Lets cut to the chase - are you hungry for more of God? And by hungry I mean really hungry - really really desperate? Do you wake up in the morning excited by the thought of spending time with God? Do you force yourself to stay up late so that you can pray some more? In short - are you passionate for Him?

Do you remember the days of youthful excitement and enthusiasm; when you felt like you and God were a superhero dream team that could do anything and everything together? Remember when you had dreams the size of mountains, and absolutely nothing seemed impossible; when you were going to be a history maker, a world changer?

But somewhere along the line that passion began to fade, and the dreams started to die. For a while you held on to hope, you fought to stay excited, but then life began to take its toll. After all there’s bills to pay, work to be done, people to see and TV to watch. And I don’t even have children - goodness knows how you cope when there’s clothes to wash, homework to be done, games to play and mouths to feed.

With the world around us constantly trying to get our attention, waging war against us and our time, its hard to find space for the God who created it all. Never mind trying to stay excited and passionate about the things He’s done when the next thing demanding our time needs done right this minute.

Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called
1 Timothy 6:12

I think I’m at an age now where I need to hear these words; where I need to make a stand and make the choice to not give in. It would be so easy for me to let life take over, to let how the world tells me to live my life take over, but I know I am designed for greater things. I will fight because I know that my Father loves me, and because I know what my Father wants of me.

I feel like I’m going through a moment of relearning and reawakening to the things God has for me, to the plans and dreams He has spoken over my life. His love for me has moved from being a theological but slightly unbelievable concept to a every moment of every day reality. I’m rediscovering who I am through Him and in Him. I’m fighting for more of him, I’m desperate to see more of Him, my honest desire is for more of Him. I hope I have the maturity and experience to know that more of Him is not going to look how I thought it would 10 years ago, but I still dream of His Kingdom coming, I still long for His glory to fall. Those aren’t distant unattainable concepts, they aren’t things of the past, they are the present reality of a people who seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness. They are ours for the taking.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their heart on pilgrimage
Psalm 84:5

I’m in it for the long haul. This isn’t a 1 year project, a 5 year project, or even a lifetime one.  Moves of God can take place over generations. Reawakening and rekindling a body of people takes time. I’ve set my heart on pilgrimage, trying to strike a balance between patience and expectation, trying to be faithful in the small things and the big things. Making sure I rejoice in the small victories and the big ones.

Let me give you an example, when we first moved to the Shankill spending any time with God was difficult, very very difficult. The realities of the place and the apparent lack of God’s presence made me feel like I was knocking my head off a brick wall. 3 years later, its changed - I’ve a real sense of freedom, an ease almost of spending time with Him. It took work and perseverance, but its a small but extremely significant victory in my life.

Its so easy to spend our time looking at what God isn’t doing that we don’t acknowledge and rejoice in the things He is doing. Pilgrimage means just that - marking out the milestones on our journey, reminding ourselves and reminding God of what He has done and what He said He would do. The Bible is full of people reminding God and God reminding people - He loves to tell a story, and He loves to hear our stories. Its a part of the cycle of life with Him.

I’ve taken some time recently to look back and I can honestly say I’m amazed by what has happened in the last couple of years, never mind the last five or six. God has been so faithful, so incredibly faithful.

This has turned into some confessional-biopic piece that I never intended! I’m only talking about me because I hope it resonates with you, because I hope it inspires you, because I hope it calls you on.

We need to persevere. We need to not give in or give up. We need to keep dreaming big with the full expectation that he will complete the work he begun. He is so far from finished, in fact he’s only just warming up. We need to ask for and call down the kingdom of heaven to here on earth, and everything that comes with that. We need to call for His glory. We need to believe in the impossible.

A verse that I keep coming back to (and have done for years) is Malachi 3.10:

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

Persevere.
Give Him it all.
Don’t hold back.
Don’t give in.
Give your full offering.
Give your full tithe.

He wants to open the heavens, He wants to give us everything we dream of.

And so much more.

