Floor Sweepers and Astronauts

Arise Fred Goodwin

2012-02-01T12:46:00.000Z

Last night I cameacross the existence of an organisation I had never encountered before– not personally, you understand, just on the news – a shadowyagency at Westminster with a title worthy of George Orwell's 1984:The Forfeiture Committee. There is enough in that name to make theheart of the stoutest knight of the realm quake with fear - at leastafter last night - for this conclave of civil service enforcers hasthe power to strip the knight of his title, as Fred Goodwin ('Sir'yesterday, but not today) discovered to his cost. They met andrecommended that he should forfeit his title after RBS, the bank heled, collapsed spectacularly with gargantuan debts in 2008. Thegovernment felt it was right to do this, even though he has not beenconvicted – nor even accused – of any crime. Previously onlythose involved in major crime or treason (think of Anthony Blunt)have endured such a fate, but it was felt that even if he was not personally responsible for much of the financial crisis that we are now in, he represented everything that went wrong in bankingover the last decade, so the title had to go.

Predictably there arethose who think that this is a bit like a lynch mob, singling out avery public scapegoat, and asking what about others who are guiltybut have not been dealt with? After all, Fred Goodwin did not actalone; he had a board with him, so Ed Milliband is right when he saidthat this ought to be just the start of the change we need to see inboardrooms. Perhaps there are other civil servants and knightedworthies who ought to be sleeping a little less securely for fearthat the dreaded Inquisition will catch up with and dishonour them,too.

Maybe that last phraseindicates one of the dangers in all this: that we get aMcCarthy-style series of hearings that becomes a witch-hunt. We don'twant that, but it has rankled with most people that men like himcould be so devastatingly wrong in business (it cost the government£45 billion to bail out RBS) to the point that everyone of us istouched in some way, but then remain virtually unaffected themselves.Stripping him of a knighthood is actually quite minor, really; hestill has a pension of £650,000 a year, so I don't think he is goingto suffer, and certainly nothing like the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands who arelosing their jobs as a result of the crisis.

It is interesting inthis regard that the Bible is quite clear that a cavalier attitude tothe welfare of others is a sure way of inviting the anger of God.Some of the most withering denunciations of the Bible are levelledagainst the rich who exploit the poor. Go to an Old Testament prophetlike Amos to read his scorching indictment of the wealthy whotrampled the poor while they lounged around in comfort. Or take Nehemiahwho lambasted those in Jerusalem who sold fellow Jews into slavery.And then there is James in the New Testament who attacked richlandowners who failed to pay their workmen their wages. But perhapsthe most poignant are the words of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel,whose visions are among the wierdest and most embarrasing you will find,but the point they are making is bluntly obvious. He compares Israelof his day to the ill-fated city of Sodom that was consumed in thefire of God's judgment, but what is most significant are the crimeshe cites that brought this judgment. He says that the city was“arrogant, overfed and unconcerned for the poor” to such anextent that God decided he had had enough. That comparison would haveoutraged Ezekiel's hearers and it should be no less shocking for ustoday.

We need to ask whatsort of society we have created and where it is going. What would Godhave to say to us if he came to visit Britain, as he did Sodom, tosee if the report is as bad as he has heard? He would see that thenation has cast off what it sees as the shackles of religion andfaith in the name of personal liberty and choice, but he would alsonot fail to notice that righteousness is disappearing, too, as it didin Sodom. No nation or civilisation has the automatic right thecontinue as it wills, doing what it pleases, at the expense ofothers. The Old Testament records that superpowers like Assyria andBabylon fell under God's scrutiny for their cruelty and greed, but sodid Israel. Israel made the mistake of thinking they were exemptbecause they were the chosen nation, but they discovered to theircost that they were not immune. God has his own Forfeiture Committeein place; maybe it is in session for us even now.

The truth about our leaders

2012-01-25T13:29:00.000Z

It will be surprising if Meryl Streep doesn't win an Oscar (along with a Bafta and Golden Globe) for her mesmerising performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. There are naturally plenty of people who don't agree with Streep's interpretation of Thatcher's character – Norman Tebbit, not surprisingly, has been scathing about the film because he feels it portrays her as half-hysterical and over-emotional; others are unhappy with the way it focuses on her to the detriment of the men in her cabinet, making it seem she was the only figure who counted in the 1980s; still others can't believe the film doesn't criticise her policies more. Speaking as someone who never voted for her, I think the portrayal was a sympathetic one. I didn't come out loving her, but I wonder if some of those who hated her are simply too mean or embittered to accept anything that paints her in a positive light. She divided the nation then and it seems she is still doing it now.

There has also been talk about how appropriate it is to produce a film about her particularly from the perspective of her struggle with dementia. I don't expect her family or those who admired her find that aspect easy to watch, and they probably have a case when they say that this part of the film is inaccurate and could be perceived as being unkind, but it didn't come across that way to me. It works well as a story-telling method and enables the film to present her as more human than I ever perceived her, although I recognise that this is precisely the problem with these docu-dramas: you never know where reality ends and fiction begins.

So how should we assess events and the people who make them happen? On occasions you will hear critics say that we are too close to events to assess them, that you have to leave a respectful gap of decades before you can start writing history; at other times, people will complain that we are too far removed by time really to understand what went on, that documents cannot convey what happened, why they took place, how people understood these events and so on. It seems that we are sometimes wary of the eyewitness accounts for being too close to events, and suspicious of historical accounts for being too distant.

The same sorts of questions arise when we think about how we understand and evaluate the events that form the New Testament account of the life of Jesus. In the New Testament we have a historical account of what happened that comes from eyewitnesses who are at pains not merely to relate those things, but also give us an authoritative account of what they mean for us today. It is at this point that most people part company with the Christian faith. There used to be a great deal of talk about rejecting the 'Christ of faith' and getting back to the 'Jesus of history'. That came because people believed that over the centuries the church added layers of dogma and doctrine about the Christ onto the simple story of Jesus of Nazareth. If only we could cut away those layers, so the argument goes, we could then get back to the real Jesus. But that is just not the way it happened. There is clear evidence that the documents we possess were produced between 25 and 50 years after the events they describe, and that they were informed by the testimony of those who saw those events unfold before their eyes.

Of course these accounts are not neutral (there is no such thing as 'value-free neutrality' anyway); they come from people who were changed by what they saw, but who then, under God's guidance, put down a careful record of those world-moving happenings so that we might grasp the reality for ourselves. John the apostle writes in one of his letters that they saw and touched the one who was the “Word of Life”, Jesus, which we obviously cannot do. So they then wrote for us what happened so that we might share that experience by reading their account and through this come to know Jesus for ourselves. But it is more than just a human record of the past. They were guided by God in this process to give us God's perspective on what these events mean for us, so that we not only have a description of what happened, but God's own interpretation of it all too, that Jesus is the Saviour God sent for us, as well as the Lord before whom we must all bow. And this is why what we make of the account of Jesus is more important than any view we might take of our leaders. With human leaders we can assess them, judge them and evaluate their qualities. We like to think that we can call them to account for their actions. But when we read the life of Jesus, we discover that he is in fact doing that to us.

Assume the stance

2012-01-18T14:23:00.002Z

It is interesting the way that quirky phenomena suddenly become global. The practice of praying before or even during a football game is not new, nor even the gesture of kneeling on the pitch to give thanks after a successful move. I have watched American football long enough to remember other players doing just that, but Tim Tebow, the quarterback for the Denver Broncos, has managed to take it to another level. The son of evangelical missionaries, he has habitually prayed on one knee before a game and at every touchdown as a means of proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ, and now he finds that the whole world is following him. Put “Tebowing” into the search engine and, alongside the picture of the man himself, you will be given a wide variety of anonymous individuals adopting the pose (down on one knee, elbow in knee, forehead on closed fist, in an attitude of prayer, shutting everyone else out) in shopping centres, at monuments or with famous views in the background. It’s a new photographic craze with spiritual origins.

The reason for the sudden appearance of this phenomenon is probably because it looked like God was actually answering prayer in dramatic fashion. The Broncos didn’t get a great start to the season, but when Tebow played he led the team to win games in a manner that seemed out of all proportion to his actual skills. I have read that he is not generally regarded as one of the great quarterbacks (yet), but in mid-season he snatched victory on several occasions in the dying moments of the fourth period of the game and people began to take note of him. He has always been completely upfront and open about his faith, about his reliance on God in everything and about praying before and during games, so someone coined the nickname “God’s quarterback”. With five wins out of his first six games as starting quarterback, and many of those pulled out of the bag, it seemed the designation was a good one, and it carried on into the post-season with a breathtaking overtime win against the Steelers on Sunday 8 January.

But, of course, the fascination is at a purely external level. It’s all about adopting the pose, as if there is a mystical power in assuming a particular body stance that will make everything better, or ensure that success comes my way. There is nothing about adopting the faith or sharing the beliefs that make prayer a reality - which is, after all, where Tebow is coming from - or that create a desire for others to come to know Jesus as Saviour and Lord. Nothing about following Jesus as Lord to allow him to change your life. The craze, as so often happens, has taken the external and outward aspects and jettisoned the internal reality that gives it meaning.

What this particular craze does is challenge us to ask whether our belief in prayer is our real default position or is just a stance that we adopt. It is quite possible for prayer to be empty of any real significance; it is just something we acknowledge as important in our traditions, but it has lost personal relevance and power. The reasons for that may be manifold, signalling a loss of confidence in God or simply that we have allowed circumstances to crowd prayer out, but whatever the reason it is essential that we all find our way back to a living personal trust in God that we express regularly in prayer. And it is important to note that a reliance on God in prayer does not mean automatic success, even though that is what people were assuming about Tebow with his miraculous game-winning moves. The Broncos were thumped 45-10 in the Divisional Play-Offs on Sunday 14 January by the New England Patriots and pitched out of the competition. So it’s not miracles all the way, but I hope that Tebow still bowed at the end of that game to thank God for his goodness, pray for grace to face defeat and carry on living for Jesus.

Mean what you say

2012-01-12T14:54:00.000Z

guardian.co.uk

It is two years today since an earthquake claimed 316,000 lives in Port-au-Prince in Haiti and reports show that the country, which was poor enough before the disaster, is still struggling to recover from the devastating blow the quake administered. It is estimated that perhaps half a million Haitians are still living in plastic tents or in public parks, while pledged aid has not materialised at anything like the rate promised – perhaps just half of it has appeared in total, leaving you wondering whether governments were not just wanting to be seen to be generous, without it actually costing them anything.

Certainly, that is one of the tendencies the Old Testament addresses when it warns worshippers not to make promises in haste. The writer in Ecclesiastes has some choice phrases when he urges his readers “When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it,” to which he adds “He has no pleasure in fools; fulfil your vow.” Cough up if you have promised it, and don't make promises if you have no intention – or perhaps no means – of keeping them. “Do not let your mouth lead you into sin. And do not protest, 'My vow was a mistake.'”

Jesus highlights similar tendencies in his Sermon on the Mount: “When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men.” With the people Jesus has in mind it appears that these hypocrites at least gave the money with the fanfare, so perhaps international governments are one stage worse.

But it is too easy to point the finger at governments, while assuming we are not part of the problem. It is, of course, sad that one of the commonest accusations against politicians is that they don't keep their promises, and this just seems to bear that out on a global scale. But show-off governments begin with individuals who want their public to think better of them – or perhaps vote for them so they can remain in power. We are often governed by a desire for people to think more of us than is warranted, which is probably wired into our sinful nature: Adam hid from God when his disobedience opened his eyes to his naked body and we have been hiding ever since. After all, what would people think of us if they knew what we were really like? So we wear a mask over our motives and dress up all that we do in a favourable light, even if it means going back on what we say at a later stage. The openness and transparency of Eden may be a government aim, but it is hardly achievable. We have too much to lose.

It is doubly tragic when faith becomes a factor in this cover-up. We proclaim a God who sees everything and knows us inside-out, so it is nothing short of crazy to demonstrate that we count the world's approval as more important. Yet Jesus says that is what prominent individuals were doing in his day and we must acknowledge the subtle temptation for us to do the same. Performing 'acts of righteousness' to be seen is the danger Jesus addresses, so that we are known for our generosity, prayers or self sacrifice, with people speaking well of us because of this. If that is the reward we seek then Jesus says that is the reward we will receive, but it will be the only reward.

Faith in Jesus, however, should be the one feature that releases us from the desperate need for applause that lies behind the “say one thing and do another culture” we witness so much of, since it should remind us that his eye is on us and it is his approval we need. Perhaps I ought to point out that believing this doesn't automatically make us painful to live with (I have seen that, too), as if we have to then be unpopular to prove we are not seeking others' approval. Rather, it should turn us into people who mean what they say, who keep their word even when it hurts and, as Jesus himself said, whose 'Yes' really is 'Yes.' Those of us who know Jesus Christ appreciate that it takes an earthquake in life to make that possible (and even then it is far from straightforward), so it is to be wondered what magnitude of earthquake would be required to bring that about across society, but until we have that sort of person in government, the people of Haiti are likely to be kept waiting.

Open up the Bible

2012-01-05T11:48:00.002Z

If your reading of the Bible has fallen on hard times, this site may give you the boost that you need. "Open up the Bible" has a list of resources (Bible reading notes in particular) and videos giving helpful ideas on how to take time to read the Bible each day. It's linked with The Good Book Company's site, so you can access it there too. Worth thinking about - make a new year's resolution that is worth striving to keep.

Open Up the Bible from The Good Book Company on Vimeo.

Hungry and foolish

2011-12-30T17:23:00.000Z

If there has been one man's death that has made the headlines this year more than any other it will be the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple's founder and techno-guru to millions around the world. There's no doubt he has had a massive influence on the world today, but some of the tributes would probably leave him a little embarrassed. A statue of him has already appeared in Budapest, Hungary, holding an iphone. Shrines appeared in Apple shops throughout the world, with photos of him that make him look like almost Christ-like. Actually, even before Jobs died it was possible to view Apple as a substitute religion, with Apple shops laid out like temples for the worshippers to meet in, electronic devices laid out like Bibles, and a picture of the founder displayed prominently like a cathedral's great east window.

In keeping with this quasi-religious atmosphere, his devotees also hang on his every word, with his business acumen running alongside a savvy wisdom for life that makes people sit up and listen. Take three examples. First, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” was his message to students at Stanford University in 2005 and it is not a bad slogan for life if you take it the way he (and the people he borrowed it from) meant it. We are all prone to losing our edge because we become self-satisfied, so that we lose the desire to push on and lose the hunger for greater success. Or we become frightened of those who think that our schemes are a bit too madcap, so we rein in the creativity that pushed us forward when younger and only go with anything that seems sensible and safe. The New Testament commends those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and applauds those who are fools for Christ, so taking Jobs' motto is no problem, even though he probably didn't mean it in that sense. Why not use it for 2012? Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish!

His drive to succeed was reflected in another motto that he is credited with (and once again, I am not sure that he didn't borrow this, or part of it, as he did with so many of his ideas that made Apple the giant it became): “Those who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who do.” I like that. He certainly believed it and put it into practice. His combination of excellence in design and slick technology have made the computer and communications world what it is today. But in the end he was only talking about the sort of equipment I am writing on now (I confess I am a PC user who looks rather longingly at the Apple world); he was not dealing in life or death. The Christian message, by contrast is the real revolution, dealing as it does with reconciling men and women to God, bringing true peace and reconciliation with God, cleansing the conscience and bringing eternal hope. That is something that has changed the world, is still doing so in many nations and has the power to do so once again here. What it needs is people crazy enough (there it is again – stay foolish!) to believe it is God's message for the world and to take his word seriously enough to follow it. Jobs inspired people to do so for a clever screen; is eternal life enough for you?

And thirdly, many will also have taken on board his words about death, since it was at Stanford that he first spoke of his cancer. Jobs used his impending death as the spur to even greater creativity, realising that he had to follow what he wanted because he simply didn't have the time to be side-tracked by anyone else's agenda. It certainly drove him to unparalleled success, but it is deeply saddening that his view on death was that it was nothing more than “the single best invention of Life … it is Life's change agent” designed to clear the old out and make way for the new. This whole philosophy was built, as it is for the vast majority, on the idea that “death is the destination we all share. No has ever escaped it” which is true up to a point. Death has been the fate for every human being who has walked the planet, and there is no doubt that this should spur us all to greater service. However One Man, Jesus, has escaped it, not by avoiding it, but by submitting to it and then defeating it, dying and rising from the tomb. That should change everything – this one life we all possess must be lived with God in view, since Jesus demonstrates that we will all answer to God, and we can live it with hope because Jesus has secured the way to God – but unfortunately his picture still isn't in any Apple store I have seen, his wisdom and salvation ignored, while the man whose picture reigns supreme speaks to millions and yet remains firmly in his grave.

Arab Spring, Islamist Winter?

2011-12-23T11:39:00.000Z

Iraqi Christian refugees www.barnabasfund.org

This is hardly festive reading, but it is the reality of Christmas for many Christians living in Muslim countries. It is an article written yesterday in The Telegraph by Fraser Nelson entitled How can we remain silent while Christians are being persecuted? which describes the increasing attacks on Christians in the Middle East and the British Government's perplexing silence on the subject. Two-thirds of Iraq's Christian community has fled the country due to attacks from Islamist groups which sprang up in the wake of the downfall of Saddam Hussain. Now that other dictators have been expelled or are in trouble, similar attacks are beginning in Egypt and Syria, and, with the departure of the Americans from Iraq and yesterdays bomb attacks in Baghdad, one wonders whether the new governments in these places have the power to stop the rise of extremism.

It reminds us that the Christmas story has a bloody side to it, one we don't hear much of and certainly don't sing about. The violent reaction unleashed by Herod at the news of a new King is in fact a model of much of the world's response to Christ and his claims, so at Christmas we should take the time to remember brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus who proclaim that Jesus is God's King, sent from heaven to save us, and pay the ultimate price for doing so.

Kim Jong gone

2011-12-20T11:22:00.002Z

It was a wonderful piece of serendipity that greeted me yesterday as I arrived home to find my daughter watching the 1992 film “Toys”, which stars Michael Gambon (above) as a crazy general who attempts to take over the world with an army of toys, when I had been driving home to the radio news of the passing of “The Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, who had ruled North Korea since 1994. I couldn't think of a more apt epitaph for a dictator who had played with his people as if they were nothing but puppets and threw them away when he lost interest in them.

What was interesting was the biographical information given about the man and the way the story was embellished to bring in the miraculous and make him into an almost Messianic figure. There were stories of a swallow announcing his birth and a star over the mouintain of his birth in Korea, although in reality it was somewhere in Siberia. Then there were accounts of him walking and talking at just a few weeks, having occult powers to cause a typhoon in Japan, inventing a whole host of modern gadgets, directing films, writing over a thousand books and half a dozen operas. Such exaggerations are not uncommon in the world of leadership – think of the Egyptians and Romans deifying their emperors – but it is applied with almost fanatical devotion in communist nations. The personality cult in such nations is almost totally consuming, with leaders demanding not just unquestioning obedience, but love and even worship, and with severe penalties for those who dissent. It is interesting that, having denied the realities of religion, they invest their leaders with the same qualities as spiritual leaders to give them a greater moral authority. It is also ironic that Karl Marx, whom these leaders profess to follow, said that religion was the opiate of the people. He would be turning in his grave if he knew that these men had taken all the trappings of religious figures in order to dupe their people into following them.

What is doubly tragic is that the consequences for the people they rule are usually dire, and Kim Jong-il has been no exception. It is reckoned that hundreds of thousands have already perished in famines (while he travelled around in a train that was replenished with fresh lobster flown in by helicopter), and countless millions now languish in abject poverty, among whom are Christians who are sent to labour camps or simply executed for expressing faith. It is yet another example of self-serving leadership that Ezekiel described when he spoke of shepherds who feed themselves by eating the best of the flock.

Among those who suffer at the hands of such monstrous cruelty there is hardly likely to be much regret at the Dear Leader's passing, and I wonder whether the hysterical tears of those who were pictured weeping profusely on television were genuine. Some of them at least would have been motivated to put on an act for the cameras for fear of the consequences of not doing so. Most will be asking what his son, Kim Jong-Un, will be like in power, and whether the continuation of the dynasty will mean more of the same.

For our part, we should be praying for the downfall of tyrants (or a change of heart on the part of those who succeed them) and the establishing of justice in nations, as well as working in whatever ways we can to bring about that change. It is not irrelavant to Christian mission to be concerned about the well-being of other nations, and more particularly, to express support for Christian brothers and sisters who are persecuted and denied justice. And at Christmas it is important for us to pray that God would bring down false Messiahs, who destroy their people, bring people to know and love the Saviour that he has sent and establish his reign of true peace in the furthest parts of the globe.

All mouth and gear boxes …

2011-12-09T18:03:00.001Z

Last week Jeremy Clarkson got himself into hot water for saying that strikers should be shot in front of their families and racked up an impressive total of 31,000 complaints in response. So now the BBC have shelved his appearance on QI this week (saying that they are just rescheduling it later in the series) for fear that it will prompt a backlash from viewers. The cynic in me wonders why they are worried about a backlash: why don't they just call it “aritistic integrity” as they did when 46,000 complained about “Jerry Springer: The Opera” and its open assault on Jesus Christ some years ago and the programme was still aired? But that would be to get a dig in where there is no place for one here, so I will say no more on that, and simply observe that the BBC should hardly be surprised at the recent episode since Mr C has a pretty impressive track record of verbal gaffes, blunders and basically offensive remarks. He was acting within character, really.

I confess that I enjoy his boorish repartee on “Top Gear”, but then there are a couple of counterweights on the studio floor in the persons on James May and Richard Hammond, and his opinionated banter is confined (largely) to cars and other petrolhead related matters. But give him free rein and, well, he has free rein and takes the opportunity with gusto and familiar effect. He's good for a show, but not the sort of person you would want for a dinner companion.

All of which reminds me that the New Testament has more to say about the way we speak than virtually any other topic, yet it is the one area about which we are likely to take the least care. We live in a culture which applauds outspoken brashness and celebrates quick-fire wit. Just look at the sort of characters who make it big in TV comedy for example: no fading wallflowers there, no careful, deliberate thinkers who need time to frame their answers. Only those who can shoot back an immediate response with cutting humour to bring an opponent down to size. You could point out that TV comedy can hardly function with people who are boring; they have to be sharp or people would turn them off. That's true as far as comedy goes, but it is also an example of what is going at large. There is very little room for gentleness and respect in our soundbite culture. People expect it to be shown to them, of course, (and they really hate it when they receive the opposite) but there are relatively few examples of it around; it is the opposite that sells the papers, gets the ratings and attracts all the publicity.

It is therefore instructive that the Bible, and the New Testament in particular, spells out the destructive power of the tongue. It is James who points out that the tongue is a small part of the body, yet one which exerts influence out of all proportion to its size: a small spark that can set a forest on fire; an organ that can corrupt the whole course of a person's life. Fail to control it and you lose control of the whole of your life. And James is not alone in urging control over the way we speak. Paul, also, urges followers of Jesus to bridle the way they speak both out of respect for God and for other people, but I'm not sure that Mr C brings those two groups into consideration when he opens his mouth.

But you cannot build a society where people exercise no control over the way they speak. The consequence will be that people exercise no restraint in their speech and just devour each other – which it seems is what we are getting. The tabloid press may be taking a beating at the moment for their destructive gossip mongering style of journalism, and there are all sorts of ideas afloat for regulating the press, but it sold papers: evidently somebody enjoyed eating people for breakfast. Jeremy Clarkson got his knuckles rapped, and will be out of favour for a while, but in reality his style is what our society basically wants. Christian self-control in speech doesn't automatically make entertaining programmes, and yet it is one of the ways in which we must show that the gospel is not just different, but infinitely better.

Mangling the moguls

2011-12-02T23:02:00.001Z

bbc.co.uk

It's open season on the tabloid press at the moment, so much so that it is hard to know whether people hate bankers or journalists more at the moment. With the Leveson inquiry running, victims of tabloid hacking and sleeze stories are queuing up to recount the way they have been savaged, misrepresented, slandered or abused in what appears to have been a 10 or 20 year reign of terror led by the media barons and their Nikon-armed heavy infantry. The press are alleged to have trodden roughshod over practically everyone's sensibilities in the scramble for the best story, usually accompanied by the most revealing, tear-jerking or humiliating photograph. And all with an approach to truth that was not only economic, but frequently creative as well. So now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost and the press is likely to pay quite dearly for the years of treating people so dreadfully.

It would be good to know how editors persuaded themselves that the assaults they carried out in the name of their papers were justified. I imagine that there was something along the lines of journalistic freedom, uncovering the truth, acting in the public interest, or just providing people with the sort of material they want to read. It is probable that many acted with a clear conscience, feeling no real qualms about what they were doing. But conscience can be blunted or stifled and may not be an accurate guide, and we can simply talk ourselves into doing something that is wrong because there are other rewards for our dishonesty that outweigh the rewards for doing what is right.

