Get in God's orbit!

Well we’ve started: after months of planning & praying, today we started our multi-site working as a Church. 10am at Kings City Centre, and 11am at Kings Mile Cross, AND we had the hour change to cope with!
I didn’t realise when we set the date, that our first Sunday would coincide with a couple of other notable challenging events – the Boat Race and the Australian GP.

Apart from providing me with some great afternoon viewing to relax to after a busy morning, it also made me think of how we seem to love to push ourselves to achieve things, how we seem to have an inbuilt desire to strain for something just over the horizon. Before the Boat Race there was a brief interview with Roger Bannister who famously ran the mile in less than four minutes at a time when many thought that four minutes was an unbreakable barrier. In the interview he said: “Most people just don’t know what they are capable of.” Of course that is true in many senses, good and bad. That’s why as well as experiencing exhilaration, we also experience shame. Just last week I was reading an article about that trial going on in Austria examining what a father did to his own daughter… enough said.

In God’s image, we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made; no animal or machine could conquer Everest, write a symphony or enjoy winning a race. Yet don’t we also have the capacity to mess up and do serious damage to one another? The book of Proverbs is a great guide on how to live life well (and I strongly recommend Bill Hybels book Making Life Work , £5:50 in the Kings Bookshop) and the wonderful conclusion that the writer of Proverbs returns to again and again, after all its wise instruction is this: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” . In other words, if we want to live well and live to the full measure of how we have been made, then we need to be in God’s orbit, honoring the One who made us, knows us, and without whom we continue to hurl through life in our own self-centred little orbits of self-aggrandisement , crashing into one another and disappointing ourselves.

How do we do that? By daily (in the morning, in my judgment) getting on our knees, acknowledging and enjoying God’s greatness, and committing all our amazingly impacting words and deeds to Him. It works best that way – after all, that’s how you and I were designed to operate, for His glory, not ours.

Have a great week – and thanks to all of you great people at Kings who have worked so hard to launch our second site in Mile Cross.

Goff