Sarah was invited to Kings as a kid back in 2002. Seventeen years later we see three generations of her family all following Jesus. What God can do through one child is amazing. A big thank you to all our incredible kids workers! You’re impacting whole families and future generations.
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Here’s a story that’s come out of our 24-7 prayer room at Hampden Park:
My husband was diagnosed with another illness on top of everything else that he’s got, which is going to affect our future a lot. And I couldn’t really see how we were going to cope with the future, with what it would bring.
So last Thursday, which was 6th September, Terri said to me “why don’t you go in the prayer room and talk to God”.
We went to the group meeting feeling very low still. Terri persuaded me to spend an hour in the prayer room. At first I said no, but then went in.
As I entered I felt a real presence of God. I sat down facing a wall and said “okay God, speak to me”. I prayed for about half an hour for family etc, then I had this picture (or vision) appear in my mind. It was a bit like a dream, but so real:
Ruben and I were walking along a path, hand in hand. A man approached us. He was quite young, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.
He said “the path ahead is very rough. It’s full of brambles, rocks and thorns. I will help you.”
He took us both by the hand and walked along the path with us. When I looked down, all our feet were bleeding. None of us had any shoes on including the young man.
Soon we came to the end of the path and a smooth road was ahead. The man let go of our hands and said “you will be okay now” and walked away. We continued on our way. I had a real feeling of joy as I sat there.
At first I didn’t understand why all our feet were bleeding, but I think it was to show that Jesus suffers with us, and he knows how we’re suffering.
Two days later during my quiet time at home the picture came back again. This time there was a difference. At the end of the walk I asked the man who he was. He said “some say I am nobody. But to you I am everybody.” Then he walked away as before.
I feel a load has been lifted from my heart. I see a future now that I didn’t before: hope and joy.
— Lynn, Hampden Park Venue
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If you’ve got a story from our 30 days of prayer, we would love to hear them! Let us know at: www.kings.church/forms/your-stories
We’re celebrating 30 years of Kings with 30 days of prayer this September. We have produced a 30 day prayer guide complete with our key events. You can pick a booklet up from each of our three venues on a Sunday, or you can download a PDF here:
Before the iPhone, SnapChat or the Internet, there was Kings! Planted in the 80s, in the age of the Rubix Cube, Ceefax and the Commodore 64, Kings Church began in Old Town, in a house, with just 18 people.
Many things have changed, but one thing hasn’t…
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Reaching young people is amazing. 2018 marks thirty years since Kings was planted. In this time a whole generation of kids and young people have grown up amongst us, left home and are influencing the world around them. In this collage we’ve captured a small snapshot of the first generation that has grown up at Kings.
We were delighted to welcome over 300 to our Autumn Kidz Inspire event at Kings during the October half term. Children, parents, grandparents & friends came along to enjoy the craft activities, games, afternoon movie and refreshments in Vivo cafe. Much messy fun was had by all!
It seems to be written into nature that when something stops growing it begins to die. But can it also be true of our Christian faith? How do we ensure that years and decades from now we are still strong in faith, still growing, still learning?
Jesus calls us to follow him 1. There’s a journey, there’s direction and there’s movement. Faith is active: we walk by the spirit 2, straining forward, pressing on towards the goal 3. To be unengaged or distracted does not leave us in a neutral zone — we are either walking towards Jesus or we are drifting away, carried by the currents of this world, the enemy and our own earthly desires 4.
Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. Matthew 24:12-13
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One of the marks of true faith is that we press on until the very end. Given its importance, how do we make sure that, as Christians, we never stop growing, never stop enduring? Is it all down to us, or is our church family and our heavenly Father involved as well?
We caught up with several members at Kings to see how continual growth in their lives has been worked out on a practical level.
I was a bit ‘in and out’ with my faith until about 2000. Before that I couldn’t really say I was a Christian; I just grew up amongst Christian people. But it was about that time that I just got into university, and had a lot going on. At that time you’re really getting your identity together — what you are really about. I realised that I was living the sort of life that could only end in destruction! So I sat down and thought “this is not the path for me, I need to get serious”.
“it shocked me to reality, let me put it that way.”
Q: So you’ve been a Christian since 2000. What would you say has caused you to grow in your faith between then and now?
I’ve had some ups and downs, and I think the biggest one was when I lost my mum in 2009. It was a big shock and very unexpected. I guess everyone would say this, but my mum was that very, very special person to me. Even when I wasn’t such a very good boy, we could always rub minds and I would always listen to her. Her death really affected me and I was like “God, you shouldn’t have let this happen”. At that point in time my faith was rock bottom.
Q: So did this ultimately spark growth in your faith?
Yeah, it shocked me to reality, let me put it that way. For about two years I didn’t know what I was. I had lost my identity at that point. I didn’t stop believing, I still knew God, but I was really upset. I wasn’t showing forth the fruit. But then I was having this conversation with my older brother who I respect so much. We were chatting about how much we missed her. I told him I didn’t know what I was about anymore, and just living every day as it came.
