City Church Sheffield Podcast

Abraham and Sarah saw famine and there were hard decisions to be made, but they also saw the grace and sovereignty of God. Living in God's promises doesn't make us immune to hardship, and the grace and sovereignty of God doesn't mean we are free from sin and bad choices. God's grace can come through very strange means - it sees the vulnerable and covers over all sins.

We are encouraged to exalt and elevate God, to humble ourselves by seeking his will not our own, and to pray for a renewed spirit within us.

We are called to be fishers of men, ambassadors of Christ who attract people to him by letting his light shine through us in their midst.

We need to learn how to lament. We can do this by using our own words or by using some of the lament psalms that have been given us to help us pray. We need to make a deliberate decision to turn to the Lord, bring our complaint to him, make definite clear requests, and choose to trust him.

Like Abraham, we must face the facts - the facts make us more aware of our need for God. Yet we should continue to believe God, so let's look up and be strengthened in our faith.

God delights in restoring those who have wandered away. We should be a people of real concern, who care for those wandering from the truth; a people of real discretion in confronting them; and a people of real zeal for bringing them back.

James encourages us to pray. He tells us to pray for ourselves and for one another, and the sick are to call for the elders to pray for them. We are to come to God in faith, in repentance, in honesty and in humility.

We should be trustworthy at all times, and therefore have no need to take oaths. If we feel the need to take oaths then it suggests that our word cannot be trusted otherwise.

Some of us may have been excluded for being Christians, whilst others may have experienced more intense suffering. James calls us to be patient, but he is not insensitive to suffering, nor is he telling us to be inactive. To cope with suffering, we need to learn how to lament. Our ultimate hope is the return of Jesus.

We should not put our trust or find our security in possessions. We should be rich towards God, and generous with our wealth. We should not be complicit in oppressing the poor by our shopping habits. God is not against us having money, but wants us to use wealth for his glory and his kingdom.

We are told to love one another, bear with one another and accept one another because God has first loved, accepted and forgiven us. Do we know that we are loved, accepted and forgiven by God every moment?

Because God came as both Jesus (Saviour) and Immanuel (God with us) we can know him and be saved from our sins.

Join us as we look at why, despite all the restrictions and changes, Christmas can never really be cancelled. To see the full Carol Service please go to: https://youtu.be/OwoV8BnRLRg.

God is in control, and Jesus relied totally on God. James isn't telling us not to plan ahead, but warning us against the arrogance of thinking we are lord of our own lives. If we don't know God then we can know him today. If we do know God then we can trust him today.

If we focus on other people's faults, we don't keep our eyes on what we should be doing. We shouldn't judge others because when we do, we are looking in the wrong place with a wrong attitude, we are putting ourselves above the law, and we damage church unity. We should deal with our own faults, loving others instead of judging, and remembering that it's up to God to judge.

Jeremy Simpkins and Dan Maton give us a brief introduction to what our new Hubs are all about.

We mustn't have a domesticated view of Jesus. He is exalted in heaven, and our appropriate response is one of worship and repentance. He is also enthroned, and so we should live as a community of kingdom people. And he is also active, pouring out his Spirit. We may be in Lockdown, but Heaven is still open.

Many of our desires are good, but we are looking in the wrong place to satisfy them. We need to remember to ask God. God gives us his Spirit, and we are invited to humble ourselves and draw near to God.

James is addressing people who may be experience many big changes in their lives and are not copying or responding well, so he points them to the wisdom of God - its source, which is Jesus who is the wisdom of God; its character; and its outcome. We can bless the world around us by making peace because we have listened to Jesus.

We need to change not just our actions but also our hearts, which we do by humbly accepting the word planted in us. We accept this by obeying it. True religion involves a change in the way we speak, a concern for the most vulnerable and keeping ourselves from being corrupted by the world.

There are four steps to dealing with our inner desires and temptations. We should keep our eye on the end goal; realise where the temptation comes from and where it leads; deal with our desire, not just our actions; and remember God's goodness and good gifts to us.

What do we rejoice in? Jesus talks about the deceitfulness of wealth. We shouldn't rejoice in our wealth or our lack of it, but in Christ and our position in him. Our hope is in Jesus, and we are living for him not for better jobs or better houses.

We are to respond to the trials of life by pursuing wisdom. This comes from God, who is wise beyond measure. We should be eager to pray to God, asking him for wisdom, knowing that he is eager to give it.

How do we respond to the trials of life? We are to respond with joy, not because the trials are enjoyable in themselves but because we recognise what God is doing through them. Let's allow perseverance to finish its work.

Jesus would have us recognize our king, follow our king and pray to our king.

We are reminded of the importance of being spiritually awake and alert. There has been a long wait for Jesus to return, and we need to be careful how we handle this wait - the reason for the delay is so that everybody can hear the gospel. We need to be prepared - we can't rely on the spirituality or prayerfulness of others.

