Broken Cisterns (Jeremiah 2.1-13)

Introduction

One Sunday afternoon in April 1739 a 35 year-old Church of England clergyman preached to an open-air gathering of miners in Bristol.

It was the first time he had ever preached outside a church building and he only did it because he had been refused permission to preach in any church by several displeased bishops. They didn’t approve of his enthusiastic delivery and his style of speech that appealed to the emotions.

The preacher was not happy with the idea of having to conduct open-air services. He felt it was undignified. But with church pulpits closed to him, he continued to preach in the open air for the next fifty-two years. He did speak in churches on the rare occasion he was invited to do so, but mostly he preached in fields, in streets and in town halls.

All his life from that April afternoon onwards he was seen as a threat. At times he was physically attacked by mobs. Clergy often denounced him in sermons and in print. He was criticised as a pedlar of false doctrines and religious extremism. He was branded as a fanatic, leading people astray. He was accused of spuriously claiming miraculous gifts and even trying to reinstate Catholicism as the established church in England.

He rode 250,000 miles by horse, travelling from town to town with the gospel. That’s the equivalent of going to Australia and back 13 times. It’s the distance from the earth to the moon! He preached more than 40,000 sermons, three a day on average. And of course his name was John Wesley. His open-air preaching changed our nation.

What many people don’t realise is that at the time Wesley preached the gospel in England, our country was in a desperate state.

Most children were denied an education, being forced into cheap labour in workhouses where they died in droves. Child hanging for petty crime was commonplace.

Crime was rife. Prisons were a national disgrace. Debtors were often tortured to death by jailors for money they did not have.

Alcoholism and premature death fuelled by cheap gin was endemic.

And while the country was in a terrible state, the church was ineffective. It was upper class and lifeless; part of the problem, not part of the answer.

Jeremiah’s first sermon was also in the open air, on the streets of Jerusalem, not to an appreciative congregation but to a hostile crowd. We heard a bit of it in our first reading.

Unlike Wesley, Jeremiah had no training and no experience. He would have been young, probably in his early twenties and, like Wesley, his preaching quickly got him excluded from official religious buildings because the establishment didn’t like the message.

Our God never has been and never will be confined to ecclesiastical buildings. If the church closes its doors to him, he just raises people up to speak his word somewhere else. Jesus spoke more in the open air and in homes than he ever did in so-called holy places.

Background

We had a little look at Jeremiah’s world last week, but in case you weren’t here I want to give a quick outline.

Jeremiah preached for a period of about 40 years, towards 600 BC in the last days of the nation of Judah.

Now remember, when King Solomon died about 350 years beforehand, there was power struggle. Two men staked rival claims for the throne and it led to a civil war.

In the end, they decided to separate and become two independent nations. 10 of the 12 tribes to the north kept the name “Israel.” The two remaining tribes to the south (Judah and Benjamin) called themselves “Judah” after the larger of the two.

Israel had a succession of kings, 19 in all, and the Bible says that every one of them, without exception, did evil in the eyes of the Lord. That northern kingdom was eventually carried off into exile to Assyria in 722 BC leaving just Judah.

Most of the kings of Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord too but they did have some good ones.

And Jeremiah started his preaching during the reign of Judah’s very last good king, Josiah. Most of Jeremiah’s ministry therefore was during the reigns of kings who were irreversibly turning the nation away from God’s ways.

The people of Judah were wandering away from the living God down their own paths.

Let’s have a look at Jeremiah’s first sermon then.

An Unhappy Marriage (v1-8)

In v1-8, God compares his relationship with his people to an unhappy marriage. God speaks about his heartbreak over becoming estranged from the people he loves.

This is something we can all relate to. We all know people whose marriages have broken down. We all know couples who have gone through messy divorces. We might have suffered it ourselves.

A shattered marriage is like a death. Just like when somebody dies, in marriage breakdown there’s shock, there’s anger, there’s broken hearts, there’s tears.

There’s bewilderment. God says here “Have I broken any promise to you? Have I ever let you down? I feel so heartbroken.”

Those who look on at a divorce from the outside just feel powerless. All we feel able to say is that “it’s very sad” which sounds so lame but what else can you say?

In v2-3 God looks back nostalgically to the honeymoon when he and his bride were together alone. “I remember the devotion of your youth,” he says, “how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness…”

And God opens his heart about how protective he was of his bride, and how pure she was.

But then things started to go wrong. She started finding fault with him and flirting. God says “I brought you out of a barren wilderness into a fertile land.” He’s saying “Look, I provided for you, I gave you all you ever wanted, I treated you honourably, you wanted for nothing.”

History shows that God’s people drifted away from the temple and went after tacky, gaudy fertility rituals instead.

