Sermon – “Open Your Mouth Wide” (Psalm 81)

One of the joys that my wife and I share is not only that we live within a few minutes’ drive from three of our grandchildren, but that our house backs onto miles of forest. The result is that our back yard is almost constantly being visited by wildlife—even including a bear! But our most frequent visitors are the birds. This summer we’ve counted seventeen different varieties of them, but I’ve got to say that our favourites are the hummingbirds. We love to watch them zip madly back and forth across the yard, stopping every once in a while to suck up some nectar into their needle-like beaks.

The hummingbird is the smallest of all bird species. A mature hummingbird weighs less than a nickel and their nests are no bigger in size than a walnut. Their tiny hearts thump away at an amazing rate of over twelve hundred beats a minute. They lay their eggs (which are about the size of a jellybean) twice in the summer. And, sad to say, in a few weeks’ time we won’t be seeing them anymore, because they will be starting their four-thousand-kilometer journey back over the eastern United States and across the Gulf of Mexico to their winter quarters in Central America.

I often find myself asking, how do they do it? How do those tiny fledglings, only weeks old, know when they should be heading south? How do they know their destination? And how do they know how to get there? It seems that somehow it’s all been implanted in their tiny brains from birth.

What a contrast to us human beings! When we’re born there’s almost nothing we can do for ourselves, except occasionally fill our diapers! We have to be taught practically everything. And, unlike the hummingbirds, it seems that nowadays I can’t find my way anywhere without a GPS!

It shouldn’t surprise us then that, like almost everything else in life, the worship of God is something that has to be learned. And in many ways the psalm from which we have read this morning gives us some useful instruction on how to worship. So let’s take a look at it for the next few minutes and discover what it has to teach us.

Sing (1-5a)

The first lesson comes in the opening words: “Sing aloud to God our strength; shout for joy to the God of Jacob.” Unlike professional football or tennis, worship is a participatory sport. True worship demands our involvement, both spiritually, mentally and even physically. And so it’s vitally important that we listen carefully to the Scripture readings, that we join in the prayers (not least with a hearty “Amen!”), that we sing the hymns…

Now at this point you might be saying to yourself, “You don’t really want to hear me sing. I can’t hold a tune in a bucket.” Well, neither can I, but it doesn’t stop me from trying. So sing anyway. It’s good for you—not only spiritually (and this may surprise you) but also psychologically and physically.

A report published in Australia in 2008 revealed that on average, choral singers rated their satisfaction with life higher than the general public—even when the actual problems they experienced were more substantial than those faced by those around them. Another study from ten years before that found that after nursing home residents took part in a singing program for a month, there were significant decreases in the levels of both anxiety and depression.[1]

Two and a half centuries ago John Wesley was concerned about the state of singing that he heard in the churches where he preached. Here are a few of the pieces of advice that he offered at the time:

Sing all.

See that you join with the whole congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.

Sing lustily and with a good courage.

Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep, but lift up your voice with strength. Do not be afraid of your voice now, nor ashamed of its being heard …

Above all sing spiritually.

Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is … offered to God continually. So shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.

So it is that our psalm this morning calls upon us to sing aloud, to shout for joy, to raise a song… And we find the same when we read the New Testament, where we are encouraged to “be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:18-20).

Remember (5b-10a)

So we are encouraged to sing. And the second thing our psalm calls us to do is to remember. The problem with the people of Israel was that they frequently suffered from collective memory loss. We might call it a kind of spiritual amnesia. They were inclined to forget the God who had made his covenant with Abraham, who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt, who had brought them into the Promised Land.

Now ask my wife and she’ll tell you that I’m not always all that good at remembering things, including names. We have new next-door neighbours who just moved in last week. They’re a young couple from the United States and they are excited to be in Nova Scotia. The other evening we spent a few moments introducing ourselves—and fifteen minutes later, do you think I could remember their names? A few days later I saw them in their driveway and I apologized that I had forgotten their names. I had hardly gotten the words out of my mouth when they apologized that they couldn’t recall my name either!

So it is that the psalmist writes about hearing “a voice I had not known”. Yet it was a voice that everyone in Israel should have recognized. It was the voice that had called creation into being. It was the voice that had spoken softly to Adam and Eve in the Garden. It was the voice that had thundered from the top of Mount Sinai. It was the voice who addressed his people time and time again through the prophets. Yet it had become unfamiliar, forgotten, not even a distant echo from the past.

