Birth, crucifixion, resurrection or Pentecost?

If you ever want to get your head round all the different groups there are in Christianity, try the following exercise. Look at any church stream and try to gauge which part of the life of the Lord Jesus is the main inspiration of its followers. It will either be His birth, His death, His resurrection or the sending of His Holy Spirit. (There may be groups that focus on the Ascension or on Jesus’ earthly life, of course. But these and any others will probably be subsumed under one or other of the Big Four.)

Of course, spokespersons for each church stream will be careful to insist that Jesus’ birth isn’t everything (nor His crucifixion, nor whatever else it happens to be). To hold that opinion would, they realise, be heresy and error. Heresy actually means “picking and choosing” – highlighting the doctrines you like and ignoring the rest. That will not do for any church that places itself in the Christian mainstream. A church with an “incarnational” mindset, in whose eyes Christmas is the time of year when we really get into the heart of God, will be very careful to give Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost due weight as well. Typically this point of view would be held by Catholics and by many in the Church of England.

Yet somehow those stressing the incarnation always come back to the amazing truth that God was born as a human being – that He became incarnate in our world. It is, they affirm, an amazing condescension on the part of the everlasting God that He should voluntarily limit Himself to the straight-jacket of our time and space. Though His existence is from all eternity and to all eternity, He let Himself be tied down to a precise period in human history. An ancient statement of Christian belief states that Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate”. Pilate is a real historical figure. We have specific dates when he was in charge of Judaea: 26-36 AD.

Whatever part of Jesus’ career we lay stress on, we can all agree that His incarnation is a comfort beyond measure. For many of us, time hangs heavy. The frail elderly person in slow decline, battling pain and loss of powers, may long for her release from this earth as day follows uncomfortable day. The addict may wonder how many more days and nights he will have to endure where he must stifle his craving. The long-term prisoner dare not mark the passage of time overly closely; it is too depressing to think about. Time is a pitiless master.

Now I agree that the Lord Jesus did not have to endure suffering in quite the same ways or for quite the same extended periods as the people I have mentioned above. As far as I know, He had no catastrophic illness, no addiction and no lengthy imprisonment. He died in His prime, like the casualties of war who grow “not old as we that are left grow old;/age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn”. Yet His sufferings were on a divine scale. I cannot begin to imagine what an infinity of suffering went into those three hours on the cross. He absorbed suffering not just as man but as the God who could take charge of any and every situation in the universe if He chose. To refrain from retaliating, moment by moment, takes a humility and a self-restraint that I cannot fathom.

The letter of Hebrews puts the implications across in superb fashion: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16).

Perhaps the late Poet Laureate John Betjeman captures the incarnational spirit as well as any mortal can, in his Christmas poem:

… And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,

A Baby in an ox's stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Many lights, one Light

At this time of year it is common to see great arrays of Christmas lights festooning the outside of people's homes. I can't remember this being the case when I was a child. The occasional enterprising householder might put a string of coloured standard light bulbs on a tree in the garden, but that was about as far as it went.

Nowadays many homes spend fortunes on illuminations specially manufactured for this season of the year: lights that blink on and off; lights making Santa or star shapes. Sometimes they are intended to attract a wider audience than just family, neighbours or passers-by. They may be a spectacle that folk come from a distance to admire. Visitors will often be encouraged to give something to a good cause if they appreciate the display.

Personally I don't quite know what to make of it all. It could express joy or exuberance or just an urge to cheer up the long dark nights.

A recent article by Our Daily Bread writer Julie Ackerman Link helped me make better sense of this new phenomenon. She spoke of one such display in her neighbourhood, a spectacular one to which many neighbours contributed. She commented:

“The sound-and-light display is so elaborate that it requires a network of 64 computers to keep everything synchronized.

“When I think about these holiday lights, I am reminded of the Light that makes Christmas a holiday for many — a single Light so bright that it illuminates the whole world with truth, justice, and love. This Light — Jesus — is everything that the world is longing and looking for (Isaiah 9:2,6-7). And He has told His followers to display His light so that others will see and glorify God (Matthew 5:16).

“Imagine if Christians worked as hard at shining and synchronizing the light of God’s love as the families of that neighborhood work when they illuminate their street with Christmas lights.”

This makes sense to me. We should point others not to superficial pinpricks of light but to the great Light of truth, our Saviour Jesus. How badly people need a reliable truth source today! Lies and half-truths are found on every side and at all levels, from heads of state to local families. Even churches, that are supposed to be the foremost bodies to represent Jesus Christ, are not without their lying and devious leaders. Spiritual darkness seems to brood and to reign supreme in many corners, as though it were midwinter all year round.

Of course, when all is said and done, the sun is always shining even when we cannot see it. It takes faith to keep believing that the light is there even though all around seems to be darkness.

Jesus is the true light of the world. John 1:5 reminds us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” He, the living Word, was of a piece with the written word of God, the Bible. Psalm 119:105 gives credit to that word as light: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Quotes are from the ESV.) What a comfort and an assurance it is to walk in the light of Jesus Christ! “I am the light of the world,” He announces. “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Just a final sobering thought: the light is not there just to attract and intrigue us like fairy lights. It is truth and love, but it judges us too. John 3:19: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.”