Coming out of an unpopulated desert they became distracted by sophisticated society. They became corrupted by perverted practices. They allowed themselves to experiment with rotten religion.

And v8 says this: they stopped asking “where is the Lord?” You see, you don’t need to do anything bad to get away from God. All it takes is to get distracted and forget what he’s done for you and you’re soon on the way to replacing him altogether.

“You came and defiled my land” says God in v7. In the context, he’s saying “Do you know what? It was like returning home to our beautiful house and finding you in bed with some stranger.”

Throughout the Bible God likes to talk about his relationship with us in terms of a romance and a marriage.

In Ephesians 5 Paul says that a marriage between a man and a woman is an acted drama of the relationship between Christ and the church. It’s about two incompatible partners becoming one. It’s about committed love and a binding promise to never leave or forsake one another.

But marriages go wrong. In Revelation 2 Jesus says to a church, his bride, “You have forgotten your first love.”

Have you ever been in love? For some of you this morning like myself, it has been some years but do you remember the first time you were in love? Think back to your first kiss – the softness of the lips, the racing of the heart, the passion, the excitement that your feelings are reciprocated.

Do you remember what it was like wanting to spend every moment of every day with that one person? Do you remember how slowly time went by when you were apart? And how quickly it went when you were together? You had never had feelings so exhilarating, so overwhelming. Nothing was too much to ask, no amount was too big to spend, and no distance was too far to go.

Do you remember first coming to faith? Do you remember a time in your life when you loved to be with the Lord? When there was an abundance of joy in his presence? Perhaps when you were baptized in the Holy Spirit or when you saw an amazing answer to prayer…

As the song says, “Where did the good times go?”

Have you forgotten the absolute thrill of knowing Jesus for the first time? Have you forgotten the amazing feeling you had at that moment of salvation when you realized God loves you so much? Have you forgotten the lifting of sin from your shoulders to be replaced by complete forgiveness? Have you forgotten the glorious freedom of the children of God that is yours in Christ?

I just wonder if anyone’s relationship with God here this morning has become stale, like a marriage that’s going through the motions.

Well, just as the flame between a husband and wife can be rekindled, the relationship between us and God can be reignited. That’s what God wants to do today.

2) A Leaking Container (v9-13)

If in v1-8 God compares his relationship to his people as an unhappy marriage, in v9-13 he compares his people to a broken cistern.

In our culture, a broken cistern means a busted flush on a toilet – which stinks. But a cistern in Bible times had nothing to do with toilets.

If you’ve ever lived in a dry country abroad, you’ll know that attitudes towards rain are completely different to what they are here.

In Britain, rain is usually an inconvenience and can even feel like a curse – especially when it is relentless as it has been this year.

But water is always welcome in the Middle East. It is never annoying, never an ordeal.

They would approve absolutely Benjamin Franklin’s comment on the blessing of what we call bad weather. This is what he said. “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards. There it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

That’s a very civilised way of looking at a wet and miserable weekend isn’t it? Rain in Bible lands means God is showing us his favour. No rain means God is not blessing us for some reason.

Despite the fact that Israel has a long dry season, there are several constant springs there. You can find springs in Israel that have never been dry in living memory. But they are rare.

Almost all the hill country in Israel is limestone which is porous. It doesn’t hold the little water there is from rainfall, so they have to find ways of storing it so that there is a supply all year round.

In Jeremiah’s day, they used to make deep hollows into the ground, line them with clay and fill them with water collected in the brief rainy season. These were called cisterns and they could be the difference between life and death.

The problem is that Israel is a zone where there are frequent small earth tremors and they form hairline cracks in the lining of the cisterns, meaning the water leaks away and is lost. Broken cisterns.

God said through Jeremiah that the people of Judah had gone wrong on two points. Let’s look at v13, it’s one of the key verses in Jeremiah.

“My people have committed two sins: [1] they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and [2, they] have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

Imagine living in a dry and thirsty land, and moving away from a water source that has never, ever run dry and settling instead for a cracked underground water tank that turns the water muddy and constantly leaks.

God says that’s what it’s like whenever people replace a relationship with him for every latest fad.

In every age, there is a temptation to discard the fountain of living water and look elsewhere for something different to quench our spiritual thirst.

The people of Judah found that their cisterns were broken and could hold no refreshing water.

Trying to construct an artificial reservoir for spiritual water is foolish enough, but to turn and reject a supply from a never-failing spring is doubly stupid. All our man-made substitutes for spiritual fulfilment are doomed from the start.

I feel this is such a word for our nation which, in the last 100 years has forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water, and dug its own cisterns, broken cisterns that hold nothing.

Let me give you a few examples.

In 1910 around 85% of children in the UK attended Sunday school. They learned about Jesus, they heard the gospel about God’s love for them and they were familiar with the Bible. Not all of it was great probably, but a lot of it was and there was a healthy fear of God in the life of our nation.

