Lightboat

There are three things about a light vessel.

It is not defined by its movement but by its position.  Living in a helter-skelter city in a helter-skelter age it is hard to appreciate the value of being rightly positioned rather than going at speed.  This is the curse of the church too.  We are not a denomination, we are a movement is the Baptist Union's current emphasis.  All this has a point.  But whether the point has much to do with Jesus's instruction to watch and pray is not clear to me.  

It must shine.  Our church's strap line is A Light on a Hill.  Being positioned well (at sea or on a hill) is not much use without lighting the world about us.

It mustn't sink.  If it sinks it is neither a light nor in the right position.  The Bible teaches us to stand firm.  

There is much that the Christian and the Christian Church can learn from a Light Vessel and almost nothing we can learn from a speedboat.  

Mrs Colville

Today at Church we thought about sowing seeds of goodness (Galatians 6:7-10).  It reminded me of Mrs Colville from Gateshead.  

What did Mrs Colville do?  It was embarrassingly simple really. In the middle of the 19th century she went from door to door seeking to tell people about the Gospel of the Lord Jesus.

She arrived in Ballymena in Ireland with the Baptist Missionary Society.  Going from door to door one day she was she found two ladies who were already conversing with a young man about spiritual things.  His name was James.  James subsequently sought out Mrs Colville for further discussion and his life began to change.

The story moves to Kells, a nearby village, where two young men - Jeremiah Meneely and Robert Carlisle - were walking home with the school-master following a school property meeting.  Robert asked them had they heard about the great change that had come over James.

That autumn, reflecting on James's change of life, Jeremiah was inspired to begin a Prayer Meeting.  After 3 months nothing much had happened, except two more men had joined.   On January 1st the first conversion took place as a result of the prayer-meeting.

But after that there were conversions one after another. By year's end about fifty young men were taking part in the prayer meeting.

From that meeting in North Antrim the seed of revival grew into the great Revival of 1859 in Ulster, one glimpse of which might be seen in this description of one of countless great meetings which often lasted days - I could not get into the building; every open window was more than occupied. In the vestry room there were those under conviction of sin; it was a scene impossible to forget and equally impossible to describe. An old man, a boy, and a young man were in varying stages of upset. They all wanted to be free from sin. “ I know that my redeemer liveth, the young man said. “I know that He can save my soul. I know that He can wash me from all uncleanness in the fountain of His atoning blood. But, Oh I have crucified Him, I have crucified Him."

Or this from the local newspaper in one town:  Common street prostitutes and public nuisances who had frequently been convicted for drunkenness and loitering are now clothed with attention to decency and struggling to earn their livelihood by honest labour, and by learning to read. They are all daily and humbly beseeching pardon for their past sin and in regular attendance at some place of worship.  At the Raceview Woollen Mills by twelve noon the factory had to close down as so many of the employees were crying out to God.

Mrs Colville had returned from her Mission Trip sad at the poor response.  Yet she had been the sower of a seed that, even in the amazing events of 1859, had scarcely begun to reveal its true harvest.

Meanwhile in Edinburgh . . .

A young lady was converted in that great revival of 1859 and all she could pray for was one thing. That revival would break out in her little church in Edinburgh. Time went by - thirty years went by - and she still had not seen an answer to her prayers.  But she was sowing in prayer as surely as Mrs Colville had previously done to lead towards that Revival in which this lady had been saved. But that will take another blog.

Summer Sundays

We had a very good time in the Lord's presence today at church.  But who is 'we'?

Every summer in my ministry life these July Sundays present an exaggerated version of the constant challenge - where is he/she gone and why?  No response to this ever seems to me to work very well.  Blithely assuming that usually healthy people are healthy later uncovers some sudden illness and a sense of neglect; unwisely imagining that someone who is a strong Christian could not be lapsing yields a later story of having witnessed too lazily the first signs of decline; pursuing the absentee on the other hand provokes a sense of Big Brother and loss of freedom - in short, July presents like a multiple choice question where each answer is wrong.

In general it is not, in my general experience, wise to assume the best (which is why many services begin with confession).  Any reading of history yields support for the view that many a non-engaged Christian is simultaneously disengaged from the Word of God and from God himself as, centuries upon centuries ago, the great Eastern preacher John Chrysostom, preaching on John remarked;

If a harper, or dancer, or stage-player call the city, they all run eagerly, and feel obliged to him for the call, and spend the half of an entire day in attending to him alone; but when God speaks to us by Prophets and Apostles, we yawn, we scratch ourselves, we are drowsy. 

And in summer, the heat seems too great, and we betake ourselves to the market place; and again, in winter, the rain and mire are a hindrance, and we sit at home; yet at horse races, though there is no roof over them to keep off the wet, the greater number, while heavy rains are falling, and the wind is dashing the water into their faces, stand like madmen, caring not for cold, and wet, and mud, and length of way, and nothing either keeps them at home, or prevents their going there. 

But here, where there are roofs over head, and where the warmth is admirable, they hold back instead of running together; and this too, when the gain is that of their own souls. How is this tolerable, tell me? Thus it happens, that while we are more skilled than any in those matters, in things necessary we are more ignorant than children. If a man call you a charioteer, or a dancer, you say that you have been insulted, and use every means to wipe off the affront; but if he draw you to be a spectator of the action, you do not start away, and the art whose name you shun, you almost in every case pursue. But where you ought to have both the action and the name, both to be and to be called a Christian, you do not even know what kind of thing the action is. 

