Struggling to keep going?

Six pointers from Hebrews, the book of perseverance: -

1.       Keep doing the right thing

When you don’t know what to do, do good. There is always something you can do for others, especially the people of God. ‘God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people, and continue to help them. We want each to you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.’ (6:10-12) And keep it up! ‘Do not become weary in welldoing…’  (Galations 6:9)

 

2.       Stay with the rest of the flock

‘Do not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing…’ (10:25) A sheep that has wandered off from the flock is easy prey for a wolf. Satan is just such a wolf and one of his best tricks is to isolate Christians from other believers. Immediately he has deprived us of one of the most important aids that God has given us – each other.

The Christian life is not a race for individuals.  We will finish as a team, being encouraged and encouraging each other by turns as we each face different difficulties and challenges. Don’t let apathy, relationship difficulties, disillusionment or differences of tradition keep you from fellowship with the flock – you need them and they need you. 

3.       Pay attention!

‘We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard so that we do not drift away.’  (2:1)  What have we heard? The Word of God and in particular the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you don’t want to fall away, study and treasure the scriptures as if your life depended on it – it does. 

4.       Keep on believing and encourage others to do likewise

‘See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God, but encourage one another as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly til the end the confidence we had at first.’ (3:12-14) We know that it is faith that saves us, but that faith must be ongoing. Make no mistake - unless we keep trusting and believing to the end, we will not be saved. So we must be on the watch, because Satan is constantly looking out for ways to break the thread of faith that holds us to God. Therefore ‘…let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess.’ (4:14/10:23)

5.       Keep on suffering

Evidently the Hebrew believers had suffered much, and in the face of intense persecution were tempted to turn back. The writer to the Hebrews encourages them that these sufferings were not in vain. If they endured suffering a little while longer, God would reward them richly. (10: 32-39)

6.       Keep doing battle with sin

‘…Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.’ (12:1) The writer describes sin as something which will tangle up the runner’s legs and trip them up in the race.  Therefore it is necessary to engage in mortal combat with sin (12:4) As John Owen said, 'Cease not a day from this work! Be killing sin or it will be killing you.' Our incentive, example and strength in this struggle is the Lord Jesus himself and we must fix our eyes on him. (12:2)

Ultimate sins

In the Christian life we all have different sins that we struggle with. Something which is a constant temptation to one person troubles another Christian very little. There are, however, two sins which affect us all – pride and unbelief. These we will need to do daily battle with until the day we die. They are fundamental sins which underlie other sins that are merely the external manifestations of these two great spiritual ills.

When as a young Christian I was despondent about not being able to conquer pride, someone told me that pride was  ‘like a man’s vest – the first thing he puts on in a morning and the last thing he takes off at night.’ It was a helpful analogy. My on-going struggle was normal., and I could expect to do battle with pride to my dying hour.

Pride was behind the first sin, when Eve succumbed to the temptation to be ‘like God’ by taking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Pride wants control, wants to re-write the rules, wants everything  to be about us. Yet we were created in another’s image, not to be objects of admiration ourselves but to reflect the glory of another. We were made to love and serve, but instead life has become a constant search for the love and admiration of others, always looking to what we can get rather than what we can give.  We struggle against the will of God and try to squirm out of obeying his rules – whether by open disobedience  or more subtle attempts to redefine God’s laws. We substitute the order and authority God designed for his creation with chaos, rebellion and conflict.

If faith is the channel by which our souls are saved, then unbelief brings our souls into the greatest peril. It lies at the bottom of so many of our actions if we care to look closely enough. For example, when I don’t bother to pray I am expressing unbelief in God’s power to change situations. When I grumble about a situation God has placed me in, I am failing to believe that God is truly good in his providence. When I worry unnecessarily, I am expressing unbelief in God’s power and care for me. Do we take unbelief seriously? None of these examples might seem that bad in the scheme of things and yet unbelief is mortal danger to our souls. It is like a cancer or virulent infection. It feeds on itself; one unbelieving thought leads to another. It is insidious. If we stop waging war against it for a moment, it rapidly gains control of our spiritual lives.

The Puritan John Owen said ‘Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you’. That is nowhere more true than in relation to these two great enemies.

Sin and the Savile Scandal

On tonight’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, Michael Buerk is to discuss whether, in the light of this week’s revelations about Jimmy Savile and Lance Armstrong, people’s good works are inevitably tainted by their evil deeds. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nbq68 

 

No doubt it will be an interesting debate. The programme will also examine to what extent the sinner can be separated from the sin, and whether works of art are contaminated by the private lives of their creaters. The Bible, however,  gives an unequivocal and unpalatable answer:

‘All of us have become like one unclean,
and all of our righteous acts are as filthy rags.
We all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.      
                                                                                 (Isaiah 64:6)

Even the best things we do are so contaminated by sin that we are ‘swept away’ by the wrath of God. From the cradle our natures are so corrupted that what was designed to generate holiness, goodness and to glorify God produces, at best, something so contaminated as to be of no worth before God.

 

True in cases like Savile and Armstrong, perhaps, but true of us? Take the greatest acts that you have done and analyse your motives honestly. Who of us can claim to have acted completely disinterestedly, without a  thought to our own interests or the desire to stand a little higher in the estimation of others, God or even just ourselves?  The more I have come to know myself and to see myself reflected in the mirror of Scripture, the more I see that my best deeds are indeed as filthy rags – or as other translations put it, a ‘polluted garment’ with which I once tried to make myself presentable before God.

