. Why
should this happen? Why should we not? Then God said, chapter 35 verse 1, then God said to Jacob,
get ready and move to Bethel and settle there. Build an altar there to the God who appeared to
you when you fled from your brother Esau. Go back, Jacob. Like God has waited until they’ve
got to this point of absolute disaster, of absolute desperation, and then he comes in.
He doesn’t say, right, I’m going to help you. We’re going to clean up this mess. We’re going to pick
this apart. We’re going to get this sorted out. He says, simply go back. Go back to where I first
spoke to you. Go back to where you first met me. Go back to where you first heard the promise.
Go back to when it really mattered. Go back to when you realized that you had encountered God.
Go back to that place.
Come back with me, Jacob. And that is the route to restoration and renewal in all our lives.
When life disappoints us, and it does. When circumstances go against us, and they do.
Breaking news. When people betray you. When grief overtakes you. When you’re weary and
disillusioned and you wonder what it’s all for. Perhaps that’s the time for God to come to you
and say, let’s just go back. Let’s reel back and remember where it all began. And one of the things
I love about Genesis and the things that we’ve taught, and it’s been a theme that’s repeated
over and over again, is the stretch of time, the stretch of years. We love everything to be
instant. If God says something to us today, we want the fulfillment tomorrow.
There’s no gap. If it doesn’t come tomorrow, well, where’s God? I thought he spoke to me.
Go to Genesis and read about the men and the women and the children that went through year after year
after year, generation after generation, where the promises actually made sense. That Jacob could
take the blessing at age 23 and at age 97, he’s still working it out. And I’ve just been thinking
about that recently. I don’t consider myself very old, but there’s an awful lot that we fit into our
lives, isn’t there? And when you start to look back and you think, well, it did all look different
when I was 25 rather than 55. And we were looking ahead and we were thinking about the possibilities
and what God could do and what our lives might look like. And there was a sense of excitement.
And then you get further along the line and there’s actually quite a lot behind you.
And you start to think, and as I look back to, and I was thinking, I don’t know why it’s been coming
into my mind recently, but just thinking back to early days in church leadership, early days
in Zambia, all those things that we were doing. And I realized that it’s almost like we’re in
a completely different universe now. And looking ahead, it’s a strange thing to look ahead when
there’s so much of what we hoped for and prayed for and dreamed about has sort of worked its way
out. I don’t think it’s all over, by the way, but it’s really interesting. But one thing that’s
important for me, for you, as you get weary, as you get tired, as you get older, because we all
get older, don’t we, is to have this ability to allow God through his Holy Spirit to take us back
and to remind us. Because those memories are not just memories, they are actually foundation stones
in our lives. Those are the points where we remember this is what God said to us. And when
we start to get a little bit desperate, a little bit disillusioned, and so many people these days
you read about have actually been walking away from faith, because we lose track of what God
has actually said to us in the past. It’s so important to be able to go back and to focus
on those things. I remember, I probably told you this story before, I tell these stories over and
over again, but when we left for Zambia, Erica’s dad took us aside and said how pleased he was with
what we were doing and excited for us. But he wanted to know that in the middle of all the
excitement, all the sense of adventure, and all the newsletters that were going out, and the
fridge magnets saying pray for the Lug family as they go to be missionaries and all that stuff,
in the middle of all of that, you do know that you’ve heard God. And we said, yeah, we do.
We know that God is called. I remember, I can even remember, that’s what God takes us back,
I can remember where I was sitting when these things dropped into me, and that sense of
conviction about what we should do. And he said the reason you have to do that, you have to know
that, is because there are many times when the excitement has waned and things aren’t looking
as bright and rosy as they do today. You’ll have to know and you have to remember, otherwise you
won’t succeed, you won’t keep going, you won’t make it. And we won’t make it in life unless we’re
able to take ourselves back and remind ourselves of what God has shown us at different stages in
our lives. We might feel like we’re different people now, but we know that those things stand
forever. And that’s what the story of Genesis teaches us, is that these things stand through
generation after generation after generation. It matters what God has said years ago. And it’s
really important that we’re able to allow him to take us back. And I do remember one time,
some months after we got out there, and nothing was working out as we planned, and I remember
standing alone in our garden and looking up at the sky. It’s a lot more interesting to look up
at the night sky in Zambia than it is here. Lots of stars and a bright moon and all of that,
and just looking up and thinking about the sort of songs that we’ve sung this morning and thinking
about God and just thinking, what has happened? It felt like it was all finished. It felt like
that what we’d set out to do, there was nothing left. People had said to us, you can’t take your
children to Zambia. It will ruin their lives. And we said, oh, don’t be silly. God is with us.
