One Cornerstone - Many Living Stones (Psalm 122 and 1 Peter 2.4-10)

Introduction

So we have come at last to the end of our building project.

This winter, when it pours with rain, there’ll be no wondering if the occasional leak we have is going to electrocute the band precariously standing just underneath it.

When the temperature drops to 5 degrees or lower, there’ll be no calculating “shall I bring my fur lined coat and duvet and ear muffs to the 9:00am service just in case my blood freezes solid during the sermon?”

When it blows a gale outside no one will be looking anxiously up at the ridge tiles to see if any have flown off and demolished next door’s greenhouse.

We have got a proper, sound, waterproof, insulated roof, all fastened down to new timbers. It looks great and it feels warm and it’s going to last for decades.

The next few generations will be snug in winter, cool in summer, dry all year round and they will not have a legacy from us of annual repair bills.

So I want to thank Neil and his team of men, David our architect, our roof committee and everyone else here who has supported the project from the start. It is a first rate piece of work and, though it took a little longer than originally anticipated because of delays with suppliers, you have not compromised quality to make up for lost time – and it has come in under budget. So well done all of you. You can be rightly proud of your work.

God’s Way

Right at the beginning of this project, we were inspired by a verse from Psalm 127 which says this: “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”

That means it is vital for us to aim to do things the right way, God’s way. That has been a constant feature of the roof project and you see the results.

Today we have had read another Psalm that talks about how, 1000 years before Christ, people loved going up to Jerusalem from the small towns and admire the fabulous architecture of the city; especially its mighty walls and its magnificent temple. They were well designed, beautifully proportioned and expertly constructed.

There’s something that honours God in a building for worship that is sound and fit for purpose. It’s not right that we should live in comfortable homes when the place we meet for worshiping Almighty God is cold and dishevelled.

The Church - People, Not Buildings

But no matter how good this building is, no matter how inspiring Durham Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the Vatican are, Christianity is not about buildings. And it never has been. Let’s be clear about that.

It’s all about people. God loves any one person more than all the buildings ever built put together. Jesus didn’t come so that York Minster would be built. He didn’t die to renovate our roof. He lived and died and rose again to save you and me, because God loves us. He is for us and not against us.

So our New Testament reading today from the first letter of Peter says this: “As you come to [Jesus], the Living Stone – rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him – you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house.”

What does that mean? It means basically that this building isn’t the church. No building is the church. We are the church. When somebody stops us in the street and says, “Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the church?” we should say, “Yes, right here, you’re looking at it!”

Look around at this physical building. About 110 years ago, it was nothing but scattered bits. There was a stack of four-by-twos at the timber yard. There was a pile of sand and cement and a pile of nails and screws at the builder’s supplier. There were tiles at the clay quarry. There were sheets of glass in a glazier's warehouse.

But now, due to great planning and a lot of hard work and expertise, all those pieces, and hundreds more, have come together and been assembled into one building.

The same is true of what God is building - the church, by which I mean the people. Many of us who are now Christians were once separated into individual pieces. We come from different social settings, different ethnic backgrounds. We had different interests. We had very little in common.

But Jesus Christ, the great architect and master builder, has taken us and joined us together in what he is building.

There’s a story about a king of Sparta in ancient Greece who was bragging one day to a visiting ruler about the mighty walls of Sparta; how great they were, how solid, how impregnable. Well, his guest looked round and didn’t see any city walls at all. In fact, Sparta was one of the most vulnerable and exposed looking cities he’d ever seen.

So finally he said to the king, “I’d like to see these incredible walls you’re talking about. I can’t see any walls. Show them to me.”

Do you know what the Spartan king did? He led his guest on a review of his best troops. The Spartans were the most disciplined, physically fit, courageous and well-drilled troops anywhere in ancient Greece. If you’ve seen the film ‘300’ – well, they were Spartans. They were at that time the dominant military power and everyone feared them. They were legendary.

The king walked his guest up and down in front of these guys – all toned muscle and imposing stature - and just said “There they are! Here are the walls of Sparta!”

