Look at the Birds

How quickly the world can change. Just a month ago, life felt 95% normal. Yes, there was a vague awareness of some virus going around but it was mostly somewhere else. Now our entire nation is shut down. We are confined to our homes. The economy has all but shuddered to a halt. Life is eerily quiet.

Church is locked shut. All services are suspended. Midweek ministry has stopped. Youth and children’s work are on pause. Everything has had to be moved online. The REACh phase 3 work has also had to stop temporarily as the work is deemed non-essential.

It’s at times like this that Life Groups come into their own as they already are a network of spiritual friendship, mutual pastoral care and practical service. 

We have tried to ensure that the most at risk among us have some kind of regular contact and offer of support.

I hope we’ll all make an effort to keep in touch with each other by phone, text or via the dizzying array of social media options.  Some find social isolation almost crushing and, though electronic media can never be an adequate substitute for face-to-face contact, it might be a precious lifeline for many at a time like this.

This is a time of worry. Will I, or any of my loved-ones, get infected with Covid-19? If so, are we healthy enough to survive it? Am I spiritually prepared for the worst?

Have we got enough in the cupboards to keep us going? By sheer grace, most of our lives we have an abundance to feast on. The Lord taught us to ask only for daily bread; a supply of basic necessities for 24 hours. He gives abundantly more...

How long is all this going to go on for?  When will touch become normal again? How long can I keep sane with the children off school indefinitely? Will I still have a job when life returns to normal?

Jesus said, “Do not worry about what you will eat or drink or about what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 7).

This is bad. It is deadly serious. But it will pass. And when it’s all over, God will still reign on his throne then as we trust he does now.

...Meanwhile in Heaven (Job 1.6-12 and 2.1-10)

Well, good morning everyone and welcome to our virtual service.

Over this last couple of weeks, I have felt like an actor in a dystopian film - and I haven’t quite learned my lines yet.

They say a week is a long time in politics. Well, two weeks feels like perpetuity in a pandemic! I have to say, I find all this very challenging and I’m struggling a bit to adjust.

I’m not used to speaking into smartphones. I don’t relate well to small electronic devices. I crave old fashioned human interaction.

A fortnight ago, I preached in church with real people. We were a little down in attendance but not much. Now, we are all confined to our personal bunkers, stuck in our homes and wondering when all this will come to an end.

Unsociable is the new sociable as we all avoid one another in order to help one another. It’s weird isn’t it?

Can I say, “thank you” to all of you who are working really hard to help us pray and worship even though we cannot meet physically. Involvement in Morning Prayer is actually up since all this started thanks to Zoom videoconferencing.

Thanks as well to everyone who is keeping in contact with others by phone, email, and text, on Messenger, Facebook and Instagram.

We have tried to link people up to ensure that the most at risk among us get the help they need. If you need a bit of support, let us know and we’ll do what we can.

When we were preaching through First John back in January/February, I said that I felt that 2020 is going to be a year when we really learn in a deeper way than before to love one another as brothers and sisters. This is our moment!

Can I encourage you, if you haven’t yet done so, to get in contact with someone else in church just for a bit of a chat, and share something uplifting to lift the morale?

We have worked hard to ensure that our church family is cared for, but I hope you’ll be inspired to look out for neighbours living near you as well.

Some of you have already ‘adopted’ your street and offered to help out wherever you can – that is so good. The world will know we are Christians by our love and when this is all behind us, it won’t be forgotten. Let your light shine…

Introduction

Two weeks ago, I spoke on the Book of Job. It’s a poetic book in the middle of the Bible that explores (but never really answers) the biggest question of them all; why do bad things happen to good people?

Professor Sir Norman Anderson was an outstanding academic with a brilliant legal mind; he lectured on Law at Cambridge University. He was elected to the British Academy of leading scholars honoured for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences.

He was also a Christian and he wrote a book called “The Evidence for the Resurrection” which argues from a forensic perspective how compelling the case is for Jesus’ rising from the dead as the four Gospels claim.

Norman Anderson was a man of great intellectual stature and strong faith. But that faith was severely shaken when his only son, Hugh, an exceptionally gifted young man, undergraduate at Cambridge, suddenly fell ill and died of a brain tumour.

A few days later, Anderson gave a talk, as planned, on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.

He explained why he believed that God raised Jesus from the dead and then he said, “On this I am prepared to stake my life. In this faith my son died just a few days ago, shortly after saying, “I'm drawing near to my Lord.” Anderson said, “I am convinced that my son was not mistaken.”

Yes, but why? What a waste! A gifted Christian in the prime of his life, with such a future ahead of him, a great gift for the church and the world – taken, apparently randomly.

We have to admit and accept that a lot of suffering is simply a mystery to us. Deuteronomy 29.29 says that the secret things belong to the Lord alone.  