The Bible doesn't have cautionary tales as such, but many of its characters provide significant examples of human weakness that we do well to heed. This should not distract us from the main storyline of the Bible (God's salvation announced and prepared in the Old Testament, and then fulfilled and realised in the New), but rather remind us of the need of God's salvation because its heroes are so flawed. One series of examples comes from Abraham and his line, where one of the patriarch's actions almost becomes a family trait: lying. It all begins when Abraham feels obliged to head down to Egypt on account of a famine in Canaan. He feels that his wife, Sarah, will be a source of temptation to the locals, who may kill him and take her captive, so he instructs her to tell the Egyptian king she is his sister rather than wife. This she does, with ensuing complications from which God has to extract him, but it is not the last time such a tactic appears in his family. Abraham feels obliged to employ the same dubious method with a tribe in Canaan, his son Isaac later feels he has to do the same with his wife, Rebekah. But it doesn't stop there.

Isaac's son, Jacob, sadly lived up to his name of “Deceiver” with a life of trickery, bluff and simple lies (no, I don't think he was on the staff at the NOTW). In consequence he earned his brother's hatred, he had to flee his life at home and never saw his mother again, and then he produced a family of his own riven with such jealousies and animosity that his own sons conspired to sell one of their number into slavery and then cover up the deed for perhaps 15 to 20 years. No doubt each of them could have justified their actions at the time and explain why they treated others like this, but in the cold light of hindsight we call their actions by their proper names; despicable, cruel, heartless, selfish, greedy … this list goes on and on.

The heart of the lesson for us is that we have to know ourselves and, as John Calvin says, the only way we can know ourselves is if we know God. Of course, knowing God does not make us completely immune from the temptation to silence our conscience and abuse others or act dishonourably (that's what those Old Testament stories prove). But he gives us his Spirit to strengthen us to resist temptation and do both what honours him and protects others. His Spirit in us creates traits like openness, honesty, integrity, faithfulness, goodness and self-control, traits which must be cultivated carefully because we know we are weak and may give in to selfishness. Above all, one of the key motivating factors that will cause us to guard our tongues and our attitude to other is that we stand, not merely in the glare of public attention, but under the gaze of God who has called us to honour him and reflect his holiness, whose own inquiry into both our words and lives awaits.

Worries, riches and pleasures

2011-11-26T16:59:00.001Z

Many people blithely assume that becoming a Christian makes life simple, when just the reverse is usually the case. The Christian faith has to be maintained in the face of a whole variety of assaults and Jesus announced as much in his famous parable of the Sower. This picture of people's varied responses to the message Jesus preached describes what happens in terms of a crop growing – or not – once the seed has been planted. There are those who do not understand and walk away scratching their heads as to why the message is of any importance to them. Then there are some who greet the message with open-armed joy, only to crumble when those around them make life difficult. And then there are those who see its value and embrace it, yet are so weighed down by what life throws at them that they never really grow; the seed is choked by what the gospel writer Luke calls “worries, riches and pleasures” and what Mark more eloquently spells out as “the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things”.

What they all point out is that there is a whole raft of issues that will come our way and threaten simply to swamp faith or, to use the picture Jesus uses, ensure that it is never able to grow because it is stifled by these other things. I think most people are genuinely surprised that this proves to be the case. The first flush of faith is often quite powerful. Jesus appears so wonderful that they cannot imagine anything that would dim their enthusiasm for him. How can we possibly turn away from him when he has done so much for us? But then these other things crowd in. Life takes an unexpectedly difficult turn and threatens to get even worse – I can think of several people who have taken a battering and then allowed those things to stoke their fears. So, rather than hold on in faith, they let go and give way to their worries. Others are surprised by the power that wealth (or perhaps the desire for it) holds over them, dominating their thinking to the point that Jesus is squeezed out. Still others find that they just long for something else; there is always something more exciting and Jesus just becomes irrelevant.

The group of people that Jesus is speaking to at this point is not the outside world that wants nothing to do with him, but with those who claim to be his disciples. I can think of too many people who, professing faith in Jesus, have slipped away from active faith because life's awkward circumstances have conspired to relax their grip on Jesus, by making him seem more distant, less important, or just unable to help. In every case the person concerned would deny that they were losing their faith; they still believed, but that belief was in fact only half a belief. It was an acknowledgement that God existed, but no longer an active trust. And in the course of time even that bare acknowledgement withered to nothing.

There is no easy solution to these pressures – although perhaps the word 'assaults' was over-dramatic. They are usually far more subtle than outright assault. At the very least we must be aware that they will come our way and that we must ready ourselves for them by building faith in the good times. By doing this we will be able to say when faced with worry that nothing has changed in God's love for us: he is with us nevertheless. Or when tempted to trust in wealth we will realise that there really is nothing greater than the riches of God's grace. And when tempted to build our lives on “other things” we will know already that God is the only secure foundation we can build on both for life and eternity.

Those who stand firm prove the value of doing so, bearing fruit as Jesus said, and “producing a harvest of righteousness and peace.” The irony of giving way to worries and letting go of Christ is that the worries do not cease; they become worse and keep on. The wealth does not provide the answer, any more than the “other things” fill the gap. The only solution is to hold onto faith in the first place and swim against the tide, not just of public opinion, but perhaps also of the way you feel about it, too. But then I guess that is what faith is all about.

The waiting game

2011-11-17T21:53:00.001Z

It was John Piper who pointed out that impatience comes as a result of our unwillingness to trust God either that we are in the place he has appointed for us or that we are moving at the pace he has chosen for us. Those two elements are the key - his place and his pace – because these are the points at which the proverbial rubber hits the road, the points where either faith operates or we turn to our resources and insist that we have to do it ourselves because God doesn't seem to be working.

We have to acknowledge that there are occasions in our lives when events take a direction that seems to indicate that God is no longer around. We are greeted with roadblocks on every turn, obstacles and hindrances lie across our path, while mishaps dog all our plans and frustrate all we seek to do. Meanwhile we watch deadlines approach and begin to panic. We wonder if God has got it right, whether his timing can be trusted or his ability to help relied on. So we demand that God act in the way that we feel is right for us: surely he can understand that we want this progressed faster, at our pace rather than his? In short, we become impatient.

The issue here is not whether we have to chose between doing nothing (i.e. waiting for delivery from heaven) or doing everything ourselves about the matter in hand. For instance, missionaries frequently have to stand waiting for visas, sometimes for days, while petty bureaucrats bluster and delay, sometimes waiting for a bribe. Such tedious processes can be shortened miraculously and they pray that it will be so, but they know that God does not smooth every path automatically. My brother once received a visa back practically by return of post, leaving everyone dumbfounded at such a rapid turnaround, but mostly God's answer comes at the end of a long line of people, so the need therefore is to learn patience in the face of despotic officials and apparent divine inactivity.

It is how we handle it that counts, perhaps coming down to the simple question of how we react and what we do first. Watch people when their expectations are dashed and their hopes unfulfilled and you will often see rage, lashing out at the nearest target, a desperate impatience to see the situation reversed, followed by the inevitable depression and bitterness when none of that produces the desired change. Alternatively, the vehement protest might just work, but that then reinforces the mistaken belief that it is our energy that counts, so the next time we leap into action all the more quickly.

But Paul in one of his letters to the church in Corinth speaks of a different spirit. When his own life was in danger at one point – and we know no other detail about this incident – he reflects that “this happened so that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead.” He speaks of the deliverance he experienced and then of his confidence that God would continue to do so “as you help us by your prayers.” In all of it the spirit of his words is that, even in suffering, he relies on God and waits patiently for him, an attitude that is reflected in the way he prayed. I think most of us have to confess that patience and trust like this do not come naturally. It is much more our style to try to move things on at our own pace first and only pray when all other avenues have been exhausted. Yet Paul's testimony was he saw God work powerfully as he and the church prayed, and if we were to make prayer the priority he did then we would be able to say the same. And maybe the answer would find us in a place we had not chosen, or moving at a pace we did not really want, but it would be God's choice, and that makes all the difference.

Under the knife

2011-11-10T11:14:00.000Z

I don't pretend to be a gardener by any stretch of the imagination, or really all that interested in it, but last week I read a piece that made me sit up. I was in hospital preparing for surgery and this was my Bible reading for the day:

I am the true vine and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

You'll find this in John 15 and it forms part of the final teaching of Jesus to his disciples while at the last supper. The rest of the passage continues in a similar vein about the living relationship between him and his disciples, but it was, hardly surprisingly, these words which caught my attention. It was not as if I hadn't known them; just that they came home with a relevance I had not felt before.

God's aim for those who follow him is clearly laid out across the Bible, expressed in various ways, but with a common underlying theme. “Be holy, because I am holy” is one way the Old Testament puts it. Paul says that God's aim is that we should be conformed to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ, and that we should walk by the Spirit and produce the fruit of the Spirit. The writer in Hebrews says that God disciplines us with the aim of producing a harvest of righteousness. So what Jesus says about bearing fruit is another variant on this theme. God's desire is that we should grow in character that reflects him. What we often fail to realise is just how passionately committed he is to this.

Israel's commission was to be a holy priesthood among the surrounding nations, praying for them and representing God to them so that they knew what he was like. Old Testament history shows just how badly they did this much of the time, with God on occasion accusing them of causing those nations to slander him because of the way they, Israel, had behaved. But his aim for his people did not change because of that, nor has it changed for us. His desire is that we should bear fruit to his glory and he will work in us to ensure that we produce it. Hence John 15 and Jesus' teaching about pruning.

Gardeners will understand the metaphor: a fruitful plant must be pruned to ensure continued as well as greater fruitfulness. The pruning can appear drastic – indeed, vines are often stripped right back to the stump – but when performed by those who know what they are doing, it leads to a vastly greater crop. So it is with our lives. God knows that he is not going to see us grow without a pruning hand. If life continues swimmingly we often become complacent, lazy, self-centred and forget God who has given us everything. When life is threatened we realise our dependence upon him and our need for his grace in greater measure, so we turn back and pray to find his help not just for the trial, but also to be what he wants us to be in normal circumstances.

If that seems a little drastic we need to remember that God knows that our happiness is also bound up with this. The fruit he wants us to produce is a powerful and beautiful combination of character traits that both glorify him and benefit us. What can possibly be wrong with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? Those are his aim for us, in greater measure (“even more fruitful”, as Jesus says) and permanently (“fruit that will last”), so he takes the steps needed to ensure this happens.

So there I am, lying on the hospital bed, waiting for some relatively drastic surgery, and Jesus tells me he is in this. I am not the victim of some ghastly lapse in God's planning or some fiendish scheme of Satan. This is the Master's hand and he will produce in me those qualities that reflect his grace, and as I remain close to him, he will ensure that it will be in abundance.

Unshakeable

2011-11-03T17:05:00.001Z

I once heard someone being described as having “unshakeable faith”. I know something about this person and would agree that their faith was strong, but I doubt they would themselves agree that their faith was unshakeable. There is plenty that can assail faith and make it tremble. We are human, after all, so it does not take much imagination to conceive of eventualities that would make a person of previously strong faith despair, lose hope, give up or wonder what on earth God is doing. Human faith in God is never going to be strong, when compared with the forces that are ranged against it. If my confidence is built upon the strength of my faith in God, then it is never going to be all that strong, and at the most crucial periods, when I really need it, it is going to be disastrously weak and will fail me. So it's just as well it is not the strength of my faith that counts.

Since faith is about relying on someone else, what counts is how strong that someone else actually is. That means it is possible to put faith in the wrong person or the wrong thing. Climbers entrust their security to a rope, for example, which is a good thing to do, unless the rope is frayed, in which case it is going to let them down very badly. Or people entrust themselves to political leaders, saying that they believe in them and trust them to bring about the desired change, leaders who may or may not turn out to be worthy of that trust. And so it is with our lives and eternity: in what or in whom are you placing your trust?

The Bible's constant quest is to bring people to trust God, rather than themselves. That begins with us putting aside the good that we think we have done, that we are so proud of, realising that this goodness is not enough to make us acceptable to God, and then put our faith in the Saviour God has provided, that is Jesus Christ. Rather than believe we can do what is necessary to wash away our sins, we trust that God himself has provided the Saviour who will do that for us in his death and resurrection. That is where faith starts, but it is then translated into a whole lifestyle that depends on God rather than our wisdom, our cleverness, our skills, our expertise, our technological wizardry. Rather then resting on myself, I place my faith in God that he knows what is right, that he is able, that he has the power, that his will is perfect, that he can be trusted. Because he is infinitely strong, faith in him is well-placed; it is not located in my weakness, but in someone worthy of trust, someone stronger and more reliable than any human can ever be.

You can read the history of Israel in this light. The Old Testament is filled with their attempts to find help elsewhere – anywhere, it seems, other than in God himself. There were futile alliances with the godless superpowers around them, or flirtations with the gods of the surrounding nations, none of which bore any fruit except bitterness. Amid all this you can read the words of the prophets, as they repeatedly urged Israel to put aside their trust in worthless idols and shaky alliances. You can even read a rebuke from a pagan general as he asks them on what they are basing their confidence, because confidence in anything or anyone other than God can only ever be shaky because it can only ever be short-lived.

By contrast, when the New Testament talks of the security of faith in God it says we are receiving “a kingdom that cannot be shaken”. Built on a secure foundation, what we have in Christ cannot be lost, seeing that it is secured by the one sent from heaven, who died and rose again and who lives today. In fact, to use the language from that passage, it cannot be shaken. It is an uncomfortable fact that we may lose everything (in fact, those to whom this letter was addressed had to face that prospect), because those things can be taken from us. God, however, calls us to build on him, to believe in him and his word, to place our confidence in him rather than ourselves as someone who is absolutely trustworthy. So in this it is not the strength of our faith that counts, but whether we actually have faith in someone who is worthy of our trust. It is not the faith that needs to be unshakeable, but the foundation, and the New Testament leaves in no doubt that Jesus is just that.

Standing on his word

2011-10-27T12:06:00.001+01:00

I can think of times I have had to eat my words. On some occasions I have regretted them. But most times I simply have to stand by them, and this is such a time. I have the prospect of an operation to remove a small growth that I have now been told is cancerous, so everything I have previously said about healing, and perhaps last week's post Spray and Pray in particular, comes back to me and says, “Do you still believe that? Will you stand by what you said then? Or are you going to go down to South London for a bottle of Anointing Water?” The answer to the first two of those questions is “Yes,” and to the third, “No. Definitely not.”

God heals, but I am not about to do something daft like ignore the surgeon's advice that if I don't have this piece removed it will take over and eventually kill me. And if the medical professionals feel that it needs chemotherapy after that (they tell me there is a possibility that it won't), then I will take their advice and submit to that. I find no personal conflict in accepting the surgeon's wisdom and knowledge (both of which are God-given, even if he doesn't acknowledge it) about my condition, treatment and cure, alongside trusting and praying that God will bring healing. All healing is divine, whether it comes through medicine or prayer, so I am not about to sideline something God has given. I should receive the date for my operation today; I will ask the elders to lay hands on me and pray this Sunday.

While we're thinking about all this, permit me a slight digression. Can those of you who are old enough to remember the popular preacher David Watson answer a question: Just why, when he was diagnosed with a much more serious bowel cancer, did he decline chemotherapy the moment he knew his condition? His book about facing cancer 'Fear No Evil' (out of print, but try Amazon second hand) was mystifying in this regard, as I don't recall him explaining his reasons. Was it because his church had a well-known healing ministry and he therefore felt employing such methods would show a lack of trust in God? Or was it just that he knew the diagnosis was terminal and it was therefore not worth it? Overall, I confess I did not find it helpful when I read it 25 years ago and I won't be turning to it now.

To get back to the subject in hand, do I need to point out that actually in all of this it is not my words I have to stand on, but God's? The key is taking God at his word, and I remember seeing that in action when we were living in Somerset. Two women started attending church around the same time. They were about the same age, but all similarity ended there. In particular one battled with accepting the Bible and questioned it at every turn, while the other drank it in. It will not surprise you to learn that first never really appeared to find her faith helpful, while the second woman grew by leaps and bounds and is still actively serving God. Her baseline attitude was and remains simply to take God at his word, stand by it, believe it, submit to it, accept it, allow it to change her attitudes, speak to her fears and desires and shape her thoughts. In it she found news of a Heavenly Father who loved her and a Saviour who gave himself for her; she believed that and proceeded to surrender her life to him, rejoicing in the forgiveness and new life she found, drawing strength from that and finding new purpose in service and worship.

That is all I am doing now. My hope for the future does not come from wild promises of healing or wealth, but in knowing Christ and being known by him. It is found in believing what he says and entrusting myself to that, rather than listening to the outrageous claims of some ranting preacher. And although the surgeons are thankfully saying they feel they can deal with this problem successfully, I have to affirm also that this hope is there even if God doesn't heal. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this hope is present especially if he doesn't heal, for the great hope the Christian faith points to is the time when we shall see him face to face. This is the great day we look for and anticipate as the goal of all our life on earth. Having known him here we shall then be with him and know him for ever. There is no more reliable foundation to life than standing on his word, because to build your life on his promises is to build on God himself and find that beneath the shifting sands of human experience lies solid rock.

Spray and pray

2011-10-20T09:05:00.000+01:00

The BBC news a couple of nights ago reported on the deaths of three people in London who had been told by “Evangelical Christian pastors” that they had been healed of HIV-Aids so they could stop taking their medication. It seems these are not isolated cases in the London area where a number of prosperity or health and wealth churches are concentrated, with the BBC online article drawing attention to the activities of the Synagogue Church of All Nations in south London as a prime example of the sort of ministry that would potentially advise people to quit medication.

I didn't know anything about the church in question, but a visit to the website was pretty informative, revealing a style of ministry that is dramatically emotional, promising healing and deliverance from every condition under the sun, with videos of people who, it is claimed, have been healed of Aids. The site is careful to point out that it is God who heals, but at the same time leaves you in no doubt that he will heal (“there is never a sickness Jesus cannot heal”) and, moreover, that it will be through the church's own prophets and wise men. One particularly revealing section of the site details the use of “Anointing Water” which is used in the church's healing ministry. Once again, the site explains that “it is not the anointing water that heals the sick, but Jesus Christ himself …”, but its use is in reality little more than primitive magic: “By using the anointing water you are symbolically setting yourself apart for Jesus Christ's special attention as you pray in faith … you are positioned for mercy, favour, healing, deliverance, blessing, prosperity and fruitfulness,” while the blurb on the bottle says “For good health and breakthrough in all areas of your life and for the salvation of your soul.” Is a person who can buy into that sort of superstition also more likely to be the sort who will swallow the advice of a prophet who tells you that you don't need the tablets any more?

Basically, what they are doing is claiming to guarantee all the blessings of heaven in this life, using methods that exploit people's desires to see God work in their lives. They offer complete deliverance, absolute healing, blessings which can be claimed as of right by those who have trusted in the victory of Christ – and all you need to position yourself for this wonder is a bottle of anointed water! Heaven on earth brought to you in a bottle that will fit in your handbag. Spray, pray – and probably pay – and the healing is yours!

If you don't believe then it is easy to rubbish the whole system. You can dismiss everything and laugh at the gullibility of those who fall for this. But it is not so straightforward for the rest of us. We accept that some of it does need to be rubbished: playing on people's emotions, exploiting their vulnerability, dispensing advice that kills people. All that is wrong, but how can we find the right balance between believing that God is able to heal and using the methods he has given in modern medicine? That is a question Christians have always wrestled with and it is not answered by insisting that God will always heal if we have the right amount of faith or if we use the right techniques (or water) to position ourselves for healing.

Actually, in all of these churches' teaching there is nothing about finding God's help in suffering, and this is one way in which they sell people short. They are so keen, perhaps even desperate, to see God heal that they sideline the Bible's teaching about learning to find God's grace and strength in affliction, about knowing his power to help us struggle through, or trusting him for his provision in poverty. They focus almost exclusively on the hope of God's intervention in this lifetime, but that is not the source of Christian hope. Our hope ultimately lies in resurrection, a hope brought to us through Jesus Christ who suffered and died for us, but who also rose from the dead. It is this hope which sustains us in the trials we face, knowing that we experience these things with him alongside us, under his sovereign hand, with his Spirit giving us strength and grace to stand firm. God gives no guarantee that he will heal, or make rash promises about deliverance from incurable illness, but he does promise to give grace in trial. That is the hope that we all really need.

Outward images and inward reality

2011-10-12T14:38:00.000+01:00

www.lovethesepics.com

Years ago a painting of Jesus Christ appeared in the window of a house on the main street that passed through the small town where we used to live. It was quite well painted and represented Jesus as we have traditionally come to see him in such art: a man with a beard, dressed in flowing robes, raising one hand in blessing, with rays of light behind him. I met the man who had painted it and discovered that he made no claim to be a Christian; he held a unique collection of beliefs that centred on crystal healing, Buddhist meditation and the Kabala, among other things, but had painted a picture of Jesus because he believed that people merely needed to see this image of Jesus for the spirit of Jesus to enter their consciousness and make them more like him. Needless to say, I didn't get very far in trying to say that the Christian point of view is very different.

I had cause to reflect on that again when I learned that today is the 80th anniversary of the building of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. At 39.6m high it is apparently the world’s largest art deco statue and, since it is one of the world’s most recognisable monuments, it is now also counted as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. And it must be said that it is pretty impressive – Lynn and I (here with our youngest daughter) saw it while visiting missionaries in Rio in 1992. It has an appeal as a piece of art deco sculpture, but it is its situation that makes it so special. Perched on an outcrop of rock 700m above the city, with Rio, its bay and beaches stretching out around the base of the mountain, and the Sugar Loaf Mountain on the other side, it is staggeringly beautiful. You can see a smaller copy in Lisbon (“Christ the King”), but that is a pale imitation both in size and location. There is nothing quite like the original.

While the statue is for most people little more than a massive tourist attraction, one of the 100 things you must see before you die, I wonder if some see it the way my new age painter viewed it: look at it and a kind of spiritual osmosis takes place: you don’t need to believe, you just look at it and the spirit it contains will filter into your mind, heart and soul. Perhaps some people see it performing the function of a shrine, much as shrines were used in Alpine valleys, standing at the head of the valley to bless the communities below. So here we have the arms of Christ reaching out in a manner symbolic of the cross, bringing peace to the city and encompassing its inhabitants with his protection, grace and love. Maybe we need reminding that it is just a statue and that the Bible has little good to say about such objects because of the capacity of the human heart to make them what they are not.

Aside from the innate human tendency to worship the object rather than the God it is seeking to portray (and not forgetting that no image of God can ever properly portray him properly anyway), we need to remember how easy it is to use an image to focus on the external and visible, rather than the internal and invisible. God’s priority remains the inward transformation of the soul so that we are “conformed to the image of his Son” and the image the apostle Paul is talking of there is not an image moulded in concrete, but the likeness in our character and heart of Jesus himself. It is a matter of growing in his love, putting his forgiveness into practice in our relationships, exercising his patience with others around us, or standing firm like him under pressure and stress. It is about building his character into ours, a process that will not come by the transmission of vibes, but which rather comes through a relationship with him and a determination each day to take his word into our mind and heart so that it becomes a part of what we are and thus shapes what we do.

The need is therefore for an inward and personal reality in our faith in Jesus, which is only found in a living relationship with him, in which we encounter him through his word, with his Spirit empowering the change that we need as he applies that word to us. Outward images of Jesus may have some power to make us think (and perhaps they demonstrate that the artists have thought about Christ for themselves); they may impress us, shock us, or just leave us unmoved because we are bored with them. What they will not do is transform us.

The irregularities of human justice

2011-10-05T18:24:00.000+01:00

Have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do? My own experience is really trivial. I took some garden rubbish to the local tip once and noticed as I emptied my bags that someone else had included 4 or 5 plastic seed trays in their load, which should have been sorted and put elsewhere. Moments later one of the site workers yelled at me to get that plastic out of the green waste. I looked at him, slightly confused, but he continued by accusing me of failing to sort the rubbish and, when I protested my innocence, asserted “I saw you put it in!” He hadn’t seen me do that, actually, but I realised that it wasn’t worth starting a war over a few bits of plastic, so I meekly removed them (thereby probably proving my guilt in his eyes).

Wrongs like this come about because people do not have a perfect view of what happens and the recent release of Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito demonstrates powerfully how tragically true this can be. Originally convicted of the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, the two were released after an appeal that had all the hallmarks of a media show trial. From their perspective they suffered an enormous wrong: locked up for a crime they claimed not to have committed, an injustice now put right. But the Kercher family now face the other side of that coin: from having to deal with the agony of Meredith’s death, and being told that the Knox and Sollecito’s conviction was emphatically certain, they now have to contend with the dismantling of the prosecution’s case and reversal of that verdict. So, not surprisingly, they feel they are back to square one and do not know how they are ever going to find out who killed Meredith. Perhaps they will never know.