Just as each Spartan warrior was considered by the king as a brick in his indestructible wall, so Christians are called “living stones... built up a spiritual house” by God.

A Never-Ending Project

A few years ago, Kathie and I visited Barcelona. One of the iconic buildings there is the Sagrada Familia. It is a stunning building. The work started on it on 19th March 1882. That’s 131 years ago. What a lot of people don’t realise is that it still isn’t finished.

And I don’t mean it’s like the 4^th Bridge, meaning you need to start painting it again as soon as you finish it. I mean it literally still isn’t finished. Nowhere near. When you go there, there are cranes and hard hats and no-access areas everywhere you look. 1,570 months after starting that building, it’s still a construction site! How many Spanish suppliers have been taking a siesta instead of delivering their materials? Talk about a slight delay!

The website for the Sagrada Familia says “The building…  could be finished sometime in the first third of the 21st century.” So maybe in the next 20 years… I won’t hold my breath.

But I think that is a bit like what God is building – the church (the people). Jesus has been building it for almost 2,000 years. Every time there is a baptism, every time someone is added, another stone is set into place.

And the magnificent building is never completed. It just grows and grows in grandeur and scale because Christians are continually being added.

Build On or Reject the Cornerstone

But God, the architect and master builder, favours a very particular building design. As we go on in our passage it says this:

“In Scripture it says:

See, I lay a stone in Zion,

a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him

will never be put to shame.”

This is not the only time in the Bible that Jesus is called a cornerstone. What does it mean?

Buildings in the Middle East were and often still are constructed differently to the way they are here so we don’t always fully get what this is about.

They use many, many stones of different shapes and sizes but they begin the building by laying one very large, squared off stone. And they place it at the base of the building, right in the corner. It’s therefore the piece that holds everything else up.

Then they lay another smaller, irregular stone on top of the cornerstone, and then another and so on. They take lots of stones of odd shapes and different sizes and place them up and out from that large, level cornerstone, which is vital to the soundness of the building.

It was invaluable to have a cornerstone that was expertly cut and placed. If the chief cornerstone was not cut straight and well laid then all the rest was sure to be unstable.

About 10 years ago I visited the Pantheon in Rome. It’s incredible. It stands just as it did well over two thousand years ago. That would be impossible had its foundations not been right.

When I was a teenager I walked over the Rialto Bridge that spans the Grand Canal in Venice. It was built in 1588 over sinking islands on a major waterway. The engineering of the bridge was so audacious that experts said it would collapse. But that bridge has stood as it now stands for over four centuries, because it rests on twelve thousand piles, each forty feet in length, driven deeply into the soil. 

If the foundations are right, everything else can endure.

Now, for hundreds of years before Christ, God was saying “I’m going to lay a cornerstone. I’m going to lay a foundation you can build your lives on.”

That’s Jesus. You can build your life on him or you can say “I’m going to reject that and build my life on my own without him.”

And in fact, this is what Peter says in our reading.

To those who do not believe,

‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone,’

and, ‘A stone that causes people to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.’

You see, you can do either. You can either say “My life is going to be built on Christ or I’m going to do it my way.”

Many people choose the latter which is why Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” is the number one most popular song played at humanist funerals.

Either Jesus is the stone you build your life on or he is the stone you fall on your face tripping up over.

Ending - Testimony

So let me end very briefly by telling you my story. In my life I’ve done both. When I was in my teens, I was at a stage in life when I had rejected Jesus, the cornerstone. I wasn’t interested. Going to church was about the worst way to spend an hour or two of my life that I could possibly imagine. I wanted to do my own thing, live my own way and build my own life without God.

But one warm July evening in 1979, all that changed. When I really thought about God and where my life was going, I experienced three things.

Firstly, a sharp sense of the darkness in my heart. I thought I was a good person. But if anyone had asked me if I had ever lied in my life, I would have had to say “yes.” If they asked me how many lies I had told in my, I would have had to admit “too many to count.” And if they had asked me what I call someone who had told countless lies I would have had to admit I was a liar. So I realised how utterly unable I was to live a good life.