As I mentioned last Sunday, political leaders and newspaper editors twice called the citizens of the UK to days of prayer in 1940. Most of the adults of our land had been to Sunday school and they knew about the God who saved Daniel from the lion’s den. They knew about the kid with a slingshot who defeated mighty Goliath. So they cried out to God and our country was twice delivered against overwhelming odds.

100 years on, only 5% of children in the UK attend Sunday school today. That’s one example of how our country has forsaken the spring of living water. There are many more. Lord, have mercy on us.

At the same time as forsaking the spring of living water, we have made our own cisterns by making secular humanism our default philosophy, by accepting political correctness, by embracing relationships that are light on commitment, and by becoming obsessed by trashy celebrities.

The former chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs had it right when he said “The idols of today are unmistakable - fame without achievement, sex without consequences and wealth without responsibility.”

Our broadcasters and printed media caricature the church, lampoon its leaders and rubbish the Bible.

Our political leaders pass legislation that is contrary to God’s revealed will and our police arrest people for public expressions of faith.

And we ask why Britain is top of the league in Europe for teenage pregnancy.

We wonder why teenage self-harm inpatient admissions increased by 68% between 2002 and 2012. That’s 1 in 12 young people in the UK. Soul Survivor has afternoon sessions that typically attract about 150 young people to each one. Last year a new seminar broke all records as 800 teenagers turned up for a seminar entitled “I hate myself.”

The most dangerous place for a child to be in 2012 Britain was in its mother’s womb, where over 200,000 lives were ended before being sent to the hospital incinerator. Over a quarter of those were repeat abortions for women under 25.

We hear of local councils banning prayer for healing on the streets, and of employers dismissing employees for wearing a cross at work or expressing a view on “same-sex marriage” on a private social media.

This is like the world Jeremiah lived in. We too have forsaken the source of living water and made for ourselves broken cisterns that hold no water.

Every summer, we are treated to broadcasts of the Last Night of the Proms where people wave flags and sing Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia.

It’s fun because it’s over the top and patriotic and we all like a party. But we all know it’s ironic. Since when has Britain ruled the waves? It did once. Since when can we sing “By Freedom gained, by truth maintained, thine Empire shall be strong”? What truth maintained? What empire?

These songs belong to an era when God gave us stewardship of much of the world, an empire upon which the sun never set.

Why, as a nation, do we never stop to ask why all this has happened? Why did Britain lose its empire?

No Prime Minister in my lifetime, 52 years, has ever asked why our nation has been so humbled over the course of the last century, a period where faith in Christ has become side-lined and replaced with broken cisterns. Lord, have mercy on us.

Ending

The Bible says "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news." I've had plenty of bad news this morning so let me finish with this. It is never too late to return to the spring of living water. Never. That's the good news.

You know, one hot afternoon, Jesus walked up to a well, a cistern if you like, and had a conversation about water with a woman who'd burned some bridges in her life. He said that he is that never ending spring that Jeremiah talked about.

Don’t refuse the water that Jesus offers you this morning.

So as I end, here are four things Jesus says about that bubbling, cool, fresh, living water that is himself.

1. Jesus said it’s the gift of God. You can’t buy it. You can’t earn it. But you have to receive it. Do you need to learn to receive?

2. Jesus said it’s living water. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. Don’t be fooled by the stagnant water of religion. Jesus is the way, the truth and the… life.

3. “If you drink it,” says Jesus, “you will never thirst again. That means Christ is always able to satisfy your weary soul when you are spiritually dry.

4. Jesus said the water becomes a spring. Here’s why you never get thirsty again; it’s not because one drink is all you need. It’s because one true drink produces a well inside your soul that supplies an eternity of drinks.

All who are thirsty, come and drink.

Let’s stand to pray…

 Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 2nd March 2014

Disdain or Devotion (Jeremiah 36.1-32)

Introduction

Well, hands up those of you whose favourite book in the Bible is Jeremiah! I’ll be honest, it’s not mine and I confess I’ve only ever preached on this book once before. It’s a book people tend to avoid and I think there are four reasons for that.

Firstly, the content; it’s quite heavy. A large proportion of it is about judgement and doom and gloom and impending disaster. We prefer our Bible reading to be a bit more uplifting.

Secondly, the length; it’s really long. In fact, Jeremiah contains more words than any other book in the Bible. We usually prefer something a little more bite size.

Thirdly, the structure; it’s confusing. The chapters are not arranged in chronological order so it’s not easy to see how the events relate to each other.

And fourthly, the culture; it’s so alien to us. Situated 2,600 years before our time, in a world with very different customs and ideas to our own, we struggle to relate to it especially if we're unfamiliar with the historical context.