And then as I stood there, I thought, maybe they were right. There’s that sense of desperation.
But I remember how from that moment, people, circumstances, gentle words of encouragement,
the gentle words of the Spirit of God in my heart took me back to those moments that I’ve already
talked about when I knew. And I knew that God had spoken to us. And I knew that that word doesn’t
diminish because things go wrong or because things go against us. That thing doesn’t disappear. It
doesn’t get wiped out. It doesn’t get rubbed out. And I knew that God would be with us through it
all. And so I can say that 20 years later, that which I thought was dead then is still living,
still growing. And there are many times things in your life that you might have looked back
and you think, well, what was that all about? It’s all finished. It’s all gone.
And yet if we allow God to lead us through that, if we allow God to remind us,
he doesn’t always, Kathy said, he doesn’t remove the Red Sea, but he does party. He doesn’t
take away all the problems. He doesn’t solve them all. He doesn’t take away those challenges.
He doesn’t take away the things that eat away at our confidence and our hope.
But he does remind us about who he is and what he said and what he’s promised.
So we all need Jacob moments like at the end of 34 and 35 when God says, come back with me.
Come back and we’ll go back to where it all began. So Jacob told everyone in his household,
get rid of all your pagan idols. Purify yourselves and put on clean clothing. We are now going to
Bethel where I’ll build an altar to the God who answered my prayers when I was in distress.
He is being with me wherever I’ve gone. I love that. I mean, as I read it, I just thought,
the one thing, I don’t know why it’s my mischievous sense of humor or something,
there’s a poster that I saw once that simply said, Jesus is coming. Look busy.
And it just reminded me about that. You know what? God comes in the middle of all the mess
and all the chaos and all the distress and all the trauma. God comes and says, right,
we’re going to go back to the altar, go back to the place, build an altar, and I’m going to
go back where it all began. Jacob says, oh yeah, remember now. Right, everybody pack up your pagan
idols. They’re going to go, these things weren’t a surprise to Jacob. The household was just
living with these idols. They were living in this way. They were living in this chaotic,
cluttered way. And the first thing Jacob says to them is, pack up. Pack it all up. We’re going
to go back. We’re going to simplify. We’re going to purify. We’re going to get things straight.
We all carry clutter and stuff that we pick up along the way, don’t we? Ways of thinking,
ways of behaving. We drift in our passion for God and so that we live under the blessing. Our lives
can be full of so much other stuff and you probably know what that feels like. I don’t
know, I’ve forgotten the name of the program, Stacey Solomon. There was a BBC program we used
to watch last year when we were on holiday. We watched all the episodes, shows how spiritual we
are about how to declutter your life. And you go in somebody’s, people have got houses with
stuff from floor to ceiling and they just clear it all out and put it all over the floor of a
warehouse and then they have to go through and have to get rid of like 70% of their stuff and
then they put it back in the house. And it’s interesting. It’s fascinating. But it’s a great
example of what our lives can get like as we, even as we live under the blessing of God. We
know that we’re believers. We know that God loves us. We know that he’s called us. We know that we
can tell a testimony of the day that we became a Christian. But since that day, the process that
we’ve gone on, our lives have got cluttered. They’ve got full of stuff. We carry so much
baggage around with us. Just like Jacob said to the people there, come on, pack up, get rid,
declutter. We’re going to go back to where it all began.
We’re going to Bethel where I will build an altar to the God who answered my prayers when I was in
distress. He’s remembering now, you see. He has been with me wherever I have gone. What a statement.
And that doesn’t mean that Jacob was a great, you know, God raises these patriarchs as heroes
of faith. But when we look at it from our peer-to-peer level, they’re not heroes of faith.
There’s so much that goes, there’s so much that we can compare with ourselves. But he has been
with me wherever I have gone. And what it tells me is that the blessing and the presence of God
is not, as much as we like to believe it, is not a reward for our righteousness or faithfulness.
But it’s a result of his faithfulness and his determination to keep his covenant of love with
his people. So Jacob can say, no matter how much has gone wrong, no matter what a mess his life
has got in, how chaotic the family is, he can say, even then, God has gone with me wherever I have
gone. And that will be, is and will be our testimony as people of God, that God has gone with
us wherever we have gone, wherever. Even if we drift off in our attention, even if we lose our
passion for him, even if we wander into sin, wherever we have gone, God has attached himself to us.