Secondly, I grieved over my wasted life. I thought to myself, “What a fool I’ve been.” I stopped living in denial. I turned round from the path I was on and changed direction.

And thirdly, I had a profound revelation of the undeserved love of God. I’ve never had another experience quite like it. Wave after wave of amazing grace poured down into my soul. I knew I was loved by God. What joy! I would never be the same again.

33 years later, I still see that conversion experience as the most significant event in my life. I’m no better than anyone else. But God has made me one of those living stones that are built on the chief cornerstone - Jesus. I hope you are as well.

As we celebrate this roof project today, let’s keep our lives firmly set on the best foundation there is.

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 29th September 2013

Why I am a Christian (20)

Christian Fellowship Offers a Depth of Relationship I Have Not Enjoyed Elsewhere

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

I have so far covered themes from the realms of science, philosophy and theology before looking at five different facets of Jesus (I could have explored many more). Then I looked at the inspiration, invincibility and influence of the Bible. This is the third of the last nine posts which are more personal and are based more on my experiences.

Every summer Kathie and I head off on holiday somewhere and we never fail to check out the nearest lively church to visit while we are away.

I suppose, being a church leader, I rarely get the opportunity to sit in the congregation and enjoy the service without feeling responsible if the preacher is a bit long (I always keep to time, believe me), or if the guitar is slightly out of tune (that could be mine to be fair) or if the projection of words onto the screen is distractingly slow. Or whatever... It’s a pleasant change when all that is someone else’s problem.

But what I love most about visiting other churches is that, wherever it might be on God’s Earth, and even though I probably don’t know a soul, I always feel like I am with my real family.

It doesn’t even matter if I can’t fully understand the language. I have worshipped with Japanese, Moroccan, Tamil, French and Filipino congregations and in each case I’ve barely understood a word. (I picked up French in the end but when we first moved to France, I was lost). 

No matter what the language might be, it hardly matters that the words are foreign to me. There is a language of heaven where mere vocabulary is secondary. There is a human connectedness in worship that goes deeper than the mind and the heart; it touches the soul of anyone who is alive to God through Jesus.

We used to sing a simple and delightful song when I was a church leader in France by Mady Ramos. I would love singing it because it articulates so guilelessly and so accurately what worshiping with other Christians feels like for me.

Moi, je suis dans la joie	I am so glad
Quand on me dit :	When people say to me:
‘Allons, allons à la maison de l'Éternel.’	‘Come on, let’s go to the house of the Lord.’
Là, sont réunis mes frères et mes amis,	This is where I find brothers, sisters, friends,
Tous les gens que j'aime,	All the people I love
Ceux qui me comprennent,	And who understand where I’m coming from.
C'est ici que je suis bien.	This is where I feel right.

I would sometimes look round at other members of the church as we sang it and the smiles on people’s faces assured me that I wasn’t alone in feeling that this is family. It’s where we can let the masks down, be ourselves and make mistakes in an atmosphere of love and acceptance. 

But I wonder. Isn’t this just a social phenomenon that works the same way in secular contexts? I know that people feel gladness and belonging when they meet up with friends in pubs and clubs. I do. I love the feeling of seeing people with whom I have a common interest.

Whenever I go to football matches it feels great to be part of a crowd cheering on my team and winding up the opposing fans. I love celebrating a goal or a penalty save – the feeling of elation, of solidarity, is thrilling. I love the banter with the opposing supporters as well. Singing “Is there a fire drill?” when my team go 4-0 up and they desert the stadium in disgust is a lot of fun.

But nothing compares with the strength of solidarity, the depth of friendship, the familial affection I have when I am with fellow believers. Everything else seems like a pale imitation.

I love it when someone becomes a Christian, or is baptized as an adult. In fact, few things bring me greater happiness. It is very similar of the birth of a baby. In a sense, that’s what it is. This is why Jesus described beginning a new life of Christian faith as being “born again.”

When people come to Christ, they are born into a family of brothers and sisters. Any church anywhere in the world is a gathering of spiritual siblings. You can travel to any part of the world and there you will find believers in Jesus Christ who know what you mean when you celebrate his greatness or lament over the things that grieve him. There is an amazing connection between Christians even before meeting up.