He said “let me put it this way. God’s made some promises about life on earth, but his main promise is about eternity. And mum hasn’t lost that. But if you’re not careful, you will lose that.” And that spurred me on.
I went home that day and prayed and asked God for forgiveness. I started living again. And there was one prayer: I asked God “never let me get to a point where I am filled. Let me always be hungry for you”. Ever since then, that’s what I’ve been all about. If you ask my wife, she’ll tell you that a deeper relationship with God is what I pray for every day. With God it’s never ending, you can’t get to the bottom of that relationship. You can just go deeper and deeper and deeper.
“Living on earth makes you think you can actually live without God. But you realise it’s just a mirage, a trick of the enemy”
Q: What do you think the key is to finishing well?
That’s a tricky one! There’s no way you can finish well without growing. Living on earth makes you think you can actually live without God. But you realise it’s just a mirage, a trick of the enemy. You have to feed on God every day.
M: On my first Newday (aged 12) I responded to the gospel with my friends and gave my life to Jesus. But when I got back from Newday, nothing really changed. We got into a cycle: you meet Jesus for one week and it’s amazing; but then you come back and nothing’s changed. And that went on for a few years until last Newday, 2016, where we did a Holy Spirit night, where you invite the Holy Spirit into your life. I was filled with so much joy and love. I instantly realised what this was all about and kept seeking God after this happened. So that changed my life.
B: A very similar story to Maddie’s. When I was 12 I gave my life to God at Newday, but like Maddie, it didn’t really change anything. At the next Newday I re-gave my life, and I think that’s when my faith started to take effect. It was a gradual process of it becoming more real. I began to share my faith with my friends and have discussions, debates, and grow in my faith.
Q: What have been the most important and significant things to helping you grow as a Christian?
M: I would definitely say joining the ID team and being a leader. Getting involved and seeing what’s going on. You talk to the kids about Jesus and I love the opportunity to share the gospel. I also loved (y)Hunger where I got to do a talk on jealousy; and doing other talks at ID have helped me want to read my Bible more.
“What has helped you grow? A: Getting involved and seeing what’s going on … I love the opportunity to share the gospel.”
B: I would say the ongoing support from the church has been a vital step in me being who I am today. We were always a bit of a pain at ID. We always caused trouble and wreaked havoc. But they never gave up, and our current leader Anne has always been there for us and a tremendous help spiritually.
“We were always a bit of a pain at ID. We always caused trouble and wreaked havoc. But they never gave up”
Having come from a Christian background, certainly the information of Christianity was with me since childhood: who Christ was, the details of God, worship, and those kinds of things. But I can remember the actual time of making a decision — I must have been in my twenties. Then I knew that I knew that I was a born again Christian.
Q: Having spent fifty to sixty years following Jesus, what has helped you the most to continually grow as a Christian?
The whole concept of reading the Word of God and communication with him through prayer. It seems to be rather a pat answer, but that’s the truth. It’s reading the word and talking to God. Those two things are the keys to my life really.
My faith has always been strong because I’ve had the ability of disciplining myself to get up early – 6am every morning – for years and years. Again, I simply enjoy spending time with God, and very often I will keep a note of what God is saying to me. So that’s been the key to having a very stable relationship.
Q: What have been your greatest struggles?
I think the greatest struggle is being independent. Thinking that you can do things by yourself when in reality you can’t. And God has to bring you to a point where he shows you that you can’t, where he says “you’re utterly dependent on me”. It’s a hard lesson to learn because you keep repeating it!
“When Christ is everything to you, he is the answer to everything. But it’s allowing him to be that.”
Q: If you could talk to yourself back in your twenties, what’s the biggest life lesson you would teach yourself?
I think I would have to go back to the whole thing of my dependence on him. At the end of the day the essence of the Christian life is looking to Jesus because he is your everything. When Christ is everything to you, he is the answer to everything. But it’s allowing him to be that. He is the author, the perfector of your faith. Keep your eyes on Jesus.
If you have questions or comments related to this article, Life Groups are a great place to discuss the Bible and share life together.
Ice creams, sunny days, slip ‘n slide, football tournaments, beautiful lakes, kids running free… Fantastic worship, challenging teaching and getting the big picture for our towns and cities, Europe and beyond. Here’s a snapshot of the Ashburnham weekend away.
Missed the weekend or missed a session? You can watch or listen to all the main talks on the New Ground website at newgroundchurches.org/media
Mum didn’t have much money on benefits with five kids. More times than I could remember we would sit around the table at dinner, with nothing on it. Mum would say grace, and then there would be a knock at the door, and someone had brought us food. No lie!
