Moving On

In the last few months I have been reminding our folk at chapel that we Christians are an Exodus people, a people who move on.

It seems strange to our little congregation to be in on the closing for worship of our building. This has been brought about by lack of numbers and also by the death, earlier this year, of our much loved secretary on whom we relied so heavily. Yet it means the end of a Free Church presence in our village that has lasted 113 years. Indeed, the origins go back over 80 years further than that, but in premises now lost.

The turn of events seems strange to the folk of the village as well as to us. People wonder what will come next, and hope that the property will not be turned into yet another housing development.

But if there is anything strange, it ought to be that one congregation has been in the same place for so long. The presence of such edifices as our ancient cathedrals lulls us into an illusion of permanence. People speak wistfully of the worshippers who have occupied the sacred, hallowed spaces over many centuries, handing down a long chain of praise to God. In comparison, a church that has lasted little more than a century may be thought of as not running the distance.

Yet this is surely a false notion. As far as this world is concerned, Jesus Christ did not think in terms of centuries.

“When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (from Matthew 10, ESV).

Churches are not meant to stay put indefinitely. The real fixtures are God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit:

“For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he ‘has put everything under his feet.’ Now when it says that ‘everything’ has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:22-28 NIV).

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever — the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16 NIV).

As for me, I have now passed retirement age and am looking forward to making my home in Llandudno, North Wales. I know I shall never retire from being a Christian. But the pattern of my ministry will now inevitably change.

One other development is that I am discontinuing this blog. Some of you may have followed me through 8 years and almost 200 entries. I am thankful to have had a readership and wish everyone concerned all the best for the future.

The best legacy I can leave with you is this urgent plea: if you have not yet known Christ as your Saviour, accept Him now. He is the one fixed point in a changing life. If you have already accepted Him, hold fast. That is my testimony and my comfort: through thick and thin, by His grace, I am still here, with Him in my life!

Deafness

Just lately I’ve been suffering again from a wretched condition which leaves my ears blocked and me with most of my hearing gone until I can get to an expert who will unblock them again and restore me to what I was before. Thankfully this should be soon!

It is a strange business, going around with this hearing loss. It means I can sympathise with those who are chronically hard of hearing. The difference is that their problem may be permanent and may deteriorate over time.

At first it was infuriating to have this unwelcome issue returning. I was very aware of it and felt as though I had to apologise to everyone for it. I’ve just spent a week at a big Christian conference and felt the need to keep changing my place in the auditorium, going to where I could best hear the speakers. Speech would sound muffled while music would absolutely assault the “good” ear – the one which managed to pick up more sound. It would come across as shrill, piercing, painful even.

Yet by now, in a strange way, I have grown used to the handicap. I just accept the distortion of the sound around me. In other words, I put up with something that falls far short of the level of hearing I normally enjoy, which they say is fine for my age.

Spiritually most people have rejected the call of Christ so often they have become deaf to it. They tune it out, as we say. And just like me with my physical hearing, they put up with their hearing loss quite readily, not even conscious that it it is there!

It is a tragedy. The prophet Isaiah laments in the Bible:

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” And he said, “Go, and say to this people:

“‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand;

keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’

Make the heart of this people dull,

and their ears heavy,

and blind their eyes;

lest they see with their eyes,

and hear with their ears,

and understand with their hearts,

and turn and be healed.” (Isaiah 6:8-10 ESV)

The meaning of this startling sounding passage is not that God deliberately wants to make His people unreceptive to His message. It is rather that He is determined to carry on speaking to them regardless of the reception they give His prophet. If they persist in their attitude, they will be unresponsive and therefore gain no benefit.

God forbid that any of us should resolve to tune out the message of a living Saviour who loves us enough to die for our sin and to rise again. Never could there be a more tragic example of someone looking a gift horse in the mouth.

All-knowing, All-powerful, Everywhere at Once

Sometimes I listen to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day and discover that it gives voice to my own thoughts. One such occasion was when John Bell of the Iona Community spoke a few days ago. He was talking about the way mobile phones give their users the feeling of having godlike qualities.

They give us the illusion of being all-knowing – through them we have a world of information at our fingertips.

They make us seemingly all-powerful – we can send a message to whoever we like and order a takeaway that will arrive on our doorstep as soon as we return home and are ready for a meal!

They make us think we are everywhere at once – in an instant we can be in touch with people right across the world.

You might think we should be delighted at the power the little rectangular screen puts in our hands. Yet instead many mobile phone users feel stressed and insecure if they are out of signal range for any length of time. What do people think will happen to them in that case? That they will suddenly lose all their friends because they are out of contact for a short while?

This sense of panic reminded John Bell of Adam and Eve and their temptation and fall from grace. God had commanded Adam,

“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17 ESV.)

