Old man in a hurry

As I write this on the closing day of December, I am conscious of God having spared me to live yet another year. It is a time for remembering how swiftly life passes. This is especially so as my birthday nearly coincides with the beginning of the new year, and this time it will be a big one - I turn 60 and move from my sixth decade into (gulp) my seventh!

The daily notes this morning brought home to me some words from the 39th Psalm: "Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the measure of my days, that I may know how frail I am." That was King David's meditation. The note writer could equally have quoted the more famous Psalm 90, written by Moses. In verse 12 this says, "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Perhaps these things had added point in those far-off days. It amazes me that, though not robust, I have survived to the threshold of 60 with few significant health problems until this past year. My ancient forebears would have struggled to reach 30. Before the Great Flood, our ancestors apparently managed extremely long lifespans, but these were dramatically reduced after the Deluge, when the effects of sin and rebellion against God really took hold. Who can imagine what effect it would make on your thinking to know that by age 15 your life might well be at least half over? You would have had to cram everything you wanted to do during your life on earth into a much shorter space.

Some say that young folk are in a hurry, but that the elderly are too. There may be an increasing sense that they will not live to see a longed-for achievement. Something must be done soon. The old person exerts his or her failing powers to hasten the time, and looks with eager desire for a result. Of course, a Christian believes that most of our existence takes place in eternity after this life is over. But even so we are placed in this life in order to fill it with service.

Old Simeon in Luke chapter 2 was waiting for Jesus Christ to come. He had received a supernatural promise that he would not die without seeing Him. Naturally there was nothing he personally could do to hasten that day, but at least he turned up in the Jerusalem temple at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. It was just as well he was obedient, for that very day Mary and Joseph brought Jesus at eight days old for His dedication ceremony. Simeon burst into song: "Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel" (Luke 2:29-32 NIV).

As one more year slips by, may God find us active and obedient, and watchful for Him to achieve things in us and through us.

Another year is dawning;
dear Master, let it be,
in working or in waiting,
another year for Thee;

Another year of service,
of witness for Thy love;
another year of training
for holier work above.

Frances Ridley Havergal, 1836-79

Belt up!

-->

The first ever Christmas marked the start of a very long interval between two world-shaking events. We are still living in that interval. It is the space between the first and second comings of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This gap seems overlong to those who yearn for Christ’s second coming to put an end to all the injustice in the world, which seems to go unpunished now. Yet, if we only knew it, there is no idleness or delay in heaven. We read in the Bible that Christ is praying continually for us to His heavenly Father. “Jesus ... is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25).

There’s another biblical description of Jesus in this interval time which rarely gets a mention. In Revelation 1:13, John the Revelation-writer, exiled for his faith on an island, heard from behind him Jesus, commanding him to write messages. He turned to look at Him. What he saw was “someone ‘like a son of man’, dressed in a robe reaching down to His feet and with a golden sash round His chest”. This is the garb of a priest ready for action. The earthly priests in the Jerusalem Temple were busy people, always occupying their time with the ritual sacrifices and other duties they had to perform. Our great heavenly High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, is just as active.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon writes, “Well it is for us that [Jesus] has not ceased to fulfil his offices of love for us, since this is one of our choicest safeguards that he ever liveth to make intercession for us. Jesus is never an idler; his garments are never loose as though his offices were ended; he diligently carries on the cause of his people. A golden girdle, to manifest the superiority of his service, the royalty of his person, the dignity of his state, the glory of his reward. No longer does he cry out of the dust, but he pleads with authority, a King as well as a Priest.”

Our Lord is an example to us all. This year will present us with many opportunities but also many pitfalls. Are we dressed for service? The apostle Paul reminds us to “Stand firm, then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist” (Ephesians 6:14). If we fail to equip ourselves in this way, we can be easily tangled up with the things of this life, and tripped up by the snares of temptation. If in heaven Jesus is always dressed for action, much more should we be on earth.

And there is timely encouragement for us. Our ever-active God is working to bring us to completion, to full fitness to be with Him for ever in His kingdom. Philippians 1:6 “... he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus”.

Never too late?

As I write this, some from our church are looking forward to a trip into Yorkshire to witness the baptism by full immersion of a lady 82 years young.

Many churches have ceremonies where infants are sprinkled with water. Parents and supporters make promises (often scarcely understanding what they are saying) to guide and instruct their children in hopes that these will one day become Christians. Other churches believe you should wait till you are old enough to think for yourself before being baptised. These usually immerse the candidate fully in water “on profession of faith”, in other words their declaration that they repent of their sin and accept Jesus Christ as Saviour. Any such baptism is a powerful and moving event, but there are some special features about the one we are going to.

As happens all too often, this lady’s progress towards faith in Jesus Christ was slowed down by the fact that her husband was emphatically not a believer. After he died, she felt more free to look for a gospel church. She found one that belonged to the Baptist tradition. In it the gospel was faithfully preached and she gradually became convinced that she needed to ask for baptism.

