[0:00] Well, good morning everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you to Stephen for the welcome. Thank you to Jean and to Bill for your worship and prayers this morning.
[0:13] Okay, so if you don't know me, my name is Craig Morris. Myself and Carly, Anna and Sam have come down from East Gowbride. We attend Calderwood. Good. I'm Mark's brother, Mark over at Deniston Baptist Church. We're originally from East Main's Baptist Church, so our family goes back quite a few generations in the old Baptist circles.
[0:38] So yes, please don't hold that against us. I'm only joking. It's a delight to be here. Let me pray and then there's the sermon we'll start. So let's pray.
[0:49] Father God, Lord, we thank you for this opportunity to come and worship you on your day, Lord, on the Saviour's Day.
[1:00] Father, we thank you for the church here in Bells Hill. Lord, we thank you that we can be salt and light, whatever you call us to be. And Father, I do pray that would be our reminder for this week, that we can be your hands, your feet, we can be your salt and we can be your light to those around us this morning.
[1:22] Father, give us ears to hear, give us hearts to listen to your word. And we ask this now in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So I'm just going to turn on the clicker.
[1:39] Okay, so to start us off, can I ask you a question? Think about your worst day ever. Take a moment, think it through.
[1:51] What does your worst day look like? And we're not really used to thinking like this when we're at church, especially when we're in church. If you're a church member or a regular attender, you'll know what I'm talking about when you get asked that question, how you doing?
[2:09] And when you get asked that question, how you're doing, especially in church, then you've only really got two default go-to answers. It's either good or fine.
[2:20] We don't often bear all and actually really tell it like it is, do we? So let me ask you a different question, but in the same vein.
[2:30] How have you been during lockdown? Or how have you been during the past 12 months during the pandemic?
[2:42] Think on that for a wee moment. And I wonder if the replies that you would give me would be either good or fine during the pandemic that we've been going through or during the lockdown that we're just about nearly out of now.
[2:59] So unless you've got shares or company bonds and Zoom PLC, then we probably agree with me that you haven't had a good year.
[3:12] And it hasn't been good or fine. So as we turn to our scripture this morning, you'll be glad to hear that it's okay not to be okay.
[3:23] It's alright that things are tough right now and that the past year has been anything but good or fine. Because we know that life is tough. This is our passage this morning, Lamentations 3.
[3:37] So if you have your Bibles, please turn to them. And I'll give you a couple of moments because I found it hard to find Lamentations. So you're really looking at Old Testament after Jeremiah before Ezekiel, I think it is.
[3:53] But Lamentations 3 is on the screen if you don't have your Bibles. Let me read God's Word this morning. Starting at verse 21. Lamentations 3, 21 through to 25.
[4:04] This is what the Lord of the Lord says. But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
[4:16] His mercies never come to an end. They are new each morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul.
[4:29] Therefore I will hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him. To the soul who seeks him.
[4:41] So just to give you a wee background. I used to be the youth worker down at New Presswick Baptist Church. I was there for four years. And when I was at New Presswick Baptist, they very graciously agreed that I could go on to the Corn Hill training course in Glasgow.
[4:59] Which is basically a training course which equips and teaches predominantly young men to handle God's Word correctly. And it's also open to girls as well. And people like myself, youth workers.
[5:12] And one of the best things about Corn Hill is not only do they teach you to handle God's Word correctly, but they also teach you how to set up your sermons and how to deliver them. And two pieces of information that I was told during my two years at Corn Hill have really stuck with me.
[5:29] The first piece was, if you ever get an invite, then accept it. Because nothing beats the hands-on preaching experience. So if you ever get any invites to preach, do take them.
[5:42] And then the second one is, always set up your sermons within the context. Whatever passage you're looking at, set the context within the book itself. But also set it in the big Bible picture story.
[5:55] So because this is a standalone sermon and because we're not part of a series, I'd like to thank Cal for the invite to come and preach this morning. But I'd also like to not thank him for telling me that I've got an open playbook and now I need to preach on a standalone sermon.