Adam and Eve succumbed to that temptation. They allowed themselves to be seduced by the serpent, Satan, into thinking that God had forbidden them to eat the fruit of that tree for fear it would make them godlike.

You can make what you will of that Genesis story, but it is echoed in the behaviour of the rest of the human race in a most uncanny way. Adam and Eve became the first examples of the common human temptation to want to be all-knowing, all-powerful and everywhere at once, which having a smartphone seems to satisfy. What human beings from the first couple onwards have failed to recognise is that they are only human and cannot mysteriously become divine!

God’s response to this sad development in the relationship between Adam and Eve and Himself is found in verse 22 of chapter 3:

“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”

John Bell concludes, 

“To live comfortably with our limitations rather than constantly frustrated by them is not a bad thing.” 

While not always agreeing with Bell’s views, I can certainly say Amen to that.

The Courage to Talk

This morning I was chatting to someone who had been through a rebellious phase in his teens. He had been involved with churches for some time but then went to pubs and deliberately appeared in front of churchgoers very drunk.

Not surprisingly, he was met with disapproval and received no encouragement to come back to church. I was curious about the man’s story. From time to time you do meet people who know what the Christian life is about but who become antagonistic towards Christians.

“What would it have taken for you to change your mind and amend your life?” I asked my friend. “Just for someone to talk to me,” he replied. “But nobody spoke to me.”

His testimony gave me pause for thought. Christians are expected to show concern and compassion for those who are struggling, but in this case nobody spoke.

To me this is understandable. When you speak out you draw attention to yourself and problems can result. The wiser course of action could be to adopt a low profile and keep quiet. Sometimes I think I live by the code of “Discretion is the better part of valour”. But in this instance a gentle, friendly word could have made all the difference.

Anyway, God had His own agenda, and that man is now a loyal and tireless worker for Christ and His church. By God’s sovereign hand he came through regardless. We should not beat ourselves up over whether someone was saved or lost for want of a word from us. If God wants a man or woman to come through for Him, He will bring them through. Yet we can have – or miss – the privilege of playing a unique part in that process.

My thoughts turn to Psalm 116 and verse 10. This is a difficult verse to interpret, but in the traditional versions it reads:

“I believed, therefore I spoke.”

Believing and speaking go together. Certainly for the apostle Paul believing will inevitably mean speaking out:

“Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 4:13-15 ESV).

Sometimes believers in persecuted countries feel they have to keep mum because if they spoke out, even to close family, they would get both themselves and others into dire trouble. Yet often they are so excited by finding their Saviour that they simply cannot help but declare their Christian experience!

Our silences can be damaging. At the very least they may cause outsiders to think that really we are no different from the rest. One person speaking out can make all the difference … but maybe that person is unusual and special, someone who has experienced God speaking to him or her with particular force.

It may only be your turn once in a lifetime – but may God anoint you for that one special occasion where you speak out and it makes a difference.

Sun

The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours out speech,

and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words,

whose voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world.

In them he has set a tent for the sun,

which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,

and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.

Its rising is from the end of the heavens,

and its circuit to the end of them,

and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

Psalm 19:1-6 ESV

“Nothing hidden from its heat”: These are words which keep coming back to me as I suffer in the unaccustomed heatwave that we are experiencing at the moment in Great Britain, our country of high latitudes but with occasional hot spells.

With a patchy knowledge of science, I feel that I have never properly understood the way light and heat energy work. It mystifies me in the same way as radio waves do. These things go around corners and through walls. We can detect them even when we cannot see a clear line of sight to those sources which have given birth to them.

Even before the time of King David, there was a long history of describing God’s impact as being like the sun giving off heat and light. Nations which had many gods also had intellectuals who believed that a multitude of little gods with limited spheres of influence would not have the mighty powers evident in nature. It made more sense to talk about one God, who was often identified with the sun. The sun seems to be in overall charge of life. Without its heat life cannot exist and flourish.

All of this brings us to the creation story. In King David’s psalm, God is portrayed as the giver of life and also as a bridegroom thundering along in his chariot as if on his way to his wedding, who rejoices to run this course like the sun going from one end of the sky to the other. It is a dazzling picture.

The Psalmist is not only dazzled; he is made to feel small. He feels a sense of guilt in the presence of this power. The divine sun sheds light on his dark corners: open faults and also hidden faults. We are currently experiencing drought. The sun has immense destructive power as well as life-giving power. The grass is shrivelled. Even the weeds, persistent through most changes in climate, are turning black. The earth is hard and compacted: the other day I literally had to take a hammer to my trowel in order to break up the ground in my front border.

