Life in the Spirit and Salvation

A testimony given to the Life in the Spirit seminar organised by the Nenagh Charismatic Prayer Group in St John's Church, Nenagh on Tuesday 23rd September 2025

Introduction

My name is Joc Sanders, and I am a sinner. I try to follow the example of my Saviour Jesus Christ, but all too often I fail, as we all do if we are honest. I am a baptised and practicing member of the Church of Ireland. I am a layman, authorised by my Bishop as a lay minister to lead worship and preach within his gigantic diocese of Tuam, Limerick and Killaloe. I am also a member of the Community of Brendan the Navigator.

This evening I’m going to give you a very personal testimony. I have agonised over it for many hours, trying to be as open and honest and clear as I can be.

I shall tell you about how I have experienced the Holy Spirit at work in my own life. And I shall offer you my own thoughts about the nature of Salvation, which is the theme of this second seminar. But first I shall tell you a little of my life story.

A little about myself

My mother Lucie was a Waller of Prior Park near Carney. My father, Rev Derick Sanders, was a priest ordained in the Church of England, part of the Anglican Communion, whose family came from Charleville, north Co Cork. I was born in Nenagh hospital on Easter Day in 1948. My mother told me that the nursing sisters attending her had to miss their Easter Mass because of me – and she joked that I had been a trouble ever since!

My childhood in England with my younger brother was idyllic, at first in a rural village near Cambridge, and later in a small town in North Dorset. We had pets. We had bantam hens and Muscovy ducks. We raised a baby rook, and tawny owlets. I attended the 2-teacher village school, and I ran wild around the village with the other children, raiding birds’ nests, pond-dipping, and scrumping fruit. I came to love the natural world all around me, learning the names of plants and the songs of birds, a love which has only grown over the years.  

I was just as naughty and bold as all the other children, and got into all sorts of scrapes. But I was blessed with a loving and thoroughly Christian upbringing. As a child I learned from my parents’ example that the most important thing in life is to be a ‘useful engine’. You may remember that the Fat Controller in the Rev W Awdry’s books used to praise Thomas the Tank Engine for being a ‘useful engine’, when he had been particularly good.

Every summer my mother brought us back to her home place, where I learned to milk a cow and teach calves to drink from a bucket. Later, as my grandparents aged, a friend lent us a one-up-one-down cottage on Lough Derg, which we could only reach by boat. We met cousins, we paddled, swam, rowed boats, sailed, and generally mucked about on the water. I am blessed that much later I was able to bring my own children to stay there, and they in turn did so with theirs – 4 generations of wonderful memories.

Later, as a young adult, I worked in IT, at first in London, and then in South Wales. I married in my early 20s, and with my first wife we raised 4 lovely children. Sadly, our marriage didn’t last. It was as if an evil spirit was spreading through our social circle, driving couples apart with untold damage to our children and our friends. I was terrified of the future. I fell into depression. I went through a very painful divorce, from which I like to think I emerged a more empathetic and kinder person. Happily, the mother of my children made sure they could come to stay with me one weekend a month and for a fortnight’s summer holiday. The divorce must have been equally painful for them, but I’m glad to say they remain close and loving, and I’m proud that they are all, in their different ways, ‘useful engines’.

Through these years I drifted away from the unthinking faith of my childhood. I could no longer see the Good News of the Gospel as anything more than myth. To declare a belief in ‘God the Father, creator of heaven and earth’ seemed to me just another way of saying ‘I do not know how ‘all that is, seen and unseen’, came to be’.

My professional life moved on. My focus changed to software quality assurance and standards. I took early retirement and returned to Ireland, where I worked at the Centre for Software Engineering on the DCU campus. This gave me opportunities to teach and mentor, to write a textbook, to work on European projects and meet software engineers across Europe. I became an Irish technical expert with the International Standards Organisation developing software engineering standards.

That is how I met my wife Marty, God bless her – she was a technical expert with the USA delegation. Raised a Methodist, she shares my Christian faith. We did our courting over the internet, with long weekly phone calls, and getting together at quarterly meetings. I am very blessed that she agreed to move to join me in Ireland. You have to move fast to sustain an intercontinental relationship, and we were married within a year of meeting, in her mother’s Presbyterian church in Florida.