My only hope is in the grace of God, whereby God offers us Christ’s glorious righteousness like a pure white garment to cover over all our foulness. All he asks of me is to admit the utter inadequacy of my former attire and that I appeal to him for grace.

‘Jesus, thy blood and righteousness

My beauty are, my glorious dress.
Midst flaming worlds in these arrayed
With joy shall I lift up my head.’                               
                                                                 (Nikolaus von Zinzendorf)

 

 

Power or principle?

This week the Leader of the Liberal Democrats told his party that they faced a choice between ‘protest  and power’.  Many grass-roots Liberals seem to feel that the choice has in fact been between principles and power, and that the party in its determination to hold on to power has let go of the very things it stands for.

History’s pages are full of examples from all spheres of life of individuals and organisations who sacrificed their principles in order to cling on to power.  We would do well to think a little further about these. The church today is desperate to have influence in our nation and to avoid being ignored or marginalised. In order to cling on to the position they have in society, it has gradually diluted its message,  dropping doctrines, beliefs and practices that the world outside finds offensive and focussing all their energies on appeasing and appealing to the world.

A typical example of this of is a church near here that recently held a beer festival in its mediaeval buildin http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-17775140 . It was clear from the comments made that (possibly in addition to financial considerations) this was about getting non-church attenders inside a church building, and yet having got people into the building by such ruses,  these congregations don’t seem to  know what message they want to proclaim to people. They have so confused and compromised their beliefs that they no longer have anything distinctive to say to the world. I believe that this is why people who are really searching for something spiritual (as opposed to a good real ale) are turning away from the Established church in many places to independent churches who are still prepared to proclaim the undiluted, uncomfortable, radical Truth. I want to weep sometimes when I hear the kind of insipid counsel given to people who are clearly seeking God by people appointed to be ministers of the gospel  - mere platitudes that could just as easily have been spoken by a Buddhist or a humanist as by a Christian minister.

One of the features of our post-Christian era is that we no longer respect people of strong principles. In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, society honoured people of strong convictions and principled lives. Their opponents respected them as people of integrity even when they disagreed with them, and the heroes of the day were people like Florence Nightingale, William Booth, Earl Shaftesbury, David Livingstone and so on. Now people with uncompromising convictions are ridiculed as being fanatical, vilified as bigots or scorned as out-dated in a post-modern era. The heroes of today are film stars, people from reality TV series, overpaid footballers and all sorts of other ‘beautiful people’ with decidedly flexible morals.

So having strong principles isn’t popular in today’s world. But when the chips are down and people are seeking answers to some of the hardest questions of life, such woolly, insubstantial waffle will not do. People want answers of substance, clarity and conviction.

But let’s not fall into the trap of thinking this is just an issue for others people in other places, for this is a temptation for all of us as churches and as individuals. We are making daily judgments about how much to engage with the world, its thinking and its practices. It is not wrong to want to have influence in the world, if that is in order to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. Yet if in the process of gaining and holding on to that influence, we forget why we wanted that influence in the first place, what have we gained?

In a sermon I heard recently on being ‘salt and light’ the speaker made an obvious but fundamental point. Salt is meant to be different! Our function in this world is act as a spiritual preservative in society. To fulfil that purpose we need to remain distinctive, for ‘salt that loses its saltiness is of no use for anything’. Our effectiveness is bound up with our distinctiveness. So if we want to remain effective let’s remember why we are who we are, and hold onto our principles at all costs.

Empty dreams

Dreaming rarely gets us anywhere. In the Christian life, God is looking for realists not dreamers – people who have worked out their faith in the context of real events, real difficulties, real relationships. When we dream things for ourselves, we are just storing up for ourselves disappointment, disillusionment and sadness. There is usually little space in our dreams for God to do his sovereign will, since we have decided what we want to happen.  We then try to twist God’s arm into doing what we want and are only half listening to his voice of guidance. Dreams do not come from a heart seeking that ‘He might become greater and I might become less’ (John 3:30) Dreams are rarely about seeking what is best for others but are about ‘my hopes’, ‘my ambitions’, ‘my needs’. If we are truly laying everything on the table for God there is no place for pre-requisites or reservations - nothing held back and nothing stipulated either.

I don’t know about you but my life seems a long way at times from this total surrender to Christ. Not only that but no sooner has something been laid on the table than the ‘old man’ snatches it back again. This is a constant battle, and a painful, painful battle. It inevitably involves trying to peel away what we are most wedded to. The old self wants to cling on to the right to self-determination, the ability to seek its own happiness, the apparent ability to avoid the pain and suffering involved in living for Christ and for others.  But that is what we ought to be doing  – each day consciously placing ourselves and our resources 100% at God’s disposal for him to do with us as he will. There is no place at this altar for personal dreams.

Perseverance

‘We want each of you to show this same diligence to the end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and perseverance inherit what has been promised.’ Heb 6:11,12

I said I would be returning to this topic. It is something I feel we need to face up to urgently both in our own Christian lives and as churches.