There is little more unsettling than to realise that human justice is often imperfect and at times woefully deficient. People can lie, cover up the truth, see things wrongly or just fail to realise what is going on. That is pretty insignificant when facing a grumpy recycling operative at the council tip, but desperately serious when dealing with murder. Can we ever count on true justice? The Bible’s answer is that we may not be able to do so here, and that we have to look to God for perfect justice, but it also reminds us that we may not in fact get that justice this side of eternity.

One of the more poignant pictures in John’s Revelation is a vision of those slaughtered for remaining true to the Lord Jesus in persecution, crying out to God for justice. “How long” is their cry, “until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” But there is no summary justice on their murderers; the sufferers are “told to wait a little longer.” They therefore gave their lives without any visible assurance that their actions counted for anything, that God saw what was going on or cared about it. There are plenty of Christians today who live under the same circumstances. What assurance do Christians in North Korea have, for instance, that their poverty-stricken lives and likely deaths in labour camps are seen by God, or that he blesses them in that? They only have the assurances that God sees and takes note and that in his time he will bring to justice those who treat them this way. The can only follow in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus who “suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin and no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.”

That last phrase is the key. When we have done everything we still may not be able to bring justice to bear – and even when we do it may not actually be adequate. There are many situations even in the Bible which appear to end in injustice in our lifetime – think of the persecution of the churches and believers John was writing to in his Revelation, few of which would have any happy outcome to their lives under the Roman Empire. How did they find peace in such injustice? It can only have been by entrusting themselves to God who would give them justice in the final reckoning. Of course, that might be too far off for some, but in the irregularities of human justice it is actually the only thing that is really certain.

Bible Bashing

2011-09-28T14:28:00.003+01:00

This video comes from The Christian Institute. It is interesting that the police acted because some of the Bible verses that came up on the screen were deemed 'homophobic'. Will this reasoning then apply to such verses in the Bibles that are not actually on display, but nevertheless still in the text of the Bible? Are we going to be asked to remove such verses before we can sell or distribute Bibles in future? There are, of course, people who do that already, but is it going to become a legal necessity?

Watch and pray!

Set free from the past

2011-09-23T13:15:00.001+01:00

"The Scapegoat" by William Holman Hunt

It is amazing that even the most powerful spiritual traditions can be stripped of their meaning, or become so diluted that they lose connection with what they were intended to convey and therefore lose any power to help. I listened to the Radio 2 “Pause for Thought” this morning in which Baroness Julia Neuberger was talking about the upcoming Jewish Festival of new year which leads to the great festival of Yom Kippur. She began by describing a very powerful and moving opera which pictured the relationship between a concentration camp guard and victim and she then used that as a springboard to talk about the way the past affects us. She observed that the opera didn’t answer any of the difficult questions the holocaust created, but this period in the Jewish calendar was a useful time to reflect upon the past year, review our lives and commit ourselves to God. None of us could change the past, she said, but if we were doing good we could show that we were learning.

I found it hard to believe that she could just leave it hanging like that. The Old Testament festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was not merely about reviewing the past and seeking to learn from it, good though that is. It was focused on repentance, sacrifice and forgiveness. The whole series of pictures that you will find in the book of Leviticus are there to convey the message of God’s willingness to cleanse Israel from sins and separate them from those sins, so that they could once again know his blessing and favour. Take that away and you have little more than an interesting piece of psychological self-help.

Of course, that is probably what most people really want from religion. Something that will therapeutically cosset them, wrap them up in warmth and affirmation, send them on their way feeling good about themselves. Heaven forbid that it should challenge them or insist that they repent in order to know that forgiveness! In fact, I sometimes wonder if people actually want that forgiveness at all. It sounds so presumptuous to say that God has forgiven your sins. Much more humble to say that you have reviewed your past and are learning from it.

What that does then is to cut people off from the real power of the day of atonement. The Old Testament festival was but a symbol for One far greater, that is Jesus Christ who, in his life and death, fulfilled all the great Jewish festivals. It is in a death of Jesus Christ that we see the symbols of Yom Kippur played out: his blood as the sacrificial victim spilled to reunite us with God; his life separated from God, driven away like the scapegoat, so that we might be brought back and accepted; his service as the Great High Priest to present us to God, accepted in him as God’s children, reconciled and truly forgiven, not just for today, but for eternity. To reduce all that to an appraisal is nothing short of tragic.

Maybe people think there is nothing in religion today because most of our churches allow them to believe that faith is about reviewing your past and trying to do better - and why go to church to learn that? But there is so much more. In the death of Jesus - and his subsequent resurrection - we have the most liberating and fulfilling truths anyone can find. God himself takes action to mend both our broken relationship with him and our brokenness itself by coming in the person of his Son to set us free from our sins, from their guilt before him and their power over us. We are unable to do anything about the past, but in Christ we find God’s forgiveness for it. And why would we want to cut people off from that?

The art of Bible conversation

2011-09-15T18:19:00.000+01:00

I have a friend who always ends his e-mails to me with a two or three-line summary of his daily Bible reading. He begins his final paragraph, “My QT, …” and then gives me the chapter he was reading from, followed by a few cross references that have been brought to mind in the process of reflecting on the text. Whenever I reply to him I tend to answer him in like manner, giving the substance of my own reading to hi, but it is not always easy to do so. For a start there are days in which my own reading of the Bible is not particularly meaningful - and some days I have not managed to get around to reading it for myself (as opposed to for a sermon). On other days, my reading has been so cursory that I don’t actually take in what I have read, so one wonders what good it has been to me.

This means that the challenge from my friend’s practice is actually a really good one. It forces me to treat God’s Word with more care and adopt practices that will help me not merely recall it, but think positively about both what it means and how I should apply it to my life. More than this, it brings the Word of God into daily interaction between me and my friend. It becomes part of our regular communication with each other, and is not just confined to a Bible study or sermon.

Perhaps this is its most important benefit. We live in a culture which encourages us to keep our spiritual thoughts to ourselves and not bring faith into daily life; the Bible is a holy book that we read in private, and only discuss its message at ‘holy’ times. But God cannot be put into a box like that: he is the living God who speaks and acts, and demands that we place him at the heart of all we do. There are many ways in which this applies and what we do with the Bible is one of them. Reading the Bible each day is a good thing, but it needs to find its way into the daily round. Repeating what God has said in the context of everyday communication is important because it says that we are bringing God’s Word into everyday life, which is where it should be - in fact, that is where he should be, also.

Evil – them or us?

2011-09-09T20:23:00.000+01:00

This week-end will mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre that brought the twin towers crashing down and causing the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. Like so many I remember watching the news broadcasts with staggered disbelief that anyone could possibly hatch such a diabolical scheme that displayed such a callous disregard for human life. What sort of monsters were they? We know the answer now, and have had several other examples of the sorts of things they are capable of, except that we have learned that they were not monsters. They were people, just like you and me.

Now I realise that in several ways they were not like us: no one I know has hijacked a plane and crashed it into a building, for example. And I am not aware of any of my friends being members of an international terrorist organisation with a pathological hatred of Western society. But the hijackers were ordinary men in other respects, with family connections, with some quite well educated with friends who thought highly of them. Like so many of the 'monsters' of previous conflicts they turn out to be unremarkable inidividuals – think of Nazi concentration camp guards, Stalin's henchmen or neighbours in the recent Yugoslav civil war – who transform grotesquely when pushed, or when the opportunity presents. Studies have been done about the way that a uniform can give authority that goes to a person's head. Others show the way in which community hatreds can lie dormant for decades and resurface when new threats arise. Still others point to the effect of injustice (perceived or real) on the human spirit and how it can lead to extreme reaction. All of those have applied to one degree or another in recent conflicts, but they all have one uniting factor: it is ordinary people who change like this. And therefore it is people like you and me.

This is where the Bible's statements about human nature ring so true (and where secular views are so unrealistic): that sin twists human nature at its core, so that no facet of human personality, whether mind, will, or heart, remains untouched by sin. This does not mean that everyone is as evil as they possibly could be – after all, we live in a world in which God's general grace still operates and appears in the good that we also see all around us – but it does mean that none of us can claim that we are immune to committing such evil. If pushed, then we are capable of doing the same because the same root of sin lies in us. You only have to think of the horror of the community conflicts in Bosnia or Croatia to see this: neighbours who had got on well for decades suddenly turned against each other with frightening ruthlessness, ordinary people beforehand, yet suddenly commiting atrocities of unspeakable maliciousness.

It is humbling to have to face this, as it confronts us with God's assessment on what we are all like at heart and why we need God's salvation in Jesus Christ just as much as the terrorist or camp guard. It forces us to admit that, however good we think we are, we still need God's grace both to redeem us and transform us as well. Without this grace, we are all left at the mercy of our own nature. But the good news is that God holds out the redeeming grace of the Lord Jesus that changes all who trust in him, from the very worst to … well, it wouldn't be right to say the best, but you know what I mean: the rest of us. It is the power of Christ in his death and resurrection that transforms and gives power over sin that nothing and no one else can. And it is not just the terrorists who prove that; it is ordinary folk like you and me.

Dictators and servants

2011-09-07T11:11:00.000+01:00

You don't have to look far to see examples of what leadership is not supposed to be like. There are reports of Gaddafi loyalists (and possibly the man himself) slipping out of Libya, laden down with gold bullion and other assorted treasures to support themselves in exile. Only now that his regime has collapsed are we able to see the extent to which this man had employed the traditional tools of tyrrany to sustain his rule: prisons, torture, a vast network of bunkers and tunnels, through which he probably made his escape, with huge concrete compounds and security walls. And all for a man who met foreign diplomats in a Bedouin-style tent, suggesting openness and even weakness. And now that he has gone, he and his followers have plundered the nation they once led.

No real surprises there, then. Dictators always claim to be acting in the interest of the people they lead, but that is never the case. It is always self-serving: building up their own empires, syphoning off the best for themselves into foreign accounts, living in luxury while their people struggle in poverty, appointing favourites who are incompetent and under whose rule the couuntry stagnates and dies, creating a class of crawling minions who will stop at nothing to preserve the regime and beating the rest into submission. Whether you look at European history with its despotic kings, 20th century tragedies of Stalinism and Fascism, or just current disasters in Zimbabwe, Myanmar or North Korea (to cite just a few) the situation is always the same at root. Their leaders are serving themselves.

Now I imagine that these leaders would be rather non-plussed at that assessment. Why would they think of serving anyone? They are the rulers! But that is the point. If rulers are going to rule well, they must learn to serve the people over whom they have authority, because if they do not serve the people, they will only end up serving themselves. It was Jesus who made this point while training up his own disciples. They got into an argument about who was the greatest, a dispute we smugly think is too childish for us. But you only have to look at what happens in business when people clash to realise that, although people aren't usually so crass as to argue about who is the greatest, their actions and words show that this is what they are arguing about. They “lord it over each other”, as Jesus puts it, but he says that those who follow him have to have another spirit at heart. The greatest must be the servant of all and follow the example Jesus himself gave: “who did not come to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many.”

This is where the whole notion of “civil service” comes from – that people in government are serving the society in which they live, giving themselves so that others will benefit from stability and order. That notion is the last thing Colonel Gaddafi and his stooges had in mind as they creamed off the profits from Libya's oil revenues for themselves, but we should not be too cocky ourselves about the state of this concept in 21st century Britain. Last year's revelations about MPs' expenses demonstrated that self-serving had found its way into the corridors of Westminster, while Alistair Darling's recently published memoirs reveal (once again) that Gordon Brown's style of leadership was domineering and bullying, while his moods were “brutal and volcanic”. I don't think Brown had a network of escape tunnels and torture chambers, but his style hardly strikes me as humble servanthood.

And that is exactly what we, as followers of Jesus Christ, must model, especially (but not only) those in any authority over others. It's not a popular way of going abot things, as it may involve losing out to those who are prepared to tread others down, and it is rarely easy. But because Jesus has led the way in this, it is a calling we cannot ignore.

Six of the best

2011-08-30T17:01:00.001+01:00

The riots are a fading memory of a summer that never really got going, but the courts are still sitting late into the night to deal with the several thousand extra cases the troubles created. A leading article in The Independent today observes that the argument between leading figures in the Prison Governors' Association and the Magistrates' Association demonstrates that there is no agreement on the best way of dealing with the whole question. It also points out that “almost 70 per cent of those brought to courts since the riots have been given jail sentences or remanded in custody; the figure for 2010 was 10 per cent”. And sentences appear to be universally higher than would be expected: one of the cases was of a man give a 20 month custodial sentence for stealing a T-shirt when a crowd ransacked a designer clothes shop.

This accord with the strong language coming out of government officials whenever the matter is spoken of in public: offenders are warned justice will catch them and that justice will be swift, severe and effective. But is that what is going to happen? Aside from questions of proportionality (is a 20 month sentence for a first offence – stealing a T-shirt, admittedly in a riot, but still only a T-shirt – excessive and out of proportion to the crime? What are they going to give those who made off with a TV, 5 phones and 20 pairs of trainers?) and usefulness (whether locking everyone up is helpful, especially when prisons are overcrowded), has anyone noticed that Britain has been here before and that it didn't work then, either?

Go back 200 years to the early 1700s and there are some uncomfortable similarities, the biggest of which was that, in the face of recognisable social collapse courts were tougher than ever on crime. There were more hanging offences than at any other time in British history (and, of course, there are none today) with authorities clamouring for more power to stamp on criminals, but without any indication that such a policy worked. Part of that was down to the problems people faced: if you could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread, but faced death by starvation because you didn't have access to basic necessities, then there wasn't much choice. But most of the problems were caused by a general loss of morality. Hogarth's series of famous cartoons such as “The Rake's Progress” and “Marriage a la Mode” were comments on the empty standards of his day, with the rake being destroyed by gin and wild living, and the marriage in question falling foul of immorality. Social historians portray England at in the first quarter of the 1700s as dissolute, morally bankrupt and without much hope. Even the church had given up, with its bishops despairing that anything could ever be done to save the nation. In fact, it is doubtful that many of the bishops believed the Christian message, as many had reduced it to cold, lifeless formality that had no power, so it not surprising that harsher sentences brought no change in the nation's well-being.

So what happened? The Evangelical and Methodist revivals, that's what. George Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley, and a whole host of others burst onto the scene in 1739 and 1740, and led nationwide revival of Christian faith that touched the whole of United Kingdom, but also spread across to North America, too. Preaching an uncompromising message these men were instruments to bring the nation back to a genuine, living faith in Jesus Christ, a faith which then changed the lives of those who believed and transformed the communities in which they lived. And this transformation was then passed down the generations: virtually all of the charitable, social, or beneficial societies (including trades unions) formed from this period through to the end of the Victorian era had their origins in Christians wanting to act for the good of their neighbours. If you can get a copy of “England: Before and After Wesley” by J Wesley Bready at a second-hand bookshop, you will see this described in Britain's history in convincing detail.

The gospel, when truly believed, is a force for real change. It reaches the heart, which legislation or threats of tough justice have never ultimately been able to touch. It is the gospel of Jesus that we need to turn our country back from the brink. Which begs the question: do people around see that power at work in you?

False gods and the end of life as we know it

2011-08-09T22:35:00.000+01:00

It feels like we are witnessing the beginning of the end of western society this summer. What with massive debt problems, the threat of double-dip recession, major cuts in public services, austerity measures in some countries, the possibility that the euro might collapse altogether, and now unrestrained looting across London and several other UK cities, there seems to be enough stress to bring the entire edifice of Western secular democracy crashing down. And that was not my thought first; I heard a radio debate about 6 months ago where this possibility was seriously entertained and the conclusion reached that western society's days were in fact numbered. And I remember Alistair Cooke in 1976 observing that he saw the seeds of America's decline in her obsession with money, sex, leisure and military power. Those were the factors that brought Rome down 1600 years ago, and that team of false gods will do the same to us today.

I know in Western, secular society we think ourselves far too sophisticated to worship false gods, erect golden idols in our streets and bow down to them as the ancients did. How stupid they were, we think, to believe that a block of metal or wood could save them! But in all our smug sophisication we have our golden idols nevertheless and they are just as toxic, perhaps none more so than Mammon. It is to this idol that we have sacrificed everything in the last 50 years and it is this that the looting ironically reflected. There have been numerous comments about the sort of young people who were ransacking London shops virtually at will, observing that they make up a significant underclass who do not feel a part of the society we live in, shut off from meaningful work and opportunity (yet connected via Blackberry), surrounded by prosperity, yet unable to access it, as if they have fallen off the edge of twenty-first century Britain. Such comments probably have plenty that is right about them, for the youngsters were not looting for basic necessities; rather, they went for the designer clothes, trainers and electronic goods, as if those items would ease the social dislocation they feel. But should we blame them for thinking this way? After all, everything our media pushes out tells people they will find happiness and meaning if they worship at the altar of prosperity, when patently it does not.

It fails because false gods always let their devotees down. They are unable to satisfy and the more we rely on them the more dissatisfied we can only ever become. This comes as a nasty shock to a culture which has built its foundations on living without God, thinking that it can find hope and meaning in substitute gods, but to anyone with an open Bible it is a straightforward explanation as to why are we so unhappy when we have everything we need.

Moreover, it is one of the patterns of human nature that you become what you worship. With our culture worshipping gain to the point of obsession (what was it that drove the schemes that nearly destroyed the entire banking sector in 2008 or pushed US debt into hundreds of trillions?) it is almost inevitable that greed should become a chief trait, whether it is being praised at the top of the banking world, or expressed by the underclass who seize the opportunity to grab what they can. And then is it any surprise that society becomes harsher, greedier, more alienated, angrier, compassionless, friendless and lonely?

When Jesus brought his message of salvation to the Jewish and Roman world he presented himself as the one who would satisfy the deepest thirst that anyone can experience. Calling himself the bread of life he painted a deliberate contrast with those around him. “They will fail you,” Jesus says, “But I will bring satisfaction that will not fail you.” And there is more to it than this: all other idols not only come up short in this, they finish up destroying their followers. But Jesus brings life in all its fullness, an offer it is clear our weary society could do with understanding.

30 Days of Prayer

2011-08-01T14:35:00.000+01:00

Today is the first day of Ramadan, so this gives a good opportunity to promote the 30 Days of Prayer for Islam website. This is the 20th time there has been a concert of prayer for the Muslim World during Ramadan, and it now has participants from all around the globe. The first of the special pages for Ramadan is here, and if you sign up you can receive this information every day by e-mail, but you will find other information about praying for countries around the world on the site as well.

It is, of course, hard to measure the progress such united prayer has achieved. We are not talking about instant change in a system that for centuries has stood against the light, but we do believe things are happening across the Muslim world. It is vital that we continue to pray that these peoples see Jesus as Saviour and Lord. So use this month as a reminder to pray for Muslim peoples, not only around the world, but also on our doorstep.

John Stott: 1921-2011

2011-07-28T10:37:00.000+01:00

In case you are wondering what the fuss about this man is for, read his what Chris Wright has to say about him on his memorial site, that you cannot write a history of the second half of the 20th century without considering his influence, something recognised in the secular world, as in 2005 he was listed in Time Magazine's "100 most influential people." Then look at his biography on the Langham Partnership site, where you can see the organisations he was involved in founding and the movements he led, or just consider the books he read or edited. The BBC news site has a mention of him; other papers have yet to publish obituaries of him, but will doubtless do so. But he would not want us to extol his talents, though he had many; he was, first and foremost, a man who loved Jesus Christ and lived for him, a man who gave himself unstintingly to promote the good news of Jesus in his preaching and ministry, and who even turned down the opportunity to become a bishop because he felt that would hinder his preaching ministry. He studied hard to communicate the salvation the gospel announces and therefore would want us above all else to see Jesus.

Friendship, forgiveness and faith

2011-07-21T11:59:00.002+01:00

Can friendship survive tragedy? Is faith enough to provide forgiveness to repair the damage? This is a moving video of two men who found the answers in Christ when disaster struck.

Today (3 August) I have taken the video off as it keeps starting when the whole page comes up, but here is the link to the page where you can watch it:

A Story | Big Picture Faith from Adam Kring on Vimeo.

Go to Newspring Church for more.

Feet of clay

2011-07-15T17:34:00.001+01:00

I can't remember a time when anyone liked Rupert Murdoch. I never really paid much attention to news about him when I was younger, but I still remember the aggro directed at him when he moved The Times etc out from Fleet Street (sacking those who would not make the move) and established Fortress Wapping to make this possible. That hostility then followed him through the formation of BSkyB (when even I had the impression that he wanted to take over the world), his rather sinister background presence in the British media and his somewhat curious relationship with the Labour Party and British politics. And now comes the hacking scandal that has engulfed his media empire, bringing down the News of the World, ending News Corporation's bid to own Sky in its entirety, hastening the resignation today of Rebekah Brooks, and threatening Fox News in the States as the FBI begin to investigate allegations of phone hacking of 9/11 victims. The empire may strike back next week at the Commons hearings, but the damage is looking pretty serious at the moment.

We tend to assume that the empires that rule our world are untouchable. Certainly they are very powerful, but the Bible leaves no doubt about their very human frailties. If you read the prophecy of Daniel in the Old Testament you will find a picture of the world's empires. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon in the 6th century BC, had a dream of a fearful statue with a golden head, silver torso, bronze legs and feet partly of iron, partly of clay. Daniel interpreted this as a picture of the world's empires, current and future, in all their glory and strength, a succession of great powers from Babylon, through Persia and Greece, down to Rome. Yet the power was compromised; the feet were of clay as well as iron, reminding us that their seemingly unassailable position of dominance was an illusion, they were inherently unstable and could collapse under their own weight.

But Nebuchadnezzar's dream was not about empires collapsing by themselves; it was about someone pushing them. The second part of the dream was what made it so fearful. He saw “a rock being cut out, but not by human hands” which then struck the statue, demolishing it utterly and then rising to fill the earth. If you have trouble grasping this, take heart that Nebuchadnezzar was equally puzzled, but the meaning is not obscure in the Bible's overall picture. The “rock”, Daniel said, refers to a kingdom set up by God that will sweep away the arrogant empires of this world that think themselves invulnerable, whether political parties, tyrranical governments, financial institutions, royal thrones, religious bodies or just television corporations. History is littered with wreckage of once great empires that boasted of their achievements, confidently predicting their glorious survival down the ages. Yet they fell. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they were pushed. Their whole project was self-aggrandisement, making a name for themselves and rejecting the God whose world this is and, as with the tower of Babel, the first such self-centred empire building attempt, God ensured that it would not last. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch and his cohorts have met the rock.

It is this rock, the empire that will last, around which the dream revolves. The rock appears during Roman times and it is Jesus Christ to whom the image is pointing. By his life and death he set up a kingdom that will not fail – it is no accident that the consistent image in both Old and New Testaments is of an immoveable foundation, a rock which cannot be moved, a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a secure place to stand. The Bible is not talking of a church institution as such, for many of our organisations are flawed and fail, but rather of Christ himself, reigning in his people throughout the world and into eternity. When Daniel made this prophecy it must have sounded hopeless: how could God's kingdom survive when the Babylonians had crushed Israel? When Jesus talked about his kingdom being established that too must have sounded impossible: a few disciples against the might of Rome? Yet those empires have come and gone, while the kingdom of God grows and expands. I make no predictions about News Corporation's immediate prospects, but I will definitely put no money on them for the long term. They are just too insecure. I'm banking on a company with rock solid credentials, real longevity in the market and a bright future.

Pastafarians of the world unite!

2011-07-14T10:04:00.000+01:00

I was trying to be all serious this morning, but came across this piece of wackiness in The Telegraph online and it takes some beating. An Austrian man has won the right to wear a pasta strainer for his driving licence on the grounds of religious freedom.

The religion he claims to belong to is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was founded in 2005 to oppose and make fun of religious views of creation. The brief article in The Telegraph says that the 'church' believes that the world was created by the flying spaghetti monster, but because it was drunk at the time the design ended up being rather flawed. What it doesn't mention is that Richard Dawkins talks about the flying spaghetti monster in his controversial "The God Delusion" - he may even have invented the term himself as a foil to creationist and intelligent design ideas he has encountered. Either way, he can be credited with giving the notion the boost it needed, so perhaps he is going to be the first Pastafarian high priest?

A Soldier's Story

2011-07-07T09:55:00.000+01:00

A really encouraging testimony from a former marine, now in church leadership in Wales. Pray for more guys like him!

To die is ... to live is ...

2011-07-05T12:54:00.000+01:00

“To die is …?” What goes in the blank there? A terrible loss? A huge tragedy? A blessed release? The end of it all? No, says the apostle Paul. Gain. To die is gain.