People Like Us

A little group of enthusiasts in Worcester was putting on a display of medieval games, open to the public. I went along out of curiosity and asked a string of interested questions about the lives of people in those far-off days. “Do remember,” I was informed, “that these were people just like us.”

They meant me to go away thinking that our forebears were not so very different in their outlook on life. They might have fewer conveniences and the business of existing might have been more of a daily struggle. Yet, for all that, we are part of the same human family and they would have had feelings and responses that we would recognise today.

Well, up to a point. Of course we have a common humanity, but – just to take two topics among many – how can we possibly enter into the mindset of those whose average lifespan was barely half what it is today, and who lived with death as a daily reality? And then how can we think like those for whom the unseen spirit world, the domain of the after-life, was not just the stuff of fantasy video games but a driver of the most intimate details of their domestic routines? How did they feel about that: were they prisoners of an invisible realm? Or did they in some way experience a richness we can never now realise?

Moses in Psalm 90 verse 12 calls on God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (ESV). If you expect a long life, you are not inclined to notch up each day as one more day lent, and so may miss the wisdom that can be derived from contemplating this.

November is a month for pondering the brevity of life. During it, there falls the Remembrance season. (That fact makes this time of year particularly poignant for me. My mother died between Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day in 1997.) This current November we mark the 50^th anniversary of the day when President John F Kennedy was gunned down. His time in office held huge promise and brought high hopes – all crushed in an instant of time.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

bears all its sons away;

they fly forgotten, as a dream

dies at the opening day.

Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

Borne away and forgotten most mortals surely are – coming from an unseen world, returning to an unseen world, out of human sight and generally speaking out of human mind. But this is not the case in the mind of God, the Ruler of that unseen world. He observes the fall of the smallest expiring sparrow. His word, the Bible, unlocks something of the puzzle of the world beyond as it relates to humans, both before we were born and after we are physically dead. That world is laden with blessing for the believer.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will …” (Ephesians 1:3-5)

“... and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6-7).

To those for whom Jesus Christ is of no account, the unseen world is a primitive superstition. Yet to others it is a realm of glorious fulfilment where the Rock of Ages reigns supreme. So we can move on to the last triumphant verse of Isaac Watts’ hymn:

O God, our help in ages past,

our hope for years to come,

be Thou our guard while troubles last,

and our eternal home.

The Rarity of Repentance

An epitaph in a Spanish evangelical church to Percy Buffard, the Englishman who founded the Spanish Gospel Mission 100 years ago, quotes Malachi 2:6. This reads: “True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity” (ESV). To say that a man not only introduced people to Christ but “turned” them “from iniquity” is quite striking. I have found that it is one thing for people to turn to Christ and quite another for them to turn away from old, bad attitudes and habits of mind.

Puritan author Thomas Watson once wrote, “Greater power is put forth in conversion than in creation. When God made the world, he met with no opposition; as he had nothing to help him, so he had nothing to hinder him; but when he converts a sinner, he meets with opposition. Satan opposes him, and the heart opposes him; a sinner is angry with converting grace. The world was ‘the work of God’s fingers’. Psalm 8:3. Conversion is ‘the work of God’s arm’. Luke 1:51. In the creation, God wrought but one miracle, he spake the word; but, in conversion, he works many miracles; the blind is made to see, the dead is raised, the deaf hears the voice of the Son of God. Oh the infinite power of Jehovah!”

I say a hearty Amen. For someone to be a new creation in Christ is an even greater wonder than the original creation. It is often maintained that there are more connections in the human brain than there are particles in the visible universe. To get through all those trillions of connections, fundamentally to change the mindset of a human person, seems a tall order indeed. Yet God did it in the Lord Jesus Christ, He still does it today, and He uses many remarkable people as His agents in this precious work.

Even so, there is today a great deal of self-deception around the whole area of conversion. A person may claim to have had a converting experience and even be able to point to the date. Yet the bad side of his or her old life continues to flourish unchecked. There is the semblance of conversion but no repentance. The person has not turned from iniquity. Maybe there is no godly leader around to point out to that person, courteously and humbly, that his or her attitude and way of life does not match up to their claim of conversion.

If there was ever a man whose whole outlook on life encouraged people to turn from iniquity, it was Percy Buffard. Born in the late 1800’s in modest circumstances in England, he was headed for a professional career but developed a passion for evangelising Spain. On visiting there he found a prevailing church riddled with worldliness and superstition. After determined and patient work selling Bibles and Christian literature, and setting up a health care ministry, he was able to assemble groups of people and instruct them in God’s word. He made a particular study of Colossians, the letter of Paul which sets out the great aim of that apostle: “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28 ESV).

To this day the churches of the Spanish Gospel Mission are earnest in instructing their people about the gospel and the impact it should have on a man’s or a woman’s lifestyle, a credit to the founder under God.