With all that, what can Jeremiah possibly have to say to us? Well, I think, if we’re prepared to work hard and get to grips with it, we will find that it is extremely relevant to our situation in the UK today.

In May 1940, about 350,000 British soldiers were backed into a corner by advancing German forces near Dunkerque in northern France. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it “a colossal military disaster.” He said that the whole root and core and brain of the British Army was stranded and seemed destined to perish.

On 23rd May, many political leaders of our country, led by King George VI and supported by newspaper editors, called for a national day of prayer to be held on the following Sunday, 26th May.

The history books record that just 24 hours after that call for prayer, to the surprise and dismay of his own generals, Hitler inexplicably ordered his armies to halt. Two days later, on 26th May, our nation cried out to God for deliverance. Churches were full all over the land as people came before the Lord.

At 7:00pm that Sunday evening, with Hitler’s armies still stationary, the order was issued to attempt an audacious evacuation of Dunkerque. A fleet of 800 fishing boats, private yachts and half-seaworthy dinghies were hastily sent across the Channel with orders to rescue as many men as possible before the Germans arrived.

Incredibly, Hitler’s tanks stayed where they were not only up to 26th May, but - inexplicably - on into early June as well. To this day, no one knows why. Churchill called it - listen to this quote - “a miracle of deliverance.”

Another national day of prayer was called on 8th September that year as the Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies above our land. It is generally acknowledged now that had the Luftwaffe established air supremacy over these islands the Nazis would have launched an immediate invasion and swiftly defeated us.

The Luftwaffe outnumbered the RAF by a factor of 3:1. But once again, there was an incredible deliverance against the odds. Germany’s failure to achieve its objective of destroying Britain’s air defences was its first major defeat in the Second World War and a crucial turning point in it.

Then on D-Day, 6th June 1944 our king made a speech. Here's an extract from it.

"That we may be worthily matched with the new summons of destiny, I desire solemnly to call my people to prayer and dedication. We are not unmindful of our own shortcomings, past and present. We shall ask not that God may do our will, but that we may be enabled to do the will of God... I hope that throughout the present crisis of the liberation of Europe there may be offered up earnest, continuous and widespread prayer. We who remain in this land can most effectively enter into the suffering of subjugated Europe by prayer. Thereby we can prophesy the determination of our sailors, soldiers and airmen who go forth to set the captives free... At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young or too old, to play a part in a nation-wide, perchance world-wide, vigil of prayer ... If from every place of worship, from home and factory, from men and women of all ages and many races and occupations, our intercessions rise, then, please God, both now and in the future not remote, the predictions of an ancient song may be fulfilled: "The Lord will give strength unto his people, the Lord will give his people, the blessing of peace."" [Psalm 29.11.]

Two national days of prayer and a global call to prayer. Two remarkable victories that defied the odds and turned the tide and one overwhelmingly successful assault that sealed the outcome of the war.

That was 1940 and 1944. This is 2014. Will our nation ever come before the Lord, with one heart, on its knees again? Even in a crisis?

I’m sure our Queen would show the same fear of God her father had, but I don’t think I can imagine today’s politicians or newspaper editors uniting to call the nation to prayer. Can you?

There is a feeling that our nation is not just drifting from its spiritual moorings; it’s throwing away the anchor altogether.

Background to Jeremiah

In this sense, Jeremiah lived in similar times to ours. He lived in a nation that was increasingly impatient with expressions of faith, where the rich became super rich and the poor got left behind, where people saw worship as irrelevant to their lives. He spoke publicly about all this for about 40 years and, during that time, he watched his country slowly slide away from God.

At first, people just thought that Jeremiah was a bit eccentric. Then, as he kept saying uncomfortable and inconvenient things, they began to find him a nuisance. And finally, when he refused to stop speaking out, he was silenced and attacked for being offensive.

You can’t understand Jeremiah unless you know a bit about the times he lived in. So let’s very quickly sketch the background to all this.

Jeremiah was called to speak God’s word during the reign of Josiah. We looked at this last week. Josiah was a good king - one of the best. It was during his reign that people accidentally rediscovered the Bible during a bit of spring cleaning in the temple. They blew the dust off, opened it up and found to their alarm that the whole nation was doing the exact opposite of what God had said would lead to peace and blessing and prosperity.

They were doing what he said would lead to famine and drought and war and losing their land. They took the book to Josiah. He tore his clothes in repentance and brought in sweeping reforms, leading the nation back to God. And God blessed them.

But after Josiah died, things returned to the way they had been before.

At this time in its history, Judah was situated between two hostile superpowers; Egypt (to the south west) and Babylon (to the north east). And if you were a little country in the middle, like Judah, you had to choose whose side to be on.