And so the psalmist calls them to remember: to bring to mind the remarkable series of events that had formed their ancestors into a nation; to remember how God had had heard their groaning as they laboured as slaves in Egypt; to remember how he had enabled them to escape from the clutches of Pharaoh and his armies; to remember how he had provided for them in their forty-year trek across the wilderness and brought them into the Promised Land. And although they might have forgotten him, he would remain true to his promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)

This morning, in a few moments’ time, we will gather around the Lord’s Table and you and I too will be called to remember, as we hear once again our Lord’s familiar words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” We will take the bread into our hands to remember the body that was broken for us. And as we bring the cup to our lips, we remember the blood that was shed for us.

The challenge, though, is to take that memory into the week with us. It’s so easy, once we’ve walked out of the church and slammed the car door, to allow the world to take over once again. There are all those little details like the lunch that needs to be prepared, the lawn that needs to be mown, the text that just came up on our cellphone, and the list goes on and on…

So let me suggest a couple of things that can help us to remember: As you rise in the morning, thank God for the gift of another day and to ask for his guidance through it; before each meal (if you don’t do it already) express your gratitude for his gracious provision—simple acts in themselves but small ways in which we can keep our focus in the right place.

Open wide (10b-16)

Before we leave this psalm today, I would be remiss if I didn’t point you to what I think is one of the most wonderful promises that God gives us in the Bible—and it is so easy to overlook. It is nestled in the latter half of verse 10. There God says to us, “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.”

The words take me back to those birds in our back yard. The picture that it brings to my mind is of a nest of baby hatchlings, their tiny beaks opened as wide as they can stretch them, waiting, trusting in the mother bird to feed them. Like those little birds, whatever the cause of our spiritual hunger, we have a God we can trust and who is able to fill it.

Indeed, Jesus assures us that God knows our needs before we ask (Matthew 6:8). He once asked his disciples,

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:9-11)

And so the psalm stands as an encouragement to us—a gracious invitation—to trust God, as the little birds trust that the mother will return to the nest. Now there may be some of you who think that this kind of thinking is naïve, that it won’t stand up amid the ups and downs of life in the real world. But let me tell you, it does.

For the last six months I’ve been following the journal of a woman in Ukraine. Again and again I find myself dumbfounded by her faith in God’s provision. Here is something she wrote just the other day:

I am reminded once again of the verses in Philippians 4:11-13. ‘I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.’ … We don’t need to postpone life till after the war. We live it to the maximum now!

Our psalm this morning is an invitation to do just what she says, to live life to the maximum—joyfully to trust in God, who did not withhold even his own Son and graciously gives us all things (Romans 8:32).

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[1]     https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/singing-happy1.htm

Sermon – “Let Your Face Shine” (Psalm 80)

 

 

One of the great strengths of our Anglican worship is the continuous repetition of the psalms. If you turn to the Daily Office Lectionary in the Book of Alternative Services, you will see that there is a provision there to recite at least one psalm every morning and every evening of the year.

That is a practice that has always lain at the heart of Anglican worship, right back to the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Of course that book was only carrying on a tradition dating back to the earliest Christian liturgies. And they in turn were borrowing from Jewish practice that had gone on for a thousand years before that. So when we recite the psalms, we are not only joining with our fellow believers around the world. We are engaging in the continuous worship of three thousand years!

For quite some time now, one of the habits I have engaged in my own personal devotions is to read from the psalms every day—and I almost invariably find myself enriched by the practice.

The marvellous quality about the psalms is that they give voice to the whole range of human experience. There is joyful praise. Think, for example, of Psalm 95—what we call the Venite, with which we open Morning Prayer: “Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation…” Or the Jubilate Deo, Psalm 100: “Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song.”

At the other end of the spectrum there are psalms like Psalm 55, so magnificently set to music by the composer Mendelssohn: “Hear my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my petition… Fear and trembling have come over me and horror overwhelms me. And I said, ‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest…’” Or the chilling psalm that Jesus quoted from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Like those two psalms that I have just quoted, the psalm that we have read together this morning, Psalm 80, is one of what are known as “psalms of lament”. Each of these psalms in one way or another expresses sorrow, pain and discouragement—we might even say disappointment with God. In all, there are over fifty of them, more than any other category of psalms in the Bible.

So for the next few minutes I want us to take a look at the psalm we have just read this morning—and I hope that you may find it speaking to you in a new way.

He looks around

The psalm was likely composed some time after the year 722 BC. That was the year when the powerful armies of the Assyrian Empire finally crushed the northern Israelite kingdom centred in Samaria. The Assyrians had gradually been gaining control of Israelite territory for a dozen years. And it was after a three-year siege that the northern capital of Samaria itself eventually fell. As was the practice in those days, the city was leveled to the ground and its citizens deported to serve as slaves.