Thank God for Christian leaders of vision and principle who do not merely notch up a tally of conversions. Their heart is to see their audiences depart from iniquity and become fully mature in Christ.

Provision through the storm

Some of us who read RBC Ministries' "Our Daily Bread" notes have spotted in the past how at times they are uncannily relevant to what is happening on the day they are meant for. This is the case even though they are written some nine months in advance.

Of course, you could say that this would happen anyway by the laws of chance. Yet God moves in mysterious ways. In the lovely book of Ruth (2:3 ESV), we are told about the destitute heroine, "So she set out and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers, and she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz" - the very man who was in a position to transform the situations of her and her mother-in-law! Did it just happen - or was it divine Providence?

Let me quote Jennifer Benson Schuldt's article from this Sunday in full:

"Early one morning the wind began to blow and raindrops hit my house like small stones. I peered outside at the yellow-gray sky and watched as trees thrashed in the wind. Veins of lightning lit the sky accompanied by bone-rattling thunder. The power blinked on and off, and I wondered how long the bad weather would continue.

"After the storm passed, I opened my Bible to begin my day with reading Scripture. I read a passage in Job that compared the Lord’s power to the atmospheric muscle of a storm. Job’s friend, Elihu said, 'God thunders marvelously with His voice' (37:5). And, 'He covers His hands with lightning, and commands it to strike' (36:32). Indeed, God is 'excellent in power' (37:23).

"Compared to God, we humans are feeble. We’re unable to help ourselves spiritually, heal our hearts, or fix the injustice we often endure. Fortunately, the God of the storm cares about weaklings like us; He 'remembers that we are dust' (Ps. 103:14). What’s more, God 'gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength' (Isa. 40:29). Because God is strong, He can help us in our weakness."


That very night, the worst storm in decades "happened" to hurtle across southern England. It symbolised many things. We humans are resentful when we come across outbreaks of power beyond our control. They may be forces of nature, the attitudes of assertive people, or weaknesses in ourselves. We wonder whether God cares because He does not prevent these things from happening or take them away at once. Yet the evidence of the Bible is that God is supremely powerful, that He does not forget us, and that in Christ He empowers believers even in the midst of their weakness.

The punchy thought at the end reads, "God is the source of our strength".

Isaac Watts wrote a much-used hymn that began,

I sing the mighty power of God
That made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad
And built the lofty skies.

Later verses - one of them left out of most modern hymn books - run:

In heaven He shines with beams of love,
with wrath in hell beneath:
'tis on His earth I stand or move,
and 'tis His air I breathe.

His hand is my perpetual guard,
He guides me with His eye;
why should I then forget the Lord,
who is for ever nigh?

Scripture (unless otherwise stated) taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Shade and shelter

Spending time in rural Oxfordshire, where the weather has turned autumnal and chilly, I recall the heat of Spain as a distant memory. Given that I don't do heat, the change is not altogether unwelcome. I ponder the subject of protection – protection from heat and protection from storms.

I noticed that, given the choice, the Spanish when out walking keep to whichever pavement is in the shade at any given time. Places shaded from direct sunlight are appreciably cooler than those that aren't. We in the UK are more likely to shun the shade as bringing a chill into our lives. Yet for someone from a hot climate it plays an important role in sheltering them from the pitiless and unremitting rays of the sun.

Although in this country we know little of weather which is unremitting and intense (even though periods of heavy rain seem close to that description), many know trials and troubles that are a daily pressure in their lives. Every morning they wake up only to find themselves living that day with some stark reality that never goes away. It may be a violent death in the family or a disabling personal injury. It may be the knowledge that someone in their home has been abusive or manipulative towards them, and they fear each new day may bring further disquieting incidents. It may be a heavy responsibility that is a daily strggle to fulfil, like a daily increasing debt to a moneylender.

If freedom in the Lord Jesus is to mean anything to a person thus trapped, it needs to include shelter and shade from the relentless daily pressure of these things. This is true even if the problems themselves cannot simply be caused to vanish overnight. It will mean that quality of befriending where a Christian friend comes alongside to give companionship and a listening ear at least. Then maybe professional help can be found – legal maybe, or medical or financial – that can actually tackle the problem at root.

I’ve been impressed lately by the way a Christian money advice organisation, Christians Against Poverty (CAP) works in my locality. Debt coaches and befrienders arrange for practical advice and help to be given and, without preaching or pressure, look for ways in which they may gently introduce clients to the spiritual freedom that comes of knowing Christ and being part of His people.

In Psalm 23 the psalm-writer famously speaks of the "shadow of death" through which God will lead him.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4 ESV)

God is to the believer a benign type of shade:

The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. (Psalm 121:5-6)

The prophet Isaiah predicted that one day a righteous King-Messiah would rule over God’s people and be to them like shelter and shade:

Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land. (Isaiah 32:1-2)

May thousands more who are trapped in vicious circles of their own or others’ making come to sing like the hymn-writer

The Lord’s our Rock, in Him we hide,

a shelter in the time of storm.