When we come to church on a Sunday we bring lots of baggage with us: Happiness, sadness, excitement, disappointment, etc. But Whatever is going on, like David in this Psalm we must not forget about God. We must keep reminding ourselves who he is.

We need to learnt to speak and preach to ourselves more often. The world says “the first sign of madness is talking to yourself”, Martin Lloyd-Jones says “letting yourself speak to you is the first sign of madness”.

We must learn to speak to ourselves more often about who God is and just how amazing and vast he is. This is a choice we have to make everyday and it is amazing how quickly our focus can drift from God if we don’t so this regularly.

This is the key to our relationship to God. This is worship.

Worship is not just singing songs on a Sunday morning, it is everything we do in life. The whole act of orientating ourselves towards God is worship. We don’t have to come to church and “wait for the worship to grab me”. Just coming together is joining our lives, wherever we are at, in worship to God.

In Psalm 103 David starts focussed on himself but by the end the focus has shifted to the universe. By talking to himself he has got his head out of himself and onto the vastness of God. We must learn to do the same.

Different translations use different words for “debt” here but ultimately it means our sins. We are all in debt to God because of the sins we have committed again him and against others. Simply rebelling against God and going our own way incurs this debt. The price for this debt is death and eternal separation from God.

However, God has provided a way for us to be released form this debt. But it is not due to anything we do, it is through Jesus dying on the cross and paying it off for us.

This prayer is for believers, it is not meant as a salvation prayer therefore it shows that we don’t get cleaned of our debts once, as soon as we confess our sins we go out and start racking them up once again. Jesus is showing us through this prayer that we need to daily confess our sins and be forgiven. It’s not something God intended us to do once.

Jesus performed many miracles in his time on the Earth but forgiveness is the greatest of them all. Jesus showed in Mark 2 by forgiving the crippled man rather than healing him (although he did heal him on a few minutes later) that it is far more important that we are forgiven than to be healed physically. It is far better to crawl into heaven than to walk into hell.

But we are also to remember that forgiveness is something we give as well as receive. We are called not to hold grudges against anyone but to forgive them as we have been forgiven. Sometimes we can find forgiving others as a very difficult thing to do but it is important to do as unforgiveness can eat away at us over time.

This talk and all the others from this series can be downloaded from the Gateway Church Swindon website: http://www.gatewaychurchswindon.org.uk/audio/

Mark has been preaching through the Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6 for a few weeks now. I have to say that it has been one of the best series he has preached. I’ve missed a couple but every one I have heard has been excellent. I love the way each preach focuses on a different line of the prayer.

So this week we move onto to verse 11:

Give us today our daily bread

In today’s society, and in particular in the modern western world, we have become used to being able to pop down the shops to get bread. It is no longer common to wake up each morning and wonder where the food is going to come from. But Jesus clearly tells us to pray this. Why?

1) It’s about trust

Just because resource is easy to come by these days does not mean we should take it for granted. Praying this prayer daily helps remind us that everything from the air we breath to the home we live in and the food we eat is a gift from God.

We need to be careful not to forget this otherwise we may fall into the trap of thinking what we have is of our own doing and take pride in that and forget that only though God do we have what we have.

I was reminded only today I keep hearing stories of people not happy in the jobs and wanting to move on and that I have an excellent job which I prayed about a lot before getting. Every time someone asks me about my job it reminds me to thank God because it is only through him and his timing that I have the job I have. It was not my doing and I can’t ever allow myself to think that.

2) It’s about being content

God gives us everything we need but not always everything we want. We live in a culture where we are bombarded with advertising telling us we need more stuff. We need to learn to trust God for what we need and not be distracted by wants. We must go against culture and learn to be content. This prayer helps us focus on that.

3) It’s about our expectations

Jesus when being tempted in the desert used Deuteronomy 8 against Satan. That man does not live on bread alone. This daily bread is not meant to be only physical stuff but spiritual as well. We must ask God for the daily physical needs as well as our daily spiritual needs.

We need to not set our sights so low when praying to God. We must expect more. Even though God gives us just what we need he is also a generous father and gives us more out of grace and love.

This talk and all the others from this series can be downloaded from the Gateway Church Swindon website: http://www.gatewaychurchswindon.org.uk/audio/

There has been a lot of talk about mobilising the church recently and time to take new ground. In this text God gives 3 commands to achieve just that:

1) Get going

It is bad for us to stay still for too long. We get comfortable, lazy and start to wither. God doesn’t want us to get saved and then sit on our laurels. He wants us to be continually seeking him and moving on into the life he has planned for us. It can be so easy though to stop growing and progressing and to get complaisant where we are.

However, this is a trick of the devil. He wants us to stop. God wants us to get out of the trenches on a daily basis and take new ground for him. This could be spiritual or physical. The thing is though, we are not going to take this ground without first standing up and taking a step. Even if we fall over, it is better to fall over moving forwards than to fall backwards.

2) Get faith

Have faith in what God is saying. This is so important. We are not going to take ground without having faith. God has a purpose for us, he came and found us when we were lost and has planned our days out for us. We have to believe this if we are going to move anywhere for God.