The Westminster Confession, says the following: “They whom God hath accepted in his Beloved, effectually called and sanctified by his Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace; but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.”  This is what theologians call the doctrine of final perseverance. Another confession puts it more simply:  “We believe that none who are born again will fall away so as to be lost, but that they will persevere through grace to glory.”

Now, I believe firmly in final perseverance because  the Bible clearly teaches it.   But it’s a doctrine that has been dangerously misapplied. All too often it is understood as meaning that if a person once makes a ‘decision for Christ’, they are safe forever.  No matter that there is no resultant change in the person’s life, no desire to attend church or that there has even a complete turning away from God. The dangers of presenting such a travesty of the doctrine of final perseverance are multiple:

·         It lulls people who are not truly born again into a false sense of security about the state of their soul.

·         It plays down the need for personal holiness and a transformation in the life of the believer. It makes us blasé about the spiritual dangers all around us.

·         It makes us careless about the spiritual welfare of other believers, and less inclined to act when we see someone starting to slip away from the Lord.

·         It makes our evangelism shallow, and reduces conversion to a one-off decision rather than a total dedication and lifelong commitment to Jesus Christ.  It artificially severs evangelism from discipleship.

The Bible clearly entertains at least a theoretical possibility that Christians can fall away from faith, because the New Testament is full of warnings. Think for example of these words to Jewish Christians who seem to have been in acute danger of deciding to turn back:

‘So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what has been promised.’ Heb 10:35-36

Our our Lord’s words of warning to the church in Philadelphia:

‘I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no-one will take your crown.’ Rev 3:11

Why, then,  is it so rare to hear preaching on these warnings in Evangelical circles? It seems to me that some in ‘reformed’ churches neglect to preach on some passages of scripture because they fear they will be preaching Arminianism!  I believe that it is precisely through the warnings God has given us, and through the mutual encouragement of fellow Christians that he will ensure he brings each one of us safely to heaven. Why otherwise did the Apostle Paul and others go to such lengths to warn their spiritual children of the dangers around them and of the need to keep on in the Christian life, whilst at the same time expressing confidence in God to bring them safely to glory? If Paul and others found it so essential to give these warnings, why are they missing from so much evangelical preaching today?

When the writer to the Hebrews warned his readers not to give up meeting together, it was because he knew the peril they would be in if they did so. In fact, the epistles are full of exhortations to keep on encouraging one another – not because it is ‘nice’, but because it is essential.  But we do so looking in faith to God for salvation – indeed, these exhortations frequently occur in connection with a statement of assurance on the basis of God’s faithfulness (see 1 Thess 5:9-11, Gal 6:2, Hebrews 3:12-13, 10:23-25).

So then, let’s finish with a thought from the end of Jude:

‘Now unto him who is able to keep you from falling and present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy – to the only God our Saviour be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and evermore! Amen.’

Attractive conversation

Fans of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will recall how Lizzy remarks to Darcy that ‘We are each of us…unwilling to speak unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb.”  (If you’re not an Austen aficionado bear with me!) I have to admit that that statement fits me rather aptly at times. I am far too keen on ventilating my own opinions and airing my knowledge. (That’s probably why I’m writing a blog! )I suspect I am not alone, however, and if you struggle with this tendency too then read on!

 
The  Apostle Paul, reflecting on his approach when he reached the city of Corinth, wrote the following: ‘For I resolved to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.’ 1 Corinthians 2:2

Think for a moment about who Paul was. One greatest intellects of all time. One of God’s specially chosen messengers. A great evangelist who had seen vast numbers come to faith through his work across the Mediterranean. Yet what Paul is saying is that, in effect, he resolved to speak in Corinth as if he knew about one thing and one thing only – the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He would not be telling them about his Jewish background and or his rabbinical credentials. He would not try to impress them  with his great theological knowledge. He would not regale them with stories of thousands  turning to Christ. Only one topic of conversation would be on his lips – the person and work of Jesus Christ.  He knew this was the only thing the Corinthians needed to hear about, and as God’s messenger, it was the only message he had been commissioned to deliver. It was a subject that Paul was completely taken up with it. No wonder people thought he was obsessed or even a little mad.

 
I realised that this is the corrective to conversation that is too preoccupied with self. If you want to boast about something, Paul says, boast away  - but not about yourself but about Jesus Christ! Take a step back and look at what dominates your conversation on religious matters. Is full of your great understanding of theological matters, your encylopaedic Bible knowledge, your ability to critique every heresy known to man or to quote scripture in all three original languages (ok, I am exaggerating now!) – or is full of Jesus Christ? We can’t look two ways at once. If our attention is focussed on Jesus Christ and on glorifying him, it will not be fixed on ourselves and vice versa. Frustrated by finding yourself so self-absorbed? Look to Jesus Christ! Read about him, meditate on him, delight your soul in him and it will spill over into your conversation.

It is often true in the Christian life that if we simply try to stop doing something we get nowhere unless we put something else in its place. Hence I suspect that if we simply try to stop thinking and speaking so much about ourselves we will fail. Often such endeavours only serve to focus our attention all the more on ourselves. We need to fill our conversation more with Jesus Christ and the other things will be squeezed out. Do we want our conversation to be attractive, helpful and winsome? (Let’s face it, there’s nothing more unattractive than people who talk about themselves all the time) Fill it with Jesus Christ! Make Paul’s practice your own – to ‘know nothing’ in the communities we live in ‘except Jesus Christ and him crucified.’  

