So as you can see, God has been doing a miraculous work through
IJM over the last 28 years, and that initial spark of hope
really is becoming a flame. And I'd love to tell you a
little bit more about IJM so that you've got a full picture
of who we are this morning as we introduce this organization to
you at Verso. So IJM International Justice
Mission is one of the world's largest anti slavery
organisations and we're currently working on 32 justice
system strengthening projects across 20 countries all over the
world. That initial spark has spread
across the entire globe now. And we exist because on our
watch there are 50 million people in slavery in our world
today. And shockingly, one in four of
these is a child below the age of 18.
And the thing that I find compelling about IJM is that not
only are we seeing one life transformed, one person brought
to safety from slavery and violence, but we're also seeing
entire justice systems transformed.
And you'll see up on screen here now that six of the 9
jurisdictions that we've seen between A50 and 86% reduction in
slavery in the communities where we've worked.
It's an extraordinary transformation that is going on.
And it seems to be that the key to this breakthrough is, is
twofold. First of all, it seems to be
that there's this tipping point that happens because of the way
that we work, where we see slavery go from a low risk, high
reward activity to a high risk, low reward activity, as we see
perpetrators held to account for some of their crimes and support
survivors through the justice system.
But also, we are a movement that is underpinned by prayer.
And so this is how we're seeing this miraculous transformation
happen around the world. One of the first ways that I was
introduced to IJM, Claire mentioned that my husband and I
are involved in leading new wine.
And through new wine, I met IJM and was invited out to Ghana as
a church leader several years ago.
And on one of the days in Ghana, the trip organisers told us that
they were taking us to see one of the slave castles that was
built in the 1600s by the Europeans.
And if I'm honest, as someone who doesn't love museums, I was
a bit like, why are they spending one of our precious
days in Ghana going to see this old museum?
What I didn't realise was that beneath, as you'll see up on the
screen, beneath these white stone washed walls, beneath the
the beautiful banqueting suites and the bedrooms, looking out to
see there is a dungeon. And in this dungeon, the the
person showing us around told us that our British ancestors would
round up natives from that area in Ghana and hold them in this
dungeon thousands at a time, in close confines in the heat, with
no sanitation, bodies decaying left on the ground.
And if this isn't shocking enough, the thing that really
got our attention, that arrested my heart that day was when the
tour guides told us that right in the middle of that castle, on
top of the dungeon, there was a church.
And the slave masters would walk over a grate in the ground which
led down to the dungeons with the smell and the sounds coming
up through this grate. And during that worship
services, they prayed, just like we've been doing of their
worship. And thanks to God, if the sounds
of suffering were too loud, they would sing a little louder.
And in that moment, I just had this realisation again, I guess
that it's possible to be around church, to pray, to worship
even, and yet to not be people who are seeking first the
Kingdom of God on this earth. To be paying attention to the
least and the lost to the most vulnerable in our world.
John Tyson, who is a pastor in New York, I heard somebody tell
me recently that he'd said to a group of UK church leaders that
we are seeking, we're not seeking revival, we're seeking
the Kingdom coming. And that's, that's what we're
about, isn't it? I know that's what you're about
here at Verso and I believe that this heart cry is what Jesus
meant when he's taught his closest friends and followers to
pray your Kingdom come, your will be done in Matthew 6.
And so this morning we're going to dig into this prayer and I'm
going to read from Matthew 6, verse 5 to 15 if you want to
follow along either on screen or on in your Bibles.
So verse 5 says, And when you pray, do not be like the
hypocrites, for they love to pray, standing in the synagogues
and on the street corners to be seen by others.
Truly I tell you, they have received their rewards in full.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to
your Father who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what
is done in secret, will reward you.
And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans so they
think they will be heard because of their many words.
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need
before you ask Him. This then, is how you should
pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed
be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it
is in heaven. Give us today Our Daily Bread
and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil
one. For if you forgive other people
when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also
forgive you. But if you do not forgive others
their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
So as you might know if you've read this passage, this teaching
on prayer is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, which
is goes from Matthew 5 through to Matthew 7.
And the Sermon on the Mount is this big chunk of teaching that
Jesus gathered his closest friends and followers to tell
them what the Kingdom of God looks like and how to live in
it. Essentially think church
weekends away. It's kind of those type of
vibes. He took his his friends up to
the top of the mountain, hence Sermon on the Mount.
And it becomes clear as you read through it that this Kingdom is
not like any other Kingdom. This is an upside down Kingdom.
He teaches that here you're blessed if you're poor in
spirits, You're blessed when you hunger and thirst for
righteousness, you're blessed when you're being insulted and
mistreated. This is not a Kingdom that the
world recognises. And if we want to understand a
little bit more about what the Kingdom of God looks like, we
can look at Jesus's wider ministry.
