As I sit here and write this blog the snow is on the ground and it’s almost Christmas! I love this time of year and I love the snow too. Whether you love making snow angels like me, or prefer the nice warm fire, we have a lot to enjoy and be thankful for this Christmas.

2010 has seen the start of Valley Women, with the women in the church getting together to have fun, eat great food, be waited on by our incredible guys and receive God’s amazing truth from some fabulous guest speakers. We have had great messages from Sophia Barrett, Rachel Hickson, and Kathryn Durham last week.

Over the last 12 months we have seen God do some amazing things. We have seen people find God and get stuck into church, seen lives changed and people emotionally and physically healed. We have also seen women start to understand who they are in Christ and realise they are precious and treasured.

Last week it was truly exciting to be able give £335 to the A21 Campaign to help release more girls who have been trafficked, and pass on what we know to be true in our own lives to others who need to be empowered too.

You are all amazing and God has blessed us so much with each other. I couldn’t finish the year without saying a huge thank you to the Valley Women team who have all worked so hard this year to bring us all such fantastic events. In many ways I just have to ask for something and they make it happen. I value and appreciate you all massively. A final thank you too from all the women to all the guys who have blessed us this year by hosting us, cheering us on and being our best supporters. We thank God for you all! (Phil 1:3-7)

May God bless you all this Christmas. Enjoy the celebrations and see you Christmas Day!

Michele

Recently, some of our team went to Mumbai, in India, to come alongside the work that Vision Rescue are doing. The team were out for ten days, working in some of the poorest areas of the country, travelling around slums on the Vision Rescue bus, teaching and feeding children.

“Mumbai is one of the 4 major Metropolitan cities of India with a population of 24 million people. There are 3,00,000 street children living on the streets of Mumbai. With all the help provided to these children it is estimated that only 15,000 of them receive any kind of attention and care.”

Below are some pictures from the trip, keep an eye out for more in the coming weeks!

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Today we provide another short answer for another question asked during the Q&A Series. This time the answer comes from Ps Ed Carter

Question – If heaven is perfect, how come Satan came from there and does that mean sin could enter heaven again?

Answer -

• This answer begins with a need for a few simple definitions: Sin – the attitude and actions of “I know better than God”, Heaven – the place where God is, different from our known universe, Satan – one of the chief angels that rebelled against God.
• We know that God is the creator of all things including that which is now ‘fallen’ (was created good but is now not so).
• Created beings fall, when given the choice of either following God or doing what they feel is right they have chosen what they feel is right over what God has said to do. Satan and the angels (that are now demons) where given the choice in heaven and rebelled (and as a result where thrown out of heaven), mankind was/is given the choice on Earth and rebelled. Satan and the demons choice is now fixed (can’t be changed) and when mankind dies their choices also becomes fixed.
• This means, as it stands now, no sin is in heaven or can enter it.
• Therefore the only way sin could again enter heaven is, if God created a being, which lived in heaven and which had free will to choose and chose to do it own thing not God’s.

So this is what you’ve all been waiting for – the answers to the questions we didn’t quite have time for. The answers are fairly brief and quick summaries. To fully get to grips with them, further study is necessary! So hopefully these will provide some food for thought. We’ll keep answering them over the next couple of weeks.

Question – If God is all powerful, why doesn’t he stop natural disasters?

Answer – This is a common question and one that normally leaves people feeling dissatissfied with the answer given! Firstly, we need to understand that this question is loaded and we all make assumptions when we ask it. We also look at only one side of the logical coin in figuring out God’s part in this stuff. One side of the coin is easy – this is when we talk about God being a ‘good’ God and who is all-powerful and because of this logic, we can’t reconcile the fact that we believe in a good God but bad things still happen to a lot of ‘bad’ AND ‘good’ people. The other side of the logic coin is that we are finite, God is infinite. We don’t know everything God has done in the past and we don’t know everything that God will do in the future. Bearing these two perspectives in mind, we can attempt to answer the question.

Matthew 5:44-45 (AMP) says – But I tell you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 To show that you are the children of your Father Who is in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the wicked and on the good, and makes the rain fall upon the upright and the wrongdoers [alike].

C.S. Lewis once wrote that ‘Pain is God’s megaphone to the world’. It’s impossible for us to know the causes or the true consequences of natural disasters, or even disasters closer to home. Perhaps you lost someone you love, maybe financially everything is going wrong even though you’ve applied wisdom. Sometimes stuff just happens to us and no matter how well we live or prepare or plan, bad things still happen. Pain still comes. As hard as it may seem, perhaps God uses the pain of the world to draw us to Him?

The important thing for us as Christians is to ensure that we never take a ‘God is punishing you’ stance. As far as I’m concerned, there is never ever ever ever an instance where anyone can say with %100 confidence that they are correct that God is punishing someone. If God was like that, we’d all be long dead. God, like a loving father, allows His children to experience hardships and pain to learn lessons, to drive us to seek Him and to realise that we need Jesus. Life is hard and I for one certainly wouldn’t want to do it without Jesus helping me through.

Like the verse says, good things and bad things happen to both ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’. We can’t presume to understand or know the reasons or consequences, all we really need to learn to do is to Trust and Obey.

So, we’ve reached the end of the Q&A Series, we’ve asked and answered a whole lot of questions as best as we can. Stay tuned for more content soon – we didn’t have time to answer every question but we’ll get some more answered online here.

For the time being, enjoy the videos from our special guests over the last four weeks -

Hey church,

Yesterday we had the fourth of our Five Hot Weekends. Ps Rachel Hickson was a massive blessing to us and she spoke three great messages throughout the day. You can download those messages here.

In the morning, Ps Rachel preached on ‘Enjoying a Great Life’ and in the evening ‘Making Sound Waves’. In the afternoon, the women of Ribble Valley Church gathered together for the second ever Valley Women event. Ps Michele hosted and many lives were impacted as Ps Rachel shared her heart with the women.

All in all we enjoyed a day full of God-encounters, inspiration and life-change. And get this – it was also our BIGGEST EVER SUNDAY. So, and here’s the main point -

THANK YOU!

Church is not about events, programmes or structure. It’s not even just about great worship and preaching. Church is about God and it’s about People. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for all that you do to support our church. You give faithfully of your time, finances and energy, you are committed to the cause and the vision of the house and you never cease to amaze us with your never-give-up attitude. Church wouldn’t be the same without you, in fact church wouldn’t be church without you!

So let’s look back with thankfulness and continue to look forward with passion and expectancy as we move forward and build His Church. The way of life winds upwards for the wise (Pro 15:24), so let’s commit to moving upwards and onwards in pursuit of Him.

Thanks Church,
Ed & Michele