Of course, brothers and sisters sometimes fall out. Church members fall out as well sometimes. But they remain brothers and sisters. That’s one of the reasons Christians celebrate Holy Communion. When I partake of the Lord’s Supper, it is a reminder of the essential unity before God with my brothers and sisters. This is where we bury our pride, forgive one another, renew our love for each other and for Christ. There is a bond, a connection, a unity which transcends language, culture, tradition and experience.

We, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf (1 Corinthians 10.17).

I used to think that Christians were weird. When I was at Sixth Form College, I thought they were way too intense. I couldn’t understand why they would enjoy meeting together as a Christian Union and do boring things like study the Bible and sing songs seated in a circle. I felt a bit sorry for them, like they were a self-help group for born losers.

But after I became a Christian, I went to one of their meetings. I discovered that they were all quite normal. In fact, I found mostly that they were wonderful people with amazing stories to tell. I found that I could completely relate to them. I began to look forward to Christian Union meetings more than anything else in the week.

The New Testament has a word for the kind of close friendship that Christians live out and enjoy.

It’s usually translated “fellowship” or “life together.” In fact, the word is translated from the Greek koinonia which has many meanings and no single English word adequately express its range or depth. It comes from a word meaning “mutual” but it carries the sense of relationship, of joint participation in something with someone, of community, of sharing and even intimacy.

In Acts 2.44 and 45 it says: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

John Stott in his commentary on Acts describes these verses as “disturbing.” Maybe they are but I think there’s something about the renunciation of possessiveness that is liberating and exhilarating.

When I was at Bible College in 1988 we gave away our much loved Citroen 2CV to a poor and hungry fellow student. His need was greater than ours and God had already provided us with the funds for the larger model we needed for our expanding family.

In 2008, about 6 months before we left Paris, a member in my church came up to me and said, “We’re getting a new car. Would you like our old Mercedes!? You can sell it when you leave for England. We want to bless you.” So you plant a Deux Chevaux and 20 years later you reap a Merc! It was not a brand new model but we felt like royalty driving around in it!

I mention this just to make the point that they are not isolated incidents. Because of the love there is between believers in Christ I have discovered that it is not all that rare for Christians to voluntarily give away books, washing machines, furniture, cars, even property – you name it – when they could have sold them and kept the money. I find that many Christians are incredibly generous.

I’ve known Christians struggling to pay their bills checking the mail and finding anonymously posted envelopes full of banknotes. And, given the nature of the thing, I’m sure there’s a lot that goes on that no one ever hears about. I just love being a member of God's people.

No wonder pagan observers of the first Christians are recorded to have said, “Look, how they love one another and how they are ready to die for each other.”

Especially in the West, people can sometimes fall into the trap of imagining that being a Christian is just “me and Jesus.” But there are 44 different “one another’s” in the New Testament. The church is a group of people who are commanded to love one other, forgive one another, mutually encourage one another, spur one another on, carry each other’s burdens, accept one another, hold one another accountable, admonish one another, build one another up, bear with each other and so on.

There is virtually nothing in the New Testament about self-fulfilment. Christians are not voluntary members of a special interest club, still less a motley aggregate of individuals with private beliefs. Christians are citizens of a new community.

The Christian community is one in which my fellow believers and I can talk about things that really matter in our lives. When Christian community works like it is designed to – koinonia – people get real. That’s when people can ask me and I them “How are you really?”

It is a depth of authentic friendship I have not experienced anywhere else – even amongst my own family members who are not Christians. 

That’s the 20^th reason I am a Christian. It’s special belonging to the biggest, happiest, craziest, most diverse family in the world. It’s my real family and the key to my true identity; a child of God with brothers and sisters as numerous as the grains of sand on the shore and the stars in the sky.

Why I am a Christian (19)

Revivals Around the World Attest to the Continuing Power of the Gospel

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

I have so far covered themes from the realms of science, philosophy and theology before looking at five different facets of Jesus (I could have explored many more). Then I looked at the inspiration, invincibility and influence of the Bible. This is the second of the last nine posts which are more personal and are based more on my experiences.

