Thanksgiving Wisdom 3. God's Love

As tens of millions have travelled in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families, it is a reminder of how much love there is in families.  Isn't it?

Maybe, maybe not.  

The public health officials travelling to gather in mixed ages from different States may just be the most dangerous thing a group can do towards each other mid-pandemic.  Endangering each other is not love.  And here lies an example of the problem with love. 

We define our own love.  And we will not be told what love really is by anyone else.  Including God.

John Robinson, the Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, was wise enough to see that self-defining love is true of just one being - God.  He wrote:

God loveth himself first and most as the chiefest good

Jesus made the same point in the prayer to His Father in John chapter 17.  

“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.  

God lived, love lived, before any human love.  And any human love is to be defined by God, not human beings.  And this offends us very much, but that doesn't change its truth.

Love in the creature ever presupposeth some good, true or apparent, in the thing loved, by which that affection of union is drawn.

Our love is a victim of our unreliable attraction to things and people, sometimes worthy, sometimes pleasant, sometimes dodgy, sometimes criminal. But our love reaches out to what attracts us.  But God?

But the love of God, to the contrary, causeth all good to be produced in the creature.

His love gives the goodness rather than seeking it out.  Jesus came to seek the lost, the sick, the unlovely, the dead, the criminal, the leper.

Like all Western Countries - but bigger and better of course - the United States has a culture of self-defining love. Holywood has helped it along fabulously.  Yet 400 years ago those pilgrims were fed by their Pastor a view of love which would draw out holiness rather than Holywood.  And may that wisdom not disappear from either side of the Atlantic completely.

Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 7. Unforgettable (Nat King Cole)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and this time number 7 - 'Unforgettable' performed by Nat King Cole  . . .

Why it's good for a funeral:

Funerals help us remember - to make someone more unforgettable.

Why it's bad for a funeral:

It's nothing to do with death, life in general, or life beyond death - just a sweet romantic song.

Line that's most like a Christian song:

It's incredible that someone so unforgettable thinks I'm unforgettable too.

Line that's least like a Christian song:

'Darling' [It's the one word in the song that means, however hard you try, you can't associate it with your relationship with God!]

A Quote from (singer) Nat King Cole:

'I'm in the music business for one purpose - to make money'

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

I have no interest in being unforgettable - at least by humans. 

A better Christian alternative:

The day of love

It is terribly bad luck that Lent begins on Valentines Day.  It is the death knell to every abstemious vow that involved chocolate and probably several other things that are perhaps best not speculated about . . .

Ash Wednesday seems a dive of a day by comparison with its romantic counterpart.  Who'd ever give an Ash Wednesday Card?

Try this.

It's not going to revive the flagging High Street retail sector, is it?

Yet of course the two days are linked by more than a calendar coincidence.  They are linked by love.  The Valentine love that overwhelms but can never last and the other a Calvary love that died but can never die.

Barsanuphius

I'm not the greatest authority on Saints Days but today being that of Barsanuphius I thought he deserved some attention. In fact attention was exactly what he didn't have as he disappeared for 50 years as a hermit and communicated by correspondence only. That has a certain appeal as a lifestyle when faced with an unsympathetic culture, but he also wrote many things that offered wisdom to those more engaged with the world than he . . .

Do not demand love from your neighbour, because you will suffer if you don’t receive it; but better still, you indicate your love toward your neighbour and you will settle down. In this way, you will lead your neighbour toward love.

Don’t exchange your love toward your neighbour for some type of object, because in having love toward your neighbour, you acquire within yourself Him who is most precious in the whole world.

Forsake the petty so as to acquire the great; spurn the excessive and everything meaningless so as to acquire the valuable.

Shelter the sinner if it brings you no harm. Through this you will encourage him toward repentance and reform — and attract the Lord’s mercy to yourself. With a kind word and all possible means, fortify the infirm and the sorrowful and that Right Arm that controls everything, will also support you. With prayers and sorrow of your heart, share your lot with the aggrieved and the source of God’s mercy will open to your entreaties.

Do not distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. Let everyone be equal to you for good deeds, so that you may be able to also attract the unworthy toward goodness, because through outside acts, the soul quickly learns to be reverent before God.

Do not annoy or hate anyone – neither for faith, nor for his evil deeds… If you want to convert someone to truth, then grieve over him, with tears and love say a word or two to him, but do not burst out in anger, and may he not see any sign of hatred on your part, because love is not able to hate, or become irritated, or reproach anyone with passion…

The Abode of Love

Valentine's Day brings us to but one subject - love. 

