Finding Joy During Lockdown

Here’s a guest post from Heather about how God can bring us joy even in the midst of trials. You can find Heather’s previous post about patience here.

Paul speaks a lot about rejoicing in trials.  We looked at some of these verses in my last blog post where I wrote down some thoughts on how God is teaching me patience through this time.

If last week could be described as thinking how to persevere in trials, then this week I have been thinking about how to go one further and actually rejoice in them. 

This last couple of weeks have probably been some of the hardest times I can remember for a while.  I have felt really low at some points and i’m not someone who generally gets low.  I am definitely more glass half full than half empty.  And it really hit me, that feeling of lethargy and lack of purpose and like I really didn’t want to do…anything. 

I think I started to feel like this a couple of weeks back when I reached the most stressful point of lockdown so far.  The kids were tetchy at the end of the Easter ‘holidays’ having hit maximum boredom.  I was struggling to know what my purpose was in all this (I am the sort of person who likes to keep busy and have a focus) and I found my self shouting more, losing my temper and being snappy with my family.  And that made me just feel even worse.  Because all of a sudden my sin was there slapping me full in the face and I just felt wretched.  It’s painful.  Really painful.

So that led to a period of what I can only describe as wallowing.  I was wallowing in my sin and feeling sorry for myself and guilty and just unable to really move past it.  And then I listened to this short video from Dave Holden who heads up the New Ground sphere of New Frontiers churches that we are involved with.  Dave was particularly addressing families about how to make the most of this season in terms of encouraging our own children in their faith.  And one of the things he spoke about was the uncovering of sin in us (our children included) and how it is this process that provides the way in for the gospel.  The whole point of the gospel, after all, is to proclaim salvation to sinners.  Jesus didn’t die so that all the perfect people could come and join his perfect people club.  He died so that sinners (that’s you, me and everyone else who has ever lived apart from Jesus!) could be reunited with God.  

Jesus said, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ – Mark 2:17.

So in order to receive the good news that Jesus died for our sins and has set us free from them to live in eternity with God, we first of all need to realise and accept that we are in fact sinners.  

And it was remembering this message that got me thinking about rejoicing in trials.  Today I went for a walk and found myself rejoicing and thanking God for allowing me to have a really rubbish couple of weeks and for allowing my sin to bubble once again to the surface.  Because if my sin doesn’t bubble to the surface now and again, then I can so easily forget my need for Jesus.  And right now, I really do need Jesus.  Because life is uncertain and challenging and death is around us staring us in the face and I need to be reminded of the hope and victory we have in him.  And so being freshly reminded that I am still a sinner who needs saving as much as the next person, I found my self praising God for allowing this rough season to happen.  Because the result is that it drives me ever deeper into Jesus.  It drives me closer to him in prayer and teaches me to rely more upon the Holy Spirit to continue his purifying work in my life, because I need him.  As the song goes, “Lord I need you, oh I need you, every hour I need you.”

And I want him to work in me, I really do.  I don’t want to be stuck in spirals of shouting and self loathing.  I want to be set free from it all.  I want to live the life that God intended me to live when he created me.  I know that’s not going to be a reality this side of eternity, but I also know that God has made it possible, through Jesus, to be set free from the grip of sin right now.  And that happens by releasing our lives into his hands – by saying, every day, ‘God I can’t do this, but you can, so take my life today and come live in me.’  

And so today I am rejoicing as I remember the incredible gift of new life and freedom from sin that I have been given in Jesus.  And I thank God that he is a good father who loves me enough to let me fall now and again, so that I learn just how much I need him and that he is right there to help me if I am willing to let him.  And I thank God that he loves me enough to remind me of this message for my parenting too and that as the reality of our sinful messy lives is revealed in this lockdown period, it is an incredible opportunity to share the grace and love of God with my children.  I want them to know the reality of sin, that they will mess up in life, but that Jesus forgives them and will heal and remake them and has a better plan for their lives.  We just to need to let him in.  

And so I find myself once again, being lifted out of the valley by my God who loves me more than I can possibly understand.  

Patience… and how to get it now!

Lockdown can be really difficult. As a weekend bonus, here’s a short article from the wonderful Heather Fellows reflecting on what God is doing in us when we find our circumstances hard.

We are living in strange times and I have got to confess that having started this lockdown process with a fairly positive mindset and feeing like I was succeeding in the transition to home-schooling mum, I have found the last couple of week much harder.  I am definitely struggling with being patient with the people around me and my attitude towards this situation in general.  And I came across this verse in Romans which really struck me.  I thought I would share it with you, as I imagine lots of us are struggling with similar feelings:

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

Romans 5:1-5

The book of Romans is a letter written by Paul to the early church in Rome.  It seems a strange thing for Paul to say that they ‘glory’ in their sufferings.  More often I complain about mine!  And it got me thinking why Paul was able to say this.  What was it about his sufferings that he was able to glory in?  

Firstly, suffering is inevitable in the world.  Jesus is recorded as saying in John 16:33 that, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”  I love that Jesus doesn’t hide that from us.  He never promised us a life that would be easy and in fact he is very upfront that we will have trouble in this world.  And Jesus reminds us here that we should take comfort in the fact that he has overcome the world – in other words, if we believe in Jesus, then we can know that there is nothing that this world has to throw at us that he has not already overcome.  There is hope, in other words, for a better future.

But what about when we are in the midst of the suffering?  Paul says that suffering produces perseverance.  The word is also translated patience.  So Paul seems to be saying here that suffering actually produces patience in us.  (Clearly I need to endure some more suffering because i don’t feel very patient yet!).  In other words, what Paul seems to be saying here is that it is only actually through struggles and suffering that we ever really learn patience.  It makes sense I guess – when life is going well and the people around us treat us well or don’t bother us we don’t need much patience.  The apostle James says something very similar in James 1:2-3.

