We know that being the church today is not an easy task – it never has been. It would be good if we could say to people ‘Look at the church – that’s the way God wants us to live!’ I would not be so bold. What we do as Christians does not always bring praise and glory to God. Even in the early church reported in the Acts of the Apostles there was not always agreement. Generally speaking Peter and Paul agreed to disagree, one stayed in Jerusalem while the other travelled the Roman Empire to share the message of the gospel with Jewish and Gentile communities around the Mediterranean. One place was not big enough for them both!

And so it continues. There are many expressions of Christian faith today, each of which shows something of God’s glory while also saying something equally loud about the people we are! We may want the light of God to shine through us but we also have to recognize the strength of our own characters. The hymn writer puts it ‘all of you and none of me!’ (StF.432) – but it’s a fair guess to say that what we offer is often in different proportions!

Nevertheless God uses us as we are. That is the miracle of grace. He does not expect perfection. He entrusts his work to people who get it wrong and make mistakes. And yet somehow through all this things still ‘work together for good’. (Romans 8.28) It is important from time to time to reflect on what we do and how we do it. We play a small but nonetheless significant part of how God’s purposes are fulfilled. In these days around the Ascension when we remember how Jesus’ work is finished, we make ourselves available to be used as his hands and feet, to continue the work of preaching, teaching and healing, to help the kingdom of God to come, to share his love and forgiveness in what we say and how we live. And we recognise that it is only in his strength that anything is possible and it is only through our humility that anything of real worth is achieved.