This was remarkable, not only because of her age, but because believer’s baptism would not have been part of her culture. She struggled with the issue. One Sunday morning she was visiting our church at Bethany. I just happened to mention baptism. It was not the main point of the sermon I was preaching and I certainly didn’t expect it to have the effect it did. To her it was like a confirmation of her growing wish to be baptised. She took the matter to the authorities of her church and they have been preparing her for that great day when she is to go through the waters.

I might almost say the moral of this story is “It’s never too late”. When things change for an elderly person, a deep impression is made. In Acts 3 we read of the healing of a lame man. There was much sensitivity around this event and a lot of controversy, but what silenced the critics was that this man was “over forty years old” – beyond the age when cures normally took place! I remember, too, the astonishment in the voice of a churchgoer in Cornwall as he told me about a local preacher in her late 80’s who, he said, was actually preaching better and better.

We praise God for the woman who is about to be baptised and exclaim, “It’s never too late”. But there is a warning in the Bible about a window of opportunity which is not to be missed. Isaiah 55:6 says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found”. That is literally, “Seek the Lord in His finding time”.

Even though I became a Christian at 18, I regret leaving it as long as I did! We rejoice in God’s mighty work in those of advanced years, but don’t put off what you need to do just so you can become a miracle of grace in your 80’s. The “finding time” is finite and you can leave it too late.

How Guernsey helped

Last week I paid a visit to the Channel Island of Guernsey, where I was born and bred. I still have a number of good friends there. A special highlight of every visit is to spend time with a group of people who helped me become a Christian by keeping religion simple. In my teenage years I was a very intellectual “Christian” – not really a Christian at all. I had all sorts of high-flown ideas which were no help to me or to anyone else where salvation was concerned.

The church I attended was made up of very kind people, but a suburban and intellectual bunch who expected the kind of preaching that would suit their tastes. Social comment was acceptable but ministers and preachers never really presented Christ and His claims on each one of us. I suspect that Church attenders could take their places in the pews for a lifetime without ever hearing of their need of a Saviour from sin, or ever recognising that we can and must get to know Him personally.

My mother, who was profoundly deaf, did me an enormous favour by joining the Deaf Christian Fellowship. This was not part of our church, but it met on Sunday evenings in the church vestry. It consisted of people, many of them deaf from birth, who communicated by sign language. To help them understand the gospel, the preachers at the Fellowship, normally Christian Brethren, put the Christian message in very simple terms. They talked much of the cleansing of sin through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. I went along with Mum and the meetings had a great impact on me.

At first I thought the talks were way too simple and naïve for someone like myself with a top-flight education. Even so, I became aware of great gaps in my understanding which these preachers were filling for me. Eventually, at age 18, shortly before my family and I left the island to live on the mainland, I did what these simple speakers had always been urging me to do – I put my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and gave my heart to Him.

I was a new person from then on. The change in me took a while to absorb and I behaved badly that summer. But on a number of occasions and in a number of ways I saw God at work in my life, helping me to make the right choices, paving the way for me to enter Christian ministry. That way I found my faith confirmed and strengthened.

You can appreciate, then, how much I owe to those down-to-earth, caring, hard-working champions of the deaf and how much I enjoy renewing fellowship with them every time I go back to the island. A particular joy was to visit a lady in her nineties I know as Auntie Ruth. With her common sense and kindness she was a mother in Israel to our family. When her husband died she continued to steer the Deaf Christian Fellowship, under God, with a steady hand. It still exists, though sadly she is not well enough to attend.

She and her friends illustrate a truth from the words of Jesus that often strikes me. In Matthew chapter 11 He expresses His frustration with the towns in His neighbourhood who have failed to respond to His message. He then exclaims this prayer in verse 25: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”

This is certainly not a plea to His hearers to be simplistic. It is a plea to look at who Jesus is and respond as we should.

It's no yoke?

I was rather bemused, a few weeks ago, by the rumpus surrounding the decision of a priest in the UK to refuse permission for yoga classes in his church. Gospel churches have been resisting requests to host such classes for years, and mostly the reasons are well understood and not thought newsworthy.

It is no accident that the Sanskrit word “yoga” is linked to our word “yoke”. We have the right to ask of everyone who promotes yoga, “What exactly are you expecting us to yoke ourselves to?”

A lady who was brought on to the radio as a spokesperson for yoga had to admit that there was a religious dimension to the practice. While superficially yoga may simply be a set of physical exercises to bring about inner peace and calm, there are overtones of an Eastern spirituality that is foreign to what Christianity teaches. Put bluntly, the underlying philosophy goes like this: spirit - good, body - bad, and you must overcome the downward pull of the body by the exercise of mind over matter.

Now certainly, there is a place in Christianity for training the mind to stand up to the promptings of the flesh, whether those lead you to laziness or to unwholesome thoughts. “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6 ESV). “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1-3).

Yet at the same time Christianity views our bodies as important – too important to be suppressed or yoked to an oriental philosophy. Jesus Christ was raised bodily from the dead. It wasn’t simply a disembodied ghost that left Jesus’ tomb on resurrection day. And because we follow where Jesus leads, we who trust in Him can look forward to a bodily resurrection as well. Quite how this works out, I don’t know. It is beyond anything in our experience.

