Praising God because of me

Thank you for joining me, and I hope you have a great day. As I indicated, to think that in the life of Saul of Tarsus, there could be anything really beautiful. That may be the case with some of you here.

You feel that God really, and others also, can't appreciate that within you there could be any good thing. But when Saul was unhorsed on the Damascus Road, and also unmasked, when God looked at him and Paul looked at himself, Paul discovered that with God there was potential in his life. And he remained, to the day of his death, utterly amazed that God should have stopped him, unmasked him, and done something with him.

Now, let's listen to Paul's experience being read by one of our brothers with just a selection of personal verses scattered in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles that speak of Paul. Then Tim leads us with some songs of praise and worship before we pick up on this theme again in a moment. But Paul began to destroy the church, going from house to house.

He dragged off men and women and put them in prison. Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. So he went to the high priest and asked for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if there were any there who belonged to the church, whether man or woman, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem.

I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name. I have been crucified with Christ, and I now no longer live, but Christ lives in me and gave himself for me.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who has given me strength that he considered me faithful, appointed me to his service. Even though I was only a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.

I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. You've set your hope in me, which ties in with the theme this evening, which is the Apostle Paul in Galatians 1 and 24 says of his colleagues in Jerusalem, they praise God because of me. I guess the Apostle Paul, if you would have whispered in his ear twenty years before he wrote the letter to the Galatians, would have been absolutely amazed that he would be numbered amongst Christian people and that he would become the foremost exponent of the gospel of Jesus.

But that sort of radical transformation didn't just take place in the first century. It has been repeated, perhaps not always as dramatically, perhaps not always with such remarkable repercussions, but nonetheless every conversion is a miracle in itself. And I guess amongst all the leadership in the church here and indeed amongst all those who are committed to our family, our church family, there is evidence in each life of the grace of God.

Some of us were brought up not to be Christians. Some were brought up from a Christian family and kicked against the traces and eventually came back in the grace of God. One of our esteemed leaders, one of our elders, John Kennard, you were brought up in a Christian family.

Yes, I was, Tony. So why was it that you didn't quite follow the path of your father, Arthur Kennard? Well, it's a difficult one actually when you look back at this. I think as a child I tried very much to do what I could to please my parents.

But when we arrived in this country back in 1972, I'd been brought up over in a place called Fiji and lived a fairly sort of sheltered life over there. All of a sudden everything was new and different and I'd started my first job and I just wanted not to even try any longer to live in the shadow of my parents anymore and was going to do my own thing. How many years ago was that? Oh, that's going back about 25 years now.

So if somebody, going back to what I was saying about Paul when he was sold, if somebody had said to John Kennard minus 25 years ago, the time will come when some so-called clergyman would be interviewing you at Worthington and that you would be part of the spiritual oversight of the church. You would have had difficulty in believing that that could have been an accurate prediction. I couldn't have even imagined it or foreseen that by any means.

My lifestyle when I first arrived over in this country was just to have a good time like a little child. Even though I'd been brought up with Christianity all around me, believe it or not, I was totally ignorant of it. I just had no understanding whatsoever of really what Christianity was about.

All I had done was just to try to follow in my parents' footsteps. So you went off and did your own thing? I very much so, yes. What eventually happened to make you rethink your earlier years that something of what your dad and mum lived for might indeed have value for your life? Well, praise the Lord.

I think there was a combination of things which brought me back to my understanding of Christianity. And that was, A, my roots in which my parents had given me, which was a tremendous big advantage to me. But I didn't realize the benefit of this until I had been out.

And like, unfortunately, so many young men have gone out and tasted life for myself and then realized that I wasn't getting anywhere. Here I was, just an ignorant young adolescent at the time, doing my own thing. And quite honestly, it wasn't getting me anywhere.

And the sort of friends which I had and kept, if you could call them friends, were just there to make the most of you and to get out of you what they could. And I wasn't very particularly happy about this and wanted, in some ways, to see a change in my life take place. And I didn't quite know how to do it either at the time.

So what were God's means of retrieval? Did you suddenly find yourself in church service or was it some thought of the past that caused you to go off into the woods or something and pray to the Lord? Well, like I said, it was a combination of certain parts of my life. It was the faithful prayers of my parents and family. And there was always this pressure to get a warden, as I'm known in the family, although most of you may know me as John, back into church or to get me here at least to Sunday service.