Well, the next major king after Josiah was Jehoiakim (there was one called Jehoahaz between the two but he lasted only three months).

Jeremiah brought Jehoiakim a word from the Lord. “The Lord says don’t side with Egypt.” Jehoiakim decided to side with Egypt. Anything that God said in those days was routinely ignored by those in power. A few years’ later, in 604 BC, there was an almighty battle between north and south.

Babylon demolished Egypt and established itself as the one, dominant superpower in that region.

Jeremiah had been saying in the name of the Lord for decades that a great power would come from the north and flatten little Judah. They told him to stop being unpatriotic.

He said the nation had to get right with God again. Nobody listened. He became a laughing stock and the target of mockery.

He asked “Why are we cutting ourselves off from (what we would call) our Christian roots?” People told him to stop whinging and they banned him from the temple.

He survived several attempts on his life. A priest had him beaten and put in the stocks for a day. He was thrown in a cistern and left for dead.

Here’s the thing - people just wanted him to say something nice. They didn’t want to be told that there was a train coming as they played on the railway line. They wanted to be encouraged and be told that there wasn’t a train coming because that feels better.

Writing It Down

One thing we know about Jeremiah is that he spoke spontaneously under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

We know he spoke without notes as well because Jeremiah 36 is the story about how all his words first came to be written down about 600 BC. Here’s how the story unfolds.

In v1-7 Jeremiah meets a lawyer’s secretary called Baruch who seems honest and supportive so Jeremiah asks him if he would be his scribe. He says “Look, I need to write down everything I’ve been saying for the last 20 years or so. This is going to be one, last, desperate effort to warn people that this is going to end in tears if nothing changes. If they hear it all together, maybe they will listen.”

But how could Jeremiah possibly remember everything he had said over the previous two decades or so with no notes to refer to? We speak. Life moves on. We forget what we said. Can you remember verbatim anything you said last year? I can’t even remember what I said in my last sermon!

But experts on brain function have discovered that the human brain creates a permanent record of our conscious experience which is stored away in the brain, like files on a computer drive.

I located a computer document a couple of weeks ago that I thought had been lost. It was an e-mail attachment that I opened, edited and saved. But when I opened it again none of my changes had been kept. Has that ever happened to you? Maddening isn’t it? Well, there is a record of it somewhere deep in the computer’s cache that you can access to recover it if you know how.

Similarly, everything we say and hear and see is stored away somewhere in our subconscious. The problem we have is retrieving it – but it is there.

What happened with Jeremiah is that the Holy Spirit brought back to his conscious mind everything he had spoken in the name of the Lord.

Jesus said that this is one of the things the Holy Spirit does. “All this I have spoken while still with you” he said. “But… the Holy Spirit… will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14.25-26). This is why incidentally it’s worth reading the Bible even if you forget it.

So, taking a pen and ink, Baruch put down, word by word on a parchment what we now have as chapters 1-25 of Jeremiah.

With the help of a computer, I worked out yesterday that, in English, that’s 17,341 words. Speaking at average pace, that’s about 3 hours of relentless bad news. That’s not easy listening.

Now it had to be read in public. Jeremiah had been banned from the temple by this time. So in v9-10 he gets Baruch to wait till the next big feast day and read it aloud in the temple then.

So that’s what he does. In v11-19 one of the temple officials hears it, takes it seriously, and tells the local councillors what he’s just heard. They say “You’d better bring the man here and let him read to us.” So he does.

They hear it and look at one another in panic. Why? Because if Jeremiah is right, the king has got his foreign policy completely wrong. Egypt is the wrong horse to back. “We’ll have to tell the king,” they say.

So in v20-26 they get the king’s private secretary to read it a third time, this time to the king. Jehoiakim has no time for it. He has zero fear of God. He is unwilling to listen. He takes a penknife and, as the secretary reads down the parchment, Jehoiakim cuts off what’s just been read and throws it into the fire.

What a contrast between Jehoiakim and his father Josiah! When they read the word of God to Josiah he tore his clothes and called the nation back to God.

When they read it to Jehoiakim in a display of open contempt for God’s word, he nonchalantly burns it.

Responding to the Word

Is the UK in 2014 a Josiah nation or a Jehoiakim nation?

If the word of the Lord was read aloud in our Parliament, to our newspaper owners, to our financial shakers and movers, to our High Court judges, to our intellectuals today what would they do? I wonder if they would turn back to God as their predecessors did twice in 1940.

Or, these days, would Churchill’s “miracle of deliverance” be downgraded to “an inexplicable slice of luck”?

Have we forgotten what God did when, as a nation, we got down on our knees? Well, I’ll say more about all that next week.

What I want to highlight this morning is this: God’s word is indestructible.

All that work that Baruch did, writing it all down. It must have taken a couple of days. All destroyed. But you can’t get rid of God’s word!