Superficially, at least, quite a lot of people believe that, but it probably is only very superficial indeed. They believe in a vague sense that heaven is a reality beyond this life into which they will pass on death. They believe that the future world which awaits will in some way be better than this one, but they cannot say in what way. It is all a little hazy, really. In fact, this belief is probably little more than a superstition, a gut feeling that this life cannot be all that we are given, a warm sensation that those who die have gone on and we will see them one day. It is frequently little more than something they would like to be true, but cannot be sure is real, so the notion of death really being gain is one they cannot really comprehend. And therefore the life they live in this world remains largely unaffected by thoughts of the life to come. Future glory and heaven do not bring hope into this world, neither do they inform and affect the decisions made here.

But when Paul says that “to die is gain” he is saying that he knows that the life to come is better than this one. There is nothing indefinite about it: weigh the two in the balance and the brief joys of this world are eclipsed by what he calls elsewhere “an eternal weight of glory beyond comparison.” None of this nonsense about sitting around on clouds paying harps, but rather it is “to be with Christ, which is better by far.” But you can only understand that if you have grasped the first part of Paul's life's formula: “To live is Christ.”

What word would you susbtitute for “Christ” in that slogan? Family? Friends? Yourself? (that is today's trinity of important values) Or just making money, achieving a comfortable life, enjoyment, the adrenaline rush, beauty, affirmation, success? Whatever it is, this is what you will lose at death, the thing that will be taken from you and bring into question the idea that to die is gain. In fact, you might lose it a long time before you die, so it is not possible to believe that death is gain if the life prior to that has not been centred around Christ, but it is a different matter if Christ is the heart of your life. Notice it doesn't say “the church” or even “the Christian faith”; it says “Christ”. Those other aspects may feature, but the heart must be Christ himself. To know him (which, as he says in John's gospel “is eternal life”) and be known by him, to love him and be loved, to find all our hopes in his salvation and grace, to discover his peace in the trials we face, his blessing in our joys, his presence in our loneliness, his guidance in the winding trails, his voice in our confusion, his comfort in our doubts, his priorities in our schedules, his standards in our business. That is what it means to live, because this can never be taken from us. It is something that grows with time and does not diminish. It blossoms and matures when other things wither and fade. And that is why death is gain; death ushers us into the presence of the one we have been living for and with all the time up to that point, “to be with Christ which is better by far.”

And that begs a question: what do people see in those of us who profess to follow Christ? Do they see that we are living with Christ at heart? After all, that is what people saw in the followers of Jesus in the early days and hence coined the nickname Christians. So what will they see in us? People who live for the same values of the world around, but who just baptise these values with a little religion on Sunday? Or people whose actions, motives and words are moulded by a relationship with Jesus Christ, for whom to live is Christ, and therefore for whom death is real, solid, everlasting gain?

Born aGagain?

2011-06-29T10:56:00.001+01:00

Type “Lady” into Google and the top entry will be Lady Gaga, with 8 out of the top 10 entries relating in some way to her. She has stormed the pop world and has swept everything before her with her reputation for outrageous outfits, strongly sexual lyrics and a driving rhythm. The Wikipedia article about her estimated she had sold 13-15 million albums and 51-60 million singles worldwide, while also commenting that she has already been listed in Time magazine's Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. The world really has gone gaga over Gaga.

Her latest single “Judas” has followed the usual stellar trajectory. When I found it on You Tube it had been viewed nearly 69 million times already (so it doesn't need me to put up the link for you and add to that astronomical total), but that is not unusual for her videos - “Bad Romance” has been viewed nearly 400 million times. So what is the attraction? Lady Gaga is celebrated for her creativity and originality, which she certainly possesses, but in reality it feels that her success has come for more straightforward reasons: she is prepared to take more of her clothes off than most other celebrities and dance in an even more sexually provocative manner. So there is nothing new in the style of the new single, but it is in the content that we have a new element.

As yet another ex-Catholic convent school pupil she has comprehensively rejected her religious upbringing, yet has imported religious imagery into her music, so she is sometimes hailed as a new Madonna. She has spoken of her concerts as religious experiences, but the religious content of this piece exceeds practically everything anyone else has done before. For instance, Judas is the central character in a motorbike gang, with Peter and John appearing as his wingmen; she speaks of washing his feet with her hair; he appears in the video wearing a crown of thorns; the video ends with her dressed like one of the images of the Madonna seen at the big Catholic festivals. And all of this to some pretty choice lyrics. The use of religious imagery in this manner is not surprising, given her personal history, nor is it to be wondered at that, in keeping with the spirit of our age, it is the Christian faith that is being subverted (I haven't seen any pop videos attacking Muhammad's wars, for instance, or even protesting against suicide bombers). It demonstrates the contempt in which popular culture now holds Christian belief, but I wonder if many of her fans have any real idea of the source of the ideas behind the video and simply swallow the anti-Christian imagery unthinkingly.

And that describes the challenge we face as Christians today. The usual portrayal of Christian belief (as opposed to Christian living) is negative. This is not helped by the gatekeepers of our society who ensure that the primary sources of information paint the church in a more negative light (for instance, “they are still debating gay marriage, while the rest of us have moved on and accepted it – when are they going to catch up?”), but most people follow them in this. Most have a mental picture of the church as an outdated institution, with teachings that are unjust, immoral, irrelevant, even illegal, and the flood of images that pour out into the public domain only serve to reinforce that impression. Such negativity is not new, of course. In Roman society the power of the state joined up with popular cynicism to mispresent and vilify both the church and Christ himself. So you can read reports by Roman governors about Christians in the second century, describing the worship and beliefs of early Christians and how they were dealt with; or you can find anti-Christian graffiti, one of the more famous being the cartoon of a man bowing down before a crucified victim who has the head of a donkey, with the inscription “Alexamenos worships his god.” The church handled it then in the way we must do so today. They held fast to Christ, served him faithfully and demonstrated the reality of the hope that faith in Jesus brings. While it is important to argue the Christian case in the public sphere, as they did, the key in the end will be the quality of the lives we lead as followers of Jesus Christ. Christians in Roman society overcame by the power of their lives, exposing the utter emptiness of the sex-obsessed, greedy and violent paganism around them, and, by contrast, the superiority of faith in Jesus Christ. At the moment Lady Gaga seems to have all the attention, but give it time and the emptiness will become obvious. We need to pray that when this happens they then see in us the solid hope that there is in knowing Jesus.

Ashes and sludge

2011-06-22T19:50:00.000+01:00

At first glance this appears to be Russell Brand at his usual motormouth level of conversation, but when you listen to what he is saying you realise this is not his usual subject matter. There are a few astonishing sentiments in this short piece:

That being a celebrity is just like ashes in his mouth (if you listen to the first video in the series he goes into far more colourful detail, that celebrity status is completely vacuous, like a fabulous-looking meal that turns out to be tasteless sludge when you eat it);
His desire that people should look for something of more enduring value - and that all our desires are a substitute for God;
His statement that he believes in God (his wife Katy Perry professes a more traditional Christian faith than he does, but it is interesting to see Jeremy Paxman's face when Brand admits to believing and praying);
His comment that we ought to stop moving in the shadows and move into the real light.

Brand is obviously far more intelligent than the buffoon/cad/comedian/fashionista image he cultivates. He has tasted and seen that the celebrity lifestyle he strove to achieve is worthless and that people are being utterly deceived by it, even comparing it to the "bread and circuses" of Roman times (entertainment was used to keep the people from worrying about the real problems). So is he going to leave it behind? Will he taste and see that the Lord is good, and that only hungering and thirsting after true righteousness will bring lasting satisfaction? I hope so.

Living hope in dying

2011-06-17T15:47:00.001+01:00

The debate about assisted suicide is now firmly in the public agenda thanks to Terry Pratchett's broadcast, but as Christians we are not likely to find ourselves entering that debate on our own terms. It is a secular article of faith that this life is all we have got, and any alternative viewpoint has to speak against that first of all. Moreover, it is assumed that faith alternatives are all equally valid, so that there is nothing to choose between any of them – which means they are all equally invalid and, if not a waste of time (it is recognised that faith can help people get through great difficulties), at least they have nothing to contribute to answering the question on whether assisted suicide should be allowed in law.

Yet the Christian viewpoint is vital and it is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead which changes everything. This event transforms the horizons of human existence and indicates that death, the natural limit of such existence, is not in fact the end. It is not the furthest point on our journey, but a boundary that we all must cross. When Jesus rose from death he promised eternal life for all who will trust him, giving a future hope in the face of an enemy too strong for us all. But this future hope seeps back into the present. It does not create people who are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good (and it certainly doesn't create people who are prepared to blow others up because they have been promised paradise as a reward); it creates people who have a deep concern for people around them, with a desire to serve, and it is their security in knowing that they are heaven-bound that makes them this way.

And this is where the debate is so tragically ironic. You would think that accepting the notion that we only have one short life to live would produce a desire to do everything to preserve life, even a desperation to hang onto it. No doubt there are some who feel that way, and I am certainly not saying that humanists care nothing for others, but the prevailing philosophy of our society appears to be the reverse: max out, live on the edge and to the extreme, do it for yourself, because you're worth it, and once you can no longer live like that then you might as well throw it away. In the long run, such an approach is a prelude to despair. In the 1970s Francis Shaeffer argued in his iconic film and book series “Whatever happened to the human race?” that society is disintegrating when it destroys the unborn and shunts the elderly off at the other end. His warnings about euthanasia seemed stark when I first heard them as a young Christian, but his predictions have proved true and we are dangerously closer to the brink than when he first made them.

So how does the resurrection change the outlook? Consider these words from Paul in 2 Corinthians:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes on what is seen, but in what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Dying is not an easy option and it never will be, but the resurrection demands that we look at it from the other side. In fact, it insists that we fix our eyes on the one thing that cannot be lost, on the eternal glory that far outweighs everything we endure, then view this life in the light of the glory that shines from heaven and allow that to dictate the way we live in the present. What that means for the specifics of Christian living is spelled out in the New Testament letters, among other places, but Paul says here that it involves a process of steady inward renewal to counteract the tragic decline we experience in physical health. Perhaps the most significant effect is found in what Paul says first of all, which contrasts so vividly with the emptiness the world around generally feels in the face of death and dying: it means that we do not lose heart.

Normalising suicide

2011-06-15T09:34:00.001+01:00

Terry Pratchett is the most public advocate of assisted suicide and was given another platform to express his view on Monday (“Choosing to Die”, BBC 2). Now suffering from Alzheimer's, Pratchett has made it clear that he wants to end his life before the terrible disease takes its full course, so the programme was part of his own investigation into the possibility as he followed a man who went to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland to end his life. The basis of Pratchett's view is that people with terminal illnesses ought to have the right to choose exactly when they die, rather than let such diseases take their full and terrible course, and that others should not be prosecuted for helping them to do so. The founder of the Dignitas clinic agreed. He quoted the European Convention on Human Rights to back up his argument, saying that it guarantees the right to “self-determination” and that this must include the right to determine the time and manner of one's own death. I'm not sure the lawyers had that in mind when they drafted that article, but it does afford an insight into what is driving this debate and, perhaps more importantly, where it is likely to go.

It is the issue of our rights that is centre-stage here. My human rights – actually, my rights as a consumer to choose my death – and no one has the right to say otherwise. Currently campaigners are asking only for those with terminal illnesses to be given the right (and therefore the help) to end their lives, but Dignitas's own statistics reveal that 21% of those who died in their clinic were not in fact suffering that way, but were struggling with incurable illnesses and were tired of life. Why should human rights to self-determination not be extended to those people? Why, if someone is fully convinced they want to die, should they not be allowed to end their lives irrespective of their condition? If the answer is sought in human rights, there is no reason that legislation would not go further.

This fear was expressed in the Newsnight debate that followed the broadcast by disability campaigner Liz Carr. She said that disabled and vulnerable people were frightened of the consequences of any law being passed allowing assisted suicide, as such people often feel they are a burden to others and that there would be a subtle moral pressure on them to end their lives. The danger is that the emphasis would shift away from providing such people with support to help them live meaningful lives, not to killing them, but merely allowing the thought that it might be easier for such people to get out of the way and stop being a drain on resources.

No one denies that this situation is a terrible one. What Terry Pratchett faces is awful, and his visit to Dignitas higlighted his dilemma in a way he had not envisaged. If he is to take his own life at a clinic like Dignitas he has to be able to take the lethal dose himself, which means he has to end his life before the disease goes too far and that is probably before he is really ready to die. And that creates a further legal question: Would a person's desire to die be taken into account in new laws, thus allowing someone else to administer the final dose in accordance with their wishes if they proved unable? It is human rights that are being trumpeted, but campaigners ought to be thinking about human nature and what that might do with such an opportunity.

But there was one subject that no one seemed to be thinking about: life after death. Not that this is surprising. If life is all about our rights and what we choose to do, why should anyone think about that? And I imagine if they did, then it was purely as a release from suffering, but the Bible insists that there is more to life and death than this. When Jesus Christ rose from the dead he demonstrated that there is life beyond death, that there is judgment to come and a God to whom we must answer as those who are made in his image, and it is this that gives life its true hope and proper focus. Current beliefs about life have effectively reduced us to mere creatures who can end their lives as a final consumer choice because they have no eternal significance, indeed no real significance at all. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that suicide seems a healthy option.

Get digging!

2011-06-10T20:36:00.000+01:00

As a way of finishing our 1611 series here are a few links to sharpen your understanding.

For young people, try the Fervr website and the article How do we know the Bible is reliable?

Go to the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity articles on Engaging with the Bible for a series of articles about the Bible. For a classic message from John Stott on The Authority of Scripture click here (with an introduction from Mark Greene).

And for those with the time to pursue matters more deeply, go to the UCCF Theology Network page with a large series of articles, both written and audio, about the Bible.

Dig deep and find the treasure!

Do you believe in the possibility of growth?

2011-06-06T12:44:00.000+01:00

If we are honest, in British churches we tend to be negative about church growth. We are often suspicious that large churches might be using unhealthy methods to get people in. Of course, it is quite possible that some are doing that, but certainly not all, and Jesus tells us that the kingdom will grow:

"What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade." (Mark 4:30-32)

Maybe we find that hard to believe because we have become too used to an absence of progress, so that we assume it cannot be any other way. But a parable like that is meant to encourage us to believe God for growth, and to believe that it is worth persevering even if we don't see that right now. Maybe someone else is going to reap the benefits of the work we do now (as Jesus says happens in John 4); perhaps we may go through lean times while others see greater blessing, but that does not change the fact that there is a harvest coming and the gospel of Jesus is going to be heard all over the world. It would be tragic if we stopped believing that.

Change or die?

2011-06-03T17:08:00.001+01:00

This week I came across a book written by a rather notorious retired bishop – no, not David Jenkins, but an American equivalent, John Shelby Spong, who courted controversy during his tenure in office with his radical views on what Christianity should and should not be. The book in question was written in 1999, but I have no reason to believe he does not still stand by what he wrote (if anything, he will have added to the list of things he wants to change since then).

The essence of the book was that Christianity is so outmoded that modern people will not be able to accept its historical tenets, so we had better change them fast or the church will die. I only skimmed a couple of chapters, but the material there was unsurprising: we can't trust the New Testament accounts to tell us the truth about Jesus, so we have to get behind them to find the real, historical Jesus; and the resurrection didn't take place, rather it was the disciples finding the spirit of Jesus living in them after his death – so there was no empty tomb, but that doesn't matter, because the spirit of Jesus lives on in his followers.

Those were just a couple of examples from that particular book, but Spong has gone public on many occasions in his rejection of most of historical Christianity. But such a stance is hardly original because, in essence, those two examples are little more than recycled liberal theology from the 1920s and 30s, when the watchword was also that we should rid the Bible of those bits that modern and sophisticated people could not possibly believe – the atonement was a target then, as now, alongside the miracles of Jesus. Perhaps the biggest difference today is that the list of outdated doctrines has got longer. But there are significant similarities: the effect was disastrous for the church then and it will be so now.

What the revolutionaries in the twenties and thirties (and their Victorian predecessors who taught them) failed to see was that they were substituting God's message for their own and that such an exchange can only ever have fatal results. If they had looked properly they would have seen it pictured in the history of the Old Testament that there was never a happy outcome. Israel was called to be a people who listened to God, who were governed by his Word, so their lives were in line with his commands. Whenever they turned away from that Word, or thought themselves too superior to listen or obey, they always brought themselves misery. And so it proved for the liberals in the inter-war period. They presided over swiftly declining congregations. They changed the message and brought spiritual decline, decay and death upon themselves. My own pastor was trained for 5 years in one such college in the 1960s. He said all it taught him was that such liberalism has no message for the world – it has nothing to say that will communicate spiritual life. But then if you have lost confidence in what God says what other route do you have?

If we are to gain anything from the 1611 anniversary and all the celebrations it must be that we need to hold fast to what we have in the Bible. It is God's word of life. It is the voice that we must bring to ourselves first of all – it's no good giving it out to others if we are not both believing it and living by it – and then it is the message that we must give to the world. Of course they don't want to hear it; of course most people are too sophisticated to listen to it; of course they will look for ways to water it down, or make it more palatable, but that is what they have always done. The world's cultures, insititutions, leaders and religions have always been looking for ways to squeeze the Christian faith into their mould – read Romans 12:1 & 2 and you will see there is nothing new in that sort of pressure. But if we cut out the heart of the gospel message because we are afraid of the opinion of an unbelieving society we are cutting ourselves off from the one of whom the gospel speaks. If we change the gospel we effectively lose the message, along with the Messenger and the salvation he holds out. To put it bluntly, if we change the gospel we die.

What's in a name?

2011-05-27T14:33:00.000+01:00

Sorry - sermon-writing taking longer than usual, so here is a talk from Peter Williams about the sort of evidence which demonstrates the authenticity of the gospels, such as considering the sort of names Jews had in Palestine at the time. It's anything but boring - about 50 minutes devoted to the talk and then the remainder answers to some questions. I found this on the UCCF Be thinking site, which is great for evidence and apologetics.

Enjoy and learn!

Lecture with Dr. Peter Williams from Lanier Theological Library on Vimeo.

Passionate about the Word of God

2011-05-23T15:08:00.000+01:00

What are you passionate about? The Bible? Here is a recommendation from Paul that we cannot ignore:

"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly."

If we are honest, we are frequently embarrased about the Bible and ashamed to own its message, but what Paul says here means that we who know Jesus should, of all people be passionate about God's Word.

And here is a piece of video from St Helen's Bishopsgate to help you understand how the King James Version was produced and what it should mean to you. It's about 13 minutes long and is easy to watch - don't be frightened that the history will lose you; it is very clear and concise. And there is some useful application about the Bible for us today, too.

A Short History of the KJV from St Helen’s Church on Vimeo.

100 phrases from the KJV

2011-05-13T17:40:00.000+01:00

Get this - more than 100 phrases from the King James version of the Bible crammed into a little over 3 minutes by an Anglican curate from Eastbourne. Done to demonstrate the influence of the King James Bible on English, it also aims to point out that reading King Jimmy should lead you to know King Jesus! Enjoy!

A constant companion

2011-05-09T12:36:00.000+01:00

What part does the word of God play in your life? Here is what Joshua was told as he prepared to lead the people into Canaan:

"Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; mediate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful." Joshua 1:8

I remember a photo of a Romanian pastor, taken in about 1980. He had spent several years in jail for his faith, during which he was denied access to a Bible, so always carried one with him wherever he went. It was, quite literally, always in his hand. Sure enough, the family photo we were shown had him, one arm around his wife, holding the Bible in his other hand. He reasoned that he never knew when he would be arrested again, so he wanted to take every moment he had to read the Bible. Of course, it is more than a matter of carrying the Good Book with you (although taking it to work, for instance, would not be a bad thing to do!), it is about having what it says imprinted on your soul. That is what God was urging Joshua to do, and if you look at the end of the book of Joshua, you will see that he managed to do that. How about you?

The perils of the moral high-ground

2011-05-06T19:08:00.001+01:00

Are you old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall? In addition to the sense of euphoria that everything was ok now that the Cold War was over, there was also a feeling that we had won. Western capitalism and democracy had triumphed and everyone would be happy. It came as rather a shock, therefore, to realise that the previously centralised Eastern bloc economies were completely unable to cope with the new free market and that the only industry that found it easy to grow over there was organised crime. Whole countries collapsed (Albania, for instance, with the pyramid selling scheme that swallowed an entire economy) and I remember bemused reports about people wanting to go back to the bad old days of communism. How could that be possible? (the answer was that at least you got fed then)

We may be in danger of adopting the same tone over the death of Osama Bin Laden, The Sun, for instance, announcing it in its own inimitable, triumphalistic style: 'Bin Bagged!' We've won, haven't we? So that means we are top once again! Democracy and freedom triumph! And that means that we are superior, doesn't it? There are, of course, aspects to Bin Laden's philosophy that are utterly repugnant and should be regarded as morally inferior, but we have to be careful that we then do not conclude that we are morally superior and above judgment.

One of the most revealing exposés of the sins of God's people you will find in the Bible is in the prophecy of Amos. Old Testament prophets were sometimes brutal in the way they pulled back the curtain on national evils, but Amos has a unique way of doing it. He begins with a series of thundering denunciations of the sins of Israel's pagan neighbours – the Syrians, the Philistines, the Edomites, the Ammonites and so on – all hated rivals who caused trouble on Israel's borders for centuries. You can hear the locals rubbing their hands with glee as Amos lays into them one by one. Then he even goes for Judah, the southern kingdom, and denounces them for their failure to keep God's law. How good did that feel? Those southern snobs! They'll get what they deserve! But Amos's audience hadn't noticed that he was circling steadily towards them and the hammer blow that eventually fell was devastating: God will judge you, too, Amos says. You think that you can escape his justice and carry on the way you are going? How can you escape God's judgment when your streets are filled with injustice and violence, when you ignore what God says, and when your prosperity makes you corrupt and selfish?

This would have sounded a jarring note at the time. The northern kingdom of Israel was at it most prosperous under the reign of Jereboam II; it was richer than it had ever been and had even expanded its borders, so everyone would have assumed that this was a sign of God's favour. In fact, it was a fifty-year period in which there was the opportunity to return to God, an opportunity that was thrown away. The terse summary in the Kings account of Jereboam's long and splendid reign was simply that he did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Neither the king nor the people made any moves to turn back to God, and just about forty years after Jereboam's death the northern kingdom was completely crushed and swept away by the Assyrians.

If God blesses us with security and prosperity it is not because he favours our way of life over another. He has stern things to say about our rampant promiscuity, greed, waste, materialism, militarism, the things we do in the name of “liberty”. Are we going to turn from them? Or are we going to assume that everything must be ok simply because God has allowed it to continue? That would be a dangerous conclusion to come to in the light of what happened to Israel. Those who assume the moral high ground need to realise that they may have a long way to fall.

Living on the wrong diet

2011-05-05T11:52:00.001+01:00

This week's 1611 verse speaks directly to a society that thinks it can manage without God:

"Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord." Deuteronomy 8:3

If that is what we are meant to do, it should come as no surprise that society is now filled with insecurities, a loss of meaning, hope and identity. As a society we are living on the wrong diet. We are basically starving and nothing short of a return to the diet we were intended to live on will bring a return to spiritual and emotional health.

Royalty and reality in religion

2011-04-30T18:02:00.000+01:00

As yesterday proved, everyone loves a good wedding. But what did the big wedding in question say about the place of the Christian faith in modern society? Well, it was a thoroughly Christian affair, without any inter-faith additions or other diversions from the standard Anglican service, much as you would find in most parish churches on Saturdays throughout the summer. One surprising element was a reading from Romans in a modern translation (I haven't found out which one), read by Catherine Middleton's younger brother James – a refreshingly different text, read in a way that made you believe he wanted the congregation to undertand its contents. And it was good to hear that the couple had written a prayer, which the Bishop of London quoted at the close of his message. But apart from that there was no concession to anything up-to-date: old hymns (perhaps because most people don't know any of the new ones), the old version of the Lord's prayer (ditto?), thee and thou in the other prayers, bishops in all their finery, and a very formal bow to Grandma as they began their walk together down the aisle. All very grand, but a bit out of touch?

Perhaps we should not expect anything different for a state occasion, but the assumption carries over into many people's thinking about what place Christianity has in national life today. If people think about the church at all they will usually tell you that it's good to have the formal stuff done in church, but will also indicate that this formal religion really doesn't carry over into what happens the rest of the year. It's there for the ceremony, but not the course of daily life, and it is that assumption which indicates that reality in faith has disappeared from the nation's heart.

Not that we should blame those who don't go to church for that impression. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard talk of “Sunday Christianity”: describing people who come to church on a Sunday because it is respectable (profitable, customary, or whatever) to do so, but who take their Christianity off with their Sunday clothes and live like the rest of the world for the other six days of the week. If we allow the notion to survive that Christianity is a one-hour-a-week-only belief system it should hardly surprise us that society around us comes to the conclusion that they want Christianity as a once-in-a-blue-moon-important-occasion-only belief system.