If we don’t have faith then we are doing all things in our own strength and then our plans are either doomed to failure or totally pointless. We need to get caught up in what God is doing and go along with his plans.

God is huge and we need to realise that more. We box God up into something we can understand but God can’t be boxed, he is far too vast and complex to do that. But what we do need to do is get a bigger idea of God into our heads. The bigger God is the smaller we become and then we can focus more on him and less on ourselves.

3) Get fighting

Finally, even though God can do anything he wants, he still wants our involvement in everything. When he tells us to go take ground we know that it will be taken but we actually have to go and do it. God has chosen to work with us and through us in all things. We don’t do things on our own and neither does he.

We have to fight for the things God is telling us to do. So let’s fight more!

However, once a week I have to sit down at Gateway Church Swindon and pay attention to a real person talking at the front of my church. I find this quite a difficult thing to do as my mind will wander.

Thankfully, I discovered fairly quickly that if I made notes during a sermon I would stay focussed and take on board everything that was being said.

So it was this way this morning. I was sat making my notes as usual. It dawned on me though that despite always making notes and highlighting things which I thought were particularly relevant to me, as soon as church finished I knew I would forget it all. I always have the intention of going back over my notes but I very rarely do.

So it was with some inspiration from God that I came up with this idea: Every week I am going to write a blog post on the day’s talk.

I was told once that no matter how many preaches I listen to, the most important one is the one given at my church on that Sunday. The reason being that that is the sermon that God wants me to hear. This coupled with the fact that I remember things better if I rewrite them in my own words (as hard as this is for me to do) is the motivation for doing what I am about to do.

There may just be some Sunday’s where I don’t get the time to do this or I may just get lazy but my hope is this will be the start of me listening and also remembering what it is that God wants to say to me.

Let the blogging begin…

I am good with computers, I always have been. In recent years this has turned into the useful skill of being able to fix other people’s PCs. I have a loft full of spare parts to help me out and I enjoy doing it.

So when I was asked recently to take a look at someone’s PC because it was running slowly I thought I would go and upgrade the RAM and hard drive and that would be it. I knew at the time that I was really busy and I should say no but it was such a simple job what could go wrong?

How about seven days of stress? That’s what I ended up with! For a start the motherboard wouldn’t support more than 256MB RAM so that meant the only option was to change motherboard. I should have stopped at this point and said no but I carried on.

Cutting a looooong and painful story short I’ve had boot failures, blown motherboards, blue screens of death, registry corruption, dead monitors and data loss. However, after lots of late nights and a lounge that now looks like a Maplin’s warehouse I finally have the PC back as it was when I first got it. I’ve spent countless hours and effort and achieved nothing.

So, I’m going to accept this lesson from God and shut the doors on this computer repair shop. Now only family and very close friends get to have access to my time. For the sake of my sanity I’m going to have to say no to anybody else from now on.

So, please don’t take offense when I say no to you in future. Trust me, it’s for the best!

No, me neither but this is still a fairly entertaining waste of two minutes:

1. You get over worked. You do everything that’s asked of you, and that can be alot. You get tired and grumpy.
2. You don’t perform to your best. You know the score – when you’re stressed or doing too much, mistakes happen or things get missed. That failure you were so afraid of becomes more likely.
3. Your time is misused. There are things that you’re naturally good at, where you excel. But when you’re running around doing everything, you don’t play to your strengths. You do twenty things to a mediocre standard, when you could be doing 2 or 3 to a high standard.
4. Important priorities get missed. By this I mean those areas that aren’t asking for your help. It might be that you neglect your own home because you’re busy looking after someone else’s. Or you don’t spend enough time with your family because your always off helping someone else.
5. You prevent someone else from excelling. Listen – you’re not the only one who can do things! While you’re doing a job that you’re ok at, just because you were the first person to be asked, someone who has the particular skill and gifting to do that job well isn’t doing it!
6. Some people just keep asking you to do things. They know you’re a ‘yes’ person, so they take advantage of you. They don’t necessarily mean to, they just know you’re someone they can ‘depend on’. But it’s not a good thing – it means they’re not finding out other people who can also help, spreading the load, because it’s too easy just to ask you.
7. You’ll come to resent it. No matter how cheery a servant you are at the start, keep giving in the wrong areas for the wrong reasons without giving yourself a break, and you’ll start to resent that you’re always the one they ask.
8. Some people will stop asking you altogether. These are the people who have noticed that you’re a ‘yes’ man. They know that whatever they ask of you, you’ll do. But that means that you’ll do it even if you shouldn’t, or that you’ll do it and resent it. They won’t ask you because they can’t trust you to say ‘no’ if necessary.
9. You give other people a get out clause to not help. ‘I don’t need to, because Joe will do it’. It’s not a good attitude to encourage! There will always be those people who could help but don’t. It’s tempting for the serial ‘yes’ man to step in to fill the gap. While that sometimes may be necessary – consider that filling the gap means that they don’t see the consequences of their not helping. Sometimes leaving a gap encourages someone else to start being a gap filler too.

Read the full article at: http://millyj.posterous.com/just-say-no-63