I once heard the testimony of a man called Tulip Scott. That’s an unusual name isn’t it? Tulip obviously never caught on as a boy’s name, and I think for good reason…

Anyway, this man used to go around asking people, “Do you see anything funny about my face?” How do you reply to a question like that? I mean, it’s a bit awkward isn’t it?

Well, people would look at his face and there was nothing particularly noteworthy about it. So, they’d say, “Well, no I can’t see anything particularly out of the ordinary…”

And he’d smile and say, “The earliest memory I have is of my mother tying my hands to my legs with rope. I would struggle and fight it as she did this. I never understood what she was doing. Why would my own mother inflict this on me, a small boy?”

And then he’d say, “But I learned much later that she did it because she loved me. I had smallpox and she was preventing me from scratching my face and disfiguring it for life.”

Maybe some of suffering is like that… Perhaps there is a bigger picture that we cannot see or fathom, which we will understand only too well one day… but which we may not ever understand in this life. It may take until the next life to see why some suffering occurs.

A fortnight ago, I asked, “does the Bible, God’s word, offer any clues as to why a loving God would allow suffering in the world he made and declared good? And I said, “yes it does.”

To remind you, firstly, some suffering is allowed by God for a greater good. Sometimes it’s an alarm bell that shakes us out of spiritual apathy. C.S. Lewis once said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures but he shouts to us in our pain. Suffering is God's megaphone to awake a sleeping world.”

Suffering can also be a friend in disguise that brings us into a sweeter, closer relationship with God.

Secondly, some suffering, we saw two weeks ago, is the result of personal sin.

For example, if I view pornographic material, I will suffer damage and dysfunction in my relationships with women. So much misery in marriage and breakdown in family life and confusion and chaos is caused by this scourge in our society.

Thirdly, some suffering is caused by collective sin. The world God made has gone wrong because of the sin of Adam and Eve that we all share in; our inclination to want to define what is right and wrong.

People celebrate what God calls ‘sin’. People profane what God calls ‘holy’ and it all brings blight and decay on the entire created order.

This Coronavirus, like all pestilence, and all sickness, is one of the consequences of living in a fallen world. This is what I mean by collective sin; nothing works quite like God intended it to.

But you could add up all the sin of every human being on earth and it still wouldn’t account for everything that is wrong in the world.

The Bible speaks of a fourth source of suffering; the demonic. Yes, this is God’s world because he created it. But it’s also Satan’s world, because he corrupted it.

You might recall, in Luke 13, there’s the story about a woman whose body was bent over and contorted so that she could not straighten up at all. The Bible tells us that Jesus saw her.

·         And he called her forward.

·         She approached him.

·         And he put his hands on her and said, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.”

·         Immediately, she was released.

·         She straightened up; her twisted body shape became upright and she praised God.

Luke specifically says that she had been crippled by an evil spirit. Jesus described the woman as “a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan [had] kept bound for eighteen long years.”

We have a spiritual enemy, Satan, who hates us, who hates God, and who is able to harm us, though this book of Job tells us that he is allowed to inflict suffering only up to a limit stipulated by God.

Last week, we skipped over the satanic verses in Job 1 and 2, because I wanted us to try and understand what Job’s suffering felt like for him.

Remember, he didn’t know anything about the strange conversation in chapters 1 and 2 between God and Satan. He never did get to know about it, even at the end of the book.

But today, we’re going to take a peek behind the scenes. This part of the story tells us that, just as there is invisible air, pollen, bacteria, viruses and radio waves all around us, there are there are also dark spiritual realities in our world that are hidden from our view.

The hidden reality for Job is that God and Satan have a wager on whether adversity would cause Job, a devout and righteous man, to curse God and abandon his faith.

As I said last time, all good dramas work with suspense and this is no exception. We know why Job is suffering. We can see that his friends are out of order to blame Job’s suffering on him, but they can’t.

Satan goes on the rampage; Job loses his income, his savings, his pension, his house and his children. Then he loses his health. Then his wife turns on him. Then his friends spend 34 chapters judging him and blaming him. It’s horrible.

But the explanation that God does sometimes allow suffering as a result of Satan’s work leaves us with more questions than it answers.

Why? We may never know – but God does know.

Job never got the answer to any his questions. He never found out why God let him suffer like he did. But he did find peace before his suffering ended.

What happened? He came to a place where, even if he didn’t know why, he accepted and believed that God did know – and he resolved to say yes to God and trust him.

Towards the end of last year, David Emerton and Andrew Killick brought to my attention a radio interview that was broadcast on Christmas Eve. You can still access it on BBC Sounds if you type “A Bright Yellow Light” into the search bar. It is worth a listen.

It's an interview with a gifted and successful self-made man called Nadim Ednan-Laperouse. He describes how he used to be someone with no interest in faith at all. He never thought about God. You probably haven’t heard of him.

