Sunday Service 26th October

Speaking to God

26/10/25

Call to worship

Hymn 143: Who put the colours in the rainbow

Time for all

Hymn 772: In the Lord I’ll be ever thankful (x3)

Reading:  Job 38: 1-15 & 40:1-5 John

Prayer

Hymn 124: Praise to the Lord             

Sermon

Prayer

Hymn 115: Love is the touch of intangible joy (tune Be thou my vision)

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 26^th of October.

Speaking to God, or trying to speak to God can be frustrating, how should we speak to God?

What is God expecting from us, and what should we expect from God?

There is the feeling that getting that kind of thing wrong might be a bad thing, but how do we get it right?

We will look at that after John gives us our reading and prayer for today.

Sermon

I know talking to God can be difficult.

And we have all kinds of filters and baggage when we talk to other human beings that get in the way of communicating with other human beings, let alone talking to God.

I remember once trying to ask this girl out on a date.

It should have been very simple; I go up to the girl and say, ‘Would you like to go out at some time?’

But I had so much baggage.

I was painfully shy.

I was over thinking it; I spent days going through different versions of what I should say.

And in the end I just froze.

And that is something simple.

So imagine talking to God, the creator of the universe, the one who knows all things.

It doesn’t help that the example that they have given us is this one today.

Where God seems to be saying to Job, ‘Who do you think you are?’

If we start to think like that who are any of us to speak to God?

It would be very easy for me to say that Job has got the talking to God thing wrong;

we should therefore only talk to God with honour and respect and give him the dignity that he deserves.

Maybe we should sprinkle in some thee’s and thou’s in the prayer; we should tell God how wonderful he is at all times, because he is wonderful.

And I am not too sure God would like that.

I suspect that God’s ego is a bit more robust than we think it is.

I think the problem about a sermon about talking to God is that it is a bit like me trying to give a sermon on talking to a wife.

As soon as I say the words, ‘This is the way you should talk to your wife...’

You get various reactions...

You get 99% of the women already offended and you haven’t even said anything.

You get stupid men thinking to themselves, ‘At last I will know how to talk to me wife.’

And you will get very wise men thinking to themselves, ‘This guy’s an idiot if he thinks he knows how to talk to any woman.’

I play a friend at squash three times a week.

Or at least that is what I tell Roseanna, and to be fair that is what John tells his wife Lorraine.

The truth is that we play five minutes of squash and the rest of the time we moan about our wives.

Invariably every conversation finishes with the sentence, ‘No matter how long I am married to her I will never understand the way my wife’s brain works.’

Well that’s the way John finishes his conversation, I finish the conversation with, ‘I think Roseanna is wonderful and anything she thinks is right.’

I love the book of Job. It is a fascinating parable of how we deal with problems in our life.

It gives some reasons for why evil might exist in the world and pushes those arguments to the extreme to confront us with how cold and unfeeling the theory of evil may be to those suffering from evil.

It forces us to see that in the midst of evil the wrong question to ask is, ‘Why is this happening?’

And the right question to ask is, ‘Who is there to stand with me as I face this suffering?

Unfortunately you have to go through the 90% of the chapters that argue about why the evil exists, 90% of looking at the WHY question, before you realise that we should be asking the WHO question, who is going to stand with me as I face this evil.

And here’s the thing.

When Job finally gets to talk to God, Job still wants to ask the WHY question.

‘Why has this happened to me?

What did I do to deserve this?’

Now God knows that answering the why question isn’t going to bring any comfort to Job.

Answering the why question isn’t going bring back his children that have died.

God could give a thesis on the reason for suffering and pain,

on how the existence of evil is proof of the existence of good, that without the sun there can never be shadow,

or that evil isn’t real, it is a mental construction that we create to try to make sense of that which could ever make sense.

God could have given Job all of that...and none of it would have brought comfort or healing.

For healing and comfort Job needed to face the WHO question,

who is with me in my suffering,

who will help me through my suffering,

who will comfort me in my suffering,

who will heal me from my suffering?

But Job isn’t there yet.

He is still stuck with the WHY questions...

Maybe it’s his pride: he wants to prove to God that he didn’t deserve the suffering.

Maybe it’s his anger: he is furious at the injustice that has taken place.

Maybe it’s his grief: he wants others to know how much he is in pain,

he maybe feels his pain will define him from that moment on,

maybe he wants others to feel the same pain that he feels.