And I'm sure many parents must experience this with their own children. And all of a sudden, as I found that my friends, my non-Christian friends, were in some ways sort of falling away, one or two had gone off and got married and one particular chap who was sort of my best friend at the time, we had had a bit of a fallout with each other. And I was finding myself almost a little bit, even at the age of about 21, 22, just a little bit sort of lonely.

And all of a sudden I woke up to the fact that there were also youngsters of my own age who were here worshipping in a church, which I thought was quite unusual at that point in my life. I just didn't realise that people of my age group, they're worshipped in a church. You came to a realisation that you too could count in the sight of God.

Did that surprise you? Yes, it did, very much so. And as I formed friendships, one very precious friendship to me was that of Simon Eden. And we became very friendly with both Simon and Anne Eden at the time.

And they all of a sudden started opening up through conversations and a chance to talk with this couple at the time about scripture. And it was all there in the back of my mind and in my memory. And it started all of a sudden no longer just being something that was boring and irrelevant to me, but something which was now starting to come to life to me and being very, very precious to me and started making sense to me in my life as well at that time.

John, I've noticed that quite frequently when we throw the Meeting Open for Prayer here, which is not an easy thing to do, not so much the throwing open of the service, but for people to participate when you've got three, four, sometimes five hundred people, quite frequently you come in. And one of the things about your prayers is that you use the personal pronouns quite a lot. Like when we had in the Bible reading the Apostle Paul saying of Jesus, he loved me, he gave himself for me.

It's very much a me-my sort of thing that you find from Paul. You find that with you when you're praying. Can you tell us a little bit about the preciousness of Jesus to you that makes you not just pray abstractly, but makes you pray personally? Yes, yes, very much so.

And in fact, just to sort of highlight this as well, are a couple of verses which were very, very appropriately given to me at my baptism, when I was baptized here in the very pool beneath us, which are verses from Psalm 139. And just to read them with a couple of verses around the context to set the context for this. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed body all the days ordained for me, were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God. How vast is the sum of them.

Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. And that, those verses have been really, really precious to me. To think that there was a God out there who had every day of my life ordained for me before I even came to be.

I just couldn't believe this thought. It's so difficult to take in. But I wanted to know how to obtain that.

And just through that relationship which I found by coming in and making the friendship with people within the church here, that I discovered that the door is there in Jesus Christ who opens up that door to this new life. Going on from there, when you became a Christian some years later, I remember talking to you about your job as a mechanic. And we discussed from time to time the possibility of you establishing your own business.

And at that stage you used to come very regularly to a meeting with us. It was basically a men's prayer meeting on a Saturday. And various things started, or seemingly so, came together in your mind.

And now you are a businessman well-known in this church. You call your business Cedar Gouge. Do you make a distinction between being a Christian and being a businessman? Or does the former affect the latter, and how? Well, I try my best to make the two slot in together.

And to bring my Christian ethics into my business as well. And that is not always easy to do. And it's not something I would claim always, 100% of the time, goes that way.

But when I look at my business and the way the Lord has led me and guided me through that, I can see that His hand has been upon so many areas of my life. And one of them which has been important to anybody who has a small business, and it's your livelihood, is something that becomes very much ingrained in your life. And the Lord has led me in many areas, difficult areas of this business of mine at times, through miraculous situations and opened up situations to me which, quite honestly, without having the security of having the Lord there to fall back on at times, I think I would have just fallen to pieces, quite honestly.

And I recognize that as God is so interested in me and my business, that I also have got an interest in serving my Lord in what I do, in my week-to-week job that I do. Is there a sort of key to your calling your garage, cedar garage, to do with that? Yes, it is. And in fact, I fell in a little bit, first of all, within the name, with another colleague within the town who is running a similar business, but we both discussed this.

And it's very much a biblically-based name, cedar, and speaking of the Cedars of the Leaven and the way the Lord has blessed and liked Cedars of the Leaven and will grow in stature and grow. And they're a tree that just cannot help but be noticed and are nourished by the Lords and by the streams, and we believe by the streams of living water. And this is a name which I have used, and I believe is a name which the Lord has blessed me through as well, and for which I am forever grateful to the Lord for this.

