Explainable

I don't want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit.

These words leapt out of the page as I was reading one of Francis Chan's books.  My impression of the story of the Christian faith is that it is, in very many respects, explainable only be the Holy Spirit.  From the dramatic transformed boldness of Simon Peter after Pentecost to countless more mundane instances in, say, even my own experience of ministry there are lots of unexplainables that make perfect sense with the Holy Spirit of God factored in.

 

Nevertheless, there is an alarming number of things in British church life that are too easily explainable.  How often the trend away from volunteering in Society is reflected in local churches of all persuasions; how much of the work of Jesus has been cut back like a Government department during the economic times we are in; how the moral outlook of Christians seems to be as umblically attached to the trends of the age as those of the politicians.

 

May God grant us to see the day when we use the word amazing not because it is projected on the screen at the front of the meeting but because the life of the Church in 21st Century England is . . .  amazing.

The Bitter Fruit of Freedom

As a Baptist Christian I celebrate the freedom of our Parliament to make law on behalf of the ordinary people.  It was not a freedom inherent in the place or in most historic government.

 

The emperor or monarch could make the laws.  While it is hard to see how this policy could have survived into the 21st century it took the spilling of blood and many an imprisonment to make it happen when it did.

 

Every November 5th we are supposed to remember that outside powers have longed to hold sway on this island, powers that include religious ones.  The people thus could have been enabled to do only what those authorities told them to do.

 

Or it could have been the landowners, or the men, who made the laws.  For years it was. The majority of people thus excluded by poverty or gender from representation.

 

Or we may have had the Third Reich.  What would a provincial government of that have looked like in Westminster?

 

And so to today, when our Parliament took upon itself the role of improving God's idea of marriage.

Freedom brings responsibility.  Before and again, like many a teenager leaving home, those who have a sense of authoritative freedom have disregarded and will disregard any limitations that might have previously constrained them.  Who cares what the Queen thinks?  Who cares what the Bible teaches?  Who cares what millennia of marriage has meant and its place in our story?  Who cares what the Church thinks?  Who cares what the Pope thinks, or the Islamic world thinks?  We can make our own, more perfect world.  Look, they think, we just did.  'An important step forward', David Cameron (and Ed Miliband) called it.  At least we can agree that it is an important step.  On that the redefiners and the Creator of marriage do agree.

 

We celebrate freedom not because it gets things right but because it reinforces human responsibility.  There will be no Britons of this generation who can look God in the eye (if that were possible) and say, "They messed about with your idea of marriage".  Do we seriously think that this Parliament would be redefining marriage if 90% of the voters were strongly opposed?  If a United Kingdom Marriage Party had been formed and UKMP had 55% in the opinion polls would the Bill voted on today have received the same support?  We all know that exactly the same MPs in exactly the same Parliament would be whistling a very different tune.

 

Freedom means this is our Parliament, our decision, our law, our redefinition, our responsibility and either God sits in his heaven tonight toasting the enlightened way we and David Cameron have improved on His original idea or the Bible is true and He's starting to look away until he calls us to account later.