London has an endless supply of weirdness for those who have a mind for such things. On Valentine's Day I can think of no more deserving place to ponder than the Georgian Orthodox Cathedral whose vast steeple overlooks Clapton Common, these days surrounded by synagogues of the Stamford Hill Jewish community.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this was not always a Georgian Orthodox Cathedral.  Just one look at it tells you it was formerly a Church of England parish church (or just possibly a Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist or less likely Baptist imitation of one).

Wrong.

Notwithstanding its appearance, this building has never been any of those kind of churches and has written into its former trust that it can never be used by the Church of England or the Salvation Army.  In the early 21st Century it passes for just another old religious building, but at the end of the 19th century it was, to put it mildly, the centre of attention.

This 'Ark of the Covenant' as it was called, was the London location of the Agapemonites.  Together with a vast communal estate in Somerset and various minor outposts in Britain and Europe it represented the influence of an End-Time preacher who centred his followers on the Song of Solomon.  Mr Prince's followers included several wealthy Victorian merchants and several more Victorian single and separated women. 

Like countless before, contemporary with and following his day, Mr Prince gathered a following of those who knew they would not die for they were the last generation.  As it was to turn out they did die and so did he, but that was just the start: into his shoes had stepped the ample figure of Mr Smyth-Pigott, formerly of the Anglicans and Salvation Army (note above) under whose charismatic auspices this phenomenal building was erected.  And later besieged by rioters.

The Abode of Love (the community) and this building (the Ark of the Covenant) gave the Victorian press plenty of juicy speculative material of preachers with multiple wives (spiritual brides) and various goings on imagined.  Well, not entirely imagined because a spiritual bride fell pregnant . . .

As the Church of England worries itself sick about same sex marriage it might look a little closely at a building from which it is banned in Upper Clapton and figure that even a church with a high steeple is not enough to give spiritual dignity to an entity that has misunderstood the kind of love the church should really be talking about to the world.

Wedding Words

Yesterday we went to a wedding.  Thanks Matt and Martha!!

A friend said to us today, "Was it a Wedding you went to or was it an Anniversary?".  I understood their point: Usually the only time people our age go to weddingy things it is to take part - or for someone on their second or third attempt.  One of the blessings of Christian ministry is having young people who know you!

What strikes me these days is the radical nature of the words of Christian marriage in our society.  In a way I mourn the loss of social Christianity but in another way I love the thought that the simple words that once resounded every Saturday in every Parish Church now seem more Corbynite-radical than the Government's newly invented Same Sex Marriage idea.

Better than that, although the ideas of prayer and blessing, of hymns and Bible readings seem radical because they are, well, quite religious in a secularised culture the really radical bit isn't religious at all:

to have and to hold

from this day forward;

for better, for worse,

for richer, for poorer,

in sickness and in health,

to love and to cherish,

till death us do part.

When I write isn't religious at all I am both right and wrong.  Such promises as above can be made - are made - by rabid atheists or ruminating agnostics.  However they are dying out with the dying interest in Church weddings.  Sometimes they are not replaced by anything much (in my experience) but a flowery insistence of lifelong dotage or mutual self-fulfilment.  Here's an example:

I am proud to take you as my husband/wife. For all the time we have been together, there has always been the kind of mutual understanding which is only shared when there is true love. You have helped me triumph over challenges presented, encouraged my personal growth and boosted my self-esteem.

You have helped me become the person I am today, and with your help, I will be a better person tomorrow than I was yesterday.

Like the arrival of the Humanist funeral there is a refreshing honesty about these vows.  They more accurately reflect what most people mostly mean.  Perhaps they represent the most that can be really expected without the help of the Lord and the example of Calvary.

All Souls

This is an interesting day to me this year, the year in which I laid my Dad's remains to rest.  Mostly but not exclusively in Catholic settings this is All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.



There is unquestionably a fellowship between the Church on earth and the Church at rest but this has been an awkward fellowship to define.  It has alarming, spooky elements when Spiritualists or those inclined their way seek to speak with the Dead.  It is only a little better in the one way communication by which the Saints are allegedly spoken to in prayer (without any assurance that they can hear and no Bible promise that suggests they can).  In evangelicalism a peculiar two part problem arises when the Faithful Departed are dispensed with in somewhat the way of any text containing the word Thou, i.e. they are fine but they are history.  This, however is countered by a hope that in the sweet by and by we will meet on that beautiful shore and reconstitute our families.