But if I told you that his teenage daughter Natasha died on a plane about 3 years ago as a result of an allergic reaction after eating a sandwich that wasn’t clearly labelled, that might ring a bell. It made all the news headlines.

Nadim spoke very movingly about the heart-breaking experience of trying to keep his daughter alive, of holding her in his arms, of giving her two antihistamine injections, of paramedics administering CPR for 45 minutes, of nothing working.

But then the interviewer asks him about a spiritual experience he had while he was trying to save her life. And he describes in fascinating detail, to his astonishment, seeing five angels, as in extremely high definition, looking at him and moving calmly around her.

I say ‘in great detail’ but there were some aspects of these heavenly figures which he could not quite put into words. He is a creative designer, but he had never before imagined anything like what he saw then. The light around them he says was very bright, very vivid, but incredibly soothing and not hard on the eye.

He whooshed the angels away with his arm, thinking they had come for her soul, and he shouted “It’s not her time!” With that, they vanished and she died. Nothing more could be done for her.

What you probably don’t know is that, over the year previously, Natasha had had been going to a church, seeking God. She had given her life to Christ and was preparing to be baptized.

Following Natasha’s death, the family started going to her church, and at least two of them including Nadim have now come to faith.

During the inquest and legal challenge to get the law changed on food labeling, Nadim prayed that the truth would come to light and all the vested interests of business would be exposed. Every prayer was answered. The inquest led to a change in the law in a record short space of time.

When the then Prime Minister mentioned Natasha at her party conference, Nadim stopped to pray to give thanks and, as he did, the whole room was lit up by that same indescribable yellow light he saw on the plane. And he felt the strong, powerful presence of God with him right there.

I tell that story (and I do encourage you to listen to the whole thing) because I think it illustrates that there is a spiritual realm that is real, that is mostly unseen, and that there is so much going on all the time that we don’t know about.

Suffering is often decisive in determining the genuineness of our relationship with God. I have known people who I thought had a real heart for God become hardened away from faith because of affliction. I have also seen hard and angry hearts soften for the same reason.

I know a man in France called Jacques who had three daughters. Each of them died of leukaemia before reaching adulthood. He told me once that, years on, he still feels bereft; he and his wife will never fully recover from the bitterness of that experience – until they get to heaven where all pain and tears wash away.

But he thanks God, with a tear in his eye, that in his mercy that tragedy started his journey from militant Marxist agitator, always protesting about something, to one of the most soft-hearted, grace-filled, joyful Christians I have ever met. He is now a powerful evangelist who has led many to Christ.

None of what I have shared fully answers the question “why?” But I hope at least that it helps you to think about all this differently.

Conclusion

As I come to a close, I want to say that Christians must view suffering in the light of two facts, that are rarely thought about by others.

Firstly, suffering and pleasure in this world are both magnified in next.

Psalm 73 complains “What’s the point of living for God when it often comes with pain, when wicked, arrogant people live comfortably, make life hell for everyone else and then pass away peacefully?”

But it ends with the thought, “Would you trade places with them on judgement day?”

Jesus saw weeping and gnashing of teeth in the next world. He also said to the repentant thief on the cross next to him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.”

Paul spoke in Romans 8 of “this momentary and light affliction which is as nothing compared to glory to be revealed…”

Secondly, when we ask as Christians, “Why? Why do bad things happen to good people?” we ask it from the shadow of the cross.

In this talk, I’ve shared three true stories of parents watching their children die; Norman Anderson, Nadim Ednan-Laperouse and Jacques Barbero. I think this is probably the most unbearable pain humans ever experience.

Why did God allow his Son, who lived a perfect life, to suffer the worst death anyone has faced? Why?

When you next ask the question “why?”, remind yourself that Jesus asked it too at the point of his greatest anguish and distress. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

As he took upon himself the wrath of God for the sin of the whole world, the shock was so traumatic, the agony was so excruciating, the mental torment was so harrowing that I think he lost all perspective.

I think that for that dreadful moment as he suddenly felt thirsty because he was passing through hell, he didn’t know why his Father’s affection had abruptly been withdrawn from him… to be replaced by the condemnation and separation from God our sins deserve.

He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

Let’s pray…

Sermon preached via video link at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 29 March 2020

What on Earth..? (Job 1.1-5 and 13-22)

Introduction

The 16th Century nun, Teresa of Avilla, once went through a very difficult and painful time in her life.  

She was, I think, a feisty and courageous reformer, certainly Spirit-filled and full of faith. But during this troublesome phase of her life certain members of her Carmelite order began to criticise her and bully her and resist the changes she was trying to introduce.

For example, they hindered her from establishing any more spiritually renewed convents. They ordered her to go into ‘voluntary’ retirement (which didn’t actually stop her but it was pretty disheartening). Her friends and associates were also subjected to harassment and bureaucratic hurdles and persecution.