One of the things that will always be precious, John, as we bring this little conversation to a conclusion, one of the things that will always be precious to me in the recall of seeing your development as a Christian and as a Christian businessman, is when you got the premises more or less opposite West Worthing Station, and one Sunday afternoon, I don't know, maybe a dozen, maybe twenty or so people came along and dedicated your garage to the Lord. And on the open tarmac on the forecourt, we sang, Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. And I reckon it's probably one of the few garages in Worthing, one of the few garages in the United Kingdom where that sort of dedication was made.

And just looking back over this, it really is quite remarkable what God has done for you as an individual and as a businessman. Yes, it is. It's something which I daily want to praise the Lord for.

It's alright, there are times when you go through, it's not always, you know, it must come across and sound very easy and rosy at times. And there have been times, even since I've been in that business, where there have been some very, very sticky moments for us as well, in terms of a business. But it's so great to look back to that time of dedication, because that time of dedication came about from a time of real testing in that business and in my own personal life, from a situation which I've been brought from.

And that in itself made that so very much more real to us, that dedicating the business. And it's a point to which I can always refer back to and look back to and see the blessings of God being poured out on us in that area of our lives. And it just seems an impossibility that there is this God who's there, and he's got an interest in each one of us in our individual lives and in the things that we do day to day.

And it just amazes me that he is so interested in everything that we do. I find it so impossible to believe that, as an individual, one of billions of people are just teeming around this earth, that God has a special place for me in his heart. And to read in his word that his thoughts towards me outnumber the grains of sand, that just boggles the mind, doesn't it? So let's link in again to Paul's words.

He's writing to the Galatians, which actually was an area in a sort of county in Asia Minor, and to a group of churches who would probably each receive a copy of the letter or it would be circulated. And Paul says in the opening chapter of this epistle, on the eleventh verse, I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it.

Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. Four, and now he deals with his past. You have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.

I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But, and now he deals with the more recent past moving into the present. But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was.

But I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then he tells us about what he did as a Christian leader. And based also in here, incipient, locked into it is also his desires for the future.

Then after three days, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him. Within fifteen days I saw none of the other apostles, only James, the Lord's brother. I assure you before God that what I am writing to you is no lie.

Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only heard the report.

The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy together. And they praise God because of me. And I want to say to you on the authority of God that that twenty-fourth verse is descriptive of many of you here as far as the rest of us are concerned.

We're praising God because of you. Now, doubtless, as John illustrated and as I started off by saying, as far as Paul was concerned, he would have been flabbergasted. I mean, here is this little, according to tradition, balding, hook-nosed Jew who, by his own confession, didn't feel an ease with words as a public orator.

A man who might well have had a condition called glaucoma affecting his eyes which would have made him anything but your typical TV evangelist, let alone film star of the twentieth century. Here is this man who, moreover, was a religious bigot who decided that the best thing to do with Christians was to eliminate them. And now he has become the prime evangelist in the first century and indeed of all time.

And you ask, why? You see, not only did he have these disagreeable things in his past, not all were disagreeable, but some that I've just mentioned, particularly regarding his personal physique, not only did he have these things in his past, but he'd also got his memory. Some of you were present at our 945 live service when very often the sort of interview that was just conducted with John is part and parcel of what we try to put together to bridge that link between those who are not used to a normal style of church service. And my friend Anthony, an Irish businessman who turned to alcohol as a result of the death of his wife and through a car smash and the death of his daughters, he said this morning, one of the problems having become a Christian is that he can't forget what he did before and saw.

I mean, what he did before was far worse than any of you. I mean, he persecuted the church. The first Christian martyr, Paul was present at his execution and indeed was probably a prime mover.

I refer to Stephen. I guess that whenever Paul closed his eyes in later years, having become a Christian, he remembered not only Stephen but all those widows that he caused to be widows amongst the Christian community in Jerusalem. How much he must have regretted of the past.

Somebody wrote a poem once. I've quoted it frequently because it's a favourite of mine. Imagining Paul in days after his conversion thinking about those who went on to heaven seemingly prematurely because of his malice towards the followers of Jesus.

Saints, did I say, with your remembered faces, dear men and women whom I sought and slew, ah, when I reach the heavenly places, how will I weep with Stephen and with you. Not easy to forget the things that you did in the past of which you are ashamed. But Paul knows this, as I tell you also in the authority, under the authority of God's word, that the Lord has pressed the delete button on all the wrong that you have done in the past having confessed Jesus as your Saviour.

