Harvest is the opportunity for us to stop and realise just how good God is to us and to give thanks. That God is with us, that we have indeed tasted that God is good, but maybe we just need to remember how good that taste is.
As we celebrate harvest today, certainly we acknowledge the goodness of God and the faithfulness of God because God is good and faithful. We also acknowledge the reality of the world in which we live. It is hard, it is painful, it is worrying. Part of what it is to celebrate the goodness of God is to throw ourselves on that goodness by confessing that all of this pain stems from the fact we are sinful.
When we read stories like Peter and John healing the man at the temple gate, the question I’m always left with is, where has our confidence in God gone? Why is it we read these stories in scripture, but we don’t see them happening or hear them being talked about in our churches today? Why do we not have the same confidence that Peter and John displayed when they walked up to this crippled man and said, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.’
https://youtu.be/UGsJ8wJ_YV4 https://www.portstewartpresbyterian.org/prayer-diary-8/
If we waited for the Spirit today as the disciples did, would the tongues we speak in make us more relevant and understandable to our community? Surely as we learn to wait on God in preparation for being his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, this is what we should be asking God to do for us, that we would be understandable.
If the church calls us into service through the guidance of the spirit and by the authority of God then we are not called to volunteer (A volunteer is someone who gives themselves to something without expectation, it is voluntary, our choice.) If the church has the authority of God and acts under the guidance of the Spirit, then we are not being asked to volunteer but commanded to serve
Instead of worrying about what tomorrow will bring or what the future will be, what the church will look like, or when Christ will return, we have been charged with witnessing to the goodness and the gospel of Jesus Christ. That witnessing begins here in these pews, our Jerusalem. We are to remind one another, teach one another, point one another to Jesus, the cross. We are to remind one another that our hope not just for the future, but for today lies in Christ alone.
The sufficiency of God’s grace that comes with our unanswered prayers is the way in which our situations, grief, illness, limited capacity of any kind – the unlikeness of the role that has been thrust upon us, or the feeling of being out of our depth in the situation we find ourselves. The sufficiency of God’s grace is that he enables the gospel to be preached, talked about despite who we are or what we are.