From about this time, 1582, there’s an old story about her going on a journey to set up a couple of convents, houses of prayer, in Burgos and Grenada. Her journey was disagreeable and exhausting – and at one point perilous. And it’s said that at this point, it all got a bit much, and she turned to God in a prayer of utter exasperation.

“O my Lord,” she said, “when will you cease from scattering obstacles in our path?” And she got a reply. She felt God say to her, “Do not complain, daughter; this is how I treat all my friends!” So she said, “In that case, Lord, it’s no wonder you haven’t got very many!” I told you she was feisty!

Meet Job…

Today and in two weeks’ time, we will be looking at the book of Job, taking a break for Mothering Sunday in between.

The great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once described the book of Job as “the greatest poem in ancient or modern times.”

It’s actually one of the oldest books we have -not just in the Bible- but in the world and it explores one of the oldest questions that humans have ever asked; why? Why do bad things happen to good people?

Because, you see, Job was a good person; in fact, he was beyond reproach. And bad things happened to him. Lots of really bad things… Why is that? If God is really good and if God truly rules supreme over the world he made, how can this be?

How on earth can I believe in the goodness of God when everything around me is falling to pieces and my prayers go unanswered?

As we’ll see in two weeks’ time, at the beginning of the Book of Job, one day God and Satan have a strange discussion about whether Job would ever curse God and lose his faith. Satan says, “I bet you he would,” and God says, “Oh no, he won’t.”  

Every good film or play works with suspense and tension - and this drama is no exception. We know, as readers, all about the wager in heaven. We know the reasons for Job’s suffering. But Job and his friends are never told the reasons for it, even at the end of the book.

That’s why today’s readings have cut out God’s conversations with Satan; we’ll come back to that in a fortnight, because I want today to try and get a feel for Job’s predicament as he experienced it.

Chapter 1.13-19 tells us that in a single day, Job loses all his flocks (which are his source of income), he loses all his servants (a symbol of his wealth already earned), and his house collapses on his children, killing them all.

In our terms, we would say his employer goes bust, he loses his job, all his savings and pension are wiped out, his house falls down, all his personal possessions are destroyed in the rubble, and all his children are dead – all that in one day.

Not only that, but 1.5 tells us that these personal tragedies all occur shortly after Job specifically prays for blessing on each of his children.

Not long after this day from hell, (and this is in chapter 2 now) Job’s health breaks down too. He comes out in painful and itchy sores from head to toe and he ends up sitting on an ash heap, away from where people go, because nobody can bear to look at his hideous face, deformed as it is by ugly sores oozing pus and blood.

And it’s at this point we’re told (2.9) that his wife starts to nag sarcastically. “Still holding on to your precious integrity, are you? Why don’t you just get it over with? Curse God; go on! Perhaps he’ll put you out of your agony.”

There are times when you don’t need that kind of feedback, and I’m sure Job probably just wanted to be left alone.

Which is when his mates turn up. By now, Job is so disfigured that, at first, they don’t recognise him. When it dawns on them that it’s him (2.12) they begin to weep aloud and wail and howl as if at a middle-eastern funeral, which I’m sure will have really cheered Job up and been such a blessing...

A man’s whole world utterly collapses in a few days.

But we detach ourselves from any emotional involvement from this story not because we have hard hearts and don’t care, but because it’s an old story which reads like a fable. Being honest, it doesn’t feel all that real does it?

I mean, three separate but identical disasters, all on the same day, each leaving a solitary survivor, who all use exactly the same words to break the bad news. That’s not how life happens.

Later in the book, each comforter speaks three times, and in carefully constructed poetic verse. It makes you wonder, “is this for real?” It must be just a story. And yet, other Bible authors (Ezekiel and James) write about Job as a real person who actually lived, and Job appears in other ancient writings as well outside the Bible.

For my money, the Book of Job is probably a kind of historical drama, a bit like The Crown or Shakespeare in Love. Those are adapted screenplays, touched by artistic license, but based on historical figures and events. The screenwriter’s skill is in exploring the big questions we care about through the dialogue and suspense.

That’s what I think we have with the Book of Job; a play, a tragedy, about actual people who experienced truly horrible things, dramatized by a skilled writer, who is led by the Holy Spirit as he or she puts it all together.

The Question Why?

Let’s try to get under Job’s itchy skin and get a feel for what it must have been like for him to suffer so unfairly.

His first speech comes in chapter 3, where he curses the day he was born and then asks the question that we ask when we see bad things happen to good people; “Why?” In fact, he asks “why?” five times:

·         Why didn’t I die at birth?

·         Why were there arms to rock me and breasts to drink from?

·         Why wasn’t I stillborn and spared all this misery?

·         Why does God keep those who suffer alive, prolonging the pain?

·         Why am I alive - what’s the point when nothing makes sense?