No matter how dark and desperate things have become, God had been with him wherever he had gone.
God’s reminder to him about what happened at Bethel turned on the light and he could say, oh yeah,
things were beginning to change. He’d gone from absolute desperation to hearing the voice of God
again. And we all need to make that transition. When we wander and lose energy, we drift far from God.
We can’t solve the issues, we can’t make ourselves better, we can’t unpick all that’s gone wrong,
but we can build an altar to God and we can remind ourselves of what it’s all about.
We can remind ourselves of who it is that’s called us and what he said in our lives.
When Jacob returned to Bethel, God appeared to him once again, blessed him and said,
your name is Jacob, but you’ll not be called Jacob any longer. From now on, your name will be Israel.
Jacob means heal and deceiver. You know, he came out grabbing the heel of his brother.
Israel means God fights. And so 74 years after he first tricked his way to a blessing, the focus is
now shifting from what Jacob was to who God is. And that’s a journey that we’ve all got to make.
I remember one of the first sermons I ever heard in our church in Surrey when I first joined the
church. There was a man called Bernard Thompson from Oxford and he stood up and he was asking
people. He did all those sort of questions and answers, interaction. So what does Jacob mean to
you? He said, what sort of person was Jacob? And our church treasurer spoke up and said he was a
deceiver and a trickster. And that was an example of how reputations stick. The guy’s point was that
he was a man after God’s own heart and he sort of explained all that. But that was something that
carried him around. Jacob means heal and deceiver. That was the label. That was the banner over his
life. That was the identifier. That’s the type of person that he was. He gets what he wants through
deception. But God says to him at that moment, Jacob, you will no longer be called Jacob,
but you will now be called Israel. Israel means God fights. And that’s the slow journey that we’re
all on, being transformed in our understanding from who we are to understanding who God is.
And many times the dominant thing in our minds is what we are, what we’re not, what we’ve failed at,
what we feel about ourselves, what other people say about us, what circumstances have told us,
what the failures and disappointments of life, all of those things become our definition. They
become our definition. So if somebody was to ask you, describe yourself, you’d say useless or
failure or shy or whatever else you might say.
And God wants to take us all on the same journey that he took Jacob to say, all right,
you’ll no longer be called that, but you’re going to be called something else. And what
you’re going to be called is something that reflects what God is in you, what God has done
for you. And that’s the journey that will be. And sometimes we won’t make that journey fully
in this life, but we need to make progress on that journey. We need to start. I know that in my own
life I need to see what it is that God says, because often if I’m pushed, how I will identify
myself is what I think about myself or what I think other people think about me. And I very
rarely think clearly about what God thinks about me. And if we think, you know, well,
people say, well, God loves you. You think, oh, well, what does that mean?
You know, there’s not much to love or whatever else we say. We ignore what God is saying. God
took the initiative over Jacob and he says, you will no longer be called, but you will be called
this. And through the school of hard knocks, through human weakness and failure and reaching
the lowest of lows, we are carried by the faithfulness of God away from what we were
to where God wants us to be. What a journey. How many people in this room? 150, 160 people. That
means there are 150 or 160 stories that will probably make our hair curl. All sorts of stuff
that we’ve been through. Mike said, has anybody got a testimony? Well, to be truthful, we have
got about 150 testimonies in here. Probably haven’t got time for them all.
I remember being in Belfast one time, and there was an advertised event where there
was a paramilitary, former paramilitary terrorist that had been in prison
for his crimes in the time of the Troubles. And he’d become a Christian.
And the publicity was sort of this terrorist that’s turned to God. And so a lot of people
came because they wanted to hear. And the guy was really challenging because he stood up
and he said, I know why you’re all here. You want to hear stories. He said, I’m not going to tell
you any because I refuse to talk about what I was. I only want to talk about what I am
through Jesus Christ. Talk about what God has made me. Really, really powerful challenge.
But we can feel a million miles from God, unsuitable for his blessing,
disappointed in ourselves, disappointed with life. That’s where Jacob was.
God reminded him that I have been with you wherever you have gone. And God, if you look
back over your life now, over the pattern of where you’ve gone, all the wanderings and the meanderings,
the Bible says he will make our paths straight. Some of us look at our lives and think, well,
my paths haven’t been very straight. But wherever you’ve meandered, wherever you’ve wandered,
God has gone with you wherever you have gone. And now he’s back on your case. And he’s saying,
build an altar to me and I will change your name from what you were to what you will become in me.
