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.