This latter hope has always bemused me given that my Grandad was also someone else's nephew or Grandson - so how would that work?  Jesus was asked a similar question about married reunion - what happens if a wife has remarried six times?  Who's she married to up there?  Jesus answer is authoritative and exactly explains what the future state is all about - one family in God not Mr and Mrs, Father and Son.

Or to put it another way, today a son celebrates not a departed father but a departed brother in Christ; a widower not a departed wife but a departed sister in Christ. 

There are other times when old relationships, contingent to this world, may be reflected upon with tears or cheers.  But once in a while it is good to remember our soul-fellowship; to remember that relationship in baptism which binds us eternally; to remember the Lover whose love modelled the best of our earthly love without ever being matched down here; to remember that unity in Him that holds us tighter to him and to each other than any imitation found in the relationships recorded on birth, marriage and death certificates. 

This is the fellowship planned and formed and preserved by the love of Jesus.

A Son's Tribute - Speaking the Truth in Love

The motto of the Wickliffe preachers was 'Speaking the truth in love' (Ephesians 4:15)

 

This was the text taken as the theme of my Dad's thanksgiving service.  It's appropriateness was not simply that of the motto itself, it was that he lived out this text.  My Dad's gift to all who knew him was to demonstrate that Love does not have to be diminished by standing for the Truth and that the Truth does not have to be compromised by living a gracious life of Love, including (perhaps especially) in our speaking.

 

This is a combination that seems to elude almost everyone, including very many followers of Christ (who alone is the Truth and the greatest expression of Love).  And the first place it eludes people is in their speaking by which the Truth is doubted or denied or it is asserted without the kind of gracious humility that Love demands.

 

Lurv

His love to you has been MOST FREE.

It was unbought, and even unsought. In Hosea it is written, "I will love them freely". and surely, if ever there was a case in which that verse was transparently true, it is in my case. Was it not so in yours? What was there in you that could have won his love? If he could see any beauty in me, it must have been first in his own eyes. They say that love is blind; and certainly, though our heavenly bridegroom is not blind, yet he was somewhat kinder still; for he saw our deformities of sin and folly, and yet he loved us notwithstanding, all.  Let us love him because he first loved us. Beholding the generous upbringing of a love which we could not deserve and would not seek, let us freely love in return.

This love of our Lord's, so free, so full, so forceful, was and is MOST AMAZING.

We shall never bear better or more surprising news than this, that Jesus loves us. Nothing more surprising ever came to me than to learn "he loved me, and gave himself for me." Others may, perhaps, see what is wrought by the Lord's grace in us, and this may make them the less astonished at the Lord's love towards us; but we know ourselves, and see our blemishes as well as our beauties, and hence we know that there is nothing lovable in us by nature. We are amazed at our sin, and more amazed at his love. We shall go on reading in the golden Book of Christ's love throughout all eternity, and the longer we study it the more we shall be astonished that ever the Holy and the Glorious and the Ever-blessed should have espoused in love such insignificant, polluted, and fickle-hearted creatures as we are.

The love of Jesus is love MOST PRACTICAL.

Christ loves not in word only, but in deed and in truth. There is a greater force to my mind in Christ's deeds of love than in all the words which even he could have uttered. His deeds emphasize his words. Words cannot to the full express the mind of love: language filters from the lips, while feeling gushes from the heart. Jesus has written out his love in living characters. "O Master! never man spoke like you, and yet it was your most eloquent discourse when you said but little, but stretched your hands to the cross, that they might be nailed there. Then you poured out your heart, not in oratory, but in blood and water.  Said I not well that his is practical love? It is love full of tenderness, rich in bounty, lavish in thoughtfulness, firm in constancy, strong as death, mightier than the grave.

Think, again, that it was PERSONAL LOVE.

The Lord Jesus Christ loves each one of his people as much as if he had not one more. All the heart of Christ goes out to each one of us. The great sun shines today on this round earth, and while it pours its limitless flood of light on all, that one tiny daisy, as it bathes in the brightness, is able to say, "The sun is all mine." Though there be myriads of flowers in the meadows and the gardens, yet this one flower may freely possess all that the sun can give, or rather all that the little flower can receive, as much as if it were the only flower that blooms. So Jesus is to me, to you, to each one of us, all our own; neither lose we anything by the fact that he is all the own of so many millions.  The Lord Jesus, his own self, delighted in us, even in us who are not worthy to be named in the same day with him. Glory be to his holy name for ever!