As I read this psalm, I imagine the psalmist having made the journey back to Samaria. He wanders through familiar streets and alleyways where houses and shops and the king’s palace once had proudly stood, now reduced to piles of rubble. Perhaps it is a herd of sheep grazing on the tufts of vegetation growing up through the tumbled stones that prompts him to cry out, “Hear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock…” Or maybe it is the familiar words penned centuries before by Israel’s greatest king: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

In the silence of the deserted city he cries out, “Stir up your strength and come to help us!” And then for the first time we hear the sorrowful refrain that is repeated three times in the course of the psalm: “Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” Behind those words we can detect the faint echo of the blessing that Moses’ brother Aaron had given to his sons and the priests that would follow them:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
     and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
     and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-26)

Whatever the case, the psalmist is not afraid to vocalize his disappointment with God:

How long will you be angered,
despite the prayers of your people?
You have fed them with the bread of tears…
and our enemies laugh us to scorn.

A hundred and thirty-five years later, following the destruction of Jerusalem, it would be another psalmist who wailed,

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion…
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?

Kate Bowler is a Canadian author and blogger. As a young mother in her mid-thirties and having just completed her PhD thesis, she was met with the devastating news that she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Almost immediately well-meaning friends and acquaintances began to attempt to comfort her with thoughts like, “This is a test and it will make you stronger,” and, “At least you have your son. At least you’ve had an amazing marriage.” But what she really needed was time to grieve, time to be angry, time to be depressed, as she faced the terrible reality of her situation.[1]

I believe that this is exactly what we find happening in the early verses of this psalm. The poet makes no attempt to gloss things over or to look to a brighter future. He is bluntly realistic with God. And I believe this can act as a model for us today when we stand in the face of disappointment or tragedy. We need make no attempt to hide it or disguise it. Instead we can be open about it. We can be honest. Because we have a God who invites us to cast all our anxieties on him, because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).

He looks back

So the psalmist looks around. He is bluntly realistic about the situation he is facing. But then in the second part of the psalm (in verses 8 to 11) he looks back. He remembers God’s faithfulness to his people Israel—all the way back to their escape from centuries of slavery in Egypt, to the settling of the Promised Land:

You have brought a vine out of Egypt;
you cast out the nations and planted it…
You stretched out its tendrils to the Sea
and its branches to the River.

He thinks back to Israel’s establishment as a prosperous kingdom under David and Solomon—the envy even of the Queen of the faraway kingdom of Sheba!

At the same time there was a problem, and the problem was this: the people had invested their hope in the wrong place. They had been blinded by the false pleasures of wealth and prosperity and of military might. And it was not as though they had not been warned by prophets like Amos:

Alas for those who are at ease in Zion,
    and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria,
the notables of the first of the nations,
    to whom the house of Israel resorts! …

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
    and lounge on their couches,
and eat lambs from the flock,
    and calves from the stall;
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp,
    and like David improvise on instruments of music;
who drink wine from bowls,
    and anoint themselves with the finest oils,
    but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile,
    and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away. (Amos 6:1,4-7)

When things seem to have turned against us, we can sometimes be inclined to look back to the “good old days”, when everything was so much better! Of course we know that that is a mirage, that the prosperity that so many of us became accustomed to came at a tremendous cost—a cost to people who were often ignored or trodden under foot and the destruction of much of our natural environment, which it is unlikely that we will ever be able to rectify.

At the same time, the Bible calls us to look back—not to the good old days, not to some imagined golden era, but to one specific day: to the day when darkness covered the whole land, to the day when the sun’s light failed, the earth shook, and the thick curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

In a few moments’ time we will take the bread in our hands, we will bring the cup to our lips, in obedience to the one who said to his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” As we go through those familiar actions once again, we remember. We remember the ultimate example of self-giving love. We remember the one who took all the ugliness and cruelty of our sin upon himself. We remember the one who suffered defeat, so that we might share in his victory over evil and death. “Do this,” he commands us, “in remembrance of me.”

He looks ahead

It is only once he has looked back and recalled God’s faithfulness in the past, that the psalmist is able to look forward—and to look forward in hope. And so, as the psalm draws to a close, he prays,

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand,
 the one whom you made so strong for yourself.
And so we will never turn away from you;
give us life, that we may call on your name.

As he sets his sights on the future, he recognizes that, while Samaria and his life of the past may lie in ruins, he is not alone. There is a strong hand that is grasping his.