One of my favourite subjects is revival.

In April this year, reports started circulating about some unusual and exciting goings-on in a Pentecostal fellowship called Victory Church in Cwmbran, South Wales. In one of their midweek prayer meetings (10th April) a man called Paul, who had been wheelchair-bound and in constant pain for ten years following a road traffic accident, was suddenly and dramatically healed, following prayer for his condition. The 70 or so people who were there looked on startled before bursting into spontaneous applause and cheering as Paul picked up his wheelchair, held it high above his head and began to walk around the church.

On 15th May I made the four-hour journey down to Cwmbran with a couple of friends to experience for myself the ongoing excitement in that place. For over a month they had been seeing dozens of people converted to Christ every night, often with an accompanying and immediate release from depression, self-harm, addictions and so on. It is still continuing at the time of writing this in late August.

When I got there half an hour before the meeting started, I was surprised to see that a long queue had formed. I had never before seen a crowd of people queuing for up to an hour to get into church. There were enthusiastic cheers and a gentle, orderly surge to get in to the auditorium as soon as the doors opened. It felt a bit like the January sales!

Inside, there was nothing particularly lovely about the building - rather the opposite; it is a functional, modern, converted retail outlet. There was nothing especially amazing about the band and nothing out of the ordinary about the presentation and preaching. They were good, and I appreciated them, but it was honestly nothing exceptional. So I was impressed when a short, simple, unadorned, almost restrained presentation of the Gospel was met immediately by about twenty people leaving their seats to go forward and commit their lives to following Christ.

I have to say that the atmosphere was passionate and intense but there was no crowd manipulation, no theatrics, no pressure and certainly no big appeal for money. I want to insist that what I experienced was nothing to do with hype or a worked-up atmosphere.

The basic difference between what I experienced there and what I usually experience in church was an increased awareness of God’s presence. It’s very difficult to explain or describe. The presence of God is something you encounter on a deeper level than thoughts and feelings.

Later in the meeting, another decent but unremarkable talk, without notes, from Leviticus 14 brought a conviction of sin upon virtually everyone there, including me. At the invitation, hundreds came forward seeking cleansing from God through the blood of Christ. I suppose it was the vividness of knowing I needed forgiveness from God and should eagerly ask for it that was most unusual. It was one of those few times in life when, in trying to put something into words for someone, I’d say “To be honest, you’d really have to be there to understand what I’m talking about.”

Every six weeks or so at Victory Church they baptize a group of 50-100 new believers. There have been further reports of remarkable, unexplained healings as the thing they call “The Welsh Outpouring” continues to roll on. Their church website claims “Hundreds have come in as atheists, backslidden, lost, addicted, rich, poor, confused, self-harming etc and gone out loving Jesus as He has reached them.”

What they are experiencing in Cwmbran is not a movement on the scale of a great revival or awakening, and they acknowledge this openly. But being there gave me an idea of what a full-scale revival - an amplified version of the outpouring in Cwmbran - must be like.

The Baptist theologian John Piper in his book A Godward Life wrote about revival, defining it as “The sovereign work of God to awaken his people with fresh intensity to the truth and glory of God, the ugliness of sin, the horror of hell, the preciousness of Christ's atoning work, the wonder of salvation by grace through faith, the urgency of holiness and witness, and the sweetness of worship with God's people.”

That’s quite an event! And every now and again, quite unpredictably, though usually after a season of sustained intercessory prayer, revival breaks out somewhere on Earth. Here are some examples:

- In the 16th Century, the Reformation spread like a wildfire throughout Europe as thousands became alive to God through discovering the magnificent doctrine of justification by faith.

- The brutally persecuted Camisards in 17th Century France grew exponentially; from nowhere, they rapidly accounted for 10% of the population of France. They rediscovered spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues and healing; some of their infants would prophesy while they could barely walk.

- The Great Awakening associated with Jonathan Edwards in New England (1730s and 1740s) was an important movement in which people en masse cried out to God, begging for mercy such was their heightened awareness of the immediate danger of hell and the urgent necessity of being saved through faith in Jesus.