We lived and worked in Dublin for several years, but we longed to settle back in North Tipp, where we had a weekend cottage, to be close to my parents, extended family and friends. Finally, we took the plunge, resigned from our jobs, and started a new life here. I got a teaching job with the Tipperary Institute. Marty continued standards work, and went back to study in UL for a PhD. Since then, we have both retired.

The Holy Spirit in My Life

Let me turn to some of the ways that I have experienced the Holy Spirit at work in my life.

One of my earliest memories as a toddler is of escaping from my mother’s side in a church pew, and throwing myself on the ground in front of the processional cross. Everything had to stop until I was picked up. I was upset and hollered, but I don’t remember being chastised for it. I wonder if this was an early prompting of the Holy Spirit. If so, I managed to evade the Spirit’s call for all too many years!

Prayer

I think that I most experience the Holy Spirit at work through prayer. It was my mother who taught me my first prayer, this simple bedtime prayer:

‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.’

And my father taught me prayers I still use, among them this one, by St Richard of Chichester:

‘Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits you have given me, for all the pains and insults you have borne for me. O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother, may I know you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day.’

It is in stillness, contemplation, and quiet reflection, often without words, that I can feel God’s loving presence. Then the Holy Spirit can work with my God-given reason and my conscience to help me distinguish right from wrong, the Spirit can show me my need for the forgiveness Jesus promises through his life and ministry, death and resurrection, and the Spirit can gently guide me to know what God my loving Father wants of me.

I have come to realise that prayer is not about demanding what I want from God, like a petulant child. Instead, prayer is about aligning my wishes with God’s will, through the mediation of the Spirit. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t pray for what I wish for – if I can’t reveal my desires to God, who can I reveal them to? But I should model my prayers on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me – yet not my will but yours be done’.

Lay Ministry

I began to reconnect with church after I returned to Ireland. This was not a sudden, blinding conversion experience, such as St Paul had on the road to Damascus. It was more a slow, growing attraction to the essential psychological truth of the Good News.

When Marty and I left Dublin, we found our church home in the CofI Nenagh Union of Parishes. I was co-opted onto the lay committee responsible for managing parish affairs. There’s nothing like giving someone a job to engage them! Later our Rector retired, and without a resident priest, regular worship fell away. We are blessed in the CofI to have authorised services other than the Eucharist which can be led by laity. A few of us, with permission, began to lead services of Morning Prayer to fill the gaps.

The long and the short of it is this. I came to feel a ‘call’ to lay ministry, in the sense that leading worship was something that I could do for the church community. You might say I wanted to be a ‘useful engine’. After a period of training and discernment, I was commissioned as a Diocesan Reader. That is the somewhat misleading name the CofI uses for a lay minister authorised by a bishop to lead worship and preach within his or her diocese. I have been doing this for more than 18 years now, usually one Sunday a month in my own parish, and sometimes elsewhere to cover holidays and vacancies. I value this privilege, which has given me great joy. I enjoy the discipline of preparing a sermon on a text from the lectionary, as an opportunity to explore my own faith.

I do sometimes pity the poor souls who have to listen to me, but on the whole, I get encouraging feedback. Today I have no hesitation in saying that the Holy Spirit called me to this work.

From time to time, I have been asked would I consider seeking ordination as a priest. Early on I asked myself the same question. I worried I was being tempted to imitate my father. But over time I came to realise that his call was not mine. I am deeply introverted. Much of my life is lived in my own head, and I am not good at reading other people’s emotions. I realised I do not have the pastoral skills necessary for a priest.

I do have a vocation, but it is not to priesthood. My vocation is to be a witness, a witness pointing to the goodness of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a witness testifying to my Christian faith, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners like you and me. A witness is what I try to be, to the best of my ability.

Pilgrimage

I have also come to recognise the Spirit calling me to pilgrimage, as a model for a Christian’s life journey. The pilgrim journey goes like this, as I see it.

We leave our own home and friends to travel to a destination alongside others. As we travel, we talk. We enjoy each other’s company. We break bread together. We share our life stories. We explore each other’s beliefs. We receive gifts of faith and comradeship. We learn new ways of being in the world. And when we reach the destination, we return home to our friends, bringing back and sharing the gifts we received along the way.