Designer labels in the church?

We are used to living in a world full of designer labels. Labels serve to summarise a set of characteristics, identity or membership of a particular group. Some labels are useful but within the church, I’m suspicious of the practice of giving ourselves or others labels like reformed, Arminian, Calvinist and so on. Too often they seem to be used as terms of either pride or derision. They divide people and are often poorly understood even by people applying them to themselves. They act as barriers rather than helping fellow Christians to understand and love some difficult doctrines.  To be honest, what other people think about my doctrinal credentials really isn’t important, and God certainly won’t be letting me in heaven on the basis of the theological ‘badge’ I am sporting.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel passionately about some of the doctrines underlying these differences, because these labels do touch on issues at the very heart of our Christian faith. One of those has been particularly on my heart recently and I’ll be saying more about that later. I’d just like us all to drop the labels and put aside the pride that goes with them. We all need to get to know the Word of God more thoroughly and to make sure our faith is resting on a secure understanding of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  Let’s talk to each other lovingly about some of these doctrines, not to engage in esoteric theological disputes but so that we might know what God has written in his word for our comfort, encouragement and loving warning.

What is righteousness?

‘Far from being a cold rectitude preoccupied with keeping its hands clean, true righteousness is active and generous, whether it is seen in God or man…God’s righteousness is creative, stepping in to put the very worst  things right.’ (Derek Kidner, writing about God’s five ‘betrothal gifts’ of righteousness, justice, lovingkindness, compassion and faithfulness in Hosea 2:19,20)

Want to use your gifts?

When I moved back 14 years ago to the church I belong to, I used to get frustrated that the only jobs that came my way were things I felt completely ungifted in. Why didn’t God give me a role where I could use what I perceived to be my gifts? First it was teenagers. Teenagers terrify me! They seemed to speak an entirely different language to me (when they spoke at all) and made me feel like an alien in their midst. So what did God give me to do for the first seven or eight years? Teaching a teens Bible class, helping out with a church Youth Club then running a youth fellowship.  I would probably rate myself as nearly as unskilled at working with children. So what job did God give me to do next?  Sunday School teacher. Really, was God just having a laugh at my expense? Why didn’t he give me something to do that I was good at?

But now I no longer ask God to give me tasks that ‘use my gifts’ because I have realised that when I am doing things that I feel utterly unskilled at, I am most dependent on him. That dependency (we call it faith) is so much more important to the success of our labours for the Lord than how gifted we are as workers. Whilst doing something I feel I am good at, there is a grave danger that I start to do it in my own strength – and even worse, that pride creeps in. For example, when I was wondering how on earth to get through to a bunch of bored teenage boys who didn’t seem to want to do much more than grunt at me, I was praying all the way. Over many years, I learnt to love them and learnt a lot about the Lord in the process.  And now, when my Sunday School talk seems pitched all wrong and the children are badly behaved and uninterested, I am so conscious of the need for God to help me and to work in the children’s hearts. But when I am talking to a group of adults who listen to my every word and tell me afterwards how well I have done, I start to rely on myself and pride springs up in a second.

Don’t misunderstand me, I know God uses both the practical and spiritual gifts of his people to extend his kingdom. But we have to be so careful to ensure that, when we exercise our gifts, we have not stopped labouring in God’s strength or have allowed pride to creep in, because both these things will destroy our work and undo our successes. We need to constantly remember Paul’s exhortation to ‘take a sober judgment of ourselves’. When we look at ourselves through God’s eyes, our little gifts seem so puny in comparison to his power and glory. How ridiculous our pride is! This battle to remain dependent on the Lord is a constant, daily one that is won on our knees in prayer before ever we set foot out of our doors. And we need to pray for each other too, especially those in front-line ministries who are the Devil’s prime targets.

That hateful grace

A sudden encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus resulted in a dramatic change of direction for the Pharisee, Saul. All his vehemence, hatred and great abilities were concentrated into his one objective of wiping out the fledgling Church. But what exactly was it that Saul so hated about this ‘Jesus movement’? As he confronts Saul, our Lord makes clear that it is him personally, and not Christian believers, whom Saul is persecuting. No doubt there were many factors in Saul's hatred of Jesus Christ, including a perceived threat to the Pharisees’ power and prestige in Jewish society, Jesus’ humble Galilean background and his lack of formal education. But I have come to the conclusion that at the bottom of it all, Saul was offended by grace. He hated the idea of it with every fibre of his being.

Think of what Saul was – a Pharisee, whose most fundamental principle was that salvation was to be achieved by keeping rules. Ostensibly it was by keeping God’s Law as found in the first five books of the Bible, but in fact it was about keeping a whole host of rules that had accumulated around the Law until the Law itself was all but obscured. They had rules for everything – every minute detail of day to day life.  By keeping all of these petty laws, the voice of conscience and fear of the wrath of God could be supressed, and pride could swell as it totted up their achievements. And Saul had kept these rules more carefully than all of his peers. Not only that but he was a Jew of good birth with a huge intellect, an influential Rabbi of great learning with a substantial following. He was revered and respected wherever he went as a man of great righteousness and piety. He was righteous – he had made himself righteous through all his efforts. What then did he need in a gospel of grace?

