World Cup Churches 24. Croatia

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

For this blog  I'm pleased to move from buildings to people of faith: Zagreb Baptist Church shares some of its testimonies online:

ZORAN: I was so dissatisfied with life that at one point I even thought about suicide. Yet I did not have the courage to do it. Thus began my search for the answers to questions about life that had plagued me. My friends and my environment didn't help me much because they mostly avoided those questions and told me that I was still young and that I shouldn't bother with all that. Dalibor the computer salesman]  gave me the New Testament and a few books which I started reading. I sought the truth with a truly open and sincere heart. And then everything suddenly opened up. It was enough for me to read the first few pages of the Gospel of John when my hair literally started to rise on my head and I suddenly realized who Jesus was and what he wanted from me.

STEPHANIE: After years of spiritual death, over a period of months, I began to think about the truth of what others were telling me about Jesus. Nothing happened abruptly - it was as if Jesus' gentle voice was slowly calling to his lost sheep. My spiritual skeleton slowly began to gain flesh and skin, and God then breathed His Spirit into me. My perspectives miraculously changed.  Now I understand that living with Christ means living with full lungs, that it is a life in which there is no emptiness because He is always there.  When I look back I see that I am truly born again, because the old me certainly couldn’t have imagined that I would be what I am and where I am now.  This is my greatest testimony - I was dead, but Christ brought me to life!

TAMARA: As I grew, I faced many things apart from the fact that my parents were separated. I have even attempted to commit suicide in the past as an attempt to punish my father for what he had done.  I was a very angry person and for everything I blamed my father and I blamed the woman he was with. 

Soon after I gave my life to Jesus, I was in Church one day and a preacher said “there is someone who is filled with hatred towards another person, God wants to set you free today”  I grew so angry at that very moment and I was offended by Jesus that He would even suggest such a ridiculous thing. As I struggled to let go of what happened to my mum, somehow I felt like my forgiving was letting my mum down, but He told me vengeance is His.  Then the Lord asked me to go to this woman’s house and I said to God “ I really hope I heard right because I don’t know what I’m doing here.” How do you walk up to someone's house and say “I forgive you" when they never apologised to you?  As she opened the door I felt something like a fire fill my body and my body just leapt forward, and I just hugged her. I remember as I turned and walked away that I had never felt joy like that in my life. For 14 years I had been imprisoned and that was my first moment of freedom. I felt like I was walking on air. I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing, I couldn’t imagine that I could be this free. I felt like I had not been living up until that moment. It’s 10 years later and I can tell you God has blessed me so much.

It's Missing 1. A Lost Peace

Missing things are often interesting.

Take jigsaw puzzles.  If it has a thousand pieces and, on using all that are available, one is missing then that is the one that gains all your attention.

To me this works in other things.  Not least hymns.  How many times, for example, have churchgoers sung the Wesley hymn And can it be and assumed (because it flows) that it is intact?  Well it isn't.

Including a little of the traditional verses four and then the final verse, here is the original verse 5:

. . . My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Still the small inward voice I hear,

That whispers all my sins forgiven;

Still the atoning blood is near,

That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Saviour in my heart.

No condemnation now I dread;

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine . . .

For any worship leader or organist the advantages of removing this verse are obvious.  Its personal, reflective words would rudely interrupt the grand musical transition from the victorious end of verse 4 to the equally victorious beginning of the final verse.  The musician has an ally in many a theologian.  What's all this about hostile Heaven?  How could a cuddly god be hostile toward sin?  If god loves us she/he must at least love in a small way all the stuff we do - she/he could never inhabit a hostility?  Why, we'd have to put her/him on a register if she/he wasn't careful!

But then again.  What if God really hates sin?  What if having rose up and followed thee I begin to share his loathing of it.  Then I do not just need a tuba stop or drum roll of confidence - I need a whisper.  A whisper that God and I can walk together even though he hates sin and I still at times like it rather too much.

Mandela

It is a rare thing for quite so many people to be honouring one human being in his death as are now lining up to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela.  It is easy to be cynical about this when no politician can afford to be other than fulsome in their tribute of the man.  If anything resembling this honour had been afforded him in his imprisonment he would have been released far more quickly.  In other political times equally heroic people have passed unnoticed into oblivion.

 

On the other hand, his story of forgiveness and reconciliation (not tolerance, as some have tried to suggest - don't western politicians love that word?) is a heart-warming and affirming one to celebrate and to imitate.  This is humanity at its better end.  When we see it cheered it cheers us all.