And it is certainly not the fault of the royals that they are part of this system. It is difficult to see how they can get out of it: imagine the comments if the sovereign refused to be the head of the Church of England and chose instead to attend a Pentecostal Church, or announced and insisted upon a firm, personal belief in Christ as the world's only Saviour? And yes, I do know that people say our Queen has such a personal faith, but the system itself essentially appears to work against that reality and creates a distant, impersonal religion that leaves people with the impression that faith is nothing more than participation in a ritual that leaves the rest of life untouched.

Actually, if you look into the Old Testament you will see that this was exactly the problem Israel experienced. Some of the kings just used their position in society and the religious hierarchy to further themselves; there wasn't an ounce of reality in the way they practised faith, a matter made evident by their corrupt lives. Others were true men of God who did everything they could to promote faith, goodness, hope, honesty, righteousness, and they shine like beacons in the history of the Jewish nation. They are the sort of people we should be praying will rise to the top here today. Indeed, we should be praying for those already at the top that there will be some reality in the religion they encounter, and that this reality will change their lives, too. So here's congratulations to William and Catherine, and a sincere prayer for your future.

Miracles for sale

2011-04-26T10:05:00.000+01:00

There are times when those who do not believe see things more clearly than those who do, and Derren Brown demonstrated on Channel 4 last night that his vision is crystal clear. He trained a young man in the techniques of faith-healing and sent him to run a revival in Texas to show that the faith-healers on the tele-evangelist circuit are swindling charlatans who are no more plugged into the Holy Spirit than he is. And, since he is Derren Brown, he pulled it off. The young novice preacher was extremely convincing, especially when he went onto the street: using nothing more than the tricks of the hypnotist's trade, he 'prayed' for healing with various people who all testified to feeling better afterwards; he spoke passionately and powerfully at the revival meeting, saw people collapse as he pronounced over them, gave words of knowledge and healed those present. Actually, the meeting was the least convincing part of the programme, partly because they did not get the really large audience they had hoped for, which would have wound the atmosphere up, but the point Brown was seeking to make was valid and it ought to be made as loudly as possible.

There are whole ministries built upon deception, with greed as their cornerstone, all done in the name of Christ. To their outrageous claims (that you will see limbs growing, for instance) they add breath-taking dishonesty (claiming supernatural knowledge while using information culled from contact cards, in one case transmitted to the preacher via an earpiece), blatant manipulation (stoking up the adrenaline in a frantic atmosphere), cruel evasion (if you are not healed it is because you don't have enough faith, or you have a secret sin) and the showman's technique to wring money out of people that Elmer Gantry would be proud of. These were Brown's targets (and not faith, or the church), some of them multi-million dollar enterprises, others much smaller, but all playing the same game and doing quite well out of it, really. But the twenty-first century doesn't have a monopoly on such fraudsters; they have been around for centuries.

Jesus warns us that such characters would come our way, with counterfeit miracles and power to deceive both the gullible and the sincere. The apostle Paul also spoke of the religious hucksters of his own day who peddled religion for profit, comparing them with the true ministry that renounces deception and the distortion of the truth, that refuses to use methods or techniques that are underhand or manipulative. We must set forth the truth plainly, openly and honestly, he says, recognising that people may be blind to it, but nevertheless refusing to use deceptive methods to gain a following. And therein lies the temptation.

Deceptive methods, subtle suggestion, manipulation, and other related techniques all work; they get results. Crowds come, there's a lot of excitement and drama, and (perhaps most importantly) the money flows in. We can be awed into thinking that such visible success is the indicator of God's blessing and that our methods are ineffective. Yet Derren Brown's programme shows us that the methods the Bible talks about are absolutely essential. The Bible consistently talks about Christians maintaining integrity of life, being honest with money and in business, having a moderate lifestyle, loving relationships and unreproachable motives – and that is even before we open our mouths! And when we do, we are to present the truth clearly, straighforwardly, without twisting the message to make it more attractive, reasoning with people to believe, debating, patiently answering questions, teaching, demonstrating love with word and in action. That can seem pretty mundane, which is probably why the faith-healers don't use it, and yet it is God's way. It is our calling as Christians in world to live like this; this is how people are going to see Jesus and know what he is like. Forget the faith-healers!

There is a final, sad irony in all this. Lost underneath the piles of rubbish that the fake healers create there is the Bible's teaching that God hears and answers prayer, and that healing is a possibility. It is not something to be demanded or claimed as a right, but Jesus says we can bring our burdens to him. It is nothing short of tragic that people will see the tricks of the healers fail and then think that the real Jesus has nothing to offer them.

Your Word is Truth

2011-04-19T19:35:00.001+01:00

There is a powerful simplicity about this week's 1611 verse:

Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth

It is one thing to say that you believe that the Bible is true; it is quite another to say that it is the truth. In the first statement you are not saying anything more than the Bible can be trusted, perhaps like the Encylcopaedia Britannica, but the second statement is altogether more profound. You are saying that God's word is the standard by which all other claims to truth must be measured and against which all of us will be judged. That's quite a daring thing to say in today's pluralistic climate that wants to regard all religions, or even individual beliefs, as equally valid. Jesus is saying that they are not. But, bringing it down to daily life, you are also affirming that this is the means God's Holy Spirit will use to change you. There's a big challenge there, too, at a personal level. Is this really the truth that you seek to live by?

The wind blows and it is gone

2011-04-15T16:28:00.000+01:00

With the magnitude of the disaster that swept north east Japan a month ago increasingly coming to light, some of the more poignant photos that have been published are not only of human suffering, but also of what those humans left behind. Huge collection centres have been established where personal belongings that have been found in the mud and rubble are collected and then laid out in the hope that someone might come to claim them. Among this are tens of thousands of photos and albums, which are meticulously cleaned and hung out to dry so those searching for them can easily identify them. But most are anonymous, the subjects presumed dead or missing, and will probably remain unidentified.

Picture: telegraph.co.uk

It is sobering to think that a life can be blotted out so completely, a family even, so that no one remembers. The tsunami brings it home rather more forcefully, as so many people were swept away in the same moment, but that is in fact the fate we all share. If we don't see it, that is because the normal run of events doesn't present us with such a view, but we shouldn't be fooled. One of the more consistent pictures the Bible uses to portray the frailty of human existence is that of grass or flowers: short-lived and almost irrelevant. In Psalm 103 David writes:

As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and is is gone, and its place remembers it no more.

If you want to see that in action, go into any city and try to identify the statues you see there. I guarantee you will not know most of them – and they were famous in their day and deemed worthy of remembrance! Or think of the family photos you possess from the past and ask who they are: “That was Auntie So-and-So, but I'm not really sure – and I've no idea who that young child with her is.” We tend to push away thoughts of our mortality, because it is distressing to think that we don't count, even in our great-granchildren's lives, but the truth is that we are insignificant.

Yet Psalm 103 is a song of hope and praise because it looks further than our own lives. It recognises that we are “frail as summer's flower” (to quote the famous hymn that uses this psalm), but builds around it the rock-solid foundation of finding security in knowing God. It is God who shows compassion to us, not treating us as our sins deserve; it is God who shows compassion towards us and removes our transgressions from us (“as far as the east is from the west”); it is God who treats us with compassion because he knows how we are formed (“that we are dust”); and it is this God who surrounds us with a love that is “from everlasting to everlasting”, so that whatever else we might lose, we cannot lose this.

There is no greater security in the turbulence of life. It is the guarantee that we cannot be lost when we place our trust in him, since his love is promised to us for everlasting, that we are his and he is ours. And it is the thrilling reminder that though everyone may forget, God remembers.

Health and safety warning

2011-04-11T23:53:00.000+01:00

I heard of a slightly eccentric street preacher who used to put his Bible on the ground and cover it with his hat (that dates it somewhat). He would then stand back and call to passers-by, warning them that what was under the hat was alive. When their curiosity was aroused enough he would pick the Bible up from under the hat and begin preaching. While you might smile at his methods, you can't fault his beliefs. He did it because he was convinced of that it says in Hebrews 4:12-13:

The word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

This week's 1611 memory verse raises significant questions then. Is that how you see it - as God's living word to us today, rather than an ancient document that is nothing but dead letters on a page? Do you use it with confidence that it will deal with people (with you!), speaking to them with God's voice, relevant for everyone today? Do you submit to it all, or do you only read the parts that you think won't demand too much of you?

The Bible isn't tame, safe and domesticated. It is very much alive!

Revealed and Inspired

2011-04-04T10:04:00.000+01:00

There are several key features to this week's passage from 1 Corinthians 2. Firstly that God has revealed the Christian message:

What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. (2:9-10a)

Secondly, the Spirit of God inspired the writers of the New Testament, not merely giving general ideas about truth, but the content itself (verbal inspiration):

This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. (2:13)

But thirdly, and perhaps even more importantly, unless the Spirit is at work in people, they will not grasp what this revealed and inspired message is all about:

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. (2:14)

And the answer to that one is that we have to pray!

What is the G.O.S.P.E.L?

2011-04-01T23:08:00.001+01:00

Saw this on the Fervr site. It's a great piece that summarises the heart of the Christian faith. Pure poetry! Pure Gospel!

Sticking to the script

2011-03-28T10:07:00.001+01:00

This week's 1611 text comes from a blistering sermon that Jeremiah gave about the other prophets who opposed him. He is scathing about their messages that are nothing more than "the delusions of their minds", false visions and empty-headed dreams. The great need, he says, is for the prophet to "stand in the council of the Lord", hear what he says and stick to proclaiming that. Hence the verse, Jeremiah 23:28:

"Let the one who has my word speak it faithfully."

And it closes with an important question: "For what has straw to do with grain?" A ministry not based on what God says is just chaff in the wind.

Everybody hurts

2011-03-26T13:47:00.000Z

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man, but my view of life has changed as I have moved through the decades. When I was younger I knew that people went through bad stuff, or experienced things that scarred them, but believed that this was nevertheless relatively minor in most normal people, especially when weighed against the totality of life's experiences. It would be a case of the postives vastly outweighing the negatives. As a result I saw people as essentially strong, Christians especially, their strong faith pulling them through life's difficulties and carrying them over life's ups and downs. But my baseline definition of a Christian has changed in the last 20 years.

Most people are not strong at all. They face issues that leave them utterly perplexed; they have no idea how these matters are going to be resolved. And the things that happen are sometimes of such a magnitude that to talk of being scarred is completely inadequate; it would be more accurate to talk of the loss of a limb and learning to cope with that. As a result they feel weak and perhaps also guilty that their faith does not appear as victorious as others around them (who are almost certainly feeling the same). That is not a negative view of life, just a realistic one. Life here is not always rosy. For such people if there is any victory, it is in maintaining faith at all amid the turmoil that they feel. But where are we going to find help?

Michael Stipe (who sings the song that gives this post its title) says that you should take comfort in your friends, who also hurt, and realise that you are not alone. I presume he means that these friends who hurt with you can also identify with you and support you, so that you know you are not alone in your sorrows, but that might also prove to be rather cold comfort: they don't have any answers either, so you are just sitting in the dark together. That, of course, has its benefits, but what Stipe has identified is that what frequently happens in our traumas is that we end up facing them alone because we don't feel anyone else can identify with us in them.

This is why it is significant that the Bible introduces us to the God who suffers both for us and with us. It is significant that Matthew chooses to quote from the Old Testament to describe Jesus as the one who “took up our infirmities”. Paul looks at Jesus and sees the one who was in very nature God who yet took upon himself the nature of a servant, someone in human likeness, who humbled himself even to the point of death (and the terrible death on the cross, at that). In another place Paul says that even though Jesus had no sin of his own, he so identified with us that he took our sins upon himself (“became sin for us” is the astounding way he puts it) in order to redeem us.

But the real strength the Bible offers does not come from knowing that he shares with us our suffering, but rather the other way round, that we share in his. Paul is probably thinking firstly of the persecution he endured (which would ultimately claim his life), but it is not necessary to restrict it to only that. He says in Romans that if we share in the sufferings of Christ we will also share in his glory. And then he adds, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” - and we know that he is not being glib about the agonies he endured, as he then describes life in terms of frustration, groaning and not knowing what to pray for (and in another letter he puts together a list of his tribulations that dwarfs anything most of us will ever experience). He is most certainly not saying that life is an easy stroll, in which we gloriously tread down the troubles we face; just the opposite. We don't feel anything like strong. Everybody hurts. But in the tribulation we experience we discover we have identified not only with the death of the Saviour who bought us for himself at huge cost, but also with him in his resurrection, which gives us hope that extends beyond “our present sufferings” to the glory of heaven itself.

Why 66?

2011-03-21T11:55:00.000Z

Sorry, nothing to do with the only great moment in England's football history, but a talk by Brian Edwards on the production of the Bible. You'll find it on the Answers in Genesis site here (it's in 4 separate 15 minute parts, so I won't put it all on the page), and you will find it very helpful in answering questions about how the Bible came to us in the way it has, as well as dealing with a lot of the myths that are around.

And the 1611 verses come from 2 Timothy 3:16-17

"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."

Don't forget to set the alarm - but remember it will still go off even if you have set your phone to silent, so it still has the potential to embarrass you in a meeting!

Dust to dust

2011-03-16T17:08:00.000Z

On Sunday night Brian Cox (“Wonders of the Universe”, BBC2) came as close to an evangelistic appeal as I have ever heard from an atheist. He opened the programme with the announcement that he had a creation story to tell, a story that would fulfill the most basic of human needs by connecting people to something bigger. Moreover, he stated that the path of enlightenment did not involve understanding our own lives and deaths, but rather the lives and deaths of the stars, so he ended the programme with these words:

“Our story is the story of the universe and every piece of everyone, of everything you love, everything you hate, the thing you hold most precious, was assembled by the forces of nature in the first few minutes of the life of the universe, transformed in the hearts of stars or created in their fiery deaths. And when you die those pieces will be returned to the universe in the endless cycle of death and rebirth. What a wonderful thing it is to be a part of that universe and what a story - what a majestic story.”

Is that it? Is that the “something bigger” that will enlighten our path through life, giving meaning, hope, purpose? "You are nothing more than stardust from the past and your future is for all your atoms to be redistributed across the cosmos, but you should be excited about this. Some of your atoms might be part of another world in 10 billion years time.” Is it not, rather, a path to meaninglessness and futility? Evolutionary theory strips human beings of a sense of meaning, as it reduces us to nothing more than sophisticated animals. Brian Cox has reduced us to dust – sophisticated dust, maybe, but dust nevertheless.

This is not the first time I have heard Brian Cox use Biblical symbolism, but of course he uses it differently. Genesis tells us that God made man from the dust of the earth. And when Adam sinned and God punished him, he reminded him that he was nothing but dust and “to dust you will return.” But the impact of that cosmic event is not happiness, but futility. It is not something to rejoice over, but to mourn. And philosophers through the ages agree. Most have long considered that man's mortality is the greatest indicator of the meaninglessness of life: we are but a moment, a vapour, a brief, flickering candle that is all too soon snuffed out; we are born, we struggle through life, and then we die. Of course, some are content to live with that: Bertrand Russell remarked something to the effect that the only way to live was to face the fact that life was utterly meaningless and just get on with it. But for most people that is a recipe for utter desolation and emptiness. Maybe Brian Cox, as an atheist realises it, and hence the heart-warming epilogue.

“Dust to dust” is bad news, because it indicates that we are condemned to fade away, alienated from the God who made us, soon forgotten by the world we have left behind, and utterly irrelevant in the cosmic scheme of things. But the Bible transforms that picture. It tells us we are made in the image of the Creator, that we are created to know him, that we find our meaning and purpose in loving and serving him, and that we find our way to him through repentance and faith in his Son, Jesus Christ, the one he sent to restore the lost and repair the broken relationship between us and God. That salvation was forged in the heart of God and brought into being in the fires of the suffering of Jesus Christ at Calvary. This is the majestic story that gives true, solid, real, lasting hope. Everything else is, well, just dust.

Men spoke from God

2011-03-13T16:04:00.000Z

Responding to Chris's suggestion - here is this week's 1611 verse:

"Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God when they as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." 2 Peter 1:21

For those of you reading this who are not part of Salway, this is a device to get folk remembering the Bible, building on the 400th anniversary celebrations for the King James Bible. Set your phone alarm (or any digital alarm you have) to go off at 11 minutes past 4 in the afternoon - 16:11 in other words (get it?) - and when it goes off pause for a few moments to recall the verse and pray to grow in Christ through your reading of Scripture. If it goes off so others hear it, then - assuming you haven't interrupted some vital meeting - explain what you are doing and see that as an opportunity to tell people something about your faith!

This verse in Peter's second letter is central to our understanding of what the Scriptures are: they are not dictated by God, but rather something that are produced by human minds (hence the variety of styles and personalities that are visible), but so guided by God through his Holy Spirit that what they produced comes to us as God's word. The key part of the verse jumps out: "Men spoke from God." With that being the case, Peter's exhortation strikes home quite powerfully: "you will do well to pay attention to it." You certainly will!

Sending your best

2011-03-07T14:56:00.000Z

Today another one of our young people heads for the hills – well, the Andes to be precise – to work on a Tearfund project in Peru. Esther Barratt will be working for the next few months among disadvantaged children, most likely in circumstances which will open her eyes and challenge her faith. She is likely to return to us profoundly impacted by what she has seen and done, transformed even. Certainly, that is what Tearfund hopes for when it organises these trips and, actually, that is why we are sending her.

We believe that the combination of working under the auspices of an international development agency with a strong Christian ethos, travelling with other Christians in a team, sharing the burdens with Christian workers on the field and the churches they minister among, will all prove a powerful spiritual force for good. We pray that it will bring a new understanding of how God is working in other parts of the world and inspire a further desire in Esther to learn how she can serve him as she develops and matures in her faith. If you want to follow her progress, you can go to her blog here.

We are not assuming that she will automatically return from her trip with a burning desire to spend the rest of her life in Peru! Of course, that is possible. But it is more likely that she will return with a new desire to serve God in whatever capacity he calls, and that is what counts. The video below contains the testimony of several young people who went on such trips in 2010 and the way it touched them; we should pray that Esther will be able to say the same.

And one last thought: as a church we should be praying that God will raise up from our own number people who will give themselves to serve the Lord overseas on a long-term basis. We want to be a church that gives and provides resources for the building of the church of Jesus Christ, and sending people must be part of that. Will you pray that God will send out workers from among us, both to work in the UK and the wider world? There is a cost to all this, because we will be sending our best. But such sacrifice is part of what it means to be a church that is intent on getting God's Word out into his world.

The way of the cross

2011-03-03T16:00:00.000Z

Jesus said that his followers would not be above their master, and in some countries in the world his followers know that this identification with their Master is painfully literal. In Pakistan Shahbaz Bhatti paid with his life yesterday for speaking out as a Christian (and, moreover, the only Christian in the government) against blasphemy laws which are frequently employed by the Muslim majority as a means of silencing dissent and oppressing minority groups (of which Christians are just one). He had initially complained about the verdict in a case last year where a woman, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy. The governor of Punjab, who also had made strong comments about the injustice of the sentence, was assassinated in January, with Bhatti gunned down yesterday. Bhatti was head of the Ministry of Minorities, so those minorities will be feeling the pressure now.

Shahvaz Bhatti was interviewed a short while ago and spoke about the threats he had been receiving and the piece below contains his testimony of his willingness to die for the Lord Jesus. As such he represents an unknown mass of people who suffer under such oppression. His testimony reminds us of Tertullian's dictum from the second century that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." We might wish it were not so, but the Early Church grew in suffering and its foundations were laid on the bodies of those who did not shrink from death in their love for Christ. Many of the New Testament letters were written to down-trodden Christians who had no rights in Roman law, suffering discrimination and loss. The book of Revelation directs its weary and persecuted readers to the Lord who reigns on high, who will avenge their deaths and who is building his church around the world in spite of opposition. Bhatti stands with them and gives us the assurance that the foundations of the church in Pakistan are strong. His death will not be in vain; the church in Pakistan will rise.

The shaking of the foundations

2011-02-23T16:41:00.000Z

An earthquake in New Zealand reminds us that the foundations we think are so secure are often anything but stable. Similarly, previously entrenched regimes in the Middle East appear to be tottering under the weight of popular demand for change. And where it all will end no one can say: will this open the door to militant Islam once the strong central figures who opposed them are gone? For instance, will the struggle in Libya remove Colonel Gadafi (assuming it is successful in that) and pave the way for democracy or actually make it easier for Islamic groups, who are usually well-resourced, armed and trained, to assume power? Think of the outcome of the struggle for power in Gaza, where Hamas took over in 2007 by violent means.

Whatever the outcome, we should continue to pray for the Muslim world and believe that God is beginning to answer prayer for a part of the world that has resisted the love and grace of the Lord Jesus (often with violence) for centuries. It is significant that it is only in the last 20 or 30 years that Christians have actually begun to pray for this part of the world, rather than seeing these peoples as their enemies - now the cracks begin to show, now these peoples are beginning to turn to Christ. If you think of what happened in Eastern Europe: Brother Andrew called for concerted prayer for communist countries in 1980; by 1989 the Iron Curtain had collapsed. For nearly 20 years there has been a worldwide concert of prayer for Muslim countries during Ramadan (and prayer before that for the 10-40 Window). Who knows where this will lead? Keep praying!

The mention above of Brother Andrew leads to the video from Open Doors below, encouraging us to pray for the persecuted church throughout the world.

Trustworthy and true

2011-02-20T07:51:00.000Z

Doing some research for our forthcoming series on the Bible, where we plan to look at the way the Scriptures speak about Scripture, I came across a video interview. Steve Chalke was talking to Christianity Magazine, where he has a regular column as its resident agony uncle, about the question of whether the Bible is infallible. You can read the text of his answer in the magazine as well as on the website, where the video is also posted. The gist of his answer is basically (and rather disappointingly), no, it isn't.

Not that he puts it so bluntly – he talks about not being simplistic in our use of the word - but his position is clarified when he looks at something Paul says in his first letter to the church in Corinth. He claims that in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul makes a distinction between parts of his teaching, with part of it coming from the Lord (v10) and parts that are “I, not the Lord”. From this he concludes (and there is more detail in the video) not only that Paul is saying that some of his teaching is from God, while some is not, but also that Paul is admitting that some of his teaching, recorded in Scripture, is actually wrong. Answering the first part is more straightforward, as it is more sensible to say that Paul is making a distinction between teaching he received from the Lord Jesus directly, as opposed to that which he, as an appointed apostle, received under the guidance of the Spirit (rather like the contents of the book of Romans is not something he received directly from Jesus, but comes to us as God's word nevertheless). But what about the claim Paul is admitting to mistakes in his teaching, so that we have a Bible that is wrong? That is another thing altogether.

In answering this, it is important to note that no one is claiming that apostles were perfect and never made mistakes. For instance, Paul tells us (in Galatians) that he told Peter to his face that he was wrong for the way he behaved towards Gentile converts. And I think in Acts the apostles do not appear to have grasped what Jesus was saying about mission to the world and took a long time to do what he had told them to do. So we are not looking at apostolic perfection. But they were guided by the Spirit in what they recorded and wrote for us, so that the teachings that we have in the form of Scripture are in fact God's word to us – both completely trustworthy (infallible, to use the technical term) and true in all they affirm (inerrant).

I realise that some may think that this is a storm in a teacup, as you may feel that it is perfectly possible to accept the Bible as authoritative and yet believe there are parts which are not as accurate as the rest. I think that is what Steve Chalke is saying, and there have been many others like him, but the weight of history says otherwise. In fact, the testimony of past experience is that such position will, in the long run, be completely disastrous.

You only have to go back to the end of the 19th century to see the way various forms of what became known as liberal theology sucked the life out of the witness of whole denominations to see what it does. It started with the same sort of doubts that Steve Chalke has expressed, but didn't stop there. Denominations and colleges adopted positions that denied the truthfulness of Scripture, cut out unacceptable passages, or questioned their authenticity. It ended up with straightforward rejection: an old friend who grew up in a Congregational Church in the early 1920s said that his minister's message each week consisted of a brilliantly scholarly talk on which verses should be cut out. My own pastor was trained for 5 years in a college which systematically attempted to undermine his faith in Scripture, with one student hauled before the principal for reading Jim Packer! He said that he only learned one thing at college: that liberalism simply has no message. And that is where it is heading. It is the thin end of the wedge to say that one or two passages are inaccurate, or that Paul is admitting to mistakes in what he wrote. The thicker end is that we will chop the message so much there is nothing left, or we will express doubts about whether this is correct or that can be believed, that we have no message for our society. The irony of that is staggering: wanting to change the world we step forward and then find that we have nothing left to say.