Perhaps, like Nicodemus, some are watching the church service from afar. Christianity is about being born again, and Jesus reveals himself in ways we can understand. Nicodemus went on to follow Jesus, so will you?

The year 2020 is a year of drought, but the righteous are not anxious in the year of drought because their delight in the Lord in whom they trust.

Jesus was the heavenly Son of Man of Daniel 7 and yet he came to serve. not to be served. He was glorified as he was lifted upon the cross, with a thief on either side of him. James and John didn't know what they were asking for when they asked to sit on either side of him.

Salt is a preservative, and it brings out the flavour. We are meant to be different from the world, but our danger is compromise . We should be more defiant than we are. We should challenge things in the world that need challenging, even though we will experience kickback for this.

Perhaps we are meant to be experiencing the things we are experiencing. We might ask of this is the right time, but Joseph was faithful in the here and now - as a slave, as a prisoner and as a leader in Egypt. God is with us in all our circumstances.

God can use us whoever we are. Whatever the problems around us, the real problem is our sin, and God wants us to deal with this and to walk faithfully with him.

Perhaps we need a wake-up call. A church can fall asleep by lying down (assuming a low profile), getting comfy (living for pleasure), and staying still (not acting on what we hear). A church can make sure it's woken up by standing up (making it clear we're with Jesus), getting dressed (getting rid of sin) and having breakfast (being sustained by God's Word, not our own will-power). It is worth waking up because we get the opportunity to walk with Jesus and will be honoured by Jesus before the Father.

Jesus doesn't ensure that bad things don't happen but that they don't separate us from the love of God. God's plan for us is not that we don't face danger but that we depend on his grace.

We should consider supernatural generosity, and not believe the myths that having more money makes it easier to give, that I don't have the gift of generosity, that giving should always be spontaneous and that we should give without expecting something in return.

There are some things we have to wait for, but there are other we don't have to wait for. We can celebrate what God has already done. We already have total forgiveness, ongoing transformation and a new identity and relationship with God.

Being a shepherd is not glamorous or prestigious, but it's what God calls leaders to be. Jesus left his disciples an example, by washing their feet. We should submit to right authority - not unquestionable obedience to dictatorial decrees.

We are called to love one another, by which everyone will know we are Jesus' disciples. God has given gifts to each one of us, and we should use these gifts to serve one another, to the glory of God.

God's grace is secure, but we need to make sure we respond well. We must make sure we've truly received his grace, that we practice it by living it out, and that we look forward and anticipate its harvest.

We can have confidence in approaching God because he is on the throne, because Christ has opened the way, and because knows what it is like to be human. We approach God by praying, whether we feel like it or not, focusing on him, remembering that he knows best, and not worrying about the length of our prayers.

Grace teaches us to say "no" to ungodliness, but it does more than this, it works in us to help us to be more like Jesus.

Like Joseph, the church is called to be a fruitful vine, bearing fruit within our culture and amongst the nations. We may feel forgotten in Lockdown, but God has no more forgotten us than he forgot Joseph in prison. Whilst in prison, Joseph showed God's love when he noticed the sadness of his fellow prisoners, he continued to believe in the supernatural, and he continued to believe in the sovereignty of God.

We have been justified by faith. This is a done deal, and three facts follow from this: We have peace with God (not just a feeling, but reconciliation); we stand in grace (we are not just saved by grace but we live by grace); and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

On Easter Sunday, Mary, Peter and John found the stone rolled from Jesus' tomb, not so that he could get out but so that they could see he was no longer there. We should stop, look and listen, to enable us to believe. If we have lost our focus, it's time to focus again on Jesus.

The problem is that we are not basically good people who sometimes do wrong things but that we are utterly rebellious against God and deserve to die. The price paid was Jesus, who took upon himself all our sin and died on the cross. Our response is to praise God.

Peter wants to remind us of our secure position in Christ, from which we need never fall so long as we continue to trust in him. He also urges us to grow in grace, which we can do by focusing on Jesus and fixing our thoughts on him, by making a list of everything he has done in our lives and thanking him for it, by seeing suffering and hardship as an opportunity to depend on God, and by talking to God about everything on good days and bad days.

We are inseparable from Jesus, and we devote ourselves to him by devoting ourselves to the Scriptures, sharing with one another, breaking bread to remember the death of Jesus, and prayer.

The church is urged to have a unity that derives first of all from a right understanding of the cross. The cross shows us that Spiritual leadership doesn't involve being at the top of a pyramid but at the bottom. Leaders are the servants of Christ, the stewards of the mysteries of God, the scum of the earth, and father-like.

The temple, or sanctuary, is where God's presence is. Jesus is the ultimate temple of God. The church corporately is also God's temple, as are our individual bodies. Ananias and Sapphira (in Acts 5) and Simon the sorcerer (in Acts 8) are examples where people had to be dealt with harshly by God because they were in effect destroying God's temple.

Jesus is our foundation. We can build on this foundation using either stones or straw, and what we build will be tested on quality not quantity.