And I love looking at Luke 4, which is almost like Jesus
inauguration speech as he steps into public ministry and he uses
that famous passage from Isaiah 61 and he, he proclaims that the
spirit of the sovereign Lords is on him.
And, and he says that he's here to proclaim good news to the
poor, doesn't he? Freedom for the prisoners,
recovery of the site for the blind and to set the oppressed
free. That was his priority as he
stepped into his public ministry.
But I wonder if this this Kingdom mindsets can sometimes
get missed from our Western Christianity, from our churches.
I know that I can certainly do that.
I love what NT Wright, who is a theologian some of you may have
heard about, says that in Western Christianity there can
be a tendency for the theme of God's Kingdom coming on earth as
it is in heaven to be quietly lost from view.
But he's clear that the gospel's main message at the centre of it
all is about how God became king of the whole world.
The Kingdom of God is at the centre of what our faith is
about. And so the Sermon on the Mount
is central to our understanding of the Kingdom of God.
And it's no surprise to me that prayer is right at the centre.
In chapter 6, Jesus is teaching that the Kingdom of God's life
has prayer at the centre because prayer is where the
transformation happens. Prayer is where the power is.
And so prayer is where we must start because prayer
acknowledges that the power is is in the spiritual realms.
Our fight is not against flesh and blood, is it?
And so if we want to see transformation, we need to pray
for the power to change in the heavenly realms first.
And do you know, this is one of the things I love about IGN
because we really believe this and the culture that's been
created there really models having prayer right at the
centre. So our whole working rhythm is
modelled completely around prayer.
So in the morning, as a staff team of 1400 all around the
world, we have half an hour in stillness asking that God would
transform us. And then at lunchtime, we have
another half an hour coming together as teams around the
world asking that as transformed people, we would be people who
transform the world. But that God would do the work
that only he can do, because there's only so much we can do
in our own strength, isn't there?
It's God who needs to do the things like bringing down the
giant of slavery. Only he can ultimately do that.
So prayer has to be at the centre as we seek for God's
Kingdom to come on earth. Carl Bartz puts it like this to
clasp the hands in prayer. It's the beginning of an
uprising against the disorder of the world.
So I wonder when you remember first praying the Lord's Prayer
For me, I didn't grow up in church.
I didn't become a Christian to my 20s.
And so my first memory of praying the Lord's Prayer was in
a tiny little primary school room sitting alongside where the
peers probably nudging them and a bit of giggling and stuff.
And it was a lot of praying by rote and sort of chanting and
that kind of thing. I don't know what it brings back
for you, but beyond liturgy and and memorised lines, this prayer
is absolute fire. It summarises what it is to be
in relationship with our Heavenly Father, but also to
contend for a move of God, to contend for God's Kingdom to
come. So it starts by reframing how we
should relate to God. In Jewish culture, God was often
referred to as Father, but in the place of prayer he would
have been referred to as Lord. So they would have said adonai,
which was the words that they would have used.
So when Jesus teaches his followers to refer to God as
Father in the place of prayer, it was this moment of bringing
in a new kind of intimacy into that place.
I loved Lechio 365. Some of you may use that app,
and this week it actually was featuring the Lord's Prayer, and
it had this beautiful image of imagining curling up on our
Father's lap as we say these words.
I love that image, but at the same time, it combines the word
Father with reminding us that he's in heaven, that his name is
to be hallowed. And we were singing it at the
beginning, weren't we? Our God reigns above it all.
He's sovereign, He is holy. And so this duality of intimacy,
but also majesty is foundational.
As we pray your Kingdom come, your will be done.
Because here's the thing, if God is a God of intimacy, a God who
has a father's heart, who's compassionate, who loves his
children. But if he's also a God who is
holy, who is separate from sin, who longs to see his rule and
reign on the earth, it it logically means that all of his
being, all of his will, will be longing for his Kingdom to come
to be established on earth. And justice is all about what is
right and restoring the earth to what it should be.
And so it flows out of God's holiness.
So to pray for God's Kingdom to come is to pray for the things
that Jesus announced in Luke 4. Good news for the poor, freedom
for the prisoner and the oppressed.
God longs for the world to be set right, and He longs for his
followers to long for the world to be set right.
Do we long for the world to be set right?
And so he teaches his followers to centre their communication
with their loving Heavenly Father around this same heart.
Cry, Let your Kingdom come and your will be done.
So the last line that we're going to look at in the first
half of this prayer is on earth as it is in heaven.
And Tim Mackey, who is part of the Bible Project, lots of
amazing videos that you can watch online, says that the
Lord's Prayer is ultimately a prayer for the reunication of
heaven and earth. So Jesus is is teaching his
closest friends a prayer for God's presence, for God's rule
and reign to be restored on the earth, for his presence to be
here, just as it was always intended.
And we know, don't we, that one day heaven will come to earth.
