It would be wrong to claim this thought as my own so il be honest from the start. I have no idea where this comes from but its a great mini thought for the ordinary disciple. If you know, please comment below!

Jesus says this is the 5th chapter or Matthew verse 13 – “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

Have you ever wondered why God has put you in the situation you are in? Or why he’s called you to do the things your doing? When your chatting to that really frustrating person who smells a bit and spits when they talk and wondering if its a massive waste of your time. (we all know someone)

Perhaps this is why….you are the salt of the earth. Part of the basic make up of human life. 15% of our bodies could be described as salt. Salt gives flavour to our food and helps our digestion and organ functions.

But in our world, there is another option. Sugar makes everything sweeter and tastier. Its a luxury product rather than a necessity not to mention that things with too much sugar are sickly and sweet. Our bodies even create the sugar we need from the carbohydrates so there’s nothing bad about sugar. (in fact most of my favourite foods contain sugar) The thing is that sugar is great. But it’s not essential….it’s not salt.

So you are essential. You bring flavour to the world around you. You are salt. The world needs salt, and flavour and sustenance, now more than ever before. We can be the flavour in the world around us. I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of Salt Jesus was talking about.

(Thanks to a biologist friend of mine for the “sciencey” bits in this)

A friend here in Exeter introduced me to some of the worship coming from Bethel Church in California. I heard this song by Brian Johnson so thought id share it with everyone!

Its a really simple song and something about it takes me back to that first moment when you meet Jesus and decide you want to follow him. Every time i sing/hear it, i’m reminded that God is calling me on a journey with him.

So i could have posted the wonderful youtube clip of the actual studio session but i thought it might be more fun to record a cover! (i recorded it using the built in mic on my mac with garageband so its not the best quality…oh well)

So here it is….

The lyrics are are -

If my heart is overwhelmed and I cannot hear your voice
I hold onto what is true, though I cannot see
If the storms of life they come, and the road ahead gets steep
I will lift these hands in faith, I will believe

I remind myself of all that you’ve done
And the life I have because of your son

Love came down and rescued me
Love came down and set me free
I am yours
I am forever yours
Mountain high or valley low
I sing out and remind my soul
I am yours
I am forever yours

When my heart is filled with hope, and every promise comes my way
When I feel your hands of grace, rest upon me
Staying desperate for you God, Staying humbled at your feet
I will lift these hands and praise, I will believe

I am yours
I am yours
All my days
Jesus I am yours

 

This new picture in the header bar is to remind everyone that Soul Survivor and Momentum conferences 2011 are coming soon!

Soul Survivor is a Youth Conference with runs every summer in Somerset and Staffordshire. I am massively excited about it this year! Who knows what Gods gonna do!

Check out this website for more info and booking!

www.soulsurvivor.com/uk/

How do i hear from God? What does Gods voice sound like? How do i know if Gods speaking to me or not?

If your anything like me, your likely to have thought about some of those questions at some point. And if you haven’t its not biggy. I would encourage you to read this with an open mind and heart. Its quite an emotive subject.

When i moved to Exeter, i got involved in a youth church called Unlimited. One of the things that we do is go out onto the Cathedral Green and offer to pray for people and to listen to God for what he wants to say about them.

Now i grew up in a church which loved and believed that God wanted to speak to them today but asking God for things right there and then? That was new to me. I was a little scared by it. I felt like i didn’t know whether the voices in my head were Gods words or just my random thoughts.

When i read the Bible, i come across loads of situations where Gods people are faced with decisions. Big decisions and little decisions and a lot of the time, they would pray and ask God to guide them there and then. And God did speak, he led Moses in the desert and Paul on the missionary journeys he took in the new testament.

Out of all of this, i started to think that maybe God did want to speak to us today. Maybe he wasn’t just proclaiming long prophecy about the future. Maybe he also wants to tell us about who we are in him and guide us in our every day decisions. Maybe, he wants to speak to me, like he did thousands of years ago in the Bible.

But how do we know when God is speaking? The simple answer is that we cant ever be 100% certain. Sometimes we will be really sure and other times we wont. Perhaps thats the way it is following God. We know that God loves to speak to us so maybe the answer is just to learn to listen. To shut out everything that is going on in our lives and open ourselves up to what God wants to say.