So remind yourself of the dreams you had - whether you are living them out or whether you still hold them close. Remind God of what He said He would do. Remind yourself of what He said He would do. Believe that it can happen. Ask Him to make it happen. If you have no other words, then pray the only thing I seem to be able to pray right now:

God. We wait for You to come and show Your Glory here today.
Alleluia. Come.

Short and sweet and just for fun.

You know Moses - the guy who was told by God he wouldn’t get into the promised land.

Well - it turns out he did get there.

Don’t believe me? Read Matthew 17.

There is a story in Exodus that I find myself going back to again and again. There is just something about it that catches me and inspires me. You can find it in Exodus 33.

After 40 days in God’s presence Moses has just been given the blueprint for humanity (also known as the 10 commandments), but arrived at the bottom of the mountain to find the Israelites had decided they could make a better God out of a gold calf. It was not their finest hour.

God was angry - very angry.

The people he had chosen to be his example for the rest of the world to follow had turned away from him before they had barely taken their first steps. It was over before it had begun.

God had had enough - and wanted out: “I will send an angel before you and drive out the [tribes]. Go up into the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you...”

God being God was going to be faithful to His promises. He would still give the Israelites the land that He said would be theirs. He would send an angel to clear out the tribes living in the land, and make sure that they would settle into the land. All that He had said would happen to the Israelites would happen, but He himself would not be there.

But for Moses - this isn’t enough:

“If Your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know you are pleased with me and your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

Let me translate this for you.

Moses says “NO! That’s not good enough!”.
Seriously.

Moses has the boldness (stupidity?) to tell God that he thinks he’s got it wrong.

But more than that.

Moses tells God that even if all the promises happen, even if everything is good and wonderful in the promised land - if God isn’t there its not worth it. He doesn’t want to move, he doesn’t want to take one step unless God is right there beside him.

Moses’ relationship with God was worth far more to him than any of the promises, than any of the fame, than any of the amazing things he would get to see.

This is why I keep coming back to it. This is why inspires me.

But it doesn’t end there.

The very next thing we read is that God changes His mind.

I don’t know how that fits with your theology - but its right there. God changes His mind.

Now - if I was Moses I’d be quickstepping out of the there with a smile on my face and a bounce in my step, but somehow he isn’t done. Maybe its the elation of the moment, maybe he feels he has God on the back foot, but he has one more thing he wants to say.

“Now show me your glory”.

Huh?

Moses knows that he has not seen enough of God.

Despite all the talks they have had, despite all that God has shown him, and all that God has done through him, Moses has not seen enough.

And so he asks for more.

He’s already proved that his priorities are the right way round - that his desire for God is greater than his desire for the things of God.

So now he asks for more.

Show me your glory, your presence - allow me to look at you, to see you, to feel you. Moses is showing a hunger, a desire, a longing for a new depth of relationship with God.

Do you see now why I love this story?

This guy is one of the heroes of our faith. He has seen things we can only dream of, he has communicated with God and heard things that no one else had heard before. But he knew he needed more. He knew it wasn’t enough. There was something inside him that still longed for more of God, that longed for something deeper.

So the obvious question is - do you want more of God?

When we take a step back and look at ourselves, can we honestly say that we desire a deeper relationship with Him? If we’re really honest, maybe we want the things of God more than relationship with God himself?

For the last while I’ve been really trying to increase my desire for more of God.

It started out by recognising that I needed to - that my passion had grown thin. You could say that I needed to want to want to want more of God. So I kept telling him that I wanted more of Him - probably more for myself to hear than anything else.

I want to be able to stand before God and say I’m not going unless you go with me. I want to have the face to say show me your glory and mean it. I want to want relationship with God above anything else that the world can offer me. I want my passion for Him to be so infectious that others get caught up in it along the way - that their passion for Him is stoked. I want to be completely comfortable when I’m in His presence, and completely uncomfortable when I’m not.

The bible speaks of the generation of those who seek God’s face. I want to be one of them. And I don’t mean in some itty bitty way - I want to be fully seeking after Him, all or nothing.