God reminded him that he was always with him, that he could go back to where it all started
and that God would use his weakness to demonstrate his strength. So don’t lose heart.
It’s amazing what God can do and the way that he speaks to us.
I’m going to go back to again another story about how the time came when we came to leave Zambia.
That was in 2010. And it was quite traumatic for our children. They cried when they went to Zambia
and now they cried when they were leaving. And it was all very, very sad. We had lots of
farewell events and farewell services and all of that sort of stuff. And it was quite emotional
and quite draining. And on the very last day, the general secretary of our church out there came to
us and he gave us some verses from Isaiah 41. I won’t go through it all, but the key point of it,
he says, I will help you, says the Lord. And as we piled into our vehicle and we traveled down to
this ark and we ended up traveling in the middle of the night, it was just the four of us completely
on our own with our suitcases. We’d gone out to Zambia with a shipping container and we came back
with four suitcases. You know, these guys in Genesis started with the four suitcases and ended
up with a shipping container. We went the other way around. And we were all quite down and quite
sad about it all and everything else. And Jacob, our youngest son, who was 11 at the time, said,
don’t worry. We shouldn’t be sad because God says he’s going to help us.
But well, there’s a word from an 11-year-old and we held on to that. And over the years,
from time to time, that verse has come back to us. God says, I’ll help you. Even when we felt like
we’re under pressure, we’re struggling, God says he’s going to help us. And then even this week,
there were a number of things that were going on that were really, really challenging me and
struggling to come to terms with it and feeling discouraged and feeling uncertain about the way
things were going to work out. And we started reading only just a few days ago a Charles
Spurgeon devotional. And on January the 16th, we opened it up and the passage was Isaiah 41.
God says, I will help you. And it’s like God’s saying, all right, you can get into all of that
confusion. You can get into all of that discouragement, but I’ll continually bring
you back to what I said. And what I said then still stands today. And for some of you need
to know that what God said to you five, 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago still stands. And for some of
you, like Mike said, God will speak today and will put down a marker in your life today that
will make a difference in 10 years time. We know that what you hear today, hold onto it,
because the word of God stands forever in your life. And there are so many things shifting sands
and tides and things that will push us this way and that. We don’t know what’s going to happen
to us and none of us can predict what’s going to happen. Yesterday turned out entirely differently
to how I thought it would in the morning. But the word of God stands over our lives.
Finally, thank you Manuel for your testimony as well. I just want to relate to this. Amongst all
the other things that happened throughout all these things that unfold in Genesis 35,
we get to the end at verse 27 and it says, So Jacob returned to his father Isaac in Mamre,
which is near Kiriath-arbor, now called Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac had both lived as
foreigners. Isaac lived for 180 years, then he breathed his last and died at a ripe old age,
joining his ancestors in death and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.
God plays a long game in our lives and we can afford to trust Him with things that we cannot
control and things we cannot change. He’s able to orchestrate our lives, relationships, and
circumstances and bring glory to Himself. And there are things that you’re carrying even today
that you’re thinking, I don’t know how I work this out. Maybe it’s things in your family,
relationships, maybe there’s breakdown, maybe there’s uncertainty, maybe you’re worried about
children, maybe you’re worried about others, maybe things are burdening you and you don’t know what
to do about it. God plays a long game in our lives and we can afford to trust Him with things
we cannot control and things we cannot change. We wish things could be different. We wish things
hadn’t worked out the way that they have. When you can’t see any way through. This was a
dysfunctional family, the end all dysfunctional family. Brothers were at loggerheads, they were
threatening each other’s lives, there was real mortal danger that was coming up from the breakdown
of their relationship and yet there’s a simple comment at the end of verse 29 that when Isaac
died his sons Esau and Jacob buried him together. Beautiful sort of closure to a long, long, long,
long, long story.