We too ask the question “Why?” over and over again at times of suffering. In my experience, it tends to be asked less by those who are actually suffering and more by the carers or people who just hear about it.

How can we answer that question “why?” as followers of Jesus?

What do the three friends say? Job’s comforters? They are outstanding examples of what not to say. I’m afraid that virtually everything they come up with in chapters 4 to 37 is insensitive, misguided and hurtful. For them, Job’s suffering must be some kind of karma; payback for sin that Job is hiding from them.

They lecture him. They offer opinions Job didn’t ask for and they end up accusing him of things he didn’t do. If there’s one lesson from the Book of Job it’s this; don’t do that! Don’t point the finger at people who suffer, saying they have brought it on themselves.

But I think they start quite well. In 2.12 they weep with Job and they show their grief by tearing their clothes.

Even better, in v13 they sit with him and they stay by his side. For a whole week. And best of all, they say... nothing. No simplistic platitudes, no helpful advice, no morbid running commentary, not a word.

When you’re really low, you need friends who do this. Friends who are ready to listen and hold your hand, and offer to pray, but generally say little. That’s how best to care for somebody who is hurting.

They let Job talk – if he wants to. And if he doesn’t, they just keep him company. If only they had carried on the way they began!

But what about that question “why?” Does the Bible say anything about God allows suffering? Yes, it does.

First of all, it says that some suffering is caused by personal sin. We know this really.

·         If I drink to excess, I can expect problems with my liver.

·         If I or gamble every pay cheque on the horses, I will lose all my money and bring poverty on myself and my family.

·         If I take drugs, I will have addiction issues waiting for me.

·         If I commit serious crime, I will likely suffer the misery of a prison sentence.

The Bible says very clearly that, in the end, we reap what we sow. So, some suffering is caused by personal sin.

But that wasn’t the case for Job. The truth is that Job’s so-called friends were 100% wrong telling him it was all his fault. Job lived a good and upright life.

The Bible says that there is a second cause of suffering. Some suffering is caused by collective sin. What was the sin of Adam and Eve? They ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Basically, we all want to define what is right and what is wrong instead of accepting what God says.

Genesis 3 teaches that the sin of Adam and Eve, which we all share in, has corrupted and blighted the whole created order. The Eden God created, a garden of delights, has become a dump with weeds and brambles and thorns and nettles.

God’s good design is all out of kilter. Sickness and stress and sorrow and separation are all symptoms of a world that has gone wrong.

Our paradise planet is disfigured by garbage and plastic and toxic waste and unbreathable air. We are vulnerable to earthquakes and floods because we build cheap houses on geological faults and in flood plains. We set the rain forests on fire. Our planet is fragile and our societies are fractured.

I’ve read the end of the story and it says that God is one day going to put it all right again, but for now, much suffering is just what comes of living in a messed-up world.

There is a third cause of suffering according to God’s word. Suffering is usually much more complex than we think. It was for Job. And it may well be for us. Neither Job nor his friends saw what was going on behind the scenes. They didn’t know that there was a bigger spiritual picture.

We cannot always understand all that’s going on when we, or those we love, are afflicted. But we’ll spend more time looking at all that in a fortnight’s time.

A fourth reason in Scripture why we suffer is to do with intimacy with God. Our relationship with God, more precious than gold, often deepens in times of suffering.

When the Haiti earthquake hit in 2010, people in the UK asked, “Why? This is terrible. Where is God in all this?” But on the ground, Tearfund reported that everywhere they went they found people who said, “God is with us in the most amazing ways.”

Paul found this with his thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12. “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” Therefore…” he said, “for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”

The Swedish-American author John Ortberg once said, “If you ask people who don’t believe in God why they don’t believe in God, the number one reason will be… suffering. If you ask people who do believe in God when they have grown most spiritually in their lives, the number one reason will be suffering.”

God brings wholeness and blessing from broken things. It takes broken soil to receive seed, it takes broken clouds to give rain, it takes broken grain to give bread.

It takes a broken alabaster jar to fill the room with the sweet aroma of pure nard.

The Golestan Palace in Tehran has one of the most beautiful rooms of any palace in the world today. When you go into the Hall of Mirrors everything seems to be covered with diamonds.

When the Royal Palace was planned, the architects ordered mirrors from France for to cover the walls. When the mirrors arrived they opened the crates and their hearts sank. They were full of broken pieces. Everything had all been smashed in transportation.

They were going to throw the whole lot all away when the Architect overruled. He changed the plan to a mosaic of broken pieces all fitted together.

The result is a fantastic distortion in reflections, and it sparkles, diamond-like, with scintillating colours. It’s breathtaking. Broken to be more beautiful! That is what God can do with broken dreams, broken hearts and broken lives if we offer them to him in faith.

