grace

The Leadership Team are away this weekend. Well, Friday evening through to Saturday afternoon.

So there's quite a bit of preparation to be done for that. And the week is running out on me rather fast!

A bit like life itself.

A couple came in this morning and I stopped to chat with them.

A lovely couple, who've given so much down the years. But now, like so many their age, they're more and more dependent on the help that others give.

We chatted a bit about that. They spoke of the way they were conscious of losing both their dignity and liberty.

Old age, with all the infirmity old age entails, old age, I suggested, is God's final lesson in grace. An utter and total dependence on him for it all.

He does everything. Absolutely everything.

Our abilities and our energies, our efforts and our labours, our faith and our hope and our love, and our everything else - none of that's ever the reason God does what he does in our lives.

He does it all himself. We get what we're given by God, the glory of heaven itself, simply and purely because he chooses to act in that way.

Learning that lesson may well see us losing both our dignity and our liberty. But learning the lesson is a truly, wholly liberating thing.

It isn't dependent on me.

Not at all.

Which is just as well! Because when it comes to preparing this Leadership Team's time away, I'm stepping right into the dark.

It's not a thing I've done before. Taking thirteen or fourteen folk away with a view to their hearing the word of the Lord and discerning his will for our life.

A great idea! A wonderful notion!

But, practically speaking, how on earth do you bring it about?

In four short sessions can we really get clear what it is that the Lord is directing our living towards?

Grace. God does it all.

Grace. God takes the weak things of this world, even the things that are not - and confounds the strong. God takes an inexperienced guy like me, who's not done this sort of thing before in his life - and effects what he's purposed to do.

A friend was in today. A man who knows far more about such leadership than I have ever known.

I saw that as a providence of God. A token of his hand upon our lives.

I was chatting away with this man about the time we'll spend away, explaining what it was I hoped to see and asking how he'd use the time himself.

It was rather reassuring to discover that he'd seek to go about things in the sort of way I'd thought.

But I come back always to that final lesson in grace. God does it all.

It won't ever happen unless God does it himself. We won't ever hear what he's saying to us, unless the Lord speaks and unless he opens our ears. We won't ever see what he's doing, unless and until he opens our eyes to see. We won't ever know his direction for us, unless he makes it all clear.

That's grace. God must do it all.

Pray with me that he will!