Jesus said “Heaven and Earth will pass away but my words will never pass away.”

In v27-32, God says “Write the whole thing down again and add a bit more this time about Jehoiakim. Say to him that Babylon will certainly come now and bring this nation’s days to an end. Tell Jehoiakim that he will have no royal line to follow him. Tell him that he will not even have a dignified burial when he dies.”

History records that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon did indeed come with his armies the following year. It tells us that Jehoiakim died during the siege, his body was thrown over the city walls, and was never buried. It tells us that his son Jehoiachin took the crown but that he lasted just 3 months. It tells us that Jehoiakim never did have another descendant on the throne.

Oh, the folly of resisting God’s word. You might as well resist a hammer with an egg. In fact, Jeremiah likens God’s word to a hammer that shatters rock in chapter 23.

Bottom line? Jehoiakim gets a brief, inglorious mention in Wikipedia. Jeremiah’s entire prophecy is preserved forever in the world’s most translated, most distributed and bestselling book. It’s also the world’s most powerful book.

God’s Indestructible Word

You’ve probably heard about Brother Andrew’s miraculous distribution of Bibles in the days of the Soviet Union.

Well, I was told another story this week about a man, back in the days when the Bible was not widely available, who was traveling between villages with a barrow of Bibles and was met by a bandit on the way. The bandit stopped him and asked “What have got in the barrow under that cover?” He said “Books.” The bandit said “I don’t believe you, show me.”

So he did and sure enough, there were all these Bibles. The bandit was so annoyed that there was nothing more valuable he told the man to light a fire and burn the lot.

So the man said “OK, but would you let me read you a little bit before I do?” The bandit said “all right.”

So he picked up the first Bible and read the 23rd Psalm. The bandit said “That’s a good one, I’ll keep that book.” So he picked out another and read the beatitudes. “The bandit said “I like that, I’ll keep that one too.” And then he read 1 Corinthians 13 on love and the bandit said the same thing again. And so on until he had them all stacked up, not realising they were from the same book. So he said “I’ll have your barrow as well.” And off he went.

Years later that man was back in those parts and he found, to his surprise, that people were clamouring for his Bibles. He said “Oh, you’ve heard about this book have you?” They said “Yes.” “Where have you heard about?” They said “From the preacher in the village.” When he got to the village, there was the preacher, the former bandit, with his congregation.

Ending

I’m going to end with a word that appears twice in this chapter (in v3 and v7). It’s the little word “Perhaps.” As Jeremiah writes down all that God has said through him, he says “Perhaps.”

Perhaps if people hear this they will turn around from the path they’re on and I will forgive them.

Perhaps they will come before the Lord in prayer.

“Perhaps” is a word that tells me that there is always hope. I hold out the hope that our country will turn to the Lord again.

If I’m honest, I can’t see it happening humanly speaking but then who would have imagined that the rediscovery of the Bible in the temple would lead to a national revival under Josiah?

Perhaps if our generation could hear the word of the Lord, it wouldn’t get shredded and burned. Perhaps the Holy Spirit would turn hearts and change lives and heal our land?

It may seem unlikely. But who would have predicted our Army would survive intact after being cornered in Dunkerque? Who would have imagined our Air Force prevailing in the Battle of Britain when outgunned 3 to 1? But for the power of prayer and the gracious hand of God I believe our nation would have fallen into the hands of Adolf Hitler. Churchill believed that too. If Hitler had prevailed in 1940 he said "we should be reduced to the status of vassals and slaves forever." But the Lord ha mercy on us.

Perhaps if our country had to face some unknown peril again, (and I wouldn’t wish that), but if it did, perhaps we would come before him in repentance for our ingratitude as a nation and cry out to him once more.

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 23rd February 2014

Being Holy (1 Peter 1.3-25)

Introduction

I have with me here a jigsaw puzzle of 1000 pieces. I completed it a few years ago though I’m not a great jigsaw enthusiast. It’s of the history of this country from the Stone Age to the present day and I did the puzzle because I was useless at history at school and I thought this might be a good way to learn it.

I completed the puzzle as far as I could without looking at the image on the box. Well, I finished it and I now know a little bit more about British history than I did. 

If you often do puzzles, you’ll know what it feels like when you tip the pieces out of the box onto the table. Hundreds of assorted shapes with different colours – your heart sinks. If you haven’t studied the completed picture on the lid of the box, it’s impossible to imagine what the individual pieces will look like when they’re assembled but you might guess the basic theme just by looking at the jumbled pieces.

Bits and Pieces of Jesus

The pieces on the table are similar to the picture the Old Testament prophets had of Jesus when they spoke about the Messiah. The letter to the Hebrews says “God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”

Like a jigsaw, it was in bits and pieces at the start but as the picture slowly emerges when you join the pieces together, with Jesus we see perfectly clearly what God is like.