Joni Erickson Tada, who was paralysed when she was a teenager in a diving accident, once said that when she gets to heaven, she is going to fold up her wheelchair, hand it back to Jesus and say, “Thanks, I needed that.”

Don’t Despair

I don’t think Job’s wife is a great example of how wives should communicate when their husbands are sick. Job needs a bit of support but in four words, “curse God and die!” she basically washes her hands of him. “You would be better off dead” she says. “Just book a holiday in Dignitas and get it over with.”

It’s easy to criticise her for that. But remember, she’s lost everything too. Wouldn’t you be angry? It hurts so badly when someone you love is in pain and there is nothing you can do to help. It may be that Job’s wife can’t stand to see him like this and, for his relief, wants to bring his agony to an end.

She is under great stress, and her life world has been turned upside down, though it was wrong to tell her suffering husband to turn away from God.

What about Job himself? He says a number of things in these opening chapters from the place of utter desolation and devastation.

First of all, he quotes from the Church of England funeral service in 1.21. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the Lord’s name be praised.” He’s saying; God is still on the throne and, whatever happens, God is still worthy of worship.

Then in 2.9, he says, “Shall we accept good from the Lord and not trouble?” He’s saying, “I’ll take whatever comes because, whatever happens, God is still worthy of trust.”

But Job’s third utterance at the beginning of chapter 3 is different. By this time, he is broken; though he never curses God, he does curse the day he was born and wishes he had never lived. I would guess that most of us, at some time in our lives, may have sunk as low as this.

Ending

As I end, a short testimony. I can’t remember where I heard it now, but it’s about a Christian woman, perhaps in her 40s, who lived alone and who was suffering from quite debilitating osteo-arthritis.

For many months, she begged the Lord to take away her pain and heal her. Nothing happened. She confessed every sin she could think of. No difference. She went to healing conferences. Nothing changed. Every Sunday she shuffled slowly forwards for prayer ministry. Every Sunday she shuffled slowly back to her seat.

One evening, she was in such pain she decided to have an early night. As she was getting undressed, she couldn’t stretch without extreme discomfort and as she tried and tried to remove her cardigan, her patience ran out, she snapped, she cursed God, lost her balance and fell, knocking herself unconscious.

The next thing she knew, she awoke to a bright and radiant light. Her first thought was, “Oh no! I have died and I am now face to face with God. And my last words alive were to curse him.”

Her second thought was to realise that she was, in fact, in her bedroom, on the floor, half undressed, looking straight into the morning sun. And (don’t ask me how this works – I don’t know) but as she got up, she felt new; she was new. She was completely healed and free of pain.

Shall we pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 15 March 2020

Confidence before God (1 John 5.13-21)

Introduction

If you were to ask me what I think (in one word) is the overwhelming and dominant worldview here in the UK, I would probably reply pretty quickly; and my word would be agnostic.

Agnostic literally means “don’t know.” Opinion polls, when they ask the public their view on who they are going to vote for always leave an option for “don’t know.” So many people don’t know, they can’t make up their minds, or perhaps they’re apathetic and just don’t care.

There are political agnostics. Which is the best party to vote for? Don’t know. There are philosophical agnostics. What is happiness? Don’t know. And of course there are religious agnostics. Is there a God? Is he good? Does he love me? Don’t know. Agnostics tend to be sceptical about any certainties. They are reluctant to commit to one view or another.

The comedian David Mitchell is an agnostic. Here’s what he said a few years ago: “I don’t accept the argument that atheism is the most rational response to the world as we see it. I think agnosticism is. And I don’t want there to be nothing… I want there to be an all-powerful, benevolent God and I like that thought. And I was initially brought up with it and now I’m not sure – but I’m not ready to reject it.”

The Irish poet W.B. Yeats said, slightly tongue in cheek, “Some people say there is a God. Others say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.” But of course, it doesn’t lie somewhere in between. It’s at one of the poles. Either there is a God or there isn’t.

Whichever it is, agnostics are definitely wrong though. In a two-horse race, agnostics don’t know which horse to bet on, so they back neither and, either way, they are certain to miss out on the winnings.

Why 1 John Was Written

Anyway, at the end of his Gospel, John explains why he wrote it. “These things are written,” he said, “that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

And now at the end of this letter, in v13, he explains his purpose in putting pen to paper here. Why did you write this letter, John? “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

I think this verse is the key that unlocks the whole letter. It’s written to believers who are having a bit of a wobble. Agnostics say, “I don’t know; seeing is believing.” But the Bible says something more like, “Believing is seeing. Only when we believe can we really know.”

The letter was written because the church John loved was in danger of becoming a bit agnostic. They were a lot less sure than they had been before. And the reason for that is that they were becoming unsettled by know-all spiritual leaders travelling around saying, “What do you know? Follow us – we’re on the right side of history. We know best.”