Centuries before, as the people of Israel stood on the edge of the Promised Land and were preparing to enter it, their leader Moses encouraged them with these words: “It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8). And our Lord Jesus says the same to us as he promised his followers as the time of his ascension, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who vehemently opposed Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. Just before his works were banned from publication, he wrote a little book about the Psalms. Here is what he had to say about the psalms of lament:

[These] psalms have to do with that complete fellowship with God which is justification and love. But not only is Jesus Christ the goal of our prayer; he himself also accompanies us in our prayer. He who suffered every want and has brought it before God, has prayed for our sake in God’s name… For our sake he cried on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Now we know that there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ will not be with us, suffering with us and praying with us—Christ the only helper.[2]

The psalms are intended not just to be read, but to be prayed. And as you learn to pray those psalms, may you know the presence of Jesus, our Great Shepherd, praying alongside you, and the light of his countenance shining upon you.

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[1]     Bowler, Kate. Everything Happens for a Reason (2018)

[2]     Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, 49

Sermon – “A Sermon I’ve Never Wanted to Preach” (Hebrews 10:26-31)

 

Aside from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I wonder if anyone here this morning can tell me what may have been the most famous sermon ever preached…

I don’t have any statistics to back me up, but I am certain that one of the top contenders has to be a sermon delivered to a congregation in Enfield, Connecticut, on hot July day in 1741. The preacher was Jonathan Edwards, a distinguished graduate of Yale University, who would later be appointed president of what was to become Princeton University. Along with the Anglican preacher George Whitefield he was one of the leaders of the remarkable spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening. It was a movement of the Holy Spirit that profoundly touched the hearts and changed the lives of thousands as it swept across New England in the mid-1700s—reaching as far as Nova Scotia!

The title Edwards gave to this particular sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. And if you find its title forbidding, its contents are nothing less than soul-shaking. By my estimate the sermon would have taken close to an hour and a half to preach. And it was around the mid-way point that Edwards thundered forth to the congregation with these words:

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine the rest!

The reality of judgement

Now I have never been what you might call a hellfire and brimstone preacher. I am one of those who believe that the carrot is generally more effective than the stick, that the glories of heaven are far more inducive to faith than the threat of hell.

Yet I have to acknowledge that Jesus himself warned about the prospect of hell for those who turn their backs on God. He declared to the people of Capernaum, who refused to accept his message, that it would be more tolerable on the Day of Judgement for the inhabitants of Sodom than it would be for them (Matthew 11:23). He cautioned his followers, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43).

Think too of his parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man ended up in flames and anguish, desperate that Lazarus might even dip the tip of his finger in water so that he might have a droplet to cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31). And at the last supper Jesus warned his disciples, “If anyone does not remain in me, they are thrown away like a branch and wither; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned…” (John 15:6).

In fact it has been claimed (and not without merit) that Jesus had more to say about hell than anyone else in the Bible. So perhaps we should not be surprised when we come across it again in this morning’s verses from Hebrews. We read of “a fearful expectation of judgement”, and those chilling words at the conclusion of the passage: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

The word in both cases in the original Greek is foberon. It’s related to our English word phobia, hence words like acrophobia, the fear of heights, and arachnophobia, the fear of spiders. Or how about odontophobia, the fear of dentists!

It all reminds me of my days in elementary school back in the Dark Ages, when to be sent to the principal’s office was a punishment you sought to avoid at all costs. Who knew what penalty was going to be meted out behind that thick oak door? Well, at least you came back from the principal’s office. But here there is no coming back.

Now lest I leave you thinking that God is some kind of celestial killjoy, constantly on the lookout for people to punish, let me remind you that there is a whole other side to the coin. Ours is a God who cries aloud to his people, “As I live…, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.” And he pleads, “Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11). And our Lord Jesus is the good shepherd, who seeks out his sheep that have strayed and brings them back into the fold. Yet there remains the tragic possibility of an eternity without him.

So it is that our verses from Hebrews this morning contain that stark warning to those who might be tempted to abandon the faith, that “if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgement…”

Why people leave the faith

Now this connects with one of the themes that has been in the background of Hebrews all along. Indeed it is likely that it is the reason for its being written in the first place: that one by one and for various reasons people had been dropping away from the community of believers. And for the author of Hebrews that was no light matter. It’s not like dropping out of a bowling league or even dropping out of school. No, dropping away from following Jesus is a matter of life and death.