Where the Big Society can really be found

2011-02-09T16:37:00.000Z

It seems that whenever a politician comes up with a natty catchphrase to describe a particular aim, events (and people) have a way of conspiring to undermine that catchphrase and render it useless. John Major's moral “Back to Basics” campaign in the nineties was rather blown away by Conservative ministers who got up stuff that was anything but basic. Gordon Brown's “British jobs for British workers” came back to haunt him when (among other things) it was demonstrated that the British economy was held up by people doing the jobs British workers didn't want. And now David Cameron's “Big Society” strapline has fallen foul of the cuts his own government feels it necessary to make. The volunteer army might not march on its stomach, but it seems it will not march if its supply lines are cut and the funding dries up.

David Cameron's “Big Society” was an appealing slogan: get people to volunteer to help others, make the nation a better place to be because we are all in it together, a kind of peace-time “Dig for Victory” motto, I guess. But it was always under threat, and not only from lack of funding. The direction our society is moving in is overwhelmingly individualistic. Individuals may choose to help others, but they have little or no sense of duty towards others (and usually resent someone telling that this is what they ought to do). This is not to say that this is evil in and of itself (there are other things that would point to that), but just to recognise that our communities are fragmented and individuals find themselves alone, living among strangers. You only have to go into the average housing estate to find that people do not know their neighbours; look into their address books and you will see that their friends are scattered over a wide area; many will have most of their closest contacts among work colleagues who live perhaps 30 or 40 miles away. The obvious downside of this is when things go wrong: illness, for instance, may mean that a person is cut off from those they know and might want to help, and unknown to those around who are nearest and could help if they knew them.

All this is a consequence of an ethos that emphasises the individual to the exclusion of all others, so it is ironic that people brought up with that that are known to be looking for integrity in relationships and genuine community. Perhaps it is not so ironic, since they have seen breakdowns and fractured relationships and yearn for something better. The real irony lies in the fact that, in searching for genuine community, many have rejected the one source of the real thing: the church.

Now I can hear the howls of protest: the church's reputation at the moment in many quarters is that it has proved to be anything but a good example of genuine community, but that is not the complete picture. If there are some who claim the title Christian, but do not put it into practice, it does not change the fact that the people of Jesus Christ have community care written into their DNA. It goes under various names, but one of them is “fellowship”. Brought together by their knowledge of Jesus Christ as Saviour they consider each other as partners in their calling to make Jesus known, live out their faith in the world and demonstrate to the people around what God's love is all about. They are the volunteers David Cameron is looking for and they are part of a community that has service as its motto.

So that begs the question: what are you doing to care for others and serve those who are around you? If people around you are going to encounter Jesus Christ they must hear him in your voice and see him in your actions. They need to encounter him in a community of people who are not funded by government grants, who see service as their responsibility and for whom compassion is a default mode. And they need to see that it comes as a direct result of faith in Jesus Christ: having received much we are a people who give much. The faltering (and maybe failure) of David Cameron's Big Society idea presents us with a golden opportunity to tell people that the Big Society is here in the people of God. Moreover, it always has been.

Hereafter – what?

2011-02-02T11:12:00.000Z

It's funny that people can want comfort about life after death, but not certainty. People will visit mediums or spiritists in an attempt to contact loved ones who have died and hear a word from them, but try to tell them that knowing God through Jesus brings a certainty of heaven for themselves and you go away with a flea in your ear, as my grandmother used to say. That certainly seems to be the subtext in Clint Eastwood's latest film “Hereafter”.

The film movingly weaves together three separate stories of people who have faced death: a woman who nearly dies in a tsunami, a young boy whose twin brother is killed in a road accident, and a man who, having died on the operating table several times and been ressucitated, can now contact the dead merely by touching those seeking to reach them. The premise of the film is that there is very definitely a hereafter that follows this life and that most people ignore it, but beyond that statement the film will not allow any certainty at all. When the boy is looking for answers we are taken through a collection of alternatives that are obviously regarded as untenable: a man from a middle eastern country (probably a muslim) talking about the angel of death; a rather severe Christian preacher; and a series of mediums with batty notions about how to contact the dead. And when the boy finally does reach his brother through the character played by Matt Damon he asks about what it is like and where he is going, but Damon's character replies that he doesn't know, even after talking to so many from the other side.

I guess it is actually unlikely that a Hollywood film is really trying to make any serious comment about life after death, but the way they use the story indicates in what areas their beliefs lie. At one point in the film the woman asks a colleague what he thinks about life after death and he replies that if it was true you would think that there was proof, that someone would have the evidence. The woman is convinced that she has the evidence, because she saw those who had died while she was drowning, and there are plenty of people in the real world who have seen the same: people who have been clinically dead for twenty minutes who have seen and heard what was going on at the same time, usually from a floating vantage point somewhere else in the room. But their evidence is no evidence at all in this case. It is only something that they claim to have seen and, while it may have convinced them of the reality of life after death, it cannot be shown to others to help them. But the resurrection of Jesus is different.

The gospel accounts in the New Testament tell us that Jesus was crucified and died. He was buried and remained in the tomb from the Friday afternoon until the Sunday morning, when he rose from the dead. If you are looking for proof or evidence, the gospel accounts are the source. They are eye-witness accounts of people who did not believe until they saw the evidence for themselves, and they recorded it so that others who were not present could know about it, too, and have the same certainty about it as those who were present. In fact, the original apostles were so certain about what they had seen that all of them held to this account to the very end. Of the 12 all except John were martyred, refusing to deny that Jesus had been raised from the dead (and it wasn't as if the Romans didn't try to do the same to John. He died an old man, but had faced decades of persecution and torture), and those sort of stats are pretty unlikely if it hadn't in fact happened.

But the resurrection of Jesus is not some vague indication that there is, in fact, life after death. It is the demonstration that the hope of eternal life rests in Jesus alone. Jesus, Paul says in Acts, is the demonstration that God is going to judge the world, and that we must therefore put our faith in Jesus as he is the only one who can bring forgiveness and eternal life. Think of it this way: he is the living proof that the rest don't know what they are talking about, but that we can be certain about eternal life because he does.

Tweets for the soul

2011-01-27T11:20:00.000Z

I don't tweet, but I know a man who does. Gerard Kelly, a man with a heart for Europe who has purchased a rambling building in Normandy to establish a missional training centre, tweets a prayer each day to several thousand followers. They are simple (only 140 characters, remember), but spiritually profound. These two from the end of last year struck me:

2010 will never come again. The past has passed. But I carry its treasures forward. Show me God what to keep and what to leave behind.

My heart is set on pilgrimage, my face to God's presence, my will to his ways. Whatever dry valleys I cross may my soul sing still.

You find more at twitturgies - sign up if you are on Twitter. And if you ever get the opportunity to hear him lecture on European society, then don't miss that, as he is always thought-provoking and challenging.

Society really has moved on

2011-01-24T11:04:00.000Z

About 25 years ago I witnessed an event that today would make the headlines. I was in a Christian printing firm that we used, when a man came in requesting a job for the local masonic lodge. The manager of the firm said that they could not print stuff for the masons on the grounds of their beliefs. The customer was incensed, but stomped off eventually and nothing more was heard of it. Not so today. There has been a fair amount of space devoted to the outcome of a court case brought by a gay couple who were refused a bed at a guest house run by a Christian couple in Cornwall. The judge ruled that the hotliers' policy of refusing a double bed to unmarried couples discriminated against the gay couple and accordingly awarded them damages. This case is just one of a series in which religious faith has found itself running up against human rights issues – think of the registrar not permitted to exempt herself from conducting civil partnerships, or adoption agencies not permitted to refuse children to couples purely on the grounds that they are same-sex. And, as part of that series, this case in fact opens the door for further litigation: the gay couple won on the grounds that they were civil partners and should have been regarded as married by the hotel. The next case that is surely being lined up is on behalf of all unmarried couples of any persuasion that their relationship entitles them to a double room.

Personally, even though I have sympathy for their desire to honour God and live according to his word, I think that the Christian hotel owners always had a weak case. They had opened their home as a business, so it is difficult to pick and choose the guests who come, let alone question them about their sexual mores. Moreover, they allowed such couples a twin room, and the judge pointed out that they could have enjoyed basically the same week-end but in a slightly more cramped space (and what would stop guests pushing the beds together, anyway?). But what is of perhaps greater significance are the issues that arise out of this judgment.

First is the question of just how far human rights legislation will go in squeezing religious beliefs and practices into its mould. Currently, it is seeking to regulate areas where religious faith connects with the community, insisting that, to give an example of another recent case, a Christian sex-counsellor should be willing to counsel same-sex couples. But will it stop there? Will it insist that Christian (and other faith) organisations should bend their membership rules to allow greater latitude of membership? Will we as a church always be able to insist that only those who can demonstrate that they are born-again be admitted as members?

Second, it is the words of the judge in his preamble that give rise to the real concern: "Whatever may have been the position in past centuries it is no longer the case that our laws must, or should automatically reflect the Judaeo-Christian position." He also goes on to point out that society has now moved on. It certainly has, and it is this that is most significant. For decades Christians have been pointing out that we are abandoning a heritage of laws that were founded on the Judaeo-Christian ethic, and now it's official. Of course, there is nothing in the Bible that says unbelieving nations must base their laws on what God says, but Christians are convinced that the principles enshrined in the Bible are better for nations than they realise. And there is also nothing that says the Christian position should have a favoured place in society, so perhaps we had better get used to living in a pluralistic mix. But my question is, just what is it moving on to? If we are leaving behind the Judaeo-Christian system, what is replacing it?

There is a myth that if we get rid of Christian and other religious prejudice, then we will have openness and tolerance, everyone living together in harmony. But that dream is based on failed Enlightenment notions that if you get rid of superstition then everyone will agree on what is right for society. All we have now is post-Enlightenment individualism that trumpets my rights. So perhaps that is what we are moving to: from the principles of Christian religion to the religion of the self. Any reading of the Bible and the history it contains will tell you that that is not a good thing.

Living with a foolish hope

2011-01-21T10:15:00.001Z

What do you do when you go into a room and switch on the light and discover that it doesn't work? I'll bet you flick it on and off several times, in the hope that it will suddenly start to work, as as if giving it another chance is going to make a difference. That is an example of what we might call foolish hope: we know something is not working, but we try it again because we hope it might start to work if we keep pushing the button, all the while knowing that what we really need to do is to find the cause of the problem and change the bulb.

It has been said that folly can be defined as doing something, watching it fail, then repeating the process, using the same methods, and expecting a different outcome. There are probably dozens of ways in which we try to live by such a foolish hope, but it seems that our attitude to money is one of the more obvious at the moment. The credit crunch has revealed the inherent weakness of our financial systems (and perhaps more pointedly, the weakness of those who run them) and shone a light on the words of the apostle Paul who says in 1 Timothy 6 “command those who are rich in this present world not to … put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain…” I used not to feel the power in that text, but there is no doubt that Paul has been proved rather devastatingly right. I haven't heard the phrase “safe as houses” for a few years now.

And yet building personal security on wealth is one of the most natural things for us to do, because it seems so obviously right. How else are we going to survive? What future can we possibly have without building wealth? Surely we can't be safe unless we amass, expand, invest, make profit, hoard and build. But if the credit crunch has shown anything, it has demonstrated that such a system is not secure. I listened to a discussion on Radio 4 last week that suggested that the black hole created by our borrowing culture is so large that our western economies might not survive. While politicians talk of a long road to recovery, economists seem to be wondering how far we can recover, or even if there is any long-term recovery at all. But even if there is, it is evident that material prosperity has brought no personal security, if you think about the general unease that exists across our society. And yet we insist on trying to build our security on our wealth, because we can see no other alternative. Jesus' parable about the rich fool in Luke's gospel is poignantly relevant. He pictures a man who prospers and builds bigger barns to accommodate his new-found abundance. “Eat, drink and be merry,” was his conclusion, but God had the last word: “You fool! This night your soul will be required of you,” was his shocking interruption to the man's festivities. There is no security in wealth because it does not secure us against any of life's trials, and certainly not the last and greatest one. We have to find that security elsewhere.

Both Jesus and Paul tell us where that security is actually to be found. Jesus added that this man's fault was that he was not rich towards God, and that is what Paul also says: “Command those who are rich … not to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment…” That is the key. It is to have life built on a foundation that cannot be shaken, so that when everything else crumbles, this remains.

But to put your trust in such a foundation you have to be prepared for others to think you foolish. Foolish because you refuse to build your hopes on amassing property and possessions. Foolish because your trust is in a crucified Saviour who commands you to follow him. Foolish because you affirm that this world is not your true home, that your true citizenship is in heaven, and that you are looking for a city with real foundations, a city built by God. Now that sounds to be a foolish hope. But it is the foolish hope of faith. Jesus, Paul and the rest of the Bible agree: it is folly to watch something fail and then try to use it again in the hope that it works the next time around. Where this differs is that Jesus died and rose again. He defeated death in his own death and resurrection. Putting it bluntly, he didn't fail, so it would be folly not to trust him.

Losing faith

2011-01-18T17:08:00.001Z

“It can't be done. It's not worth bothering. You're wasting your time.” You might hear those sorts of remarks in any one of a hundred different situations: when presenting a business plan to turn around a failing company, or working to overcome antisocial behaviour in the neighbourhood, or persuading church members to try out something new. “It just won't work, so why try?”

It must be said that it is good to have people on a committee who are able to spot a flaw in a plan, because enthusiastic ideas people rarely look that closely and need someone to do a bit of fine thinking for them. But it is desperate when that is all you have and the only response to new ideas is a chorus of objections, a heap of wet blankets and a mumbled “I told you so” when the project inevitably runs into difficulties. The people in Haggai's day probably felt they had good reason to be like this: opposition had already shut the rebuilding project down for 18 years and then, when they finally did restart, they awoke to the fact that it wasn't going to look like the cathedral they had imagined the previous one to have been. So they evidently became rather dejected. We might infer from their remarks that they were wondering about the viability of the rebuild. “Why bother? It's not going to be much good, is it?”

But what were they expecting? Did they think that spiritual projects always run smoothly? Can you think of one in the Bible that did not run into difficulty at some stage? When Moses presented the Israelites with the grand plan for exodus, the people received it with open arms, but almost immediately it ran into trouble. Moses' challenge so riled Pharoah that he got his foremen to work the Israelites even harder. They then turned on Moses, blamed him and stated that they wished he had never come up with it. And the rebuilding of the city walls that followed the rebuilding of the temple was equally fraught with anguish: Nehemiah got involved because, at some stage previously, the walls and the gates had been demolished by neighbouring hostiles, and even when he came with the king's commission to repair them, he only completed the task in the face of aggression from outside and subversive elements within. This is God's work and there is a devil intent on stopping it, so it should not surprise us when it does not run smoothly.

But it is God's work, and that changes everything, so it is nothing short of tragic when Christians lose faith and give up. Of course, plans sometimes need to be modified, and perhaps quite drastically, when events do not turn out as initially conceived, but that is not the same as throwing in the towel. It is one thing to point out the changes you feel are needed in plan so that you can take it further; it is something else to run an idea down or refuse to have anything to do with it because you don't have the desire, faith or vision to see the church move on. That boils down to a loss of faith, and it is heartbreaking to witness.

But you are not alone in feeling it, if that is where you are. When Paul wrote what we know as his first letter to the Corinthian church, he wrote to a church that was seriously divided over several issues. A remark he makes at the end of chapter 15 hints that there were a number who thought that it wasn't worth continuing with the church because of its troubles. Don't give up, he says. “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.” Sure, the project may not compare with what you have known in the past; and yes, it may run into opposition and get verbal grief from the counsellors of doom. But Zerubbabel's temple stood for around 400 years, against all the predictions of the doubters. It was God's work and God blessed it. So if it is God's work who knows where it could go? If it is God's work you need to approach it with the faith that it can be done, that it is worth bothering, and that you are most certainly not wasting your time.

You are not your own

2011-01-11T12:24:00.001Z

When I was a student I once went to a big church in central London for the Sunday services, stayed for lunch there and ended up distributing tracts in the afternoon with a team of young people. I suppose we gave out several hundred and, while there were a few polite refusals, one youngster put into words what he really thought about the subject. “Why should I become a Christian?” he said after seeing what we were offering him. “I live for me!” He was probably only in his early teens, so I was taken aback that he had formed such a clear image both of the Christian faith (in that it required self-denial) and of his own life's purpose (self-gratification). I reckon he was speaking for quite a few of those who were too polite to say anything.

The reality of that philosophy is more evident (to me, at least) than ever before. People are so concerned with individual rights that it is almost impossible to get them to see that others have a claim on them. What counts is my own fulfilment, my own calling, my life, my priorities. If it doesn't fit with me, then it can't be right. And inevitably it can be seen in church life, too. A friend once described the quiet disbelief, or perhaps even hostility, that he felt when, as a housegroup leader, he urged friends to commit themselves to coming each week for fellowship and prayer. There was this sense that he had no right to ask that of them. In fact, it went deeper than that: it was really that God had no right to ask more of them.

I hope I am not being too cynical, but it is all to easy for Christians to live that way. We trust Christ for salvation and pray to him, but esentially what we say is “Here is the portion of my life that you can have.” We do it with our money (“here is your 10%, but the rest is mine to do with as I please.”), our time (“I can give you Sunday mornings, but I am really too busy for anything else – and actually you are going to be lucky if you get all of those.”), our work (“I can be a Christian at home, but I can't possibly take my faith to work and let it operate in that sphere.”). It all points to a divided life: we talk about God and do actually want to know him, but not too much, not too closely, not too enthusiastically. That might mean real change, real sacrifice, real commitment.

In Haggai we hear a call to commitment that takes the people's excuses head on. “This isn't the time to be putting up God's temple,” they said. There had admittedly been disappointments in the past, with high-level opposition to the building project effectively stopping it for 18 years, but now they were using that as an excuse. “Come on,” Haggai said, “Is it right that you spend all your energy on your own house while neglecting God's? Where are your priorities?” That hit them hard and they responded by dedicating themselves once again to God and his service. It's a question that is always relevant, but perhaps no more so to people who have lots of money, a good house to live in, a demanding job with a significant income and a schedule that is crammed full. What are your priorities? Does the God who has saved you and who continues to provide for you receive the dog-ends of your time and energy (to name just two areas)? Does he have a to fight for a personal appointment? Do you shut him out so that you never listen to him from one end of the week to another? Do you have any living fellowship with those who follow the same Lord, or are they strangers to you and the blessing you could bring to them? Do you serve him in all you do?

What Haggai is saying that God has a claim on your life. To use New Testament language, you have been bought at a price, you are not your own. The Christian life begins with a surrender, and it continues that way, too. Of course, such a surrender is not without its rewards: eternal life and the peace-inducing knowledge that, as God says in Haggai's prophecy, “I will make you like my signet ring, for I have chosen you.” The greatness of that reward simply cannot be compared with smallness of our commitment, but it is commitment and it involves surrender nevertheless.

True prayer is costly

2011-01-05T13:46:00.000Z

I think we often approach prayer with the notion that it should be easy, or at least that it should be natural to us as Christians and that we should therefore find it easy. So it comes as a disappointment to find that it is anything but: we drift off, find it impossible to concentrate or stay focused, and perhaps fall asleep. As a result we conclude that there must be something wrong with us – which, of course, there may be, but it must be said that usually it is just that we had not realised that prayer is not easy. It requires a certain amount of effort, discipline and determination. People who appear to find prayer easy (and they are unlikely to think that it is easy) are usually those who have put something into it. Putting it in more human terms, they are likely to have spent time practising.

In fact, true prayer is not merely an effort, it is costly, too. It requires a degree of sacrifice. That might involve getting up in the morning to read God's word and then bring the day before him; or not listening to the radio in the car; or not watching the TV in the evening so as to allow a degree of quiet in the house; or talking to God instead of listening to music while you walk to work; or going without your lunch so as to use your short lunch break to speak to God about the stresses you are facing. Actually, those are relatively minor sacrifices, but you see where they are heading. All are encouraging us to refocus our lives on the spiritual, which means restricting the impact of our day-to-day business. This is not to say that we should not have jobs or interests that are not directly spiritual, simply that these must not be allowed to squeeze out our Christian faith.

And that is where the struggle begins. We frequently allow the world around to squeeze us into its mould (to quote the JB Phillips paraphrase of Romans 12:2), so that we become obsessed with its priorities and goals and assume that we have to follow its ways. We complain that life is too busy, but how much of that is because we have let the world squeeze out the quiet moments, the down time, the quiet reflection and replace it with (for example) electronic media and screen time? Perhaps we have no time for God because we have got rid of all the empty time in our lives. And so the battle begins, for if we are to gain time to learn to pray we are going to have to puch something else out

Which brings us back to fasting. What about missing out on lunch occasionally? There are almost certainly days in your timetable when that would be possible (and it could be argued that, if you think your schedule is too busy, then that is the occasion that you really must find time to pray), so give it a go. It will give you a window for prayer that you didn't think existed (well, it didn't beforehand!), and any time for further prayer has got to be a good thing. It might lead you to deeper stuff – fasting for a whole day, or even longer? But it will be a blessing and, rather like David Livingstone was reputed to have said when asked about all the sacrifices he had made to go to Africa, you are unlikely to think of it as a sacrifice at all.

Personal faith at Christmas

2010-12-24T10:32:00.000Z

(This week's BBC production of The Nativity)

I recently told my Sikh shop-keeping friend (see Sunday 4 April) that we are moving in the spring to lead a church on the edge of London. He let out a wail of despair and told me that he would rather lose his wife than me! I protested, but he insisted that he could always get another wife. Finding another holy man to bless his shop was another thing altogether.

So he hasn’t moved on from the notion that blessing comes second-hand: you don’t have to believe yourself, because someone else will do that for you and bring the benefits to you. A holy man of God here, a saintly woman there, and you have front-row seats for spiritual security. But what if these people are taken from you? As my friend points out, godly people are not all that common and will be hard to replace. Surely it would be better to know God for yourself?

At Christmas we celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ to earth, God in human flesh, born as one of us. God is often accused of remaining at a distance, impersonal and unknowable, but nothing could be further from the truth. He came to us to share our existence and bring the salvation we need. To do this involved sharing our poverty and suffering, living in hardship and under persecution and discrimination, and finally dying a cruel death on our behalf and in our place. Nothing second-hand about his actions there!

Since God has done this he calls us to himself and tells us not keep our distance from him or hope that someone else will get to know him for us. He calls us to submit to him, trust him, love him, know him for ourselves. To this end I recently presented my friend with a special leather-bound, gilt-edged Gideons Bible. I told him that it will be the source of knowing God for himself so that he can discover for himself the blessing he believes I bring into the shop (of course, I don’t actually bring anything, other than money for my groceries, but you know what I mean). He needs to know Jesus Christ as his own Lord and Saviour, rather than thinking I am the source of blessing, and this book will bring him face-to-face with Jesus. I saw him again a few days ago and he said that the Testament was in his shop and would be there as long as he lived. I am glad he received it so positively, but what I really want is that its message (and the Saviour it speaks of) should move from the shelf in his shop to find a lodging place in his heart.

Whip yourself into a frenzy

2010-12-10T13:30:00.000Z

My own kids have grown past this stage, so I have to rely on the BBC to tell me that the teeny pop world has apparently been taken by storm by Willow Smith’s new single “Whip my hair”. The precocious ten year old, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, has already appeared in a film alongside her father in “I am Legend”, but is now launching her singing and pop career with this song that is set to drive the world nuts. “Whip my hair” is sure to start a dance craze among junior school children that will probably see some of them going to the doctor complaining of a stiff neck, since the main action of the routine involves thrashing your head round so as to whip your hair around, probably in the face of any innocent bystander.

But what does it mean? Dad Will Smith answered in an interview this week that it’s about being yourself and doing what you want and not listening to anyone who tells you that you’re wrong. The action of whipping your hair is, so it seems, like turning your head away so as not to listen. Can you imagine what that advice is going to do?

Think about the tired and rather hackneyed message that you should “be yourself”. Of course, it is not good to be pressured into other people’s moulds and no one should be forced to be what they cannot be. But what if the self you are to be is bitter, angry, selfish, proud, vain, depressed, sinful? Should you be all those things just because that is what you are? Is there ever a sense in which you should strive not to be yourself, but something better? And supposing your dreams for yourself are unrealistic, fanciful, childish or just plain wrong, is it bad that you should not be yourself in those cases? And is there ever a time when what someone says about this self might be better for you than listening to your own thoughts?