 

Humanity at its most humane is an awesome creation.  It is easy to focus on the times when the animal world seems to hold higher virtues and standards - and frankly in South Africa that has probably been sometimes true.  However, the image of God has vestiges enough in the human frame that we see glimpsed many lights in a dark landscape and, like the Christmas lights in December, they warm our hearts.  We pray for our leaders and so now we thank God for what he showed us in Nelson Mandella who will remain a lasting hero for so many of us.  Admittedly that is partly because he was outstanding for doing so often the right thing after suffering the wrong thing.  How nice it would be if that was normal instead of shockingly good.

 

I thought I'd wait until the third day to write about Nelson Mandela.

I think he is a true hero of humanity.  But on this third day as we await his funeral and know that what the apartheid regime couldn't defeat death has, I would not want anyone to mistake who is humanity's only truly victorious hero.

And he's living today and is still forgiving and reconciling human beings day by day.



Disconnect

Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow" (Matthew 6).  Tomorrow is our Church's anniversary day.

We are blessed by being disconnected from our future.  Joseph Parker lyricised it thus:

What if tomorrow’s cares were here

Without its rest!

I’d rather He unlocked the day;

And, as the hours swing open, say,

“My will is best.”

The very dimness of my sight

Makes me secure;

For, groping in my misty way,

I feel His hand; I hear Him say,

“My help is sure.”

To the unbeliever, the one certainty that the future holds for all human beings is decline and death.  This, Jesus has conquered!  For the believer decline and death are the two things that can be definitively ruled out.  Jesus has disconnected us.

We are blessed in as far as we can choose to be disconnected from our past.  Lots of stuff there we want to hold in memory but plenty else:  sudden deaths, failed tests, disrupted relationships, missed opportunities, wasted years - I could go on. One thing I do, letting go those things which are past, and stretching out to the things which are before, wrote Paul the apostle.

Jesus has detached the past from us, our sins forgiven, our defeats redeemed, our failings covered, our inner wounds healed.

But there is not a third disconnect - a disconnect from the present. We may wish there was. We may behave as though there is. But with the future unrevealed and the past put behind us the Present is the location of service, commitment, attachment. 'If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me'. Today is mine!  I must make it His.

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, that I ought to do. And what I ought to do, by the grace of God, I shall do." (Edward Everett Hale).

Gone

History will not easily forget Osama Bin Laden.  Any attempt to describe the first decade of this century will almost certainly feature his name and in his death he has comfortably dislodged the Royal Wedding from the front pages.  

His infamy hasn't stopped the American government acting to try to make his name and reputation disappear as soon as possible following his killing by a Special Forces raid in Pakistan.  They opted to remove his body and dump it (I suppose the official version is bury it) in the Arabian Gulf.

In one way this reminds me of the Roman authority's Easter Guard, positioned in front of the tomb to make sure that the dead died.  It is a curiously fearful thing to do, a superpower vs. one man.

On a more heartening note it reminds me of God.  The prophet Micah describes God dealing with his people's sin; You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19)  Sin is God's enemy and he doesn't want it coming back to haunt us.

Breaking

Philip Yancy tells the story of a guy who told him over dinner,

"I'm going to leave my wife and children for another woman.  Will God forgive me?"

He answered,

"He will, but you may not want Him to"

In the moment that one of earth's relationships is selfishly broken - the more so with earth's deepest relationship of marriage - the initiator is, consciously or unconsciously, destroying their relationship with God.  "Inasmuch as you have done it to one of these, the least of my family, you have done it to me"

That's what the wise Philip Yancey saw and, as the story is reported, his prophecy was proved sadly right.

Confession

David Powlison has written this interesting article on personal confession.

Among the great things he writes is the too-easily-forgotten certainty; God welcomes all who are weary with sin.

If I find sin an enemy, I can be sure of a very powerful and wonderful Ally.

River

This evening we looked at Jesus' amazing promise of the Holy Spirit.  He is the river that flows from Jesus for us.  Springing from the perfect Saviour, from the hill where Jesus died, from - as Ezekiel saw it - the altar, this river gives life in a world that is otherwise a spiritual desert.  A river of living water, never stagnant.  Never stopping, it is yet a place to rest.

Why is this 'amazing'?  Because the River is God himself.  Not a religious metaphor for a long ritual or an ecstatic spinning.  God himself comes to us.

When the General Election is over I do not expect to hear from the politicians much until we meet again at the next election.  Yet when Jesus went up to somewhere more exalted than Westminster or Washington or Brussels, God immediately came back to give us more and more life.  If only we could, we'd certainly elect God!  In fact, and more amazingly still, he elects us!!