- The Methodist Revival, marked by John Wesley’s inspirational preaching and Charles Wesley’s rousing hymns, changed the face of 18th Century Britain. It has often been said that this revival, accompanied by the sweeping social reforms of Christian visionaries like Lord Shaftesbury and William Wilberforce, saved Britain from the kind of political turmoil that resulted in the blood-soaked, anti-theist French Revolution across the channel.  

- The 1905 Welsh Revival, (some date it to 1904) associated with former collier Evan Roberts, was a sweeping movement in which the pubs emptied and the chapels swelled in a matter of months. 100, 000 people were converted in less than a year. Crime came to a virtual standstill. Councils held emergency meetings to discuss what to do with the police who had nothing to do all day. The number of children born outside of marriage dropped 44% within a year of the beginning of the revival. It is said that the ponies that worked down the mines were confused and didn’t know what to do as they were used to responding to daily physical brutality and hearing orders in foul language. Both fell into rapid disuse as miners were converted in droves.

The Azusa Street Church at the centre of the 20th Century Pentecostal Movement

- The Azusa Street Outpouring in April 1906 grew rapidly into the fastest growing religious movement on Earth; Pentecostalism. Thousands of church leaders from all over the world visited Azusa Street between 1906 and 1908 and exported this fiery, passionate expression of Christianity everywhere they went. There are over 500 million Pentecostals and Charismatics today and the movement is still growing fast.

- The East African Revival of the 1920s and 30’s which dramatically altered the spiritual landscape of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, and the Argentinian revival in the 1970s which transformed sections of society, starting with the prisons are two other well-documented examples. There are dozens more.

- A friend of mine from the Church Mission Society recently visited Nepal and reported that the church is doubling in size in that country every two and a half years. It has gone from practically nobody to over one million people in just sixty years.

- Then what about South Korea? After years of bloody persecution, the church grew sharply post Second World War as this BBC report shows. According to the Korean Overseas Information Service, before 1945 approximately 2% of the Korean population was Christian. By 1991, less than half a century later, the figure had ballooned to 45%.

- China too has experienced extraordinary revival, with reports of amazing healings, even resurrections, since the outlawing of Christianity by the Communists. Brother Yun’s book The Heavenly Man documents the cruel suffering of some Chinese Christians and the spectacular growth of the underground church there. According to Brook Lee writing in the World Policy Journal in 2012, the Chinese government acknowledges the existence of 14 million Christians in China, but it is widely believed that there are at least 70 million more than that. In fact, there are more disciples of Jesus Christ in Communist China today than there are members of the Communist Party.

What all this says to me is that the gospel is still just as potent as it ever was when, in the first three centuries A.D., it took on the mighty Roman Empire, got absolutely battered with wave after wave of oppression and persecution - and then came out on top.

The gospel has extraordinary power to turn society’s greatest ills on their head by changing lives. And sometimes, this occurs in a sweeping movement that not even the hardest opponent, the most defiant society or the most resistant government can suppress. The gospel is unstoppable, especially so in times of revival.

There is no way in my mind that, during these revivals, the numerous conversions are just the result of heightened emotions and mass manipulation, and that the healings associated are just psychosomatic, and that the resulting impact on society is just lots of people trying hard to be nice at the same time.

It seems to me that revivals are a sovereign work of God that demonstrate his supremacy and amazing grace, affording the world a temporary glimpse of both. In a sense, revivals are a foretaste of heaven.

This is the nineteenth reason I am a Christian. 

And I think it’s telling that you never really hear sceptics bothering to research this amazing phenomenon, still less venturing to offer an explanation for it. I seem to read scoffing remarks every week about "no evidence." Well, here's exhibit (a).

All my Christian life I have prayed for renewal and revival; renewal for the church and revival for the world. I have probably heard hundreds of prayers for this in every church I have belonged to. It remains a deep yearning in my soul.

Lord, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord.
Repeat them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

(Habakkuk 3.2)

Oh, that the church would wake up! And oh, that the world would taste and see how good the Lord is!