You know how with your close friends, they often don’t have to say anything for you to know how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking. What if it were like that with God. What if we knew him so well that just by being with him we could understand what he thinks and feels. And out of that maybe we would know what his voice sounds like too.

I pray that we would not just strive and seek to know Gods voice but that out of knowing him we would hear his voice and thoughts too.

(this is a post full of maybes’, i’m not claiming to know anything special about how to hear from God. I know that i want to hear him more. I want him to guide and inspire my everyday life)

I should say that some of the inspiration for this post came from challenging teaching by James Grier of Unlimited Youth Church

I had the pleasure of spending an unexpected hour and a half at Birmingham New Street station. What should have been a 4 1/2 hour journey ended up taking 6 hours! Bad times!

However, in that extra hour at Birmingham i started thinking about journeys. There are far too many easy and cliched analogies that i could draw, and il try to avoid them in writing this. Im sure that each of us has recently been on a journey of some kind. I travelled from Exeter, back home to Shrewsbury to see my parents new puppy! (pictures below)

Sitting on the floor on the concourse watching people rushing for the trains reminded me that each of us is on our own journey. We all started somewhere and were all heading somewhere. What happens to us is what changes us and moulds us as people. Jesus and his disciples did quite a lot of travelling. All the way through each gospel, the disciples are on the move. Maybe thats just the way Jesus did things or perhaps its because the journeys changed them.

Our faith is not a static one. Being a Christian is not a call to sit still at the feet of Jesus, its a lifelong call to follow him. To learn from him as he is on the move. God has called us on journeys with him and on those journeys we will learn about him, we will be changed by him.

My life has changed radically in the past few weeks. All part of the journey i am on. It has been painful and tough. There have been times when i would have preferred a static God where nothing would change, but thats not what he has called me to.

When Jesus called a few fisherman, he said follow me. Thats what he says to us to. Not just “follow me” as in twitter but to actually journey and change. To let God see us at our best and our worst.

Wherever you are on that journey right now, God is with you. He IS with you. He is changing you and shaping you. And he’s calling you on. Next time you take a long journey, perhaps reflect upon where God has brought you so far and allow him to speak to you about where’s next.

And finally as promised and quick pic of Holly (shes adorable)

Listening to a Pete Greig sermon from HTB recently about prayer got me thinking about traditions and how easily we begin to form and follow them. Theres certainly something about human nature that loves doing things they way they have been done before and as far as im concerned, thats no bad thing. But how do we live our lives and serve God both in the framework and appreciation of what believers before us have done and yet also innovate something new.

I cant promise to have spent years studying tradition as a social scientist but i have heard a few wise reflections recently.

Here’s a few thoughts about how we should approach tradition as radical disciples:

1. “Tradition is not wearing your grandfathers hat, its choosing to go out and buy one just like his.” – I heard that quote in a talk by Glynn Barratt of Audacious City Church and i cant quite seem to get it out of my head. Theres nothing at all wrong with building on the past ideas and movements, in fact if we didn’t we would never get anywhere. Many of the most “successful” movements and organisations have been built upon years of hard work by previous generations and to ignore that would be foolish. Yet somehow we must move onto something new and that often means doing something different. I think thats because those amazing movements like Wesley’s Methodism were born out of a vision from God and we are given a new vision for our lives. We cant just buy into the past and expect it to be what God wants to do through us today.

2. “If God moves when we are all standing on one leg, in hundreds of years time, a movement of people starts in which they believe God will ONLY move when they stand on one leg.” Pete Greig jokily used this as a warning of tradition in one of his sermon i heard online (check out the HTB Podcast) Have you ever noticed how easily we can restrict what God wants to do based on our own experience. I know that at times in my life where God has met me powerfully, the next time i prayed i expected him to do exactly the same. But as Ephesians 3:20

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,

shows although we are limited, theres nothing God cant do. We should always be surprised at the power of God and the amazing things he does in us. If we restrict our churches and our relationship with God with tradition, then couldn’t we miss something exciting that God wants to do.

3. “Getting back to the early church” Many church organisations feel strongly that the model of church found in the new testament is the way to avoid becoming traditional. If im honest, i love this approach because, the church the church in Acts was small and free to do whatever they wanted. But we have got to make sure we don’t kid ourselves about it. Aiming to be like the early church has plenty of pitfalls too and im not sure its really a way to avoid tradition. When we think about it, as soon as we develop a system and routine and then stick to it, we have created tradition. Its just that our tradition is a new tradition! Perhaps therefore, there’s no problem in having traditions and methods but we need to be willing to change them when God calls. Thats the kind of church we see in Acts and if we want to be more like them then we must be innovators and experimentalists.