Our reading this morning speaks about this: “the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, [who] searched intently and with the greatest care, [tried] to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow.” 

The prophets saw dozens of glimpses of Jesus. One said he would be conceived by a virgin. Another said that he would be born in Bethlehem. Another said he would be in David’s line. Another said he would speak in parables. Another said he would have his hands and feet pierced. Another said he be buried in a rich man’s tomb. Still another said he would rise again from death.

Peter Stoner, former Professor of Mathematics at Pasadena City College, did some sums and calculated that the probability of just 8 such predictions being fulfilled in one person is one chance in one hundred million billion (which is many times more than the total number of people who’ve ever lived). 

But only when all these prophecies come together do we see the full picture. And when we hold the box lid of Jesus’ life against it we see a perfect match.

Set Apart

When you step back and look at the completed picture, you see one like no one else.

He only had to say “Follow me” and fishermen dropped their nets at once.

People would travel for miles and press into crowded buildings to get anywhere near him.

Yet he would stop everything to give his undivided attention to one poor soul.

No one in all history has a personality anything like his. As John Stott said “It would be hopelessly incongruous to refer to him as ‘Jesus the Great,’ comparable to Alexander the Great, Charles the Great, or Napoleon the Great. Jesus is not ‘the Great,’ he is the Only. He has no peers, no rivals and no successors.”

Jesus stands head and shoulders above the rest. He is set apart from the crowd. And that is what the word “holy” means; different, set apart from the rest.

Some people don’t like the word “holy.” We sometimes associate it with weirdness. Religious oddballs are called “Holy Joes” People who look down their noses are called “holier than thou.”

But Jesus wasn’t sanctimonious. He was just unlike anyone who ever breathed before or since.

Today’s theme is “being holy” and this is what it means; to be like Jesus, to be set apart. When we live holy lives like Jesus people will see him in us. That’s why the letter to the Hebrews says “Without holiness no one will see the Lord.”

There’s a subtle temptation most Christians face from time to time – to want to fit in, to prove that we’re just like everyone else. But we’re not. Verse 15 of our passage says: “Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’”

The former slave trader turned preacher John Newton once said to the hymn writer William Cowper “I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I hope to be. But, thank God, I am not what I used to be.”

How do you get on the path of holiness? You do what John Newton did. Firstly, he gave up running his life and turned to Christ in faith. He wrote about his conversion to Christ in the hymn “Amazing Grace” that we still sing today. Secondly, he repented of his former life - he stopped working in the slave trade and he did all he could to abolish it. He committed his life to becoming more like Jesus.

Our passage talks about some of the ways we live holy lives. These are the things that God expects of you and me. I’m just going to finish very quickly with four of them.

First, it talks in v13 about “minds that are alert and fully sober.” Think straight. Don’t get intoxicated with latest ideas and crazes. Our mass media relentlessly and subtly promotes godless standards and values. Holy people don’t get sucked into that. Holy people think differently.

Secondly, in v14 it talks about obedience. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.” It’s saying don’t make the same mistakes you once did when you had no thought of God or relationship with Christ.

Thirdly, in v17 it says “live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.” Fear God. That doesn’t mean you live constantly in dread of going to hell. Quite the reverse; Jesus delivers us from that. It means something else altogether. Think about how you’d feel if you upset someone you care for deeply. It is a healthy thing to fear hurting someone you love. That’s what it means to fear God. And if you really fear God, you’ll never fear anything else.

Fourthly, in v18-19 it says “Be grateful.” Having an attitude of gratitude moves your focus away from what you lack onto the abundance you already have. Psychological research shows that gratitude is good for you. And look what we have to be thankful for; “you were redeemed from your empty way of life.” Look at the price tag; “not with… silver or gold (money gets devalued with every economic crisis) … but with the precious blood of Christ.”

Conclusion

As I close, I want to do an experiment. This is something I came across this week. 

Close your eyes and imagine with me that you have a lemon in your hand. Feel how cold it is since you just took it out of the refrigerator. Feel the shape of it. Now take a knife and cut the lemon into quarters. Careful! Don’t cut yourself. Look at the juice run down over the sides on to your fingers. 

Now, put three of the quarters down and just hold one quarter of the lemon. Now, look at it. Lean down and smell it. Get a good, full sense of the lemon fresh scent of it. OK, now take a big bite out of this freshly cut, tart, yellow lemon. Imagine that lemon juice on your lips, your tongue and your gums. You just bit into this very bitter, juicy lemon.

Right, who feels like they have more saliva in their mouth than they did a minute a go? How can that be? It was only pretend! The reason is because you always react to what your mind thinks about.