Mum had a great faith for this sort of thing. She would pray about a bill she couldn’t pay and the exact amount would get posted through our letterbox. It was just part of life.
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Seeing all these little magical things that God did for us I thought ‘he’s just so good’. When I was 14 I asked Jesus into my life, and got baptised. But I didn’t know much about the relationship side of things. I sort of thought ‘God’s just going to make me perfect now, my sins are gone’. But it’s not that easy.
I was at school in Harrow, West London. Being dyslexic I found school hard, got in lots of trouble and was put down a year. I found it difficult not having a dad around to guide me, to show me the way and how to get things done.
At 15 I was introduced to marijuana. School was hard. Half the time I was bunking, and it was just something to do.
At 16 I was smoking cannabis every day and later went on to speed, ecstasy and a bit of cocaine. I started several courses at college but dropped out, not being able to concentrate because of the drugs I was taking. At 18 we used to sell pills at Camden Palace in London making £10,000 on two nights work. But we’d be eating them like Smarties and one night I landed in hospital.
“You don’t realise when you take heroin that it grabs you and there’s no way out.”
I got married to Joanne at 21, but she didn’t realise the extent of it — how messy it was when I went clubbing. One night we came back and I was rushing off my face. My brother and his friend had some heroin, which does the opposite to ecstasy. After rushing all night at the clubs on pills they would use it to relax back down. So that was my first encounter.
Heroin is incredibly addictive. After taking it for three or four days in a row you become hooked. Your body stops making what the heroin is giving you, which is endorphins. And without them you just feel ill. Within a few months things changed, from going clubbing to sell pills to just “I need heroin, I need heroin…”
Things kept disappearing from our flat as I’d take them down Cash Converters. I got nicked a number of times for shoplifting, where I would sell items on to punters. After about a year of marriage Joanne legally separated from me. I got kicked out of the flat and lived in a shed for six months, and then slept out of my brothers old car. I did a lot of sofa surfing and went to rehab about six times. But I could never get more than a day through cold turkey.
I wasn’t a comfortable heroin addict, if that makes sense. Because I’d been baptised and seen God’s goodness, there was a real conflict and struggle within me. It was like the drugs and the addiction didn’t fit. But I had got into something I didn’t know how to get out of.
“I’d seen people overdose so it wasn’t unfamiliar. But I put it in my arm and nothing happened. Nothing at all. I should have passed out.”
You don’t realise when you take heroin that it grabs you and there’s no way out. And if you’re sleeping in a freezing shed with the rain pouring, half the time you need heroin just to help you crash out, to get you through the day.
Life got very complicated and hard. One time I got very low and decided I’d had enough. Normally you would put £10 worth of heroin in your arm, but this time I put £50 in to see what would happen. I thought ‘If I go, at least I’ll go high.’
I’d seen people overdose so it wasn’t unfamiliar. I knew this was good stuff as I’d been using it for the last few days. I knew it worked. But I put it in my arm and nothing happened. Nothing at all. I should have passed out. I know that something should have happened. I can’t explain it — and there’s been a few other occasions since where God’s just blatantly saved my life.
Because I got so desperate and was in such dire straits, the Drug and Alcohol Service in Harrow said that if I stayed off heroin for two months, and just took methadone, they would send me to Ealing Hospital where I would be medically detoxed — a very expensive treatment. So it was my one chance.
I managed to stick with it, but it took months before my body recovered. I felt like a baby, my body was so weak.
From there I went to rehab where you talk about ‘issues’. I talked about how I hadn’t had a dad to bring me up, but soon realised the extent of other people’s problems. Like backgrounds of abuse and violence — some very major stories — and you think ‘grief, I’ve got no excuse for being here’.
The question came: “so you’re a heroin addict, at the same age as your dad when he left your mum with five kids… what makes you better than him?”. And I realised history was repeating itself. I had become just like my dad.
“All through the drugs it was like I was trapped behind a pane of glass. I could see God but I couldn’t get to him.”
I knew I couldn’t go back to Harrow, because all I knew was drugs and addicts. So I packed my bags and went to work in Scotland at the Abernethy Trust, a Christian outdoor centre where my sister worked. I worked for two years on general jobs: cutting hedges, mowing lawns, that sort of thing, and then learnt to cook in the kitchens.
Every morning they would have a prayer meeting, and we would have to take it in turns to say something. So that got me closer to God and I would say that it was there that I started having a relationship with him.
When the drugs had cleared it was like God said “there you are”. All through the drugs it was like I was trapped behind a pane of glass. I could see God but I couldn’t get to him.
I stopped worrying about not having a dad around, and realised that God would be my dad instead. As soon as I made that link it transformed my life.
When you realise God’s your dad, you realise he feels just the same way as you do about your kids. Whatever they do, good or bad, you love them anyway, and you pour yourself out for them.
