A Nation's Day

As I drove through a chill November fog this morning my thoughts headed north. For not only is it cold - it is also St Andrew's Day, the national day of Scotland (which, for the time being at least, is part of the same country as I am).  I shivered.

 

I decided to think warmer thoughts.  There is another country that celebrates its national day today, and its a LOT warmer.  

 

Barbados!

 

You'll be wanting the words of the National Anthem perhaps? Here's verse 2:

 

The Lord has been the people's guide
For past three hundred years.
With Him still on the people's side
We have no doubts or fears.
Upward and onward we shall go,
Inspired, exulting, free,
And greater will our nation grow
In strength and unity.

Thanksgiving Wisdom: 4. Flattery

The culture of the United States accepts, far more willingly than that of the UK, the idea of talking people up.  As someone who worked in the US I went through strange reactions to this.

At first I hated it, wanting my old British realism.

Then I started to love it.  How much more motivating to be told how great you are!  I started to see why many Americans I knew exhibited far more confidence than we did in the UK.

Then, later, I started to revert to type.  Flattery can only take you so far, and sincerity seemed a more beautifying companion.   Donald, are you reading?

Wherever this braggadocio derived from, we can be confident it did not travel over on the Mayflower from members of John Robinson's congregation in Leiden.  For he said of flattery:

Flattery is in all cases and persons a base sin . . . but in ministers of God's holy Word is most pernicious.  How few are there so hating their vices as may not rather seek friends that cover their faults than cure them by faithful reproofs.  A man needs no other flatterer than his own partial heart to infatuate him. 

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.

Thanksgiving Wisdom: 2. Scripture and Knowledge

The coronavirus virus has done strange things to people's view of science.  People have disregarded it and depended upon it all at once.  Not two groups of people, one disregarding, the other depending, but a kind of overlapping internal confusion.  

Christians have struggled with this too:  praying for a cure from science and from God and not sure if God likes science.  Praying to God about the worrying data and fearful modelling while wanting to ignore the fear and trust 'the promises'.

John Robinson offered this wisdom to his people: 

When we avow the Scriptures perfection, we do not exclude from men common sense and the light of nature.  Yea, we ... beg of God as necessary for their fruitful understanding the light of His Holy Spirit.

Or to put it another way. the Scriptures teach us that God is the giver of all good gifts, so the benefits of science are from Him.  The work of scientists using the light of nature and common sense is no less from God than the Biblical promises they (maybe unwittingly) fulfil by supplying us with more safety.