I felt it would be good to be part of a community seeking to be pilgrims together. I shared my thoughts with others across the Church of Ireland, and found that they were feeling the same. So, I became a founder member of the Community of Brendan the Navigator. We are an evolving, dispersed religious community in the Church of Ireland, welcoming members of all Christian traditions across the island of Ireland. Pilgrimage is in our DNA, and we meet together as pilgrims several times a year. As part of my personal discipline, I lead monthly Morning Worship in Killodiernan Church, Puckane which is streamed on the Community’s Facebook page, and I lead Friends of the Community on pilgrimage to local places, sometimes just a walk around the graveyard to appreciate the glorious diversity of God’s creation.

I try to apply this model of pilgrimage when I meet ecumenically with Christians of other traditions, as I am doing here this evening. We owe a debt of gratitude to the leaders of the Holy Spirit Prayer Group, for bringing us together here, Christians from different traditions. I am sure that we all receive more of the Holy Spirit when we come together. We are better together than we are apart.

Salvation

I am an old man. I have experienced tribulations in my life. I have lived through divorce, and seen how it hurt those I love. I have felt helpless at times, filled with regrets for things I have done and not done. I have endured dark nights of depression. But I know, sinner though I am, that I have been blessed, very blessed. The Holy Spirit has been leading me to a place where I feel at peace, increasingly close to God my loving Father, walking alongside Jesus Christ, my redeemer, friend and brother. I know that when I fail to live up to God’s standards, as I surely will, I can return to him and find forgiveness.

The theme of this week’s seminar is Salvation. What is salvation? It is what God our loving Father does, by saving us from sin and its consequences – saving us from separation from his love – through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.

Sin is the name we give to our offences against God’s holiness and goodness when we break his commandments. You will remember Jesus summarised God’s commandments this way: ‘You shall love God, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’.

It is part of our human nature to be tempted to sin, that is, to do what we want, not what God wants, even when we can see it is wrong. God has made us with free will. We often give in to temptation. We sin, and we suffer guilt as a result. But Jesus tells us that if we acknowledge our sins and repent – if we make a fresh start in our lives – his Father will forgive our sins. Through his compassion and self-giving on the cross, Jesus shows us how to resist sin. The burden of guilt is removed, and we find inner peace and joy.

Sin comes in many forms, both in doing what we ought not to do, and in not doing what we ought to do.

There is what I call ‘retail sin’ – petty cruelties that wound other people, insults, gossip intended to hurt, unfaithfulness to loved ones, through personal addictions, dishonesty and stealing, up to violence and murder.

And there is what I call ‘wholesale sin’ – unfair social and political structures that cause poverty and illness, criminal drug-dealing networks, group hatreds and racism that oppress outsiders, the evil killing and destruction of war, and the damage we do to the natural world on this good earth.

Sin does not just hurt God, it hurts each one of us. And it hurts every other person too.

We all bear the consequences of ‘retail sin’. We have all been hurt by what others have said or done to us, and if we are honest, we will recognise how we have hurt others, even those we profess to love. It makes us closed off, wary, anxious. It causes depression in many, and even drives some to suicide.

And we all bear the consequences of ‘wholesale sin’ too. We see so much wrong with the wider world around us, and it tears our hearts apart. We all see in the media pictures of violence at home and abroad. We see images of death and destruction in countries at war. We see images of droughts, floods, and wildfires.

And we all know people in our community struggling with poverty and ill health, struggling to pay the bills, put food on the table, clothe their children, afford doctor’s visits. Their lives are blighted by fear, stress, illness and depression. But for the grace of God, any one of us might be one of them. As I have been at times in my life.

But God does not wish upon us any of these awful consequences of sin. His nature is loving, and he wishes all his creatures to flourish in this wonderful world he has placed us in. It will meet our every need, if only we care for it and our neighbours as we should. God offers every one of us forgiveness for our sins, an end to guilt, when we respond to his Holy Spirit at work within us, when we follow his Son Jesus, when we model our lives on his life of compassion, and self-sacrifice upon the cross.

