True Colours

We had a colourful Easter here in Pill this year. During Holy Week, as in previous years, we met together each evening for meditations on Christ's passion, led by our cell groups and the prayer room was redecorated for the season.

Each day the hall was decorated with the colour of the day. Silver for Monday, to remind us of Judas' betrayal for 30 pieces of silver, green as we reflected on Jesus' battle in the garden, purple for the kingship of Jesus and the mockery of the soldiers. On Thursday the Jam Club childred presented the gospel using different coloured flags, each one reminding them of an aspect of the gospel. Black for sin, white for purity, red for the blood of Christ. It was great to welcome their unchurched parents into the hall and remind everyone that Easter is more than chocolate and bunnies.

On Good Friday morning we considered our suffering Saviour, through the words of Isaiah, abandoned, sentenced, oppressed, afflicted and crushed for us, depicted for us by the dismantling and destruction of a red rose. It was powerful time and the singing of Man of Sorrows had to be a foretaste of heaven.
This was followed by the united Churches march of witness and in the evening the colour had to be red, as we thought about how the new covenant, is signed and sealed with the blood of Christ, written in red.

And then Easter Sunday!

The hall was a blaze of colour as we sang our hearts out, declared our joy at Christ's triumph and celebrated the fact that the the resurrection is the dawning of a new day.

Colours of day dawn into the mind

The sun has come up the night is behind

Go down to the city, into the street

And let's give the message to the people we meet.

Halleujah

God bless

Carol

Obedient to the heavenly vision

Read more Oswald Chambers which affirms what God has been saying to me.

"Thank God for the sight of all you have never yet been. The vision is not an ecstasy or a dream but a perfect understanding of what God wants, it is the divine light making manifest but calling of God. You may call the vision an emotion or a desire but it is something that absorbs you. Learn to thank God for making known his demands. You have seem what God wants you to be but what you are not yet........... God is using the anvil to bring us into the shape of the vision. The length of time it takes God to do it depends upon us.
We have not to live always in ecstasy and conscious contemplation of God but to live in reliance on what we saw in the vision when we are in the midst of actualities."


God bless

Carol

Challenging times

I read this earlier today.

"God judges us entirely by what we have seen................This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than the light." We are not judged by the light we have but by the light we have refused to accept. God holds us responsible for what we will not look at. A man is never the same after he has seen Jesus." Oswald Chambers

A few years ago I was engaged with a friend in an all night of prayer. During the early hours of the morning I had what I can only describe as a vision of the glory of God and the loveliness of holiness that was mine in Christ if I would take it. It was overwhelming beautiful and I cannot think about it or write about it without a sense of awe.

In recent days this vision has been brought back to me several times. I was reading as part of my routine Bible reading and I came across a verse in Exodus 24:9 which I had never noticed before. "Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and the seventy elders saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself."

As I read the vision came back. That "sapphire blue" is what I saw.

The reason I was able be open enough and ready enough to have a glimpse of heaven that night was because I "climbed the stair" as it were. You can only see the view from the top of a mountain if you climb it. Don't get me wrong I pray regularly but I know there is a whole level of prayer that I don't reach very often because I know it is quicker and easier to stay on the ground floor. But now I am challenged profoundly by Oswald Chambers words "God holds us responsible for what we will not look at."

The vision conveyed to me vividly the beauty of holiness. What the Holy Spirit is challenging me about is not that I didn't accept that this beauty was real but that I have not embraced what is on offer. I have tucked away the truth of it in a memory and fail to live in its light. I know what is possible but I have held back from going there.

Does this make any kind of sense?

God bless

Carol