These people were saying that Jesus is great – but he’s not the Messiah. Their message was all about them and their mystical in-crowd.

They were a secret society called gnostics – which means “those in the know” and they went around boasting about their superior wisdom. They had restricted access to classified information. They had the key that unlocked every spiritual enigma. Like in the Da Vinci Code, they were the illuminati.

And they went from fellowship to fellowship around spreading anxiety among believers and engineering splits in churches. They said, “We know what we’re talking about; Jesus was just a man who lived an inspirational life, but he was not the Son of God who opened the door to eternal life by his atoning death on the cross.

Unhealthy Bible teaching will always focus on new fads. Things like 10 Simple Steps to Feeling Great. It’s spiritual junk food; it promises a life of ease and preaches the false gospel of me, me, me.

But Jesus said the opposite; “Those who try to gain their own life will lose it; but those who lose their life for my sake will gain it”. Good, wholesome Bible teaching emphasizes self-denial, not self-fulfilment. And the paradox is that in denying self and exalting Jesus we find ourselves more alive than ever.

“If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full” said American pastor John Piper and I agree.

And so John, seeing the church he loves come under attack from this bad teaching writes this little letter to exhort the believers to stay true to the real, authentic, flesh and blood Jesus that he saw, heard and touched.

All the way through, he counters this secret knowledge rubbish by saying, “No, this is how we know that we belong to the truth... This is how we know who the children of God are... This is how we know what love is. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us.”

All the way through, John wants to give assurance to anyone who has had their heads turned by doubts and uncertainty.

Over and over again the scriptures teach assurance of salvation, because our salvation is not ultimately rooted in our choices which are fickle and inconsistent.

Our salvation is rooted in God’s sovereign decision, made and sealed before time began, and he never wavers, never has an off day, never thinks twice and his will is never thwarted.

“I give [my sheep] eternal life, and they shall never perish”; said Jesus and “no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10.28)

“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10.9).

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8.31)

“Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39)

But all of us doubt, some of us doubt chronically; and the church John wrote to did as well, but 1 John teaches very clearly that God’s will is for us is to know that we are his children, by faith, and he will not let us go.

Some people feel that their hold on God’s grace is defective or insufficient. Many wonder if they can have any assurance or confidence in being saved at all.

Psalm 56.3 says, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.” The Bible does not say that believers never have anxieties and troubles or doubts. In fact, it says that we will.

Imagine you are in a car race and a cheating rival tries to throw you off course by hurling mud at your windscreen. As the mud splatters against the glass you lose sight of the road and you start to swerve left and right.

But that wouldn’t mean that your race is over. It wouldn’t mean that you are on the wrong track. If you were out of the race or on the wrong road, your enemy wouldn’t waste time trying to sabotage your race. Having mud on the windscreen just means that you need to turn on your wipers.

When we doubt God’s goodness and the plans for us, it doesn’t mean we are not God’s children, or that we are not saved.

It means our faith is being attacked. God’s promise is that we will stay on track and finish the race. Because by his grace, we resist and battle against the unbelief of fear. We turn on the windscreen wipers.

So that’s assurance. It’s not arrogance, it’s confidence in God.

Confidence in Prayer

John continues in v14-15 to talk about confidence in prayer. One of the big questions in the Prayer Course was about unanswered prayer. The course specifically deals with that question in week 5.

The assurance we are given here is this: “if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us – whatever we ask – we know that we have what we asked of him.”

It’s troubling for us, because quite recently we all raised our voices and prayed and fasted with passion and with tears. We banged loud and long on heaven’s door. And our request was not granted and we’re sore from that experience. I still am. Our faith has taken a battering.

On the Prayer Course, we’ve been learning that prayer is about growing in our relationship knowing God, not just about getting from God what we want. It says here that God hears us, and he grants our requests too – with the proviso that we ask according to his will.

In the Lord’s Prayer of course, we pray “your will be done,” not my will. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus shuddered and sweated blood as he looked ahead to the hell that awaited him the following day. “If there’s any way, take this bitter cup from my lips! Yet not my will but yours.”

Sometimes I know what God’s will is – it is clearly spelt out in the Bible. If I ask God to help me love my wife better I know that prayer will be answered because I know it’s God’s will. “Husbands, love your wives and lay down your lives sacrificially for them” says Ephesians 5. At other times, I am not so sure whether what I ask is God’s will or not. In whatever situation, we can add to our prayers, ‘Your will be done.’

If the answer is ‘yes’ God may be increasing our faith. If the answer is ‘later’ he may be increasing our patience. If the answer is ‘no’, he may be teaching us to trust that his will is ‘good, pleasing and perfect.’

I don’t understand why our prayers for Donna were not God’s good, pleasing and perfect will. I wish I did. I believe one day, in eternity, I will.