As dear suffering Job exclaims, “... after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God”, the God who in Christ has mercifully chosen me to be His own while still in the flesh, loved me, saved me from sin and takes me to live with Him forever. This is quite different from the way things are in many Eastern philosophies. These may talk of reincarnation, which holds that you may come back to life as someone or something completely different, depending on what you have done in this life. Or they may talk of the human spirit being so liberated from all care that it is totally unburdened and absorbed into the greater spirit, thereby arguably losing any sense of identity.

No doubt many yoga teachers present themselves as well-meaning, public-spirited people putting on a service to the community. As a leader of a gospel church, I would still wish to insist politely that their yoga with its dubious yoke belongs in buildings other than ours. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).

Aliens and Strangers

It was inspiring to listen to the FIEC national director, John Stevens, at the Leaders’ Conference recently. The theme of the conference was “Aliens and Strangers”, chosen because Christians in today’s Britain feel increasingly marginalised. We mourn the passing of a Christian society. We sometimes wonder whether God has abandoned His people, or is punishing them for their sins, or even whether He has failed.

Using the book of Daniel, Stevens assured us that this marginalisation is actually not unusual but normal, because Christians are always aliens and strangers in this world. Nostalgia is pointless. We need to learn how to serve God in exile, to know how far we should conform with the prevailing society and how far we should resist. It is thought-provoking to study where Daniel and his three friends drew the line. They didn’t resist being drafted into the Babylonian civil service. They didn’t even resist when forced to ditch their names and assume Babylonian ones. They drew the line somewhere else: eating forbidden food and praying to pagan gods. Are we equally careful to pick the right battles at the right times?

The book of Daniel affirms that nothing happens outside of God’s control. Under His direction, His faithful people in exile have a massive and unexpected impact on their oppressors.

Pagan kings seemed to have humiliated the God of Israel, totally defeating His people and destroying His temple. But in fact the proud king Nebuchadnezzar ended up being humbled by God; the defiant king Belshazzar ended up being slain at a word from God; the sympathetic Persian king Darius was used by God for His own purposes.

Our day has this difference from the time of Daniel: because we live after Jesus’ resurrection, we experience both the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of Christ. We are in exile, but we know that God has already won the definitive victory in Jesus. His kingdom has broken in to our time. This is the tension that we must live through, but we are right to feel triumphant hope.

Hope is the defining characteristic of God’s people. Energised by hope, we enter into the culture in which we find ourselves, but keep pure and speak truth to power, knowing that God will glorify Himself over the long haul.

Who might be the Daniels in your church, the ordinary men and women through whom God will get honour for Himself in the midst of an alien world?

Watch yourself

The temptations faced by high-profile Christian evangelists are enormous. Those who have not made themselves sufficiently accountable have at times brought the church into disrepute. No doubt even those who lived in the past must have gone through the mill of temptation.

I admire Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the foremost evangelistic Baptist preacher of the 19th century, for his clear and courageous stand against moral compromise. As an exercise, I have taken one of his meditations on the subject and turned it into the English of today. While his original words are easy enough to understand, people express themselves in a completely different way nowadays!

Spurgeon's text for the passage which follows is Psalm 5:8. In the King James Version with which Spurgeon would have been familiar, this goes, "Lead me, O Lord, in Thy righteousness because of mine enemies."

Here is my rendering of what he has to say about it:

The hostility of the world against the people of Christ is bitter indeed. People will forgive a thousand faults in unbelievers, but they will exaggerate the slightest moral lapse by Christians. Instead of fretting about this, let us turn it to advantage. Since so many are watching for us to slip up, let the knowledge of this spur us to behave extra carefully in the presence of God. If we live without watching our conduct, the eagle-eyed world will soon spot it. With its hundred tongues, it will spread the story in all directions, exaggerated and embellished by those who enjoy putting others down. They will shout triumphantly, "Aha! Just as we always thought! Look how these Christians behave! They are hypocrites, every last one of them." Great damage will be done to the cause of Christ in this way, and great insult heaped on His name. The cross of Christ is already offensive to the world without our help; let us not do anything to make it more so. To the Jews it is "an obstacle to trip over": let us take care not to put any more obstacles where there are enough already. "To the Greeks it is foolishness": let us not add foolery of our own. This would simply give more of an edge to the scorn which the worldly-wise heap on the gospel. How watchful we should be about ourselves! How unbendable we should make our consciences! Our enemies will misrepresent even the best of our deeds. If they cannot condemn our actions, they will question our motives instead. Faced with that, how circumspect we need to be! When pilgrims travel through Vanity Fair in John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress", they are marked people. Not only are we under surveillance, but there are more spies than we could ever imagine. This espionage is everywhere, both at home and when we are out and about. If we fall into the hands of our enemies, we would be more likely to receive generous treatment from a wolf, or mercy from a malicious demon, than from them. The last thing they will show is patience with our weaknesses. After all, they spice their insipid unbelief in God with scandals against His people. Lord, lead us every moment, for fear our enemies will trip us up!