Moving gospel pictures to different walls…

On Monday our elders were listing to a talk by Jonathan Dobson. Slightly weird listening to a talk where he’s referencing stuff that’s come from our church, but he’s putting into practice what we’re talking about! Challenging and encouraging.

One of the things we got talking about was his emphasis on constantly reminding people of what they’re about every time they get together. So Dobson uses the acronym ‘SPEL’ (irony?) Shared life and Truth; Pray; Engage peoples and cultures; Love one another.

I was very taken by this approach. In my experience when you stop reminding people of what you’re about we so easily slip back into ‘learned’ ways of doing things rather than biblical ways of doing things.

Someone raised the issue of people switching off to this though if you talk about it too much. Apparently if a picture has been on a wall more than two weeks then you don’t notice it as much.

So my suggestion was – rather than taking down the picture altogether – why not move it to a different wall?

Rainbows

This morning as I headed out my door to the office I could sense the light rain before I felt it land on my recently gelled hair. I looked up at the sky to see the offending cloud but the sky was blue.

As I rounded the corner a beautiful rainbow streaked across the sky rising out of the tops of the flats opposite my road.

It got me thinking about God’s promises. It’s struck me a lot recently as I’ve been engaging pastorally with people how often we believe the lies Satan pumps out. And we believe them so easily. The lie that man is to be feared. The lie that I am in control, or when I find that I am not, the lie that I should be in control. The lie that life and satisfaction is to be found in lust.

But we see the desctructiveness of these lies over and over again. Stress indicates to us that all is not well when we seek to be in control. And yet we indulge the stress, we talk about it as if it is just what I am going through right now and that the remedy is running from the problem – on holiday, or to bed, or to solitude.

We would do well to look at a rainbow from time to time and remember God’s promises. His promises that he is in control, that he is to be feared – not man, his promise to give us life – to the full! But that life is found in losing our lives.