C H Spurgeon September 1887

Book Review - Love One Another

Love One Another

Becoming the church Jesus longs for

By Gerald L. Sittser

IVP 188 pp £8.99

This is a reworked version of Sittser’s 1994 book Loving Across Our Differences. Sittser’s book deserves respect because its original version was born out of immense family tragedy in which he lost his wife, daughter and mother in a car accident. The pastoral care that he and his remaining family received from his church gave him the passion for the subject of this work.

Sittser has written a straightforward, readable and useful book on pastoral and fellowship issues in the local church. There is much illustrative material but the chapters of the book are built around the ‘one another’ sayings in the New Testament. From these sayings he is able to address areas such as Comforting One Another, Being Subject to One Another, Forgiving One Another, Encouraging One Another and even, though with understandable difficulty, Admonishing One Another.

Sittser’s expositions of Paul’s pastoral thinking are often insightful and almost always helpful. It might form a supporting text for a local church studying what the Bible says about Christian fellowship or pastoral care. It would also provide encourage warmth and breadth for the thinking of Pastors, Elders or Deacons, possibly on a retreat.

Father

Last Weekend it was sunshine, seaside and reflecting on the Love of God.  I guess any made-for-Christian-TV commercially put-together set of Bible texts has its limitations but I think this video captures something important about the nature of God which religion often misrepresents.

The Food of Love

I know Valentine's Day is important but I also know that jet engines are important.  It doesn't follow that I understand them or know what to do when one comes near.  (Actually when a jet engine comes near it is a good idea to duck . . .)

I read a survey that explains what women don't want for Valentine's Day

Don't buy clothes.

So I didn't buy clothes!

Don't cook a heavy meal.

So I didn't cook.

Don't treat her as though she's any other woman.

So I didn't.

Instead, we went shopping in the local supermarket for our week's groceries . . .

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.

I will

In the past week I have had time with families where people have just been married and where others are celebrating anniversaries and others are facing life-threatening illness together.  In tribute to them all and in gratitude for the marriage God has given me I offer J R Miller's moving description of a precious gift mistakenly maligned.

Steps

Some time ago I was visiting another church.  The meeting was over and the night was dark for it was getting late.

"There's a woman out there with a child" said an elderly lady who had come back in after starting out for home."

On the steps of the church a woman had been sitting with her young child.  Invited in, we heard her story and prayed to the Lord for her and her family.  It was a story of tragedy, separation, lovelessness and despair.

But she had sat on the steps of a church.  There was no way of her knowing that a meeting had been taking place as, by the time she was there, everyone was in the meeting at the back of the buildings.  Yet she chose a church building over the nearby fast food places - all lit up and welcoming - or the Public House round the corner.  In her despair it had been something to her just to get to the steps of a place where God's people meet and sit there, crying.

It reminded me of the woman in the Gospel who touched the edge of Jesus' clothing. One of the worst mistakes a human being can make - but plenty of even religious people make it - is imagine that there is a lot of preparation required to receive God's response.

Sitting on the steps will do.

Happy Valentine's Day!

'Valentine' comes from the word for 'worthy'. Many of the first Christian martyrs had this name, and it is a reasonable guess that they earned the name for their bravery before they were put to death. St Valentine's Day celebrates martyrs of that name.

What has that to do with Jack and Jill giving each other kisses and chocolates?

Not much perhaps. But love and worthiness (or 'worship') go together quite well when focused in the right place . . .

Claimed

I read this week of a family pet from my home town.

The family had a monster of a tortoise that lived free-range in the family back garden. Not being content with having the whole outside grass and shrubs at his disposal, he often decided to do a Steve McQueen and pull off daring escapes. OK, there were no motorbikes or wooden vaulting horses involved, he simply burrowed under the panel fences and (in some cases) made it four houses down. Upon the third ‘prison break’, the family decided drastic action was needed to avoid losing him forever. They took a brush to his shell and painted their full home address for all to see on his back. Upon personalising that tortoise, they made an oath that it was theirs for life - for all to see.

It's amazing that God does the same with his people,

See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands (Isaiah 49:16)