Now for some people this whole topic brings up the question of whether or not it is possible for a believer to lose their salvation. And that is an issue I’m not going to delve into right now. But no matter which side of that particular debate you stand on, you don’t have to have been a Christian for very long before you notice that there are people who at one point appear to have had a genuine faith and yet somewhere along the road have left it behind.

Christian author Frank Viola offers a list of reasons why this happens.[1] Here are a number of them that he highlights:

·      The nasty way that Christians can sometimes treat each other. Disputes in the church can often arise over what are really non-essential issues and church members can become overinvested in them to the point where they lose perspective altogether and end up treating those with a different perspective as though they were enemies.

·      The simplistic answers they have been given to complex and difficult issues. The world can present us with challenges that strike at the roots of our faith. Yet sometimes these questions end up being treated with suspicion or simply dismissed with a pat answer, instead of being dealt with honestly and openly.

·      Disappointment with God as a result of a tragedy or seemingly unanswered prayer.

·      The busyness of a life that doesn’t leave room for prayer or engagement in the community of faith.

·      A legalistic understanding of the faith that demands perfection and can only lead to self-reproach, disappointment and even serious depression.

All of these can be factors in slipping away from the faith—and no doubt we could list many more as well. Indeed, in my experience one of the prime factors has been adultery. One of the biggest disappointments of my ministry has been to see leading laymen, men who have a deep and articulate understanding of the faith, Christian leaders, become involved in secretive affairs that end up undermining both their marriages and their faith. And I am sure that many of you could name any number of Christian “rock stars” who have fallen for the same reason in recent years—famous preachers and teachers, megachurch pastors and authors among them.

Today the internet adds an additional, highly powerful factor as well: pornography. It’s no longer a matter of hiding copies of Playboy under the mattress as it was when I was young. Our high-speed fibre optic cables can bring full-colour images and videos right into the privacy of our homes. And they can be deeply addictive.

Preventing departures from the faith

So what are we to say to all of this? How are we to deal with it? I could tell you that you’ll have to wait until next week’s exciting episode, and the weeks that follow. After all, we still have three chapters of Hebrews left!

But before I conclude, I want to mention one author who has been particularly helpful to me recently in thinking this whole issue through. He is psychologist Jonathan Haidt[2] and he is not a Christian but a secular Jew.

His thesis is this: We often think of our mind, our rational faculty, as what is most important in giving direction to our lives and guiding our decisions. But Haidt says no—that as often as not it is our emotions that guide us. And he summarizes it in a simple picture.

Picture if you can an elephant driver on top of an elephant. Now, by and large the elephant has been trained to be compliant. It will go wherever the driver commands. But if for one reason or another the elephant decides to take a different path, the hapless driver is forced to go along for the ride.

The elephant, says Haidt, is that part of our faculties that is based on feelings and sensations, while the driver represents our rational faculties. By and large it is our minds that we look to to guide us through life. But there will be times when the elephant of our emotions takes over—and I don’t imagine you have to think for very long to remember occasions when that has happened in your life.

So what does this mean for us as Christians? Perhaps one of the weaknesses of our Protestant tradition is that we often tend to place our emphasis on the mind at the expense of our other faculties. We engage primarily on a cerebral level, and only secondarily (if at all) on what we might call a gut level. Now I know that part of that is to avoid manipulation. Yet if our faith is to be fully rounded, it needs to involve the whole of us.

For example, how crucial music is to Christian experience! Even Paul, who seems like such an intellectual type, encourages us to “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16). Besides, I’m told that singing helps to release endorphins that contribute to both our mental and our physical health.

And how crucial is fellowship! By this I mean not just that casual cup of coffee after the service (as important a part of church life as that is!), but engaging with fellow believers on a deeper level—having others you can share with about the important things of life, people you can trust to stand by you without judging even in the most difficult times, and yet who have the courage to say, “Get with it!” when that’s what’s needed.

I would be remiss too if I didn’t stress the fundamental importance of developing a habit of taking time to be with God on a daily basis—coming before him in prayer and praise, reading his word, and simply enjoying being consciously in his company.

Yes, it is indeed a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Yet what is more wonderful than to be held in the firm grip of a loving Father, who vows never to leave us or forsake us? What could be a greater privilege than to walk with a Saviour, who promises to be with us to the end of the age? What could be more amazing than to be filled with a Spirit, who will be with us forever!

So as we hold these verses from Hebrews in one hand, let us balance them with these words from Philippians in the other:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ… And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. (Philippians 1:6;9-10)

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[1]     “7 Reasons Why Christians Abandon the Faith” https://frankviola.org/2022/05/12/7reasons/

[2]     Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012