[6:12] So with that, I need to give you a wee bit of context and background. Here is a picture of the big Bible story, predominantly from the Old Testament. So as you can probably see from the screen, at the top left is Genesis.
[6:27] So there we go, we've got the beginning. In the beginning and in the bottom right, we've got the cross at Calvary. So we are looking in today's passage in the book of Lamentations.
[6:39] So if you can see the word exile written there, quite big, in red letters. And we are focusing just below the E. That's where we are in the timeline. So 4000 BC, we've got the Garden of Eden, working our way towards the opposite end of the timeline.
[6:58] Cast your eyes to Babylon, to the destruction of God's city, Jerusalem. 70 years, God's people were in exile.
[7:09] So let's zoom a wee bit more into the book itself. The book of Lamentations is made up of five chapters. And it's all written in a poetic style.
[7:23] We don't need to worry about the poetic style this morning. But as you can see, chapter three is right in the middle of the book. And as you can imagine, it's a book on lamentations.
[7:38] Where Jeremiah is calling out to God. And whenever you come across a lamentation, not just within the book itself, but when you find lamentation poems, particularly in the Psalms, they can be in the form of three different styles.
[7:54] It can be in the form of a protest. It can be a way of processing emotion. And it can be a place to voice confusion.
[8:06] So the book of lamentations, as I say, has five chapters with five poems within the three, sorry, within the five chapters. Poem number three stands out as a beacon of encouragement and the biggest wave of despair that God's people have ever known.
[8:23] God's people had it coming to them. They weren't living as God's people should have. And they'd been told for decades that they were violating the covenant promise, which was given to King David.
[8:39] God, being slow to anger, eventually deals justly with them. And this results in the destruction of the city. And God's people are taken captive. Jeremiah fully understands that God's people had God's righteous anger on them.
[8:57] Jeremiah fully understands that God's people had God's righteous anger on them. But he also understands that God won't fail to forget his covenant.
[9:10] His promise or his promises made both through Abraham and King David brings great hope.
[9:22] So you could sum up the book by saying it's a very important book that shows how lamenting, prayer and grief are a crucial part of the journey of faith for God's people in a broken world.
[9:37] God's judgment was the seedbed for Jeremiah's future hope. And I thank the Bible Project for almost all of that kind of context and detail.
[9:53] But this I call to mind. Cursed eyes over verse 21. But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Last week at Calderwood, John at the beginning of his sermon was telling us to think about our living faith.
[10:13] A faith that can be described as when you put all your trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and have repented of the old way of living. Someone who has a living faith grasps the reality that God's forgiveness covers all our sins.
[10:29] And John followed up that idea by getting us to think about how much we think about the relationship with Jesus and how often do we talk about our relationship with Jesus with others.
[10:44] If we love Jesus, we should be telling people about Jesus. For those of us who are here this morning that can relate to the gracious love that God has given us, then it's natural that we love him in return.
[11:02] So let's keep pushing that theme for just a little bit longer this morning. Let me ask you again, and I include myself in this. How long into a typical working day does it take you to remember, or as Jeremiah puts it, call to mind, all that God has done for you and for me?
[11:23] How long in a typical normal day does it take you to call to mind all that God has done for you? Are we in the habit of constantly remembering or calling to mind the fact that we are adopted sons and daughters of the true and living God?
[11:44] This is why I think it's so important to start our day either in prayer or with a quiet time reading God's word. Ah, but I don't know your situation.
[11:55] So you could turn to me and say, Hey Craig, you don't know my situation. You don't know what it's like in my home first thing in the morning. You might have three kids, all needing their breakfast. They all might need to get ready for school.
[12:06] You might have a dog that you need to walk. You need to get the kids off to school. You need to do the laundry. You need to get the food shopping, etc., etc., etc. You might barely have time to stop, never mind stop for a quiet time.