Yet in that single encounter with Jesus Christ, Saul’s view of himself was stood on his head. For ever after Paul (as he became known) referred to himself as ‘The chief of sinners’. All that he had relied upon was empty and worthless – he stood bankrupt and empty-handed before God. Now he saw why salvation must be all of grace. God must do all for us because we have nothing to bring to the table. Paul’s tears must have flowed like a river as he now welcomed the grace he had so hated with open arms. Forever after he could speak of nothing but the Gospel of Grace. It bubbled up out of him like a joyous, unstoppable spring.

Are you offended by grace? We all began from there. Satan has been whispering into our ears from the dawn of time that we do not need God, we can go it alone. Pay no attention to his lies. He is not the Lover of your soul – that belongs to God alone. He has done all that is necessary for you himself. All you have to do is give up on your own pathetic efforts and lay hold of Jesus Christ.

Answers in the toolbox

Having become Christians, we know that God expects us to live a life of increasing holiness, producing fruit consistent with righteousness. But that brings me straight up against an awkward question. Are these fruits produced as a result of my efforts or is it the Lord’s doing? This isn’t merely a conundrum for theologians to contemplate over their cornflakes!  For I know how weak my will is and how fickle my heart is. If it is all down to me to produce a more holy life, the chances of me every living the life that God wants me to lead seem hopeless. Like the man of Romans 7, ‘what I want to do I do not, and what I hate I do!’ (Rom 7:15) If it is down to me,  I might as well pack up and go home now.

I know that I need God’s help if my life is to change. But saying that we should therefore just  ‘let go and let God’ doesn’t sit right either. What about passages like 2 Peter 5 – ‘Make every effort to add to your faith goodness, etc’? That doesn’t sound much like ‘letting go and letting God?’ In fact, it sounds very much like it is down to my effort after all. So I go away and tell myself to try harder, with inevitable consequences

Familiar story? Have you found yourself reduced to a confused, demoralised heap crying out with the man of Romans 7 ‘Oh what a wretched man (or woman) I am!’ If you have, let me share with you an every-day illustration which helped me sort this out.

Imagine you are trying to undo a nut and bolt, but the nut has rusted on and won’t turn, no matter how hard you try. You reach for the WD-40, spray it on, re-apply the spanner and hey presto! Off comes the nut. Now I reckon the WD-40 is a bit like the assistance the Holy Spirit gives us. There was no way that bolt was coming off without the WD-40. But imagine if a person just sprayed on the WD-40 and left it? He would sound a prize idiot complaining to the shop keeper that WD-40 doesn’t work because the nut was still attached! But that is what the person who thinks he or she can ‘let go and let God’ is like! Our DIY enthusiast needs to apply the WD-40 then get out his spanner and apply his own effort.

In the same way the Spirit’s power is essential but God has so ordained it that we still need to exert ourselves. But we do so resting in on God’s enabling - and that is the critical difference. Try it and you will see that this is true! But you’ll also find that the minute we start to think we can do it in our own strength we fall flat on our faces – which reinforces the lesson that we need to rely constantly on God’s enabling!

A Gathering of Nations

One of the best bits of the Olympic opening ceremony was seeing all the national teams assembling in the arena for the first times. I loved seeing all the different faces from around the world – so many beautiful faces lit up with the joy of being there. As a peaceful gathering of nations the Olympic Games are unique. Sadly they have been marred over the years as the Games have on occasions been  hijacked by repressive regimes or athletes have been excluded for political or racial reasons. But there have been wonderful moments too, when an athlete has become the first to win a medal for a tiny nation, or when the Games have been able to break through barriers of discrimination. These London Games have been such an instance, as every team included women athletes for the first time in the Games’ history.

It all made me think of that great gathering of nations that will take place at the end of time. From the time when God promised the blessing of all nations through Abraham’s offspring, God has been gathering together a people for himself from all nations on earth who will one day gather to worship him. The book of Revelation pictures that vast, glorious multitude made up of people from every corner of the earth. I imagine it will be an extraordinarily colourful and diverse scene.  I can tell you that the joy there will far exceed the happiness on the faces of those athletes. There will be none of the problems that characterise relations between people groups in this life – no fighting or war, no more of the weak exploiting the strong, no more hatred or racism. We will be one in heart and mind, united in one purpose which is the praise and worship of the Lamb on the Throne, Jesus Christ.

Perhaps that seems impossible but when all things are made new, when God is once more the centre of all human affections and his glory the motivation of all human activity, there will be no place for these things any more. On that day, when he sees his providential workings throughout history finally bringing about what has purposed for so long, no one in that vast multitude will be more joyful than the LORD himself. What it will be to behold the joy of the Almighty God!

Innocent unbelief?

Whilst studying Acts 14:2 today I was interested to learn more about the word that the ESV translates as ‘unbelieving’. When we talk about not believing something, we tend to mean failing to be convinced by the evidence presented.  For example, certain people might not believe in the existence of UFOs, or in global warming or that smoking causes cancer, because they’re not convinced by the evidence.

When we think about unbelievers, we can be in danger of viewing them in the same way – as well-meaning people who just haven’t happened to be convinced by the evidence, as if unbelief was just a harmless position of neutrality to the gospel. It’s not their fault - they just don’t know enough to believe!  The world, with its pluralist, post-modern, agnostic attitudes, is happy to have it that way. Everything is so unclear – how can you expect people to know what to believe?!

