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.