So, here is Paul. Here is John Kennard. Here is Tony Sargent.

Here are many, many people in Worthing Taub. And we found ourselves in a condition in life when we had no respect for who we were. Sometimes ashamed of what we have done.

And yet God in his grace brought us to himself as he brings Paul. And the first thing that Paul did when he became a Christian was he went off on his own. And under the tuition of the Holy Spirit, he found himself in Arabia, and there he studied out the word of God.

And we had testimonies of that, did we not? This morning, those of you who were present. As Anthony told us something of how he had tried as he came out of his alcoholic condition to come to grips with God's word and how much dependent he is on it day by day. Because if something wonderful is going to develop in your life, it must be through the quickening process of God's word transforming your personality.

Now, I congratulate John Kennard. Here he is as a Christian businessman. And he doesn't try to pull the wool over our eyes.

He tells us it's not easy. It's not easy to be a Christian father, is it? How many of you fathers wish that there were some pages in the diary that you could rip out because you made a mess? Or your mother's? Or even outside the family circle? Though we're Christian, we don't always get it right. Sometimes the devil comes, and he knows the Achilles heel.

He comes at the most vulnerable point in our personalities, and his timing is always superb. And he trips us, and we fall. Sometimes we loathe ourselves with almost a hatred because it's not what we wanted to do.

And in wiser moments, we wouldn't have done it. But such is the grace of God that even though sins, when they're repented of with tears, they too are erased. Alas, not from our recall, but from God's recall.

So Paul goes off to Arabia, and then returns to Damascus. The point at which he had left the city, having arrived there as a persecutor, he now comes back, and he becomes the evangelist extraordinary. Can you imagine what the reaction must have been for those early Christians when the apostle Paul started to minister the Word of God in Damascus? And he who had come more or less with a fanfare of trumpets or expecting such.

He who had come with a retinue of horses and all his colleagues from the high priests in Jerusalem. Things got so hot for Paul, he had to escape out of the city in a basket being lowered down at night. And from there, he went on in the purposes of God into the future, to Jerusalem, and eventually starting to open up the territories of paganism, preaching the gospel of Christ, establishing churches.

I mean, look, it really is quite incredible. I mean, one of the things that demonstrates the truthfulness of Christianity is almost the impossibility of the plot. I mean, not only do you get in terms of our beloved Lord's life and death and resurrection, who would have built a religion around a man who was bloodstained, whose body was broken on a cross? Who could have contrived such a thing? That on the third day he'd be raised again and the whole of man's destiny would pivot on his reaction to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.

Who would have taken a little man from an obscure Turkish city of Tarsus, a Jew living amongst the Diaspora, and brought him to Jerusalem, and with all his bigotry, nonetheless exercising patience, until that moment when Saul is unhorsed, when the mask falls off him and Paul looks at himself and hates himself and cries, What will you have me do, Lord? And the Lord reveals himself. Jesus becomes known to Paul and Paul embraces the gospel of Jesus Christ and commences his journey as a Christian into the future. And the day comes when he dashes off a letter, when he hastily puts a letter to churches in Galatia and he says, You know, fellas, you know, women, men and women who were suspicious of me, they eventually praised God because of me.

Paul never forgot that he was personally loved by God. He never forgot the enormity of his sin. That's almost the last letter he writes.

He says, I'm the chiefest of sinners. And as he writes on into the Galatian letter, he says, He loved me and gave himself for me. And what God did with Paul, what God did with John, Kennard, so God is doing with so many of you here and can do for all of you here.

He can exercise his grace in your life and incredible though it seems, bring you to a point where men and women, even though unknown to you, are praising God for what they see of his grace in your life. Let's sing as we prepare to come around the communion table. How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer's ear.

It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, and drives away his fear. Next year we shall have the author of the tune that we're going to sing this hymn to amongst us at the tab. He wrote it in honor of his girl who suffers from Down syndrome and yet has the most remarkable experience of the salvation of the Lord.

Let's stand and sing it and sing it sensitively, taking our seats at the fourth verse when we shall start to distribute the emblems and listen to the playing of the hymn after that if the emblems are not completely given throughout the whole of the church. Two, five, one. Let's stand.

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer's ear. It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, and drives away his fear.