So as we fill our minds and soul with the full and glorious picture of Jesus – the most attractive personality, the most compelling individual, the most inspirational figure in human history, let’s be grateful that we have had the privilege of meeting him and let’s commit ourselves afresh to be like him, living holy lives.

Sermon preached at Saint Mary's Long Newton, 9th February 2014

Raised with Christ (1 Corinthians 15.51-57)

In Memory of Doris Ward (3rd May 1915 - 16th December 2013)

The lead singer of the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, now aged 70, was interviewed on a TV chat show a few years ago and was talking about how he keeps going as a youthful rocker. Jagger described the prominent creases on his face as “laugh lines.” The interviewer just smiled and said, “Oh come on, nothing’s that funny”!

The truth is our bodies are getting older, tireder, greyer, wrinklier, achier and for some of us balder every day. Warning, this talk is intended to depress everyone!

Or maybe not, because even if we are all getting older on the outside, the Bible says that those who receive the grace of God are actually getting younger - on the inside. The Bible says “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

Christians are a new creation; new men, new women. In Christ, you get younger every day. Isn’t that good news?

These days, most people have - at best - only a sketchy idea of what the Bible says about life after death. Ask someone on the street what they think about life after death and you’ll probably get one of three answers.

Some will say, a bit like the Corinthians our reading was addressed to, that our disembodied souls kind of float around for eternity. That comes from Greek philosophy. It’s Plato - and is not what the Bible teaches at all.

Secondly, some will say that we reappear in a different form at some future point on this earth. Reincarnation in other words. That’s Hindu or New-Age thinking and is not what the Bible teaches either.

Thirdly, others will say that there is absolutely nothing at all after death. Atheists believe that when you die, that’s it. For the committed sceptic it is silly to engrave the words “Rest in peace” on headstones. Dead people do not rest, they say. Bodies decompose and that’s all there is to say.

But the Christian vision of what happens to us after death is different to all these tree beliefs. And our reading is one of the places in the Bible where the Christian view is explained.

It says “The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”

Our fragile bodies eventually go downhill, die, then decay. Our personality, the real me, the real you, our thoughts, our beliefs stay very much alive. Doris is conscious at this very moment and but is without a body and she is enjoying God’s presence in heaven. One day, when the Lord returns, she will rise with a new, immortal body that will never grow old or tired. In the age to come, all the indignities of our present bodies will be history; the dishonour of our aged, wrinkly frames will be replaced, with something quite glorious.

We have a few illustrations from nature to teach us about these eternal realities. Let me share two of them with you.

The first is the seed and the plant. The genetic make-up of an acorn, its DNA, is identical to the oak tree it becomes. The tree is unrecognisable from the seed it grows from, which may be hundreds of times smaller, and completely different in shape. In the same way, the Bible says that we will be transformed beyond anything we could imagine, completely different. And yet, it’s totally the same thing. The acorn falls into the ground and dies only to become something more glorious. As our reading says, “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

Jesus, after he was raised, was the same Jesus - but different. People knew it was him and yet, curiously, there was something about him, so that people hesitated to go near him and, in fact, didn’t always recognise him at first.

Which brings me to the second illustration from nature; the caterpillar and the butterfly. At just the right time in its life, the caterpillar goes grey and hangs upside down on a branch and weaves a cocoon. It looks like it is creating its own coffin. But inside, it is undergoing transformation. It uses the same atoms it had as a caterpillar, rearranges them, recycles them, in order to emerge, rise, if you like, as a majestic butterfly, no longer crawling but flying! Its environment is no longer limited to the earth. It can now travel in the heavens.

The same is true of us when we die. Our bodies will be recreated, using the same raw materials, but this time equipped to exist on a different level.

I look forward to meeting up with Doris again one day. We’ll both have new bodies with no aches and pains. We’ll be different but certainly recognisable.

If the resurrection is just a fairy story, Jesus’ bones are lying in a tomb somewhere in the Middle East, our faith is futile, Christianity is untrue and Doris Ward wasted a large part of her life believing a lie.

But no. Her work in the Lord’s service, her praying, her encouragement of fellow believers, her stand against evil, her love for others, her giving, the faith she shared, were not in vain.

While her soul rejoices in the glorious presence of God in heaven, he is preparing for her a body able to enjoy him forever in the eternity to come.

It’s common to become overly preoccupied with our health, particularly as we grow older. Doris certainly had no fear of death. In fact, she was ready to go and rather wished it could have been sooner.

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus opened heaven’s doors for all who repent of their sins and turn to him in faith. Because of Christ, we don’t need to fear death any longer. He has decisively nullified the sting of death.

When we know Christ, we know that one day we will be with Him forever and that makes all the difference.

Thank God for Jesus’ promise: “Because I live,” he said, “you also will live.” 

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 8th February 2014