I was eventually reunited with Joanne, and we went on to have our two daughters and also foster other children. I’ve always loved kids, and I’ve been helped so many times that I thought ‘let’s help some others’.
When I was 14 I believe my faith was real and I was a Christian. But you’ve got to take that next step, to ask for the Holy Spirit and develop a relationship with God. That’s what changes your life and gives your faith that depth.
One of my favourite verses is Matthew 18:2-4, that we must become like little children. The people Jesus used weren’t great scientists, mathematicians or anything. They were very normal blokes and the gospel is a very simple story: Jesus died for you, for your sins to be forgiven, so you could walk with him and have new life.
Jesus is a nuisance inasmuch as he’s hard to ignore and he isn’t easy to categorise.
Call him a ‘nice man’ and you’ll read about him cutting an opponent down in a discussion or insulting someone of high standing. Call him a ‘cruel man’ and you’ll find him including outsiders and healing helpless lepers. Instead if you insist that Jesus is a normal man, with a mix of good and bad like the rest of us, you’ll overhear him making claims to divinity.
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Jesus believed that when he spoke, he spoke with the authority of God and when he acted he acted on behalf of God. He told people to forget their dead, give up on their family and follow him instead. We might call him a ‘religious nutter’, but then what about the wisdom he spoke with and the care he extended to people? The claims Jesus made and the impact his followers have had on the world are simply too big to be ignored or pushed aside.
The historical existence of Jesus is widely attested to. Not only are his life and death documented in the New Testament but non-Christian historians acknowledge his existence as well. In around 93AD the historian Josephus records for us:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.
— Book 18, chapter 3:3 of the Antiquities
No credible historian today would doubt the historic existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth. So Jesus existed in history, but what was he like?
The historic references outside of the Bible tell us almost nothing about what Jesus was like. For this kind of information we need to turn to the Bible itself.
In the Bible the New Testament begins with four books, each of which is an eye witness account of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. They record in detail some of the things Jesus did, with a special focus on his death and supposed resurrection.
Can we trust the Bible as a source of accurate information? The straightforward answer is a simple ‘yes’ and here’s why.
The New Testament stands in a category of its own among ancient documents for its reliability. We trust the authenticity of other documents written around a similar time despite having very few documents at our disposal.
Take, for instance, Julius Caesar’s recorded history documenting his battles in Gaul (modern day France). We have only 10 manuscripts documenting this, the closest to the original being 950 years after the recorded event took place. Yet with the gospels we have over 20,000 copies dating as close as 50 years after it was written (a partial document) and 270 years for a complete manuscript. We can assert with confidence that what we have in our New Testament is what was written in the first instance.
The claim of Easter Sunday, that Jesus had risen from the dead, if untrue is the most outrageous stunt and deception ever pulled on the human race. It’s become the cornerstone of faith for over 2 billion Christians alive today. Let’s consider it together for a moment.
The tomb that Jesus was buried in no longer held his body on the Sunday following his execution. So what happened? Because the precautions the authorities took to guard his tomb were so extensive, only five feasible options have ever been put forward:
1.
Fearing how Jesus’ followers might react to his death the authorities took the body and kept it for themselves. But when Jesus’ followers started telling everyone Jesus was alive, the authorities were unable to produce the body to quell the disturbance.
2.
The women who found the tomb empty went to the wrong tomb. As did everyone else, including the rich man who had recently purchased it. The original tomb was never found.
3.
Jesus was close to death but didn’t actually die. In the middle of the night he revived, rolled back the stone blocking the entrance to the tomb, over-powered the guards and then headed for the hills. Then, a while later he appeared ‘alive’ to his disciples.
4.
Grave robbers stole the body. But they left behind the only thing in the tomb of any monetary value, his clothes.
5.
The disciples stole the body. Grief stricken and not wanting to admit he was gone the disciples over-powered the guards (professional Roman soldiers), broke in to the tomb and took Jesus’ body. After which they spread the rumour that Jesus was alive and well, and the world’s true ruler.
The death and resurrection of Jesus is one of the most well-documented events in history. Because of this, these are the only options that offer any explanation; but there’s significant problems with each. There is of course one more, but it’s an option with dangerous implications. It’s an option that few of us are bold enough to entertain since it forces us to question what we’re living for. The final option of course is that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive. It’s an option that validates all of his previous claims to power. It’s an option that changes everything.
Jesus’ message was that you are loved by the creator of everything. You’re so loved in fact, that before you were even born he sent his son to die for you. We have all ‘sinned’ — there’s no shortage of evil, injustice or selfishness in the world. Jesus died on the cross to take all of the punishment we deserve. Jesus died to show you that God loves you. Jesus died so that you could be set free, released from the fear of death. He died so that you could know God as your father, and receive everlasting life.
To find out more discover The Alpha Course, chat to us on a Sunday morning, or find our online resources in the Exploring Christianity section of our website.