The truth is Job is stuck.

Unfortunately his friend’s only solution is,

‘Job, face the wrong you have done and then you can move on.

Your wrong has created a barrier between God and yourself, seek forgiveness for your wrong and that barrier disappears and God can help you.’

When Job tries to say he hasn’t done anything wrong, well certainly nothing wrong enough to deserve everything that has happened to him, his friends then say, ‘Well there is the wrong, your arrogance.’

And because Job has gotten into this argument mindset, he has been arguing for 36 odd chapters, when he wants to talk to God he is still arguing away.

So God faces him as he is, basically God says, ‘Seriously, you want to argue this out...well fine, let’s get it out your system.’

The joy of this passage is that it tells us that we don’t need to work out how to talk to God.

God talks to us in whatever way we want to talk.

But he doesn’t leave us there; he leads us to where we need to be.

In Job’s case, God asks Job what arguments he wants to give, and then after Job realises that is a waste of time Job realises that just having God there to help him is actually what he needs...in fact it is actually what he wants...and with that Job can start to move on with his life.

Earlier in the Bible we see this principle with Jacob who cheated his brother and is returning home decades later. Jacob wants God’s help, but he also wants it on his terms. I mentioned this a few weeks ago.

He asks for a prayer of protection, which God is happy to give. And with that Jacob should have risked speaking to his brother to sort it out.

But Jacob doesn’t want to take risks...he wants guarantees.

So he sends a bribe across the river to supplicate his brother, but just in case that doesn’t work he sends his wives and children across...the idea being that if his brother starts to slaughter them, their screams will give him enough warning to run away.

Jacob literally wants to force God’s hand.

So God says, ‘Well if you want a fight, then I will give you a fight.’

And an angel, or God, the Bible isn’t very clear on that, wrestles with Jacob.

God even let’s Jacob win, so that he feels he has guaranteed his safety, because Jacob is the type of guy that needs that assurance.

But God is smarter than Jacob and gives Jacob what he needs, rather than what he wants.

Because in the fight Jacob’s hip gets dislocated, which means he can’t run away from his brother, he has to face him.

And when he faces him, because he has no choice, he realises that his brother forgave him years ago, he never had anything to fear.

So here are my two bits of learning for today.

If you want to talk to God, then talk to God.

If you want to use thee’s and thou’s then use thee’s and thou’s.

If you want to sit in front of an empty chair and just chat as if you are old friends then do that.

If you are angry with God about anything then shout and scream at him.

If you just want to say thank you, then just say thank you.

God wants to communicate,

he doesn’t care about the how we communicate or the why we communicate,

for that matter he doesn’t care where we communicate or when we communicate.

He will always start off where we want to start off.

Here’s is my other bit of learning...

If you want to know how to talk to your wife, you need to find another minister for that.

All I know is that Roseanna is wonderful and anything she thinks is right.

Let us pray

Heavenly Father

The trouble with your written word, is that it is written, we can’t tell the tone

So when you said to Job ‘Were you there when I made the world?’

We can’t tell how you said it.

Was it a booming angry voice to scare Job into submission and reset what was important to him.

Was it said with sarcasm, so that Job could realise that he was so caught up in his pain that he couldn’t move forward.

Was it said with sorrow, that from the moment that the world was made you realised that free will also meant that suffering was unavoidable, that it was what we did with it that mattered.

We will never know.

But we do know that however you talked to Job, it changed him.

That he felt seen, felt heard, felt assurance that things wouldn’t stay the same.

Somehow what you said to him, and the way you said it, eventually got through to him

Forgive us.

For there is that need within us to feel that we are always in control, that we always have  power over things, especially our own destiny.

And when we feel that assurance slipping we then frantically try to get it back,

by trying to  understand all the workings,

that way we think we can get control again and fix things.

Maybe we can’t fix things, maybe we are not meant to fix things, maybe we are supposed to trust that with you we can make a difference for the better.

Create some small good for today.

Show some small piece of humanity.

Remind us that sometimes your agenda is not the same as ours.

We may want a peaceful, quiet life; you may want us to have life in all its fullness.

So help us not to be afraid when you provoke us, or challenge us,

instead remind us that we are always loved.

In fact, in this imperfect world, maybe you are shaping us so that we can be the change that the world that is needed.

We can be the blessing that others may need.

If that is the case, then help us to listen.

Amen