I  don't know about you but I have found myself saying the same sorts of things to God. ‘I can’t help having doubts/not believing certain things!’ ‘Everything is too confusing… It’s not my fault!’ I have baulked as I have read in the Bible about the harsh punishments God pronounced on his people for ‘mere’ unbelief. If people  get involved in idol worship, murder, adultery –  yes, I can understand you throwing the book at them, Lord!  But unbelief?  Aren’t you going a bit over the top?

But the Bible does not mince its words about unbelief and sees us all as culpable, especially the people of God.  Unbelief is not an innocent failure to know enough to be able to believe. Romans 1 tells us that God has given everyone enough pointers to cause them to seek him, but the effects of the fall have so corrupted our minds and hearts that we reject the implications of what we see around us. Unbelief is not a position of neutrality but a conscious rejection of God, an active turning our backs on him. The word which the ESV translates ‘unbelieving’, apeitheo, can also be translated rebellious or disobedient, refusing to conform and being disloyal. And our unbelief involves all of those things – being disloyal to a God who as both our Creator and our loving father deserves our filial obedience and love. We are like teenagers, having grown up enough to know perfectly well what is right and wrong, but struggling with our desires and trying to squirm out of our responsibilities. The Bible treats unbelief as more serious than many outwardly sinful acts because it is a failure to take God at his word. It is the opposite of the faith which God commended Abraham for and which is the way of salvation for all who came after him.

So if, like me, you’ve been tempted not to take your own unbelief too seriously, remember what that word ‘unbelieving’ actually means – active rebellion against a loving Father and failure to render what we owe to our great King. And don’t fall into the world’s trap of seeing the unbelief of the people around you as innocent, understandable or acceptable. Instead, see them as God sees them – as individuals whose souls are in peril because of their rebellion to their Creator and King.

'Blessed are the peacemakers...'

This week a simple handshake has dominated the headlines as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II extended her hand to Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein. In this act we not only saw a monarch extending a hand of peace to one of her subjects who had been engaged in violent rebellion but also a very personal gesture of forgiveness, since the IRA had murdered her own cousin and closest advisor, Lord Mountbatten.

It made me think about how we have offended and rebelled against heaven’s High King. As our creator we owed him joyful obedience but each one of us has personally grieved him by rebelling against his gentle rule. And yet, through the wounds of Jesus Christ, he is able to hold out a hand of peace to us.

Martin McGuiness’s act did not occur out of the blue. It took many years of painstaking labour by many individuals at all levels of society to reach this point. They ranged from ordinary Northern Irish people who courageously reached out across the barricades in different ways to those involved in high-level negotiations. Whilst we all know the names of the politicians involved – McGuiness, Adams, Paisley, Trimble, Blair and so on - the names of many of those peacemakers will never be known and yet it was really their acts, great and small, that achieved the process of reconciliation.

Jesus said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. This is a much-quoted but much-misunderstood phrase. Jesus was not referring to those who bring an end to human conflict, commendable though that is. He was referring to the ending of that cosmic conflict between rebellious man and an angry God. Jesus offered up himself as a sacrifice of atonement to make peace between man and God – to turn away God’s righteous wrath. But who will make known this great Gospel of Peace, and bring people to lay hold of that great sacrifice offered on their behalf? For two thousand years, men and women have committed their lives to bringing their fellow creatures back into peaceful communion with their God. These individuals were derided and despised by the world, and perhaps are unknown and unremembered even by the Christian church today. Yet God has not forgotten. He knows their names. The Bible tells us that he is coming soon on the clouds of heaven and that his reward is with him. Then we will truly know how blessed are the peacemakers!

'Lord, teach us how to pray!'

Looking round my congregation recently, I was disturbed to realise that I had never prayed about many of the most pressing needs in the church at present. How could that have happened, I wondered? I've been taught, as perhaps you have too, to use the ACTS mnemonic  and to keep lists of items for prayer.  So what was going wrong?

I came to the conclusion that the danger of these methods is that our prayer times are no longer Spirit-led but driven by our lists and agendas. We rush into it all before God gets chance to say a word.  We need to get it all prayed for in time to jump into the car and rush off to work. So, sorry God I haven’t got time to listen to you!

Is there any wonder we have problems? Let’s face it. We would never take that approach with our friends – leastways, our friendships wouldn’t last long if we did! I’ve no doubt that our rushed modern lifestyles don’t help here but I think something else is wrong too – a tendency to rely on ourselves and our lists, rather than waiting on God’s guidance in our praying – a failure to ‘pray in the Spirit’.

I can’t offer you a ‘method’ to get over this problem – in fact, I think it is the use of ‘methods’ in devotional prayer that is the problem. I’m afraid that we have carried the same agenda-driven mentality that we take to work into our time with God.  The Bible says that ‘we do not know what we ought to pray’. (Romans 8:26) We are sinful, self-centred, worldly people who have wrong priorities for others, just as we do for ourselves. Our praying, like so many other things, is skewed if we rely on our own sense of spiritual direction because we are fallen creatures. We need the Holy Spirit to guide us in what and who to pray for. We must come to prayer, not full of our own agendas, but quietly waiting on God and asking him, by his Spirit, to guide our minds to those things he would have us pray about.

