GLORY!

Few of us will forget Revd Katie Windle’s sermon from Palm Sunday this year – unless of course you weren’t there. (Don’t let it happen again, please.) In it we had this image to get our head around: our life is a car on a journey, where is God in your car? Some great answers bubbled up all over the place. Few of us were bold enough to say that God was actually driving the car, my life is totally abandoned to God, although we perhaps all recognised the aspiration as good. Some conceded that God sits in the passenger seat, and maybe we talk to him about the scenery and let him suggest a route. Some of us confessed that God needed to shout at us from the back seat, and others came clean and said He’s in the boot except on Sundays when I get Him out for an hour or two. I liked the suggestion that God was the RAC who rescued us from the side of the road, I loved the comment that God is in my wife’s car, and ‘Jesus is my Sat Nav’ surely has potential as a kids’ praise song? And perhaps sometimes we simply turn to God in the garage forecourt and let Him buy the petrol when we’ve run out of everything.

Beneath it all is this, we diminish God. Not literally, of course; omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent aren’t words that we’re going to have a lot of impact on. But there is trap we fall into and make ourselves pretty big, our issues immense, our lives central, and God peripheral and small. Recovering perspective is a Christian discipline – otherwise known as worship. We’re reading the book of Job at our 9am Morning Prayer in the Abbey at the moment, chapter 38 comes next Tuesday; it is a great perspective-giver: ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!’ Nope.

So we ‘ascribe to the LORD the glory due to his name.’ (Ps 29:2). And we recover our humanity when we consider God and give Him God glory; and we recover community when we give God glory together. For when we look on glory we reflect it and become more glorious ourselves. P.S. Worker’s Prayer on July 24^th at 7.30pm will now simply be called GLORY! – an evening of passionate worship and fervent prayer led by Neill, Mandy & John. Join us as we meet with God.