Salvation is not an end result, a finished state. It is a process, a process which leads us closer to our loving God. We can never say we have been saved, once and for all, because temptation is always biting at our heels. But we can say we are being saved, provided we allow the Holy Spirit to work within us, and do our best to follow Jesus’s example, drawing us closer to our loving Father. Our lives will remain poor and mean, lacking joy, unless we accept God’s gracious offer.

The Story of Salvation

In this Creation Time, it seems right to tell the Story of Salvation in the language of Harvest, both the earthly harvest of material things we enjoy, and the heavenly harvest of spiritual blessings, which Jesus offers us.

Think for a moment about the breadth and variety of the earthly harvest. We have the staples: wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, hay for horses and silage for cattle. And there’s so much more than staples to enjoy. There are delicious fruits, grains, nuts, and vegetables, all sorts of dairy products, different kinds of meat and fish - all in amazing variety. There are gardens full of beautiful flowers. There are chicks, kittens, calves and lambs born this year, and there is the fruit of our own bodies, our children and grandchildren too. It is surely right for us to thank God for the earthly harvest. God has given it to us because he loves us!

Above all perhaps we should thank God for our health and our strength, and also for our intellects, our God-given cleverness. As every farmer knows, this bountiful harvest does not appear from heaven as if by magic: it takes intelligent planning and hard graft!

Yet for all our cleverness, the earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Our human plans do not always work out. We can all see how much is wrong in the world. Why has God not given everyone perpetually good harvests? Perhaps to remind us that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t change: Nature is as God has made it, and what we sow, we shall reap. We remain as we have always been, totally dependent on God’s continuing fatherly goodness.

Jesus speaks to us about salvation in John’s Gospel (6.27-35). He says, ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.’ ‘The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’, he says. And he makes this great claim: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me shall never be thirsty’.

What is Jesus talking about? His words are difficult, at least I find them so. And so did those who first heard them, we are told. But one way to look at it, which I find helpful, is this.

Just as God has made us clever, able to till and keep the world of which we are part, so God has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. When the Spirit inspires us to use our conscience to make the right choices, we reap a heavenly harvest of good, which nourishes us for eternal life. As the old saw says: The good we do lives after us.

But we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. So it’s hard to be good. We must work at it, just as we do for the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is right above our own desires. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul, and that evil too is eternal. A bad deed done can never be undone!

What a mess we are in! What a mess! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as God has made us want to be, in our best moments.

This is where Jesus speaks to me about Salvation. He promises us all the help we need to reap the heavenly harvest. All we need to do is come to him and listen to his words. When we do, our souls will never be hungry or thirsty. As the bread of life, he strengthens our souls. Through his life and ministry, and his self-sacrifice on the cross, he shows us how to resist temptation, how to do good, and how to defeat evil. And when we fail, as we surely will from time to time, when we come to him in penitence, he will suck out the evil that poisons the soul – in other words he will save us. The only cure for a bad deed is to repent and be forgiven!

It is in this sense that Jesus is the bread of life that nourishes us for eternal life. This eternal life is not everlasting life in a distant heavenly future. It is not pie in the sky when we die. It is here, it is now. As John (17:1-3) tells us, Jesus prays for his followers to his loving Father, asking him to give them eternal life, ‘And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent'.

This is the story of our salvation, told in a language we can all understand, the language of harvest. God our loving Father offers us salvation, a way out of the mess we are in, through his Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit at work within us. But it is up to you and me to respond to that offer. If we accept that offer, our souls will find peace, and we will be filled with joy.

So, let me finish by putting some questions to you.

Will you say ‘Yes’ to the Holy Spirit at work within you?

Will you join me in saying, ‘Yes!’ together? Altogether now: ‘Yes!’ Let us say it again, only louder, ‘Yes!’.

Will you say ‘Yes!’ to Jesus’s promise of salvation?

Will you join me in saying, ‘Yes!’ together? Altogether now: ‘Yes!’ Let us say it again, only louder, ‘Yes!’.

Do you want to feed on the bread of life? Do you want God your loving Father to forgive your sins, remove your guilt, give you eternal life in Jesus Christ?

Let us respond together, ‘Yes, I do’. Altogether now, ‘Yes, I do!’ Say it again, only louder, ‘Yes, I do!’