This is now what I am trying to do; I encourage you also to remember that in prayer, as in every other aspect of the Christian life, you are entirely dependent on God’s help. Otherwise you and I will be wasting time on the wrong priorities and in this, as in every battle, we need to make every moment spent in prayer count. May our prayer be more ‘powerful and effective’ as we pray with the Spirit’s guiding.

Too bad for justice?

I believe that one of the things upon which societies and individuals will be judged is their ability to treat their enemies with scrupulous justice, however heinous their offence. In the light of this I find some of the practices adopted by the US and UK to deal with Islamic terrorists increasingly disturbing.  There seems to be an underlying line of thought that the crimes committed by these individuals are so appalling that we can do anything we like to them – justice is too good for them.

I’ve been reading about some of the prominent figures of the English Civil War. It seems that they fell into the same trap. Some fine, principled Christians gained positions of influence under Cromwell, but tragically some of them sanctioned appalling acts in the sphere of justice. These men who had endured so much themselves in the cause of religious liberty threw off restraint when they came to power and subjected their former opponents to punishments that seem gratuitously violent and vindictive. Nothing, it seems, was too extreme for certain offences.

The fact that these punishments were often  for  ‘thought crimes’ only makes it worse. But even when an offence is truly horrific, a good society proves itself to be such by treating those who offend against it with greater justice and restraint than the perpetrator afforded to others. The seriousness of the offence never justifies setting aside the principles of justice or descending into barbarism. When that happens, society becomes as bad as the offender. Participation in barbaric forms of punishment debases us to the level of animals – we are behaving like beasts, which act aggressively when provoked because they only know to follow their instinct.  But it is our sense of justice and our awareness of the need to govern our passions that lifts us above the animals. This is part of what it means to have been made ‘in the image of God’. God supremely exemplifies those qualities. He knew that such justice is costly:

‘For God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us … When we were his enemies we were reconciled to him through the death of his son.’ Romans 5:8,10

Debts cancelled

I owed thousands and much more;
I did believe that I did nothing owe,
And lived accordingly; my creditor
Believes so too, and lets me go.

From the poem 'Faith' by George Herbert (1593-1633)

Independence?

Over the years I’ve met many patients with different illnesses who were finding it very hard to accept that they would have to continue taking medication for life in order to stay well. It was especially hard for young people. Most doctors are familiar with the scenario of the teenager who decides they can ‘go it alone’ without their medication and have to learn the hard way that unfortunately they can’t! They just find it so hard to accept that they are dependent on treatment. It seems there is something inherent in human nature that rebels against the idea of being dependent on anything or anyone else.

I was thinking about how as Christians we are dependent on God’s grace and it struck me our attitude to our dependence on God can be very much like those teenage patients.  Now, I subscribe firmly to the view that salvation begins and ends with God. The Bible says that we were ‘dead in trespasses and sins’, and dead men can’t do much to help themselves! It was God who first awakened a desire in us to seek him, and God who first showed us our need of salvation. God enabled us to repent, and God provided the way for our sins to be dealt with. I also believe that the ongoing process of making us fit to be citizens of heaven (sanctification) is entirely a work of grace too and I know by experience that we only conquer the sins we are prone to fall into through the power that God gives us. Similarly we only succeed in our endeavours for God when we are consciously depending  on him. We will be totally dependent on the grace of God from the moment of our conversion until we reach the gates of heaven.

Unfortunately, I don’t always live according to the theology I profess. All this talk of dependence on someone else goes right against human nature. Our first father, Adam, was sold the lie by Satan that he could manage without God and it is an idea that has clung unshakeably to the children of Adam ever since. As soon as it seems that we are starting to conquer some problem or have success in some Christian activity, we start to think we can do it on our own. And Satan is there at our elbow, softly whispering to us about our experience and maturity! God, in his wisdom, often allows us to carry on in our own strength for some time before he allows us to start to feel the consequences of self-sufficiency. But whether it comes sooner or later, disaster is always the eventual result. Self-sufficiency never ended anywhere but in sin, frustration, a sense of failure and loss of joy. We may blunder on for a time, deceiving ourselves that everything is fine, but eventually God stops us in our tracks. Then we look back and wonder how we could ever have been so foolish as to think we could go it alone, and how we would have wished to dispense with such an immense source of spiritual power.

We often, quite rightly, compare our relationship with God to that between parent and child. In this context, however, this is a misleading analogy. For children eventually become adults and outgrow their dependence on their parents. Hopefully a twenty year old daughter will not need a firmly held hand to cross the road, or their dinner cutting up for them, as she did when she was two! We, however, will always be dependent on God. Satan has taught us to kick against that fact, and caused us to believe that it is demeaning, but in fact we were designed to be dependent on God and can only flourish and be most productive when we are depending fully on God. To use another analogy, my CD player might decide it doesn’t like being dependent on electricity but that is the way things are. It can only play beautiful music that pleases me when it is plugged into the mains – without that it would just be a useless object that collects dust and takes up space!

Don’t let Satan deceive you into the same miserable trap as Adam but learn to rejoice and be fruitful in your dependence on God!