But I do understand this: many times in my life God has answered prayer; big things and trivial things. I’ve been praying for 7 years for a retired minister to come here and join our team, and now one is – just as I’m going. Thank you, Lord! You could have answered a little earlier, but I trust that your timing is perfect.

I’ll never forget Simon Ponsonby from Saint Aldate’s Oxford talking about a conference held in his church on relationships. One evening, a remarkable message was given and two men came forward for prayer just covered with fear, guilt and shame issues related to sex and relationships.

Their experiences had rendered them incapable of forming and sustaining healthy relationships with the opposite sex. The Holy Spirit fell and powerfully impacted both of them: they both wept and wept and they soaked Simon’s sweater with their tears. Both were married within a year!

Sometimes the Christian journey is a choice to not let the things we don’t understand eclipse and spoil the things we do understand.

John though, I think, is maybe thinking about a particular type of prayer and it’s for a brother or sister who has drifted away from faith. All through this letter there are hints that people had left the church and gone astray. Chapter 2 says it clearly.

There are some though who won’t ever return and come back to the Lord. And John describes them as those who have committed a deadly sin.  

Before anyone here starts to worry or panic, let me say quite firmly and categorically that no one here today falls into that category. If you have committed a sin that leads to death, you wouldn’t be here.

What is the sin that leads to death? Some say it’s about the seven deadly sins; pride, lust, greed, sloth, envy and so on. Well, most of us are guilty of those sins, me included, and there’s nothing in the Bible that singles out those seven vices as being particularly awful or beyond the reach of prayer.

Others say it must be a reference to Hebrews 6, which talks about former believers who, having shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, have fallen away, blaspheming Jesus and subjecting him to public disgrace.

It says there that those people are so far gone and are so obsessive about their rejection of Jesus that it’s impossible for them to be brought back to repentance.

Well, that may be what John has in mind here. I think of people like Fredrick Nietzsche, son of a pastor, who was so fanatical in his hatred of Christ he went clinically insane. I can only think of maybe only one person I have known who fits this description – and it’s no one here.

I wonder if John is thinking about specific cases like Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5) who died instantly after lying to their church about how generous they were. Or the people who abused the Lord’s Supper in Corinth, some of whom had become sick and died. Perhaps John is saying, “Don’t bother praying about them to return to God; it’s too late, they’re dead.”

But here, the promise is that if we pray earnestly for people who have wandered off from the Lord, and we pray according to his will, we can be confident that the Good Shepherd will seek the lost will bring them back.

There are a few more “we knows” in this section…

“We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin, we know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one, we know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.”

…but I feel like I’ve spoken on them all before in the last few weeks. In fact, I have, as John keeps coming back to the same points, like a spoon stirring a pot.

The final verse, 21, some scholars believe is very possibly the last sentence written in the Bible. 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation and all the rest of the New Testament were actually written earlier, so it is thought.

So, here are very possibly the last words God spoke to his church with binding authority. “Little children, keep yourself from idols.” In other words, “accept no substitutes.” It’s Jesus or nothing. And it’s all of Jesus or nothing.

Ending

But I want to draw this talk - and series - to a close by mentioning two stories about the Apostle John; this elderly gentleman with a father heart for the church he loved.

Neither is from the Bible, but there is good evidence that the stories are genuine because they are quite early and they fit so well with what we know about John in the Gospels and his letters.

The first is of John in extreme old age and very infirm. So infirm that his disciples would have to carry him in to church for the Lord's Supper, and every week they’d ask if he’d say a few words. Maybe he’d talk about his experiences of actually seeing Jesus in flesh and blood. What was it like? What was he like?

By this time, John could barely muster the voice to speak but every time they asked, he’d say, "Yes, I have a message… Little children, love one another.”

For months on end, it was the exact same 5-word sermon, week in, week out. “Little children, love one another.”

After a while, people began to tire of hearing the same short, simple message until finally, they lost patience and said, “Teacher, have you nothing else to say? Why do you always say the same thing?”

And John would look at them and say, “Because it is the Lord's command and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.”

The second story is also of John very late in his life. It was recorded in the 2nd century by a man called Irenaeus. Irenaeus had been a disciple of a leader called Polycarp, who knew John personally.

At the end of the 1st century, not very far distant from when this letter was written, there was a gnostic itinerant preacher named Cerinthus. He said that God didn’t create the physical world, he rejected the virgin birth, and denied that Jesus was the Messiah.

The story goes that John was in the public baths one day, and saw this man Cerinthus bathing in the same pool. “Get me out of here!” he said. And as they carried him out of the building, he said to those who were with him, “Let us haste, lest this bath house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within!”

It seems out of place with the first story but they tell us about the two non-negotiables for living in the light of love; an uncompromising zeal for the truth of the Gospel (without which the church falls apart and it’s finished) and a tender-hearted longing for the love of Christ to fill his church.

Let’s pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 1 March 2020