A testing week!

Sermon from Sunday

Is God a habit?
I continue to ponder on this question…


Do we turn to God at certain times in our lives simply out of habit and “addiction”? Are some people more preconditioned ?

This week we had someone distressed in church who lit all the candles, said prayers, smashed a few things and left. We have the place open for people to express their feelings and this person went wild,(like we all might do from time to time) we leave the place open... so we are vulnerable to abuse. Being open is exactly that.... vulnerable.

Do we have a particular image of God which suits us, which is perhaps different from another persons?

Freud wrote a book “The future of an illusion” which my friend Martin sent to me to read a while ago. I do not recommend it! He thinks basically that Religion (ie God) is fairly pointless and is explained as something to do with how we are preconditioned through our distant relationships with Father figures down the ages, and in our own lives.

I am sure we must not be afraid of such difficult and challenging questions. However such questions come to us, we must realise that God has been challenged since day one. You and I might feel rocked and pushed but personally I think there is still something to hold on to, even if we cannot so easily sometimes explain it, for good or ill.


The challenge to God is as old as the trees… well almost!

“We can eat everything except…… or we will die”

“No you will not…. God got that wrong.

The Bible has many examples where “God says one thing” and the people do another… indeed this is almost what the whole bible is about.

The New Testament opens its pages with the new “Word” and still we find the people calling out against it when it doesn’t appear that the message was what the people really wanted.

“Did you think I came to bring Peace?” Are we mature enough to be able to accept the message which God really has for the world.

I heard someone saying this week, “you can go so far but there must be limits…..” Jesus said we must forgive .

I have found it very difficult this week to say the Lords Prayer because of this question of forgiveness.

Jesus also said we must go out of our way to help people in distress, but how easy is it to hedge our response to this? (plenty of excuses not to.)

The presence of God in our midst continue to challenge us, even you and I who actually believe “Faith” and belief and Love and God are significant to us.

Perhaps we should not be so scathing on people like Richard Dawkins (who was apparently on TV again this week) and Sigmund Freud?

Am I a God near by, and not a God far off? Says the Lord. Who can hide in secret places? So asks Jeremiah in Today’s reading. The people struggled with the thought of God being still close to them when they were far from home.

In the Psalms of the exile they asked each other “how can we sing the Lords Song in a strange Land?”

The people of God had got so used to the thought that God dwelt with them in their Land that when the Land was far away they began to wonder if God was far away too.

God and the Land went together. (do we think the same with God and the Church? Or even God and the church building?)

Gradually their habit of thinking of God in these ways had to be challenged and changed.

The epistle to the Hebrews gives a brief history of how faith has changed the way of believing and living, and concludes for us that since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses we must let go of the things to which we cling and which cling to us and hold us back.

We are urged to run with perseverance.

Today we still do challenge God and God I am sure challenges us (I know he challenged me and I equally know I sometimes try to hide in my secret places)

I also believe that any relationship with God is precisely that “a relationship” and this has to be lived out in a day to day living. The witness of Faith down the ages will I believe always challenge and convert too.