And so remember when God first spoke to you, remember that He’s with you wherever you go,
remember that He carries you away from what you were towards what He can be in you
and that over many, many years He is able to make sense of it all. We have a friend who,
a very dear friend who died on New Year’s Eve and we did it again, we didn’t know that was
going to happen. She’d been in hospital, she’d had a bit of an accident and had been in hospital
for two or three weeks but had been recovering and was doing fine. She was quite strong. I went to see
her a couple of days before she died. She was very chatty, very energetic, very lively and then we
went to see her on New Year’s Eve and we couldn’t recognize her. She was on oxygen, got a chest
infection, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak and she died that very day. And just sitting
around her bed, she was trying to speak but she had no volume at all, nothing. She’d take the mask
off and she couldn’t form words or whatever but you could tell that she was there. And so we
chatted and we prayed a little bit and whatever and there was just like you do sometimes around
the hospital bed, there was a lot going on. And then all of a sudden she just sort of stopped us
and she took her mask off and she said with volume and clarity,
you know we can cast all our fears and worries onto him.
Really, really powerful and then she put her mask back on and she probably didn’t say anything else
until she died and I thought well that to me is an example of trust.
Trust God, lean into God, hold on to God because wherever you go, he goes with you.
As you walk through those strained relationships, as you walk through those challenges,
as you walk through those situations that you don’t know how it’s going to work out,
God goes with you and he has ways of bringing it all together and making sense of it all.
Jacob and Esau buried Isaac together after all those years of running from one another.
So the questions in response, do you need today to stop and go back
to what God has said to you over many, many years? Maybe you can, even just now as I’m saying that,
maybe just think back. Are there times when you’ve known things much more clearly than you do today
does God want to take you back by his spirit
to remind you of what he said and what he’s done and what he’s promised?
Second challenge is don’t try and solve the issues when you we look at our lives and think all right
okay so we’ve got to get this right. New Year’s resolutions, Johnny talked about it, we’ve got to
make it, got to be better, we’ve got to be stronger, we’ve got to be more organized, got to be more
spiritual, let’s get up at six o’clock every morning and pray, that’s not going to work too
well. So I mean some of you might love getting up at six o’clock in the morning to pray, others might not.
It’s not about the effort that we can put in to make things better, but it’s about our ability
to build an altar and to remember the God who originally called us, the God, that’s why
testimonies are so important to go back and remember, tell your story, tell your story to
yourself, remind yourself what God has done and what he said in your life, and then know that God
is changing your story from who you are and what you’ve made of your life to who he is and what he
makes of your life, what his destiny is for you, and then let go and trust because he plays a long
game and things work out over many, many, many years and some of the things where some of the
situations that you feel you’ve moved on from, God still has something to do and something to say
in the midst of all of that. And so I want us to pray and to turn our hearts to God,
settle ourselves, you know sometimes when we pray we come into a, we get frantic and we get anxious
don’t we, we try and blur everything out to God, oh Lord this and this and this and this, I’m really
sorry God because I haven’t prayed for so long and I’m so unspiritual and and you really must
be tired of listening to me and I just don’t, you know, I don’t even know why you bother Lord and
it’s just, it’s just hopeless in Jesus’ name, amen, and that’s the, you know, that we don’t get very far
with those sort of prayers, but we need to come to God and we say, Lord with open hands, Lord
this is a, this is me, this is us, this is our situation, but Lord we remember how faithful
you’ve been, Lord we remember those days of promise, we remember the things that you’ve,
that you, you established, we remember the things that we hope for and we dream for, we remember all
of that and say, Lord take us back, Lord we will worship you in the midst of this, we’ve got all
these idols and all this stuff that we’re packing up, but nevertheless you are the God who’s answered
our prayers, you’re the God who’s carried us through and you’re the God who changes our name
from what we were to what we can be, and so let’s just turn our hearts to God in worship,
maybe the team can come back and we just respond, begin to respond to God
what he said, I don’t know in my stumbling ways what makes sense and what makes clear,
what’s clear, but God knows he’s able to apply his word to our hearts
through the power of his Holy Spirit
and just encourage you to come, open hand, don’t come with an agenda, don’t come with lots of words,
don’t come with lots of apologies, don’t come with any of that stuff, just come before God and say,
Lord you have been with me wherever I’ve gone, now take me on again Lord, take me on again,
show me what it is that you want to do in my life, show me what it is that you want to make of my
life from this point forward, not diving back, not trying to fix things, but going forward,
what is it that you want to do, what is it that you want to say, what is it that you want to
establish in my heart and today can be a time when things change, reminded of an old sort of
proverb, what’s the best time to plant an oak tree 50 years ago, but bearing in mind the fact we
didn’t do it 50 years ago, the best time is today, there might be lots of things that you regret,
lots of things that you struggle with, but today plant something, today establish something,
today reach out to God, that God take me forward from today on the basis of what you’ve promised
over so many years. Amen.