Apparently not, because the song advocates not listening to those who tell you that you are wrong. Once again, there is a good side to this, as it is quite possible that you find yourself assailed by negative messages about yourself (and maybe you listen to them when you shouldn’t): you’re worthless, you can never do anything right and so on. Nobody should be brought up facing that sort of demeaning talk. But the song allows people (children in particular) to believe that no one has the right to say anything they don’t like; it encourages them to act as the centre of their world and ignore others, to put themselves and their opinions first and believe that they are the most important person in the world. And if you don’t like that “I am just going to whip my hair…”

That is a reflection of the me-centred culture in which we live: I am the king of my universe and no one has the right to dethrone me. We dethroned God sometime ago; now we ensure that no one else can reign there either, an outlook reflected in the disastrous book of Judges. The writer there reflects rather ruefully: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.” And the consequences of that worldview makes Judges the most unpleasant book in the Bible. But the consequences are in fact quite natural: if you allow individuals to think that the world revolves around them, then sooner or later they will begin to act like that. Little Willow probably doesn’t realise that her expression of postmodern individualism, while it might sound good on a CD, will eventually look pretty ugly. We can only hope that, in spinning their hair around, some of our youngsters might bang their heads together and have a bit of godly sense knocked into them.

Honestly, it’s painful

2010-12-07T15:07:00.001Z

The coalition government – or at least, the Liberal Democrat side of the partnership – have tied themselves into knots over the issue of increasing tuition fees for students. Having taken a pre-election pledge, personally signed by each candidate, to vote against any rise in tuition fees, Liberal Democrats are being asked by their leaders to approve a plan which may see fees rise from £3,000 or so a year to anything above £7,000. The convolutions have been rather painful to watch, with Vince Cable, one of the architects of the plan, initially suggesting (or appearing to suggest) that he might not even vote for his own policy, and then realising that he had to vote for it. Others have hinted that they might be willing to lose a place in Cabinet rather than vote with the government.

The reason for the change has been spelled out in some detail by the government, but it boils down to saying that the pledge was made without those who made it being aware of all the facts. Now in government, they can see that the state of the nation’s finances is (allegedly) much worse than they had previously thought, so such a pledge turns out to be unrealistic and cannot be kept in the form in which it was made. The financial goalposts have moved, so the approach therefore has to be modified. Of course, the cynics out there could observe that such a pledge was taken when there appeared to be no chance of gaining access to government, when it would normally be assumed that the Liberal Democrats would be part of the opposition. The pledge was therefore quite a safe one – that is until they found themselves with the opportunity of entering power.

Some will note that the terms on which the fees are to be repaid have changed, so that the threshold at which repayment begins is much higher. On this new scheme, students will have to earn considerably more before they start repaying and this will mean that many of them are better off. Not that students are seeing it that way. Most of them, like my son who is at university and my daughter who has chosen not to go, still see it that they are going to exit their course with an even greater burden of debt, that they may never be able to remove.

However you explain it – whether it is in terms of economic necessity or by pointing out the financial benefits of the new scheme – members are still being asked to go against definite promises that they made. And however you put it, that doesn’t feel good. Politics already has a reputation for people saying one thing, meaning another, and doing still another, so this isn’t going to improve that reputation, and will probably only confirm the cynics in their belief that politicians are rather too good at squirming.

I wonder if the Bible has something to say about this? My mind went to Psalm 15, which is the description of the sort of person who has the right to approach God in all his holiness. It doesn’t list religious duties, but rather concentrates on attributes that we would call integrity. Although there is a reference to handling money in the closing verse (funny that, thinking of the other parliamentary scandals of 2010), the majority of this short psalm is dedicated to producing men and women whose speech reflects God’s truthfulness: speaking the truth, no slander, no undermining your neighbour and being someone “who keeps his oath, even when it hurts.” There is something deeply challenging in those words. They tell you that you shouldn’t make rash promises that you can’t keep; they tell you that keeping your word is key feature in what it means to follow God; and they tell us what we all know, that keeping promises you made is sometimes painful and that there can be an immense cost involved in doing what you said you would. That should not surprise us; it even cost God dearly to keep his own word, since that involved coming to this world in the person of Jesus Christ for our salvation and laying down his life for our sins. And it is the same for us. Honesty and integrity costs; words may come easily, even cheaply, but there is frequently pain in keeping them. But keep them we must.

Flash Mob Hallelujah Chorus

2010-11-30T10:06:00.000Z

Sunday was the first in advent, so here is a Christmas piece.

The flash mob is a relatively recent phenomenon, popularised by adverts where crowds of people start dancing in a railway station or singing in a shopping centre. It is carefully prearranged but, while it may look and sound good in screen, is not universally popular with the authorities. Such events have been stopped in the past on health and safety grounds for fears that hundreds of people dancing in the rush hour might add to the congestion. I guess that is possible, but forget that for a moment and listen to the offering Canadian shoppers were served up with one lunchtime in November.

I must admit that I like it for another reason: there are not many opportunities to state that Jesus is Lord, that he will reign for ever, in such a public way and get away with it these days. I suppose most people regard it as a traditional element to Christmas, but the Bible is clear that this is the truth. Enjoy - and believe!

The Terror of Randomness

2010-11-26T16:20:00.000Z

Providence – the doctrine teaching that God brings all things in conformity with the purpose of his will – can be both reassuring and disconcerting. It is reassuring because it tells us that God watches over our steps, shelters us from harm and leads us through both good and bad. It assures us that he really is in control, even when it appears not to be the case, that he is working all things together for the good of those who love him, and that he is working his perfect plan for our lives. It is quite likely that we simply do not see most of what this means for us and that perhaps only eternity will reveal just what he has done for us in this regard. But it can also be disconcerting because this is not applied evenly. James, the brother of the apostle John, was taken and executed in Acts 12, while Peter, who was also arrested, was released by an angel, much to his and the church’s surprise. And a little while ago 33 Chilean miners were freed after surviving entombment hundreds of metres below ground, this week 29 miners perished in an explosion in a New Zealand mine.

In spite of providence, there appears to be a randomness to life for which we have no answer. Why did that person pass under that tree at just the moment it fell? Why did that drunken driver appear at the moment his victim crossed the road? Why do some survive and others not? It all seems so random when looked at like that and that randomness, according to Jerry Sittser, can be utterly terrifying.

He should know. His wife, mother and one of his daughters were killed in a car crash in which he and the rest of his children were also injured, and the pregnant passenger of the other vehicle also killed. The driver – drunk – escaped both serious injury at the accident and conviction for his actions because it could not be shown that he actually was the driver, since both he and his passenger were thrown free in the impact. What sort of providence is that?

You can read Sittser’s struggles as a Christian to come to terms with his loss in A Grace Disguised, which is one of the most heart-rending and challenging accounts of grief that I have ever read. It is not a deep Bible study (although the chapter which bears the same title as the title of this post refers to Job and Joseph), but it reflects from a Christian perspective on dealing with catastrophic loss. There are certainly no glib answers here to his situation; it is well-written, thought-provoking and intensely moving. His answer to the problem of randomness is to affirm that there are times when life appears to be utterly without direction, but that God is working through them in a way we cannot see:

"…our own tragedies can be a very bad chapter in a very good book. The terror of randomness is enveloped by the mysterious purposes of God… I have often imagined my own story fitting into a greater scheme, the half of which I may never fathom. I simply do not see the bigger picture, but I choose to believe that there is a bigger picture and my loss is part of some wonderful story authored by God himself."

What does it mean to be a leader?

2010-11-16T12:23:00.000Z

In another blog I came across this summary of questions posed by J Oswald Sanders for leaders and potential leaders. It comes from his classic book “Spiritual Leadership” and, as well as helping me to see what I am aiming to be, it is particularly challenging.

Have you ever broken yourself of a bad habit? To lead others, one must be master of oneself.
Do you retain control of yourself when things go wrong? The leader who loses self-control in testing circumstances forfeits respect and loses influence. He must be calm in crisis and resilient in adversity and disappointment.
Do you think independently? While using to the full the thought of others, the leader cannot afford to let others do his thinking or make his decisions for him.
Can you handle criticism objectively and remain unmoved under it? Do you turn it to good account? The humble man can derive benefit from petty and even malicious criticism.
Do you possess the ability to secure discipline without having to resort to a show of authority? True leadership is an internal quality of the spirit and requires no external show of force.
Have you qualified for the beatitude pronounced on the peacemaker? It is much easier to keep the peace than to make peace where it has been shattered. An important function in leadership is conciliation—the ability to discover common ground between opposing viewpoints and then induce both parties to accept it.
Can you induce people to do happily some legitimate thing that they would not normally wish to do?
Can you accept opposition to your viewpoint or decision without considering it a personal affront and reacting accordingly? Leaders must expect opposition and should not be offended by it.
Do you find it easy to make and keep friends? Your circle of loyal friends is an index of the quality and extent of your leadership.
Are you unduly dependent on the praise or approval of others? Can you hold a steady course in the face of disapproval and even temporary loss of confidence?
Do your subordinates appear at ease in your presence? A leader should give an impression of sympathetic understanding and friendliness that will put others at ease.
Are you really interested in people? In people of all types and all races? Or do you entertain respect of persons? Is there hidden racial prejudice? An antisocial person is unlikely to make a good leader.
Do you possess tact? Can you anticipate the likely effect of a statement before you make it?
Do you nurse resentments, or do you readily forgive injuries done to you?
Are you reasonably optimistic? Pessimism is no asset to a leader.
Do you welcome responsibility?
Do other people’s failures annoy you or challenge you?
Do you direct people or develop people?
Do you criticize or encourage?
Do you shun the problem person or seek him out?

We love God's Word

2010-11-08T19:10:00.000Z

This is the text of the sixth point of the first draft of the new Lausanne Covenant agreed at Cape Town at the end of October. The whole covenant is well worth reading, but this one jumped out with its very clear and helpful commitment to Scripture and what that means. Make yourself a cup of coffee and read it over carefully:

We love God’s word in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, echoing the joyful delight of the Psalmist in the Torah, “I love your commands more than gold! Oh how I love your law.” We receive the whole Bible as the word of God, inspired by God’s Spirit, spoken and written through human authors. We submit to it as supremely and uniquely authoritative, governing our belief and our behaviour. We testify to the power of God’s word to accomplish his purpose of salvation. We affirm that the Bible is the final written word of God, not surpassed by any further revelation, but we also rejoice that the Holy Spirit illumines the minds of God’s people so that the Bible continues to speak God’s truth in fresh ways to people in every culture.

a) The Person the Bible reveals. We love the Bible as a bride loves her husband’s letters, not for the paper they are, but for the person who speaks through them. The Bible gives us God’s own revelation of his identity, character, purposes and actions. It is the primary witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. In reading it, we encounter him through his Spirit with great joy. Our love for the Bible is an expression of our love for God.

b) The story the Bible tells. The Bible tells the universal story of creation, fall, redemption in history,and new creation. This overarching narrative provides our coherent biblical worldview and shapes our theology. At the centre of this story are the climactic saving events of the cross and resurrection of Christ which constitute the heart of the gospel. It is this story (in the Old and New Testaments) that tells us who we are, what we are here for, and where we are going. This story of God’s mission defines our identity, drives our mission, and assures us the ending is in God’s hands. This story must shape the memory and hope of God’s people and govern the content of their evangelistic witness, as it is passed on from generation to generation. We must make the Bible known by all means possible, for its message is for all people on earth. We recommit ourselves, therefore, to the ongoing task of translating, disseminating and teaching the scriptures in every culture and language, including those that are predominantly oral or non-literary.

c) The truth the Bible teaches. The whole Bible teaches us the whole counsel of God, the truth that God intends us to know. We submit to it as true and trustworthy in all it affirms, for it is the word of the God who cannot lie and will not fail. It is clear and sufficient in revealing the way of salvation. It is the foundation for exploring and understanding all dimensions of God’s truth.

We live however, in a world full of lies and rejection of the truth. Many cultures display a dominant relativism that denies that any absolute truth exists or can be known. If we love the Bible, then we must rise to the defence of its truth claims. We must find fresh ways to articulate biblical authority in all cultures. We commit ourselves again to strive for the truth of God’s revelation as part of our labour of love for God’s word.

d) The life the Bible requires. “The word is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.” Jesus and James call us to be doers of the word and not hearers only. The Bible portrays a quality of life that should mark the believer and the community of believers. From Abraham, through Moses, the Psalmists, prophets and wisdom of Israel, from Jesus and the apostles, we learn that such a biblical lifestyle includes justice, compassion, humility, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, sexual chastity, generosity, kindness, self-denial, hospitality, peace-making, non-retaliation, doing good, forgiveness, joy, contentment and love—all combined in lives of worship, praise and faithfulness to God.

We confess that we easily claim to love the Bible without loving the life it teaches—the life of costly practical obedience to God through Christ. Yet “nothing commends the gospel more eloquently than a transformed life, and nothing brings it into disrepute so much as personal inconsistency. We are charged to behave in a manner that is worthy of the gospel of Christ and even to “adorn” it, enhancing its beauty by holy lives.” For the sake of the gospel of Christ, therefore, we recommit ourselves to prove our love for God’s word by believing and obeying it. There is no biblical mission without biblical living.

Walking with a limp

2010-11-05T14:01:00.000Z

There is a poignant article on the Gospel Coalition website (go to this page and find an entry dated 22 October) about a pastor whose family life has been racked by severe illness, but who responded to questions about how he dealt with this by saying “Sometimes God trains his servants by breaking their hearts.” The difficulties he and his family have faced are of a magnitude that most of us never encounter, but that phrase indicates his recognition that God’s ways with us are not always easy and his acceptance of God’s hand in these matters. The short article, written by a member of the congregation, observes that they have seen Christ in their pastor and his family, probably in ways they would not otherwise have witnessed.

Now no one in their right mind enjoys suffering, but since we live in a culture which runs from suffering like no other, this positive perspective is one that we hear only rarely. It affirms that God is at work in the pain and darkness, that he is leading his trembling people through the valley and, moreover, that this is his purpose for them and that they will grow through it because of that. It is not something that they desire, but God has put it in their path, so they accept it and discover God in a greater way through it.

There are many Scriptures that spring to mind to reflect this, but the one that occurred first of all to me comes from Genesis 35, in the strange incident in which Jacob wrestles with a man who turns out to be God himself in angelic form. Jacob was preparing to return home after years of self-imposed exile. He had sent all his family and possessions ahead of him to meet Esau, probably for fear that his brother still wanted to kill him, and was left alone overnight to struggle with this stranger. The struggle is symbolic of Jacob’s life: he had spent much of his energy seeking to prevail over others – his brother Esau and his father-in-law Laban – often using the deception his name Jacob highlights, but now he had to realise that God held his destiny in his hands. He needed God’s blessing above everything else. The outcome of the struggle was that Jacob did in one sense prevail – he gained a blessing from God that he carried with him for the rest of his life, reflected in the change of name God gave him: Israel, meaning “he struggles with God.” But there was a cost. In order to obtain the blessing he left the encounter with an injury that probably also stayed with him for the rest of his life, his hip joint wrenched out of its socket and ensuring he could only walk with a limp.

God’s greats frequently walk with a limp, metaphorically speaking. The healers are commonly wounded; the prayer warriors bear the scars of the conflict they have prayed through in order to come closer to God; the servants find that their service takes them into the heat of trouble and distress. I cannot think of anyone whose faith is strong and which speaks powerfully and clearly of Christ who has not gained that strength of faith in the fires of affliction or grief.

But in our celebrity culture we want the short cut to spiritual maturity. We want to be able to speak with authority instantly, without the pain of the experience that will provide that authority. We want to minister God’s comfort to others without discovering it first for ourselves in the agony and sorrow of tribulation. We want to be like Jesus, yet we do not wish to pay the price that this involves. Yet that cannot be. If we are going to be like Jesus we must learn to walk with him, take up our cross and follow him, so more than likely it will be with a limp.

Ironies in converting to Islam

2010-10-29T11:07:00.000+01:00

I came across an article in The Daily Mail asking why it is that so many modern career women in Britain are converting to Islam. It was sparked by the announcement that Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, journalist Lauren Booth, had converted to Islam after what she called a “holy experience” in Iran. She is only one and I’m not sure how many the “so many” in the title actually is, but the ones they spoke to made interesting remarks about the reasons they gave for converting.

There were some who just talked of holy experiences in sacred places, which you could get, I suppose, at any shrine around the world, or even just watching a sunset, but they happened to be in a Muslim shrine, so associated the holy feeling with Islam. But it seems many are attracted by the strong and clear moral stance that Islam takes with regard to women. They point out that, while some Islamic cultures do oppress women, not all Muslim societies do (although the writer of the article, Eve Ahmed, spent her whole life seeking to escape the restrictions of her father’s faith even though I presume she was brought up in the UK). What they observe is that western society oppresses women by the constant pressure to dress provocatively and by the expectation that casual sex is the norm. One former DJ speaks of the empty life she had, drinking hard and partying often and only using God as a kind of doctor. She also describes going to an old friend’s birthday party and seeing everyone getting drunk and dancing provocatively. She said that for the first time she saw her old life with an outsider’s eyes and knew she could never go back to that. Islam has been an escape route for her from the meaninglessness that western culture creates.

There are a couple of ironies in this. Firstly, the critique that Islam offers of western culture in these areas is exactly what the Christian message has to say. The Christian gospel attacks the emptiness of the world, urges people to turn from the meaninglessness of life without Christ and provides an escape from the judgment that is to come. Those who find Christ also look back on their former lives with a sense that they really have been saved from emptiness and in finding God they find a peace they did not have before. So why do these women not turn to Christ? Possibly because the church around them failed them, or because they grew up with an image of the church that it is weak and ineffective. Perhaps the church in the west has such a tarnished image that it never occurred to them that the Christian message is worth listening to.

The second irony is that history is repeating itself. Islam came into existence because the church had such a bad image at the time and was so corrupt that an alternative appeared. When Mohammad was seeking the truth he was incensed at the polytheism of the local tribes, and opposed it vigorously. But he found no help from the churches because they preached about three gods (I know this is a common Muslim misunderstanding, but this is where it comes from; and I have seen medieval triptych portraying the Trinity as God the Father, Mary and Jesus, so what chance did he have of understanding the truth?). It didn’t help that churches around at the time were wealthy and opulent, too concerned about their own affairs, and that Christians hated the Arabs and looked on them as inferiors, so Mohammad was unlikely to respond favourably to the gospel if he had come across it. But he didn’t. There was no one around to explain the gospel to him, so he looked elsewhere and the rest, as they say, is history.

Are modern women converting to Islam because they find meaning in it? Quite likely they are. But they are doing so because the church is not doing its job of presenting the One that these women (and everyone else) really needs. So they find a system that gives them a security nothing else appears to, but they do not find the Saviour himself who would give them everything they seek, and more. How is history going to judge the way we have made this Saviour known?

The missing delegation

2010-10-18T17:40:00.000+01:00

Ok, this is cheating. Last week was a bit crazy and I haven't had time to think for myself much, so here is a link to something that is interesting.

The title comes from my brother (Neil Rees, International Director at World Horizons) who is at the Third Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization in Cape Town (always more of a high flyer than I am) and is sending daily reports back from the conference. They make good reading and can be found on the news pages of the World Horizons site. On of particular note at this stage in the conference is that the Chinese delegation was prevented from attending. 250 delegates were prevented from travelling by a large police presence at Beijing Airport.

China now has the second largest evangelical church in the world (after the US), so their absence will be keenly felt in these international gatherings. But this setback will not stop the conference being hugely influential in the world church, nor will it stop the Chinese church from growing and becoming a world leader in mission. God's church is growing around the world and the gates of hell are not going to prevent that, so petty bureaucracy has no chance at all.

Of the making of e-books there is no end…

2010-10-10T19:59:00.000+01:00

‘The end of the word as we know it’. That was how The Independent reported the changes that are sweeping the publishing world. Writers are still writing, books are still being published and people are still reading them, but it is the way that they are reading them that is causing the trouble. The arrival on the scene of the electronic book reader – first the Amazon Kindle, but now there are ones produced by Sony, Google and Apple, with one from Samsung this month – has changed everything. Well, strictly speaking, the e-reader hasn’t changed everything; the digital revolution behind it changed everything first of all. Ten or fifteen years ago analysts were pointing out that the information revolution could be compared with the revolution caused by the advent of the printing press at the end of the middle ages. The web has already changed the way people read, so this is just the latest manifestation of the information revolution that is sweeping us along at the moment.

The article outlined the traumas the publishing world is going through. There is no longer the straightforward relationship between writer, agent, publisher, retailer and customer, since, for instance, a retailer like Amazon might now be able to publish its own e-books and cut out the publishing world entirely, or an e-book manufacturer like Apple might produce its own list of e-books that do away with agents, publishers and other retailers. To most people this is not a vital question as they only buy books occasionally, and looking around my flight home from Spain last week I saw no one using any of these gizmos (lots of paperback books, though), but in the publishing world it appears to be making industry leaders ask who will be in business this time next year, and who will not. One figure not to ignore is that this year Amazon has sold more e-readers than hard-back books.

As Christians we can often have our heads in the clouds about such challenges, perhaps thinking that we will be unaffected by developments like these, but we should not ignore them. Our local Christian bookstore has seen its sales drop by half over the last ten years: a combination of people reading less, perhaps, or just buying from internet sales agencies. But this worldwide publishing crisis will undoubtedly have an effect, too. And what will happen to the Christian publishing world, already severely mauled by the crunch, if Christians start buying e-books instead of paperbacks?

But it is not all doom and gloom. We have a faith that is word-based, so an information revolution means we have more opportunities and ways of communicating God’s Word. The printing press made it possible to distribute the Bible on a scale previously unimagined. Europe was reshaped by it. How much more now that we can distribute the Word even more easily? I know a man who has been involved in distributing the Bible electronically for the past fifteen or twenty years, making it and other resources available free in Italian (go to Richard Wilson’s site La Parola to see it in action). He has seen one copy downloaded every few minutes during this period, so he has made a considerable contribution, since Italy is fairly poorly resourced as far as evangelical materials go, but there are places which are far worse off where the Bible is banned, so the e-revolution is opening new doors. Who knows where that might lead? The world reshaped by the Bible!

Having said all that it would be tragic if the revolution touched the world but passed us by. In one sense it doesn’t matter in what format you read the Bible, as long as you read it. I have a copy of the NIV on my PDA, but I still enjoy the quiet swish of a page being turned (and Bible pages, being much thinner paper, have their own distinctive sound). And there is something reassuring about being able to riffle through one hundred pages to get to the point you last left. And yet I also like the thought of the e-reader (current opinion seems to be that the new Samsung in great if you have the money, while you ought to wait for the next upgrade of the i-pad), if only because I also like the techno-feel of these new devices. But an e-reader with an unread copy of the Bible on it is nothing more than an advanced version of an old Bible gathering dust on the shelf. Make sure it revolutionises your life!

Returning to our roots

2010-10-03T18:46:00.000+01:00

After a two thousand year absence the Druids are officially back. If you had not noticed they had gone, that is because it was some time ago that the Romans slaughtered them all sometime shortly after their invasion of our islands because they were a political force who threatened to undermine Roman rule, but their ideas have never quite gone away. There has been a slow growth of interest in their ideas (worshipping nature, principally, and the sun and the earth in particular), which they will claim are the natural faith of the peoples who lived here in pre-Roman times, so even though the Druid Network, as it is called, has a relatively small number of adherents, there are more who would claim some sympathy with their views. I went to buy a new mattress for one of our beds last year and the young guy processing the paperwork, on learning that I was a minister, announced that he was a pagan and talked confidently and graciously about why he accepted these ideas.

Paganism doesn't have very good press, by and large. If you go back to the Romans, they accused them of human sacrifice (I think you can read Julius Caesar and he will fill you in on the details), although I doubt that any of the modern exponents go that far (imagine a tick box in the Charity Commission's registration forms putting human sacrifice as a public benefit!). But this has been portrayed in the classic horror movie The Wicker Man when Edward Woodward ends up in a giant wicker figure, which the original druids were known for, burned as a sacrifice to their beliefs. Is that what the famous wicker figure on the M5 at Bridgwater is being lined up for?

The fact that the druids have returned is part of living in a pluralist society where no one religion holds sway over people's beliefs any longer, so we have to accept it. Actually, it is part of living in a society which is becoming more and more like the Roman society that we see in the days the New Testament was written, where multiple faiths competed for people's attention. But New Testament tells us that there is a sense in which the we should not accept what is going on.

When the book of Acts tells us in chapter 17 that Paul went to Athens it tells us he was enraged (the NIV puts it more delicately) that the city was so full of idols, because their presence indicated that people had turned from the worship of the Creator to the worship of the creation. So he began to talk about Jesus and the resurrection and managed to get himself an invitation to talk to the city's leading thinkers at Mars Hill. We know he only had limited success at this point (mind you, most pastors would be ecstatic and that sort of limited success!), but his message remains the same.

There may be a certain logic in worshipping the created order – after all, the sun is an extremely important part of our lives – but the logic is finally flawed because you need instead to be reconciled to the Creator who gives you these things. And the way that this will come is through the man he has sent: Jesus Christ who gave his life to reconcile us to God. He is the one who is going to judge the world, and God has given proof of this by raising him from the dead. The sun comes up each day, but the Gospel insists that it is the Son who has risen from the tomb, the sun of righteousness who rises with healing in his wings, who will give us the true light to lead us back to God. The resurrection of an old faith is nothing compared to this.