So why is patience important?  Well Paul says that it produces ‘character’.  Character here means like the process of proving who you are.  James 1:4 gives us a bit more detail on this:

“Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

So this perseverance or patience is necessary because it is part of the process of completing us and making us mature in our faith.  So we see that learning patience is actually a really important part of the process of shaping us to be more like Jesus.

But that’s all very well, but it’s really hard!  I am finding it incredibly hard to be patient, especially with my kids, when I am with them 24/7.  Well because Jesus loves us and is so gracious and understands that we are weak willed beings, he has sent us some help.  

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians he says this:

“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  – Colossians 1:9-14

Paul is reminding the church that Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit and that when we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are strengthened with power that we might have patience.  Again and again at the moment I am reading about just how much we NEED the Holy Spirit to help us.  I think because at the moment I feel all the worst bits of my character being exposed and so I really need that supernatural power from the Holy Spirit if I am going to stand any chance of learning patience.

And so I want to pray, like Paul did, that we would all be filled with the Holy Spirit to strengthen us for the challenges we face right now, that we might learn to persevere and so that our character would be proven in Christ.

And finally, Paul said in our original passage that character produces hope.  That hope is the hope of the fulfilment of all the promises we see presented in the gospel.  The promise that Jesus died for us.  The promise that he died for all our sins.  That when we believe in him, those sins are forgiven and not only that but we are washed whiter than snow by the blood of Christ.  The promise that in Jesus we are a new creation and that we have been given the gift of eternal life to enjoy with God – not because of anything we have earned on our own merits, but because it is the free gift of a God who loves us more than we can possibly imagine.  And having been forgiven and cleaned up in Jesus, he sends us his Spirit to help us to live differently, to live as God intended his beautiful creation to live.  Not consumed by selfishness and greed anymore, but characterised, as he is, by love.

When we suffer and learn to persevere in Jesus and our faith is proven, we have hope.  We have hope because if God can change a wretched, stubborn sinner like me, then God can do anything.

I hope this blesses you today.

Finding Joy: Heather’s Story

This week I’m hosting guest posts from the wonderful Heather Fellows. Her passion is finding joy in Jesus.

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.  Pursuing joy is not selfish, but rather what God desires for us and from us. (John Piper)

 Church is a solemn, sober experience.

That’s what I thought before I became a Christian.  Church definitely wasn’t somewhere I would have expected to experience any happiness and the regular practice of any sort of religion looked to me like a lot of hard work for not much gain. I didn’t really get it.

And then I met Phil and he challenged me, not through his words but through his obvious conviction in his beliefs to start exploring the Christian faith for myself.

I remember when I first walked into a church as a student exploring faith.  I told Phil that if he was going to take me to church then it had to be one with pews and hymns and a nice building.  So instead he took me to a church with plastic chairs where there was a large worship band singing contemporary songs I didn’t know and all in a fairly grotty school building!   There were about 400 people there and it was like nothing I had every experienced.  As an aside they were mostly young adults too – I had only ever really known churches with old ladies or mums with young children.  What were all these students and young professionals doing here?

Once I got over the shock of a church experience completely alien to any I had had before, I began to notice something else, something that I now know lay at the heart of why they were there.  Joy.  I had never heard people worshipping God with such joy – there was something so emotional, so visible about the worship.  I’m not sure I really even understood the concept of worship at the time.  I have always liked to sing and in fact I sang in the village church choir from quite a young age – but that experience was just that, singing.  For me at the time there was no sense of meaning in it beyond that.  No sense of singing to anyone particularly or even understanding what I was singing or why.  It was just singing nice choral music.

But when I stood in that school hall 12 years ago listening to 400 people lift their voices and sometimes their hands too in real worship to God, I realised that I had stumbled across something different.  Something I hadn’t known even existed in the pursuit of God.  Joy.  And it was infectious.  I wanted it.  I wanted to feel like that.  I wanted to understand what it was that so filled them that they were singing their hearts out to God.  Now it also went against every British bone in my body, all that emotion, but I felt drawn by it. Drawn by this joy.  Intrigued.

And I found it.  It began in the moment I sat in my room telling Jesus I wanted to follow Him.  It was a fairly fumbled prayer – I didn’t know if I was doing it right or not and it took Phil the next day to confirm that if I had committed myself to Jesus the night before then that’s it, I was on my way!  And in the months that following when I, so desperate to get to the heart of this Jesus I was discovering in a completely new light, that I went to services in the school hall with the plastic chairs and the loud worship band not once, but twice every Sunday!  And as I listened to the teaching and learnt the songs I felt that joy begin to grow in me too.

CS Lewis once said:

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.  Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.

 Take hold of the joy that is set before you.  Infinite joy in Jesus.  But how do we get there?  Maybe you don’t feel particularly joyful today, perhaps you are yet to experience the joy of knowing Jesus, or you are struggling to rekindle a joy you once had in your faith but that seems to have been snuffed out somewhere along the way.  How do you find and experience joy in Christ?

I want to suggest there are 3 principle ways:

• Firstly the joy of salvation – the joy we experience in knowing Jesus, when we know that we are saved, loved, forgiven;
• Secondly, the joy of relationship – the joy that comes from being in God’s presence, learning to talk to Him, to worship Him, to get to know Him through the Bible.
• And thirdly, the joy of walking with Him – the joy that comes when we walk in faithful obedience to Him, serving as He calls and seeing Him work in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

In my next post I’m going to unpack each of those ways a bit further. Until then, how do you find joy in life? Or, as Phil insists on asking people, ‘how is it with your soul?’

Come back next time to think about this more.