Nostalgia - longing for home

I have to confess to a slightly geeky fascination with the origins of words. For some reason I was thinking about the word ‘nostalgia’ recently and wondering where it came from. We use it to mean a cosy sort of sentimental wistfulness – mulling over the ‘good old days’. As a doctor , however, I suspected that the word had a more negative meaning originally because  ‘-algia’ is an ending that crops up lots of medical terms, where it means ‘pain’.  

The pain of old memories perhaps?  I knew that for many bereaved people, memories of happy times can be a bittersweet thing, sometimes serving only to accentuate the pain of their loss. But no, that was not the meaning. Actually nostos means ‘homecoming’, so nostalgia is the pain of longing to return home. Apparently soldiers were thought to suffer with nostalgia when serving a long way from their native land. Anyone who has been detained away from home for any length of time knows a little of what this means. For many of us, the place of our birth exerts a strong pull on us that is difficult to put into words. Other places may be more pleasant or attractive but there is ‘no place like home’. Familiarity, pride, history and posterity are all tied up in it. It is sense of belonging – both of knowing and of being known.

For me it is the feeling I have when I have been away and drive back into Yorkshire over the Pennines. I’m back in a landscape that has been part of my consciousness since my earliest years. I’m back with people whose ways and habits I understand and who talk like me. Quite simply, Yorkshire is where I belong and always will. The Welsh have a word, hiraeth, for this feeling which does not have a counterpart in English. It expresses that mysterious pull back to the homeland or the land of our ancestors. For Welsh folk, it seems to take on almost a mystical quality and occurs frequently in their poetry and song.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, following on from my last post, Christians are people detained for a season far from their home. We long to be in our heavenly home. The degree to which we feel this nostalgia or hiraeth makes a good measure of our spiritual health. How much do we long for and anticipate Jesus’ second coming? Is the longing so intense that at times it is painful? Or is heaven something that seems distant and that we forget about some of the time?

At the funeral of a lady I knew, the congregations were told how she lived in daily expectation of the Lord’s return. Not that she did not get on with living a useful life in the meantime – far from it – but she loved her Lord so much, and walked so closely with him, that she lived in constant readiness for that day. This is how the Apostle Paul describes his own desire when writing to his Philippian flock:

‘I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far, but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.’ (Philippians 1:23-24)

All too often our desires do not resemble Paul’s; we have allowed our hearts and minds to become  preoccupied with the things of this world and have lost our first love. What treatment did our Lord Jesus recommend to the church in Ephesus, which had ‘forsaken its first love’? (Revelation 2:1-7) He called them to stop and look up at the height from which they had fallen. In other words, go back and consider why it was that we loved the Lord so much in the first place. Remind ourselves of all that he has done for us. Meditate again on the character of God. Kick out anything that has usurped God as King of our hearts. Confess our cold-heartedness to him and seek his Spirit afresh to revive the fires of love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Then we will begin to long for our spiritual home as we should, and that passion will breathe new life into our service for him.

To blog or not to blog...that is the question.

It is Easter, so it seemed like a good time to begin this blog. I’ve been in two minds about blogging. There seems something inherently narcissistic about broadcasting your own opinions. And I know that pride certainly isn’t something I’m likely to get free of any time soon!  However, there is also a need for the church to engage with the world outside its walls through these media, so I’m praying to be able to use this space in a God-honouring way.

I have called the blog ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ because that is how the Bible describes the people of God in relation to the world. According to the writer of Hebrews, the great heroes of faith:

‘…admitted that they were aliens and stranger (strangers and pilgrims) on earth… Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one.’ Hebrews 11:13,16

The Greek phrase for strangers and pilgrims is ‘xenoi kai parepidemoi’. Parepidemoi literally means ‘the ones that are passing through’. It carries the sense of people living in a foreign land for a limited season and a specific purpose, interacting with the society they move in but not belonging there. This reminds me straightaway of the old Spiritual;

‘This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through

My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue

My saviour’s beckonin’ me from heaven’s open door

And I can’t feel at home in this world any more.’

I find this metaphor helps both to know how we should relate to the world and to explain some of the struggles that we experience as we go through the Christian life.  Expatriates experience considerable challenges in some countries. In some countries their presence may be tolerated rather than welcomed, and in others Britons are at risk of  violence because of their nationality. Even where this is not the case, a host government does not have their welfare at heart; this is the responsibility of the British Government. Expatriates are governed by two legislatures as they must abide by the laws of the nation where they reside but are also still subject to the laws of their own country. They never truly ‘belong’ in that country although they may learn the language, make local friends and even adopt some local practices.

Do some of those things resonate with you? Do you have a sense of alienation at times from contemporary British society? Do its values and laws clash with your Christian beliefs? Does it feel at times as though society has turned on the Church - that it is tolerated but not really welcome in society? This is what it means to be parepidemoi. This earth is not where we ultimately belong and this life is not all that there is. Abraham, the archetypal figure of faith in the Bible, is described as ‘looking forward to a city with foundations, whose builder and architect is God’ (Hebrews 11:10) and, once  God had called him, he put down no roots in this world. Living as a nomad and owning no land on the earth, God made him a living picture of this ‘sojourning’ existence. He was happy to live that way because he knew that he had a home elsewhere, a city where he held citizenship. That city, the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21, will be the final resting place of all God’s children and it is the place that we should all be homesick for.

So I’m hoping this blog will be a space to explore our ‘sojourning’ here and to contemplate the great hope that we have before us.

Have a very Happy Easter.