When the barons clash over who shall be king

2010-10-01T12:58:00.000+01:00

What’s the comedy definition of feudalism? Your count votes. That’s funny now that we are 500 years from it, but it’s no joke when it really happens. The last time we had such a system in place we called it the Wars of the Roses, heads rolled and the nation suffered. I can’t help feeling that we haven’t just seen feudal barons back in action in the Labour party leadership election which appears to have been decided by the block vote of a relatively small number of trades union leaders, voting on behalf of their members (who, I’m presuming, were not consulted).

It is going to be hard for Ed Miliband to escape from that association (if, indeed, he wants to). And he is going to find it hard to deal with the fall-out from his brother David’s decision to step back from participation in the shadow cabinet. I am not an impartial observer, but it appears that the barons have voted in the man they wanted, but have done it in such a way as to force out the man with more experience and voter appeal. I wonder if the way that this leadership contest has worked out will come back to haunt the party.

Whatever the long-term outcome, it’s not for nothing that the Bible tells us to pray for leaders and all those in government (Paul had no concept of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition when he was writing, but I think he would be happy for us to include it in our prayers). Politics is a messy business at the best of times and there is frequently metaphorical blood on the carpet. But the system we have is still one of the best in the world, for all its flaws. Was it Winston Churchill who pointed out that democracy is one of the worst systems in the world, except for all the other alternatives? I’m glad of the opportunities I have to live in freedom and security, so I am going to keep praying for God’s wisdom to be given to such men – even if, as has been the topic of recent discussion, they don’t believe in him.

Revolutionary dissent

2010-09-24T11:06:00.002+01:00

A funny thing happened on the way back from the palace – we managed to get a glimpse of the pope. Not that we had planned it that way. On Saturday Lynn and I did the official tour of the Buckingham Palace state rooms. Revamped by John Nash, they are rather garishly opulent, but the tour is well organised, with a personal audio system guiding visitors smoothly through the system, allowing people to go at the speed they want. The tour of the rooms culminates on the rear terrace, where there is an enormous tea tent, serving really nice cakes, and it all ends with a walk round the garden that brings visitors to the exit on the far side of the garden. So it was that we found ourselves heading round to Hyde Park Corner to discover a throng of pilgrims waiting for the pope, and a particularly vocal Muslim protest group, so we thought we would wait with friends as well.

The overriding impression of that hour was of a continuous barrage of insults from the Muslim protest, who had the benefit of a PA system that allowed them to harangue the waiting crowds about the superiority of Islam, how much they hated the pope, that they would never forgive him for speaking against Mohammad, that Muslims were dying in Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. All of this was punctuated by various chants, some in Arabic, but others quite understandable: “Pope Benedict go to hell! Pope Benedict watch your back – the Muslims are coming back!” And more in the same vein. When he finally did appear, he swept past relatively quickly.

This was obviously an extreme group’s expression of their feelings (the group’s website goes further and curses the pope). More moderate imams have been on the news welcoming the pope’s visit and his messages about the need for faith and faith-driven ethics in a secular society (and I welcome that, too). But what they were doing struck me as having interesting parallels. They were exercising their right to express dissent, which we tend to take for granted, but it is a right that they would probably not possess in the countries from which they had come. But in using it they were also trying to say that they were above criticism, that no one could criticise their faith, their prophet, their scriptures. So effectively they were using their freedom of expression with the aim of shutting out other opinion or criticism.

This is not unique to Islamic thinking; it is the way that most revolutions go. Revolutionaries strive to have their opinions heard and accepted; they struggle for their views to capture the public mind; and when they have succeeded, they frequently use their new position to silence those who previously objected to them. The parallel is with the gay revolution that has taken place in the west. We have moved from a situation where homosexuality was outlawed, not merely to the point that it is now legal, but that it is becoming illegal to dissent from the idea that it is right and good. It is as if it is the new taboo, the one issue it is not wise to speak against, the new subject which will bring the Inquisition down on the heretics – and it is ironic that the present pope, who was head of what used to be called the Inquisition, has seen Catholic adoption agencies close down because they could not comply with the previous government’s edicts over this matter.

Both Islam and the gay rights groups are revolutionary movements that are trying to force their agenda onto the public stage in Britain; both, I suspect, would close down other opinion if given the chance. But I reckon it is lost on both of them that their freedom to express their dissent is founded on a Protestant revolution: 1688 and all that. Out of the fires of civil war and the reactionary government that followed (which led to 25 years of relatively serious persecution) the nation invited William and Mary to rule. Some of the earliest acts of their reign were to establish freedom of speech and conscience, albeit initially limited for Catholics (who had caused the trouble in the first place). But the principles enshrined in these paved the way for the freedoms we now enjoy. Allowing people to dissent when you disagree with them? Now that’s really revolutionary.

The blessedness of being out-of-touch

2010-09-15T12:45:00.000+01:00

Even if you don’t agree with him (and mostly I don’t) the visit of a pope is always a significant event. There have been debates about the cost of his visit (about £20 million), what the place of the church is in modern life, or whether we even want him to come at all. One subject which repeatedly receives air-time is whether the church’s message is relevant for the twenty-first century. With declining numbers should the church adapt its message to fit in with changing views? News items have featured debates on this score, with some insisting that they have left the Church because it hadn’t moved, and others saying they were Catholics for the same reason.

Although the scenario is new and there are new subjects under discussion, particularly homosexuality, the question itself is not a new one. It faces virtually every generation of believers: times move on, opinions change, we smile at the attitudes of our grandparents, our grandchildren will do the same and wonder how we could be so simplistic. So should the Christian message adapt to these changes? And if numbers decline because we no longer chime with our generation, wouldn’t it be prudent to move with the times and cut out those bits that offend or which are no longer relevant? The Catholic Church’s answer has been, most definitely not. “Semper eadem” is the motto – always the same. The Church is not a political party that can change its ethos to gain votes. Now is not a time to be changing, even if everyone wants us to. And in this the Church is right.

If you look back through the Old Testament at the ministry and work of the prophets you will see that most of them laboured in times when Israel had abandoned the faith. Elijah spent his time in the northern kingdom of Israel with Ahab, who, along with his wife Jezebel, had added the pagan worship of Baal to an already corrupt system; Jeremiah started his preaching in support of Josiah, who had wanted to reform the nation, but when Josiah was killed Jeremiah found himself a lone voice against hundreds of false prophets and kings who hated him; Ezekiel found himself in exile in Babylon preaching to his countrymen who refused to believe God would bring Jerusalem down. The list goes on. They ministered in times when no one wanted to hear from God and yet refused to compromise on the heart of the faith. Just because everyone else had voted with their feet was no reason to re-write their message. That was what the false prophets did; they trimmed their message in order to keep their audience happy – and their audiences were frequently large. They were able to mock and humiliate Jeremiah, isolate him and shut down his preaching. At one point you can read that he was so depressed by a particularly nasty encounter with the head of temple security that he wished he had never been born. But events proved tragically that he was right and they were wrong.

Sometimes (or should that be frequently?) the call of God to his people is to hold fast to him when others are giving up. It is not merely about going to church when others don’t, or praying at home and reading your Bible, although those are good things to maintain in such times. It is to remain faithful to his words when everyone thinks they are up for negotiation, that we should adapt them to suit our hearers because the message no longer agrees with people, knowing that if we continue to hold to these truths we may be regarded as out-of-touch, irrelevant, behind the times, bigoted, stuck in the mud.

I have other issues with the Catholic Church, but not on this principle. Truth is not up for grabs. If that means having to stand firm when others turn away, then so be it. Elijah stood alone for several years and then discovered that he was not in fact alone; there were seven thousand who “had not bowed the knee to Baal.” So I am all for being regarded as out-of-touch. We are in quite good company really.

When book-burning is a bad idea

2010-09-10T16:02:00.000+01:00

With Florida pastor, Terry Jones, calling off his proposed ceremonial burning of 20 copies of the Koran, western politicians have breathed a collective sigh of relief. Such a stunt would have incensed Muslims around the world, damaged relations between nations, put America under greater threat and put troops in Afghanistan under a much higher likelihood of retaliatory attacks, too. As President Obama said, it would have assisted recruitment among extremist organisations. That said, I wonder what those extremist groups have made of all this. Does it confirm that the west is just spineless, that the mere threat of violence is enough to have western governments desperately scrabbling for ways to avoid conflict? Or that if they are sufficiently violent the west will just lie down and give up? Does it look like they are already begging for mercy?

Dhimmi is a concept in Islamic law which officially describes a protected status for Jews and Christians to allow them to function as non-Muslims in a Muslim nation, but its purpose was actually to make those conquered feel that they had been subdued, to make them realise they were second-class and subjugated (which involved paying a special tax, the jizya, for this privilege). From this, Jewish writer Bat Ye’or has coined the word “dhimmitude” to describe a policy of intimidation and threat that elements in the Muslim world are employing to gain more concessions from western governments and laws (without giving anything themselves), but it is also used to describe a policy of appeasement pursued by western politicians, making concessions and bending over backwards in an effort to understand Muslims, in the hope that extremism will see sense and stop training suicide bombers. The speed with which British and American leaders spoke up about the dangers of the Koran burning stunt (and the general failure to observe that, for example, the Saudi government regularly burns Bibles) probably make it look to the extremist as if dhimmitude is working.

So Pastor Jones refuses to be bowed to the status of the dhimmi, but it has to be said that his way of resisting it really is disastrously and foolishly provocative. Is he not aware of the wider implications of his actions? And from a Christian perspective, is he really not aware that Christian brother and sisters in Muslim countries will suffer as a direct consequence of his actions? More importantly, is he not aware that his actions are in complete opposition to the way the New Testament calls Christians to act towards those who differ with them? What about praying for your enemies and forgiving them? Or even, following our Saviour, dying for them? Either way, that should rule out provocatively hostile actions.

It is interesting to note from Acts 19 what a pagan lawyer said about Paul’s preaching of the gospel in Ephesus. Local traders had stirred up a riot when they began to fear that the great name of the goddess Artemis was being sullied and attacked. He reasoned that the rioters had no reason for the tumult, because Paul and his team had, in his words “neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess.” In other words, Paul had declared the good news of Jesus, his salvation, his uniqueness, and so on, without attacking the local pagans. That sounds like a good way of going about things today. Of course, some people will be offended and refuse to see reason because they think they are above criticism, but our words and actions will give them no reason for responding in this way.

That is what makes following Christ so hard sometimes. We are not to use the methods the world around us uses. Read Acts and you will see that the early church was faced on a number of occasions with unreasoning, knee-jerk persecution, yet the response was never to fight fire with fire. It was always to reason with people from the word, debate, preach the good news, argue, present their case before the courts, demonstrate the truth of their words by the way they lived, wait patiently upon God for help. If that sounds weak, that’s because it is weak, but it is weakness that depends upon God. The church must not share the default methods of worldly wisdom, whether Western or Muslim. If the Muslim world is going to be touched by the grace and love of God, God’s method is the only option that is going to work, for we know that the others have already failed.

Has science buried God?

2010-09-07T12:08:00.001+01:00

This is by way of follow-up to my last post about Stephen Hawking. It wasn't just the comment box that sprang into life; just about every newspaper has carried articles by prominent scientists in answer to the assertion that the universe created itself. Here are a few from those with a Christian perspective:

John Lennox writing in The Mail.

Alister McGrath

Eric Priest in The Guardian.

Statement from The Evangelical Alliance

And if you like your response in video format, Dr David Robertson of 'Solas - Centre for Public Christianity' has started producing a weekly video blog called 'Flea Bytes' in which he addresses current issues and beliefs. He debates frequently at universities in Scotland and has made a name for himself asking awkward questions on Richard Dawkins' website (he even managed to get himself banned from the site for stirring up arguments!) Here is an answer to Stephen Hawkings - it lasts a little over eleven minutes. It's stimulating and raises all the points you would want to make.

Hawking the truth

2010-09-03T16:14:00.000+01:00

I confess I sometimes wonder if Richard Dawkins and his cohorts of militant atheists haven’t actually succeeded in wiping out of public consciousness altogether any notion that God created the world. After all, there is so much air-time given to Big Bang theorists and evolutionary thinkers that there is no room on the schedules for any creationist viewpoint, even if the media gatekeepers were minded to allow such a programme. Which they are not, of course. Cue, therefore, a certain surprise on my part when a brief article on Thursday in The Telegraph about Stephen Hawking’s latest book “The Grand Design” was flooded with comments: a little over 24 hours after the article was published there were 1350 of them.

The article was provocatively entitled “God was not needed to create the Universe” and went on to quote Hawking’s key idea: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,” to which he added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

This is what set the comment box alight. There were plenty of people willing to point out the flaws in the argument (and plenty of others willing to argue the opposing points): if there was nothing, why would there be gravity? Or if there was nothing, how did spontaneous creation take place at all? “In the beginning there was nothing; and then the universe sprang into being.” That was what Professor Brian Cox said about 18 months ago in a programme about the origin of time, but it doesn’t say how something could come from nothing. It seems like the scientific community is trying to come up with a scientifically respectable way of covering the nakedness of its arguments: having laughed at the idea that God might have created the world from nothing they have to fumble around for a better explanation, since the Big Bang posits a beginning. And the accepted explanation seems to be “Because it did.” I guess I’ll have to try to get a copy and see if it is any more complicated than that.

One thing that strikes me before reading it is a certain irony in the choice of book title: “The Grand Design”. Richard Dawkins is well-known for saying that evolution works in such a way as to make you think that the world has been designed. Everything is so beautifully fine-tuned that the idea of a Designer seems very appealing, but that, he says, is what you would think. It looks as if it has been designed, he says, but in fact it hasn’t. That sounds like an attempt to avoid the obvious, and the title of Hawking’s book seems to be attempting the same Alice-in-Wonderland logic: there is no designer at work behind the scenes (or anywhere else for that matter), but it is still a pretty grand design. Hmm. How many impossible things did the Queen of Hearts try to believe before breakfast?

Of course, every theory of beginnings inevitably comes up against the cause of the First Cause, a point at which faith is required. Who made God? is the usual riposte. In answer to that I find (as a converted atheist) that it is much more straightforward to believe that God has always existed and that he brought the universe into being (with all these laws that the scientists rely on so much), rather than believe that an inanimate nothingness generated an entire living universe all by itself. I have faith, but my faith doesn’t stretch that far.

The grass is green once again

2010-08-31T19:07:00.000+01:00

I am not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination, so I can claim no credit for the transformation: all by itself our garden has turned green over the last couple of weeks. Previously the lawn (perhaps that is speaking too highly of the patch of grass at the back of the house) – the grass – was brown, hard and crisp. June here was hot and dry, while July saw lots of cloud, but little rain. It is only now in August that we have the typically British summer of rain one day and sun the next, and the rainy days have been seriously wet, so the grass has come back to life. It’s a resurrection in colour.

It reminds me of Isaiah’s vision of Israel under God’s blessing: “The desert and the parched land will be glad: the wilderness will rejoice and blossom…” (Isaiah 35:1) He’s not merely talking of a good irrigation system in the promised land, but a time when God upholds the cause of his people so that their enemies are defeated (34:8). He goes on to describe people returning to their homeland in freedom and without fear, something they did not know under most of the kings under whom Isaiah ministered. And it was a promise that had to be believed in the face of the severest attacks, for the chapters which immediately follow this one detail the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem which so nearly brought the reign of Hezekiah to a nasty end.

But that is the way we must usually view life down here. God promises that the wilderness will blossom, but it may not seem like that at the moment. In fact, it may seem to be just the opposite and that the desert is encroaching even more. The drought is taking hold. But that is the time to hold onto the promises even more firmly: “Be strong, do not fear, your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.” (35:4-6).

Maybe you are holding on for something, trusting that God will open a door for you or answer your prayers. I can think of plenty of situations (and people) that need life-breathing into them, that could do with God pouring water onto parched ground! I don’t know in what ways such prayers will be answered, but in the final analysis it is this vision of Isaiah that sustains those prayers, for the ultimate fulfilment of what Isaiah is seeing is heaven itself. God promises a complete revival of the wilderness – a new heaven and a new earth; people restored to God and evil done away with. We are praying for rain that will revitalise the world, both now and for eternity, and should believe God for nothing less.

In all fairness

2010-08-24T17:13:00.002+01:00

We all want life to be fair, even though we know that much of the time it isn’t. We demand that people play according to the rules and that they are punished when they break them. So this week we have had further inquiry into the “Bloodgate” affair at the Heineken cup match in April last year between Harlequins and Leinster. Late into that match Tom Williams, a Harlequins winger, came off the pitch bleeding heavily from the mouth, and was substituted by a kicker who had previously gone off injured himself. It seemed too convenient to the Leinster bench, who smelled a rat when they were not allowed to examine the injury for themselves, and Williams aroused suspicion when he winked towards his own bench as he came off. It turned out the injury was faked, using a blood capsule employed in stage productions, which he had stored in his sock for the length of the game. What has also appeared is that the team doctor was pressurised to administer a real cut to the player’s mouth in an attempt to make the injury look genuine – hence the inquiry at the GMC yesterday and today into the doctor’s conduct. Punishments have already been handed out to the club: a significant fine of £258,000 to the club, 4 months’ suspension for Williams and 3 years’ suspension for the club’s director of rugby, Dean Williams, who, it was discovered, had ordered fake blood injuries on 4 other occasions.

There is a feeling that justice has been served here and that the perpetrators have got what they deserved, but it is not always anything like so clear-cut. And you could argue that this is only a game – admittedly a game with a lot at stake, which makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, but still only a game. There are injustices in the world that cost people their lives, the families, the homes or their freedom; sometimes there is no way of finding out who the perpetrators are; frequently there is a lack of evidence. Did Naomi Campbell know she was receiving so-called blood diamonds when the Liberian president Charles Taylor (now on trial for war crimes) gave a bag of dirty stones to her? And will those who suffered in that terrible war get justice in this trial anyway?

So it is that we expect justice from God and cry out when we don’t receive it. Many of the prophets railed against the injustices of the ancient world and promised God’s retribution. They occasionally condemned the nations around Israel, but aimed most of their fire at God’s own people and the injustices they encouraged. And no amount of religious privilege was going to save them: God would act against those who practised dishonesty in the market place (with false weights), or who sold the sweepings with the wheat; he would punish those who thought the Sabbath was an opportunity for exploiting their neighbours; he would give justice to the poor. But God does not promise instant lightning-bolts-from-heaven-retribution. He promises that he will bring justice in his time: “Vengeance is mine”, he says. So much prophetic teaching looks ahead to “the day of the Lord”, when God himself comes to rule and sweep away evil.

There is a fine balance to tread here in the way we present this. If we say that God’s judgment is only future, then we say that there is no justice in this world, and we leave people in despair. They are going to have to wait until eternity for justice. But neither can we insist that God punishes sinners right now every time. For one thing, where would he stop? At which injustice would he draw the line? Your neighbour’s dodging paying car tax? Your unreasonable behaviour when driving to work? The answer has to lie in a confidence in both sides of this coin.

We must be convinced that God is serious about justice. That will be reflected in our own concern for justice, especially for those who are deprived of it, as well as in our own righteous living as disciples of Jesus. It will mean that we are confident that he will act in the way that he sees fit in our experience and that we can leave outcomes to him. Sin has its own natural consequences, and there are times when God steps in to act even if we cannot say when that will be. And over all that, we know that a day is coming when God will come himself in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. That will be a day when evil is defeated and all sin dealt with, God’s justice will be seen, and his righteous judgment known. So tell me, what does that day mean to you?

Is my arm too short that it cannot save?

2010-08-19T13:29:00.001+01:00

It is tempting to think that some people are completely out of reach of the Gospel, but the attached video indicates that such people do not exist.

Masab Yousef is the son of one of the men who founded Hamas in Gaza. He was brought up under the influence of this movement and participated actively in its struggle against Israel from a young age. His tenderest years were spent passionately following the dictates of his religion (he fasted during Ramadan for the first time at the age of just five) and throwing stones at Israeli tanks in the Intifada until he was arrested and thrown into jail when he was 18. He suffered a severe beating at the hands of the Israelis, also enduring 3 months of solitary confinement, before being transferred to a prison where Hamas was basically in charge (it was an Israeli prison, but Hamas were given a great deal of freedom to run day-to-day affairs). It was there that his awakening began that led ultimately to conversion to faith in Jesus Christ. What he witnessed was what Islamic rule is like for those who do not conform and the sight shocked him to the core. Torture, beatings, discrimination were the order of the day (and night), such that it drove him away from the faith he had passionately believed in towards Christ, whose Gospel he had encountered before entering prison.

What he saw comes as no surprise to those who follow Islamic news around the world; what is surprising is that he had the courage to turn his back on his family (whom he still respects and loves dearly) and his people, flee the country and then speak out. It is two years since he spoke out and his story was made public across the media: article in The Telegraph; article in Christian Today. I do not have further news of him - he is probably (and quite wisely) living his life in anonymity in the US. But his story demonstrates that no one is too far out of reach of the love of Christ, or whose eyes are so blind that they cannot be brought to see, Let's keep praying!

Go to Answering Islam for a dialogue between Muslims and Christians; and the 30 Days Prayer Network site for 20 August (giving details on how Muslims prepare for Friday prayers) for a Fox TV news report on this young man's conversion.

Ritual or relationship?

2010-08-10T10:44:00.001+01:00

A number of years ago I was visiting friends in Turkey and decided I needed to see Friday prayers at the central mosque. So another young man and I walked down to the centre of Pendik, a township on the edge of Istanbul, stationed ourselves about 75 metres from the main entrance to the mosque and waited. We had arrived an hour before the official ceremony was due to take place, but the sermon had already begun and we could see that there were already worshippers present. There was a collection of grizzled old men sitting in the portico, cross-legged (which is the official posture required to avoid showing the soles of your feet to those around you) and virtually unmoving. Other men were arriving all the time, performing the required washing at the taps outside and then filing into the mosque.

For the next hour the preacher intoned on (the sermon was broadcast into the street, so we could hear it, but obviously not understand it), while the mosque filled up so that men stationed their prayer mats outside, with the crowd eventually stretching past us. At about one o’clock it was evident that it was all coming to a climax, as the preacher became much more animated, as if he was giving a rousing exhortation at the end. Sure enough, the familiar ritual soon took place after this, with the thousands present bowing on their mats. Then it was all over and the crowd began to disperse.

What struck me about this was how important the ritual was to the men who attended. The overwhelming majority of the men who attended turned up towards the end of the hour we were watching. They were not present for most of the sermon and seemed to pay no attention to it when they were there. They were too busy greeting friends or making phone calls, but when the moment came, they were focused and attentive. They had obviously spent time performing the washing ritual, but other than that their worship only occupied them for five minutes, and even that looked mechanical and automatic. It is obviously something that is important to them, but it appeared that the ritual—being there and the act of praying at that set time—was essentially what counted for most of them.

Is that all that knowing God is about? Paul makes the point in Romans 2 that a man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly and applies this to the Christian faith. If you have nothing but ritual, then you have nothing. The Christian faith is a relationship – knowing God through faith in Jesus Christ, loving him, having faith in him, being known by him. Ritual (or tradition, or even routine) may enhance your experience of that knowledge, but it cannot act as a substitute for it. Unless there is the reality of knowing God behind it, there is no reality at all. So make sure that you know Jesus for yourself – if you don’t, then try starting here.

And you should note that tomorrow marks the beginning of Ramadan in the Muslim world, when the ritual of fasting is added. I had some Iraqi neighbours for about 18 months and I noted that even though the man never went to Friday prayers the family became more consciously Muslim during that period, with the little girls wearing headscarves for the month (but not wearing them either before or afterwards). It is a period when the world’s Muslims become more devout and more serious about prayer. It is impossible to say how much this means to them, and whether they continue afterwards, but there is no doubt that it is a powerful force in their lives. And we should be praying for them as Christians, joining with millions of others around the world in praying for the light of the gospel message about salvation in Jesus to impact the Muslim world in the 30 days of prayer during Ramadan. After all, we have a real relationship to offer, and that is something that no amount of ritual can compete with.

What will they think?

2010-08-06T10:56:00.000+01:00

As Christians we are often taken up with the question of what people will think if we speak to them about Jesus Christ. Granted, there are some hostile people out there, but there are plenty who are not - and some will surprise us with their response. Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) is an outspoken atheist with no time for religion, but here he speaks of his reaction to being offered a Bible after one of his shows. He hasn't become a Christian, but he makes a couple of significant points on this clip (don't be put off by way the clip looks - it's just a video diary entry). Firstly, he was touched by the respectful manner of the man who approached him. And secondly, why would people not want to share a message that they believe has eternal consequences? Why indeed?