I guess where I’m going with this is that if we don’t want more of God, then we’ll never get more. Until we start asking, until we start longing, we’ll be caught up in the same old same old. Hitting the same depths, never going any deeper, never getting any closer to Him, and never seeing more of Him.

As a body, as the church, we need to start hungering for him more.

Jesus said He only said what he heard from the father, and did what the father told him.

That is supposed to be our inheritance too, it is supposed to be our experience of walking with God. But that depth of relationship is beyond us unless we start desiring God above all else. We need to prioritise intimacy with our heavenly Father.

We need to find the strength of Moses, the boldness and courage that he showed.

We need to respond to God in the way that he showed us is possible.

We need to be people who dare to say: “Show me your glory”.

For the most part I can’t claim any of these thoughts to be mine, as they rely heavily on Tom Wright’s book, “What St. Paul really said” - particularly chapter 9.

Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” - Mark 2 v 14-15

I think gospel is one of those words that I think has become muddied over time, the meaning lost on us as it has been used in different ways and with different intentions.

We hear a gospel message.
We assume its just another word for “good news”.
We think its one of the first 4 books in the New Testament.
We see a gospel choir, or listen to a gospel song.
We think of it as the moment we are saved.

Lots of different meanings, but none of them close to the magnitude of what the gospel really is.

However, I think that verse from Mark expresses exactly and succinctly what the gospel is.

It is the announcement that Jesus is Lord - Lord of the world, Lord of the cosmos, Lord of the earth, of the heavens, of everything we see, everything we think and everything that might ever be.

When we start to try to get our heads around this, there can be some huge implications.

The friction between preaching the gospel and social action dissipates in an instant. Preaching the gospel is announcing Jesus as Lord, social action is bringing that Lordship into being - they are one and the same. In fact, to preach the gospel without living it out is a contradiction, just as living it without preaching is an great omission. More than this, the gospel is at its most powerful when it is presented as words with action combined.

If Jesus is Lord over all, then there is no area of human life that does not need to come under the sovereignty of Jesus, there is no area of our lives that we can hold back from being obedient to Him. We can no longer treat our faith as only a personal thing between ourselves and God - if Jesus is Lord then our lives have to align with his rule.

We often rest on the thought that we saved by faith, however Paul talks about “obedience by faith”. Faith and obedience are not opposite - they are complimentary. The word our bibles translate as faith could just as correctly be translated faithfulness. In that light, the onus shifts from not just having faith, but to being faithful; being true to what God has asked of us. When we look at it this way, we recognise that holiness and obedience are the appropriate response for those who, by grace, are in the family of God.

As we look beyond ourselves, we see that the world around us owes allegiance to Jesus, that it is out of line with His rule. We need to show the world that there is a better way of being human, a way that is characterised by self-giving love, by justice, honesty, and by breaking down divisions.

If Jesus is Lord of all, then money and materialism are not. We must remind ourselves and others that we have another King, and that we are not to give into worshipping an idol.

If Jesus is Lord of all, then sexuality and all that the modern world tells us about it is not. We can no longer allow ourselves to buy into the lies that surround us. We need to reclaim the purity and purpose of self-giving love. We need to rediscover God’s perspective on sex and relationships, not being seduced into thinking the way the world thinks, but staying true to His intentions.

I could go on applying this to other areas of life, but I won’t.

I guess what I’m getting at, is that the gospel is not an experience, the gospel is allegiance.

When we announce the Lordship of Jesus, we proclaim that, in Jesus, the one true God has once and for all dealt with sin, death, guilt and shame, and calls every man and woman to abandon the idols that hold them captive, to discover a new life, and a new way of living in Him.

It is not about making us feel warm and fuzzy. Its not something we can pick up and set down.

It is a royal announcement, and no herald in the ancient world would say, “Caesar is emperor, accept him if it suits you”.

The gospel offers a way of life that ultimately leads to self fulfillment. However, to get there, we must first go through the cross. There is no doubt that we will experience many things from a life lived in allegiance to Jesus, however the only experience that is guaranteed is that of carrying the cross.