God will be restored on the earth or will be made new.
Every tear will be wiped from every eye, but in the meantime,
as followers of Jesus, our job is to pray your Kingdom come on
earth as it is in heaven. If we look at history and look
at the awakenings of the Church, we see that these awakenings of
the church led to His Kingdom coming on earth, to society
being transformed, to people being healed, to nations being
changed. I loved some words from Pete
Gregg recently who said And it'll come up on screen.
The quiet revival within Wesley's heart during the First
Great Awakening in England would spark one of the greatest
awakenings the world has ever seen.
Detonating the Methodist movement, reforming British
society, averting a bloody revolution, repopulating dying
churches, mobilizing the lazy, rescuing millions from
generational cycles of poverty, catalyzing the planting of
countless new churches, and ultimately, through Wesley's
disciple Wilberforce, criminalising the slave trades
in the British Empire. From our churches being renewed
and awakened, society was transformed.
What would it look like for this awakening to lead to our world
being restored and transformed? What would you love to see?
What do you long for? And I know that you guys at
Verso are doing an incredible job through Verso care, meeting
the needs of some of the more vulnerable people in your
neighborhoods. I know that you're partnering
with Azalea, a local charity who work with survivors of
trafficking, and we're so thankful for your new
partnership with IJM. We're so thankful for churches
like yours around the country and around the world because
it's means that we can work with more local agents on the ground
to see God's Kingdom come in the ways that I've been explaining.
Your support is like a stake in the ground that says that an
awakening of the Church must. Include justice and the
Reformation of society from your local street right to the ends
of the earth. And so as we come in towards the
end, I want to tell you about one of the newest areas of work
is you step in to partnership with IGN.
It's an area that we are just stepping into and it's in the
nation of Bangladesh. And I just want to give a
trigger warning that I'm going to be speaking about sexual
exploitation. And so if this is something that
you will find hard to hear, feel so free to step out.
And I know that there'll be pastoral care around if that's
something that you would like to access.
So our office in Bangladesh has been opened over the last six
months, but we've been working there over the last few years
because we've been aware of the issue of commercial sexual
exploitation of children. Our investigators have been
working on the ground for, as I say, the last few years and what
they found has kind of blown our mind.
It's beyond what we expected. What we found is that of the
200,000 people in the commercial sexual exploitation, commercial
sexual industry in Bangladesh, we believe that 50% of those
children are children, which means that there are up to
100,000 children who are currently being exploited for
sex just in one nation. In fact, we found the
investigators my colleagues found as they went around
brothels in the 14 brothel villages that are licensed in
Bangladesh. They found in 100% of the
brothels they visited there were children who were being who are
available for sex. Let's take a moment to take in
those figures. 100,000 is about the population of Watford.
And of course, inside these figures, our siblings, our
children, our friends, each one of these 100,000 is a person
with dreams, with hobbies, with hormones.
They're just normal people like you and I.
One of the IJM team over there, someone called Marie, told us
that she chatted to a 16 year old girl and this 16 year old
girl had a four month old baby. And she discovers it in
conversations with the other women in the brothel that when
the 16 year old was servicing clients, she was hand her baby
to other women in the brothel. But if there weren't other women
to look after the baby, the baby was put under the bed while the
16 year old serviced clients. When we pray the Lord's Prayer,
we're praying for people like this 16 year old girl, but we're
also praying that the systems and the structures that have led
to her and many others being exploited would be smashed,
would be transformed and changed.
Amen. Amen.
And the great thing is that we know that change is possible
because God answers prayer. God is powerful, and we have
seen God bring miraculous transformation.
As I said at the beginning, in nine jurisdictions around the
world, we've seen up to an 86% reduction in slavery and
violence. We know that he will do it again
in Bangladesh. So light is breaking in.
But as the video said at the beginning, this is just the
beginning. And so we're so thankful Verso
for your partnership as we step into works like Bangladesh and
many others around the world. In a minute, we're going to
stand and pray the Lord's Prayer together.
But first, I'd love to give you an opportunity to individually
step into praying with us as you journey with IJM as a church.
If you look on the screen, you can see the the part of our
website. So if you go to IGMUK, you may
even want to get your phone out. Now you can go to
igmuk.org/prayer and you can sign up to be a prayer partner
with us, which means that you get an e-mail and there's an
option to also get SMS text, which gives you updates on some
of our work, like the work I've been talking about this morning,
and gives you avenues to pray. Your Kingdom come on, earth as
in heaven. So if you would like to do that,
we would love you to join the thousands already in this
country who are doing that. Should we stand and pray?
I think Claire's going to join me.
So Verso, let's pray this together.
I think there might be a slide before this one.
We know the prayer. Come on guys.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, your
Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive those who sin against, and lead us not
into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever
and ever. Amen.