Koz

Koz sat down at the end of a long, hot day.  The sun had been unusually strong, and the work very hard.  He mopped his brow and prepared himself for dinner, reminding his boys that they should clean their hands too.  Dinner would be taken as the stars began to light the dark Eastern night.  Koz was proud of his boys and expected that his family, though certainly not the one of the greatest, would have a secure and growing future.

5 Ashhur the father of Tekoa had two wives, Helah and Naarah. 

6 Naarah bore him Ahuzzam, Hepher, Temeni and Haahashtari. These were the descendants of Naarah.

7 The sons of Helah: Zereth, Zohar, Ethnan, 

8 and Koz, who was the father of Anub and Hazzobebah and of the clans of Aharhel son of Harum.

9 Jabez was more honourable than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, saying, ‘I gave birth to him in pain.’ 

10 Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, ‘Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.’ And God granted his request.

A few years one American preacher managed to build one of those embarrassing evangelical empires around two verses that shine out amid the names in 1 Chronicles chapter 4 - the prayer of Jabez (you could even buy a Prayer of Jabez key ring or mug).   Jabez is only mentioned here in the Bible but his North American attraction is that he prayed for God to enlarge his territory - and God did.  I'm mildly surprised Mr Trump hasn't referenced this but I think his marriage of convenience with the Bible probably doesn't reach as far as Jabez. 

Near Jabez's little island of meaning in an ocean of genealogical names are of course many other names and with a detailed commentary even some of these names yield fascinating details.  The one that gripped me though did so because his name seemed very 21st century (and certainly easy to pronounce) - Koz. 

He had never, and would never, be a subject of eccentric Bible entrepreneurs.  Only this could be said of him - that in his day he was a significant figure in his growing, but minor, clan and that God has arranged that, unlike any modern preacher, or Shakespeare, Nero, or Alexander the Great, Koz’s name appears in the Word of God.

I like to think that Koz and others are in Scripture precisely because their names are like a church rota.  When the story of a church is written the priests, vicars or pastors (even the naughty ones) are listed, the organist who was pulled stops for 50 years, the woman who began the Girl Guides and the local dignitary who opened the new hall.  The rest?  Well, Jesus may know his sheep by name but they are passed over on earth into congregational historical anonymity.

For all of us threatened with genealogical anonymity there is the encouraging thought that most of the names in Scripture are of people as unknown as Koz.  Yet they and we are all known and all matter to our Lord.

Polycarp

Today much of the Church remembers one of the best attested early Christian martyrs.  Polycarp reminds us of the principle our Lord laid down to his Church at Smyrna in the Bible (Revelation 2): Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.

Uncle John

Friday is my day off as a rule.  Yet it is a favourite day for a funeral or memorial service whereupon I lose my day or have to have it another time.  So why today would I take my day off and use it to go to, of all things, a memorial service?  For a family member, obviously - but no, this elderly gentleman was not a member of my family or even a friend.  I went to honour the life of a man who has not only shaped me by his preaching and writing, but has helped to create the spiritual landscape in which I have been blessed with a saving knowledge of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.  Today was the Memorial Service for John Stott.

St Paul's Cathedral was an unlikely setting for a Service respecting such a humble man yet suited to the purpose partly because it was the place in which 'Uncle John' was ordained, that it was London's Cathedral (the city of his birth and core ministry) and that it is big (for there were a lot of people there of course).  I was in a seat about a mile and a half down the nave observing minuscule people at the front (and, much closer by, the back of Nicky Gumbel's head) as they brought their tributes from the continents of the earth.  The three senior clergy of the Church of England were there - the two Archbishops and the Bishop of London - though I know that more by the hearing of the ear than the seeing of the eye!

Of a thousand observations that might be made I make this one: that John Stott grew as a child in All Souls, Langham Place, where his whole life ministry was centred.  Yet his influence on the worldwide church was as great as anyone in Western Evangelicalism.  In later years this was turned into travel miles, but for many years it was the result of a faithful Biblical ministry in the centre of a world City.  It is but one of the countless ways John Stott imitated Christ.  Jesus spent nearly all his life in one area too.  But he still changed John Stott the Londoner, and his Gospel of saving love reached the ends of the earth long before the internet.

Nor do any of us need to change the world by racing round it so much as by bringing Jesus to the part to which we have been called.

Tiswas

As I type this I am in 2009. When you read it you'll be in 2010. Lots of people I love and you love will never be in 2010. None of us will again be in 2009. Ever. None of us were in 1910. None of us will be in 2100 (how are they going to say that, by the way?).

My mother often used tiswas to describe when she or someone was in a state of confusion. As human beings on a night like this we hardly know whether we are in one year or the next. What we do know is that we are very limited indeed.

Which is why it's good that Father God, who was and is and is to come, has no such limitations . . .

Unshakeoffable

Yesterday I spoke about Psalm 139.

Where could I go to escape
from your Spirit
or from your sight?
If I were to climb up
to the highest heavens,
you would be there.
If I were to dig down
to the world of the dead
you would also be there.
Suppose I had wings
like the dawning day
and flew across the ocean.
Even then your powerful arm
would guide and protect me.
Or suppose I said, "I'll hide
in the dark
until night comes
to cover me over."
But you see in the dark
because daylight and dark
are all the same to you.

God is unshakeoffable. On the one hand, in the words of Skevington Wood,

We can never talk about God behind his back.

That includes blogging - he finds the bits Google misses!

Scary? Not really. Only if I make an enemy of potentially my best friend imaginable,