[12:22] Well, that might be true, and you might be able to associate with some of that picture that I just painted. But you're right, I don't know your situation. And it might be even busier than that, than what I had described.
[12:38] Let me ask you this. How quickly do you pick up your phone on a typical working day or a typical day? How quick are you to jump onto social media or to check what's happening in the latest at BBC Sports?
[12:53] Whatever your favourite website may be, how quick are you to reach to that and recall to mind those things? Don't get me wrong.
[13:07] I like social media. It's a good tool. I'm not suggesting for a moment that we delete all our social medias or we need to bin our phones in order to spend time with God.
[13:18] But we certainly need to check the balance and think about how much time we're spending not remembering God. This tweet sums up what I'm getting at.
[13:29] It was tweeted out by John Piper a couple of years ago. Let me just read it for those who might be listening to it. For those who are here this morning, you can see it on screen. One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the last day the prayerlessness was not from a lack of time.
[13:53] Jeremiah in verse 21 is showing us the importance of what we remember. Which leads us to think, actually, what is it getting us to think about?
[14:06] Cast your eyes over verse 22 and 23. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.
[14:17] They are new each morning. Great is your faithfulness. Take a moment and just let that sink in just a little bit deeper.
[14:51] Think back to my starter question. Your worst day, even in your worst day, God's mercies were right there with you from sunrise all the way through to the fallen sunrise.
[15:11] So what do God's mercies look like in a typical day? I often think how much mercy God has shown me in my daily failures as a husband, as a father, as a friend and a colleague.
[15:26] I could tell you some of the failures I've done just in this past week which should make you really question just what kind of guy am I? What kind of father I am?
[15:37] What kind of husband I am? Carly will be able to tell you in much better detail just what some of that might look like. I don't have time this morning to tell you about a prominent story that I have about God's mercy.
[15:55] But if you ever do volunteer for SU and you come onto one of the camps that I might lead then I'll give you more time and I'll tell you about a great story of God's mercy on me and it involves a removal van and renter's insurance.
[16:13] I did forget to say that I do work for SU Scotland. I'm the Glasgow regional worker and the East and Barton regional worker. I say that now because it comes into detail a bit more.
[16:25] But yes, God's mercies are great every day and it's sometimes so easy to forget about it because we can be so busy in our typical days but it's so important that we stop and remember God's mercies.
[16:41] And if you ever do, if you're ever with me on a camp then you'll probably hear about the story of God's great mercy on me evolving a rental van. David Mattis puts it better than I ever could when he speaks about our Lamentations passage this morning.
[17:02] This is what David Mattis says. Wrath is God's righteous response to evil but it's not his heart. Justice is the stem. Mercy is the flower.
[17:21] He goes on. In the very time and the very place where God's people would most be tempted to abandon hope the prophet Jeremiah points to the mercies of God never ceasing anew every day.
[17:33] Justice is the stem. Mercy is the flower. Let me take you back to verse 18 in Lamentations chapter 3. Verse 18 says this.
[17:44] So I say, My endurance has perished. So has my hope from the Lord. Just a few verses back the prophet Jeremiah has given up.
[17:56] He couldn't endure but then he remembers. He calls to mind God's love and God's mercy. How quick are we to run on our own strength and lose hope in our daily lives?
[18:13] How many of us are so used to this way of living on our own strength that it's the norm to get by on our own fumes than that we're forgetting what it's like to be relying on God's spirit to be our fuel and to rely on him each morning.
[18:30] Great is your faithfulness Lord. Jeremiah knows the Lord.
[18:41] He knows his character and he knows that he will keep his covenant promises. Cal was preaching about this just last week when he got you thinking about the great hope we have in Jesus at Easter.
[18:53] The Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob promised Abraham his people would number the stars and he promised King David his family line would produce the saviour of the world.
[19:08] Great is your faithfulness God. After 70 years God's people would have read these verses in chapter 3 and they too much like us today would be reminded of God's faithfulness.