Somebody like me may indeed long for an end to this pitiless hot dry spell. But something also tells me we need to accept what comes. If we had a climate which was absolutely constant and always delivered the same thing, this would probably be stunted and maybe even barren. In the depths of winter I often hear people say that a good hard frost is needed to kill off the bugs.

We need both hot and cold weather. The nature that sustains us flourishes on both. I love the hymn which thanks God for all the good things he has given us. Yet it goes thoughtfully on:

“I thank Thee more that all our joy

Is touched with pain,

That shadows fall on brightest hours,

That thorns remain,

so that earth’s bliss may be our guide,

and not our chain.”

Adelaide Anne Procter, 1825-1864

Drought

As I look out over the grassland that runs parallel to the West Shore of Llandudno, I see nothing but uninterrupted brown. Even the hearts of the dandelions and other weeds are becoming charred and shrivelled. It is an unusual sight, because usually you see an endless expanse of green. Parched land in our British Isles comes as something of a shock.

We humans keep going in heatwaves - though I must admit more sluggishly in my case. I don’t do heat. But our minds and spirits still remain active.

In a time of pressure in the wilderness of Judah King David sang this:

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee,
my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;
To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.
Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.
Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.
My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips:
When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches.
Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. (Psalm 63:1-7 AV)

(I quote from the old version because I love that memorable line, “... in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is”!)

David - maybe following a sleepless night - is up early to seek God. He may be anxious about lack of supplies in a dry desert place, but God is his priority. Often when Christians visit lands in poor and straitened circumstances, people are at least as keen to have the written word of God as other provisions, even though Bible verses will not fill their bellies.

In the midst of his wilderness experience, David thought back to something that had occurred to him in the sanctuary where he worshipped God. He had had a vision of God’s glory that clearly moulded his life in a very profound way that carried him through bad times. It is like when the eminent 16th-century Protestant Reformer Martin Luther was in great heaviness of spirit after he had lit the touch-paper for the Reformation. He was under unremitting pressure from many sides. He defiantly chalked on a board, “I have been baptised”. He may have been going through hard times, but, after all, he had been counted in Christ’s community of the redeemed, and that gave him an awareness that he was a child of God.

During bitter times in my ministry, I have turned to my calling, many years ago, which was quite dramatic. God had called me in a startling and emphatic way, and nobody now was going to deny my title to a place in His ministry.

Above all, when in wilderness moments, I find myself thinking of the last verse of a very precious hymn by William Cooper, “Sometimes a light surprises”:

Though vine nor fig tree neither
their wonted fruit should bear,
though all the field should wither,
nor flocks nor herds be there,
yet God the same abiding,
His praise shall tune my voice;
for while in Him confiding,
I cannot but rejoice.

Mercifully right now Llandudno is delightful despite the heatwave, hopes are high and the abnormally dry spell isn’t about to darken my well contented mood!

Comradeship and Craft

The weather was simply too warm for the people who wanted to attend our Craft Show. Not that any high temperatures were showing on the thermometer. It was just that, though the sun was shining brightly, the air was humid and heavy. It was a pity, because the show really was a joy.

We had ten or so exhibitors plus a local ukulele band and a stall run by the charity we were supporting that day. It was a real delight to see them all enjoying each other’s company even though there were not that many visitors to attend to. Each had brought a different skill and they simply appreciated each other.

It brought to mind a recent article by Keila Ochoa in Our Daily Bread. It is a reflection on the Jews who worked side by side to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

In ancient times, a city with broken walls revealed a defeated people, exposed to danger and shame. That is why the Jews rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. How? By working side by side, an expression that can well describe Nehemiah 3.

At first glance, chapter 3 might appear to be a boring account of who did what in the reconstruction. However, a closer look highlights how people worked together. Priests were working alongside rulers. Perfume-makers were helping as well as goldsmiths. There were some who lived in nearby towns and came to give a hand. Others made repairs opposite their houses. Shallum’s daughters, for example, worked alongside the men (3:12), and some people repaired two sections, like the men of Tekoa (vv. 5, 27).

Two things stand out from this chapter. First, they all worked together for a common goal. Second, all of them are commended for being part of the work, not for how much or little they did as compared to others.

Today we see damaged families and a broken society. But Jesus came to build the kingdom of God through the transformation of lives. We can help to rebuild our neighborhoods by showing others they can find hope and new life in Jesus. All of us have something to do. So let us work side by side and do our part—whether big or small—to create a community of love where people can find Jesus.

My time with the lovely friends it’s been my privilege to pastor for just under three years is coming towards an end. With it, the work of the church itself is also soon to be wound up. But I will always remember the generous, co-operative spirit that has prevailed here. I dare to say that it has rubbed off on those who come among us. And when two work together they may be surprised to find a third moving among them:

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil … a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:9 and 12, ESV)