4. “Living by the Spirit” – We have an opportunity to be people who both live and love the traditions handed down to us AND to live by the Holy Spirit. The fear in many of our minds is that we would get stuck in the rut of tradition and lose the excitement we once had. Jesus called us into an amazing adventure with him, where each day is a new one, and THEN he sent us his Spirit so that we could live that way forever. The Holy Spirit allows us to see the past and appreciate, he gives us visions and dreams of what God wants to do in the future AND he leads us in a living relationship with God. Perhaps the tradition of the past and the  life of the present are not so mutually exclusive?

I would love to  hear your thoughts on tradition and discipleship – comment below…

(Apologies for my use of capitals, I got a bit excited as i wrote this)

Incase you didn’t see it on Russell Howards Good News…

This is a short clip by the Topsy Foundation showing the effects of Aids drugs in reverse. Have a watch, but its quite moving!

Perhaps its a wake up call for us to realise how much can be done to reverse the effects of Aids.

Click here to support the Topsy Foundation

I stopped at ENC’s 24/7 prayer room last night for some late night worship and prayer. I’ve read a lot about 24/7 prayer and their prayer rooms which have been stirring the church all around the world for the last few year, but i’d never been able to visit one before.

What an amazing place! Its hard to describe, but there was an atmosphere of urgent spirituality. Just walking through the door, you could sense the presence of the Holy Spirit meeting with people and God pouring himself out onto his people. There was a genuine hunger to see God lifted up across the city and its residents.

I dont know what it is, but there is something about people gathering to pray. When we choose to sacrifice our time and energy and pray, God hears us and moves.

2 Chronicles 7:14 says this

¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Amen

Im sure all of us will have seen the recent international news about the rescue of 33 miners from a gold/copper mine in Chile. Incase you missed the media coverage you can find it here at BBC News – Chile Mine. Seeing those miners being brought up out of the ground after almost 2 and half months trapped 600m down a collapsed shaft was inspiring and moving. The world watched as each man reached the surface and was reunited with wives, partners and children.

Somehow as a society we were inspired by a story of people being rescued from almost certain death. And yet, if we believe that Jesus came to save us, our story is not so different…

Psalm 40 vs 2 (NIV) says this…

He lifted me out of the slimy pit,

out of the mud and mire;

he set my feet on a rock

and gave me a firm place to stand.

The Hebrew word for pit is Sheol (שְׁאוֹל). King David clearly understood what it meant to be pulled from a situation that seemed so dark and lacking hope.

The fantastic reality for us as followers of Jesus is that we have been pulled from our own Sheol. In situations where we had no hope and no chance of getting out on our own. Jesus rescued us. As you watch the footage of those miners, remember that you were rescued too!

Last night I was at the commissioning of some new youth workers for a schools project in Exeter. It’s exciting work and amazing to see the progress that team has made in introducing the hope of Jesus into local schools.

What really stuck out to me about the evening was a thought shared by one of the projects patrons. He read this verse to us.

Never flag in zeal, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. Rom. 12:11

What a challenging and inspiring verse for us as disciples of Christ. It sums up the thing which he calls us to. As we break it down, it’s meaning and purpose becomes clear. Paul wrote to inspire and uplift the believers in Rome and we need that inspiration more than ever before.

Do you remember when you first decided that you wanted to follow God? In my life, I came to faith slowly, through amazing people and events where God met me. That put in me a zeal for the new life Jesus offered me. But as I got older, I lost that. Life erodes our zeal. The ordinary and mundane things cloud up our zeal. Paul is speaking to us saying “keep your zeal alive!”.

And that’s not possible without the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Paul says be Aglow. Literally, glowing in the spirit. Living lives that are in tune with the spirit of God. We need to pray for that and desire it. Otherwise we have little or no chance of keeping our zeal for God alive.

I have met people recently who are weary from life. My housemate Andy told me that tiredness is physical and weariness is spiritual. I think he’s right. We become weary and we need to come awake in our zeal again.

As disciples we have wonderful stories of the things God has done in our lives. Lets share those stories and pray for each other that we would serve christ out of our great zeal for his mission and our live which glow with spirit.

Be blessed.