[19:24] When we consider the past year we've gone through do we think about God's faithfulness. One of the biggest encouragements this past year at SU Scotland has been that we've been able to reach out much more through our Christmas and Easter resources and before Covid happened if you were to ask a typical national ministries worker at SU how many children or young people would you be able to reach either at Christmas or Easter the numbers we would be given across the country there's different regional workers across the country the numbers we would be given someday would be in the 10s 20s 30s 40s maybe hundreds if we are really busy.
[20:13] But something amazing happened in this past year and don't get me wrong SU of all the years that we've gone through this has been without doubt the hardest year SU has ever experienced in its history and many times as a staff organisation we have met together and we have prayed on Zoom and we have prayed prayers of lamentations but God's faithfulness is amazing God's faithfulness provided so much in this past new year we were able to provide two new school resources made for teachers both would never have seen the light of day had it not been for the pandemic the staff group that I'm involved in if you were to ask us back in 2019 and tell us that the next school year this year that we've just coming towards the end thousands of children up and down the country would be told the good news in a way that we've never ever produced before we would simply not have believed it
[21:13] I don't know if many of you are familiar with either light up Christmas or colour an Easter but they're all on the SU website and they have been a fantastic resource for our schools for our nation to tell the children and young people about God's amazing love at Christmas and Easter let me take you back to verses 21 and 24 but this I call to mind and therefore I have hope hope in verse 24 the Lord is my portion says my soul therefore I will hope in him I will hope in him going back to John Piper he sums up this passage that we have this morning as life is hard God is good Jesus who is my hope love it's
[22:37] Jesus who went to the cross in my place that I thank God for each day especially at Easter it's Jesus who I am living for and it's Jesus who when the day comes when my time here on earth ends I will see and it's Jesus who will return when the ultimate end of days will happen and occur the past three weeks during Easter I've had two songs on repeat as I've gone about my day living hope and we have a lamb we have a lamb is a new song which appears in the hope at Easter CD which we've been giving out to our friends and families across the churches at Cormorne at Billshill and at Calderwood let me just read you some of the chorus lines for we have a lamb for mistakes we can't forget and for the sins that still be set we have a lamb for our lost and lonely hearts for our gnarled and tangled paths we have a shepherd for our treks through burning sands to our home and promised lands this hope till all is done our
[23:56] God three in one we sing worthy worthy worthy is the lamb who was slain for the world royal arms unfurred we sing glory glory to the Christ your cross our fountain of life and as I wrap things up let me just share with you lamb shepherd king we have Jesus we have our God three in one if you don't know Jesus as your saviour who was slain slain like a lamb or if you don't know Jesus who can guide you through the difficulties of life like no other one can or like no other shepherd could if you don't know Jesus as king of your life who would gladly you would serve each day then I would really encourage you to speak to somebody this morning speak to somebody whoever it is that you're here with speak with some of the church leaders speak to
[25:10] Cal they would love to chat to you more about Jesus our hope and the faithfulness of his love that we hold on to even during the most difficult of times even during the pandemic that we've gone through and before I pass back to Jean let me pray Jean will come up and we've got another song and then I will give the benediction let's pray yeah father god lord we thank you so much father for who you are lord you are our lamb our shepherd and our king and father father thank you that we are in relationship with you and that allows us to be so real with you and father you want us to be real with you and lord we know in times of difficulty that we can cry out to you often in despair so father help us to do that when we know that things are tough but lord we thank you for your goodness we thank you for your love and we thank you for your son jesus christ lord we thank you that jesus went to the cross to die in our place and lord we thank you that jesus is alive we thank you that we have your holy spirit with us each day guiding us as we go father help us to share this good news with those around us and father help us not to give up hope even in these hardest of days and we ask this now in jesus name amen father god lord your word says rejoice your word tells us to comfort one another agree with one another live in peace father we thank you that we have our hope in you and may the grace of the lord jesus christ and the love of god and the fellowship of the holy spirit be with us all today this week and god willing as we meet again we pray this now in jesus name amen