For July and August we will be meeting in person every Sunday and we will be streaming a service on The Point YouTube channel every weekend. For those who cannot join us in-person, there will be worship, teaching, testimony and prayer every Sunday. And we hope that those who can attend the live in-person gatherings will also enjoy the summer YouTube series.
The Covid-19 Pandemic has been a huge challenge for every nation on the planet. Governments have been trying everything possible to control it and to keep people safe. It has had a massive effect in every area of our lives. Some mistakes have been made, some lessons have been learned, some have been ignored, and many more challenges still lie ahead. But what is God saying through it all?
So many people have questioned God because of this time of suffering, and that is completely understandable, many people have lost so much. But we need to get a completely different perspective. Rather than blame God and pull away from Him, God is calling us to draw near. We need Him more than ever. The Pandemic is no surprise to our loving Heavenly Father. Jesus is still on the throne and the Holy Spirit is working all things for our good. Where is God in the midst of it all?
God wants to speak to us through this. He wants us to learn some really important lessons. He wants us to get to know Him better, to become more dependent on Him. At times in the last 16 months it has felt like we have been so focussed on following guidelines and washing our hands, that maybe we have forgotten that we serve the King of Kings, the Sovereign Lord, who is high above every power and authority. He wants to reveal some profound truths through this time of trial, and to grow and “prove” our faith. It has been a time of great suffering, but just as 1 Peter 1.6-7 declares:
In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.
We are taking 8 weeks through July and August to ask questions like these:
How can we begin to make sense of the pandemic?
What is God saying to us through this time of trial?
How does God want to test and “prove the genuineness of our faith”?
This will be the focus of our summer teaching series. Some special guests (like Glen Scrivener, Jim Partridge, Julie Cameron-Hall and Sam Leighton), and a few of our regular preachers, will be unpacking these questions for us. Some will be sharing personal testimony of their own “Covid journey”, others will be asking how God has used plagues and disasters to refine His people through the Bible and what this means for us today.
It is sure to be a highly relevant and real series for each one of us – we pray that we may receive all that the Lord has for us as we earnestly seek Him together in this season.