Author: Dave Faulkner

I'm a British Methodist minister, married with two adult children. I blog from a moderate evangelical-missional-charismatic perspective. My interests include digital photography (currently using a Nikon Z8), contemporary music, and watching football (Tottenham Hotspur) and cricket. For my photography, please visit www.flickr.com/photos/davefaulkner

First Sunday in Advent: Living in the Light of his Coming (1 Thessalonians 3:9-13)

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Earlier this week, the death was reported of Hal Lindsey, author of the multi-million-selling 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth. This famous (or in my opinion, infamous) book promoted a crude understanding of prophecy in the Bible and confidently predicted we were in the last days before the Second Coming. The Common Market (not yet the EU at that point) was a sign of the Antichrist, and Chinese armies would be gathering for the Battle of Armageddon. It fascinated and scared people in equal measure.

For me, books like The Late Great Planet Earth bring unfair disrepute on the Bible and careful interpretation of its literature, and also on the doctrine of the Second Coming that we mark today on Advent Sunday. The collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t fit Lindsey’s prophecies, and nor did the failure of Jesus to return within forty years of the re-establishment of the State of Israel.

No wonder we get mocked. No wonder we get embarrassed about the doctrine of Christ’s re-appearing.

Among the early Christians, there was a sizable group in the Thessalonian church that decided ultimately to sell up and wait for the Second Coming, and Paul is not impressed. You hear of the idleness of this group in 2 Thessalonians, which includes Paul’s words that Margaret Thatcher so loved out of context: ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat’ (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

In the verses we read today, Paul gives the Thessalonians (who he dearly loved, despite the wacky behaviour of some) pointers towards how Christians live in the light of Christ’s promised return. We’re going to consider three of them:

Firstly, we live under Providence:

11 Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you.

Paul knows that his life is lived under the sovereignty of God. Even now, in this chaotic, mixed-up, suffering, and sin-infested world, God is in charge. When Christ appears again, God will be in charge but the resistance will be ended.

So right now, God is directing Paul’s life. He is not micro-managing every fine detail, because he leaves room for the limited free will that human beings have, even if he has greater free will than us. This is what we call Providence.

And so Paul looks to the Father and Jesus to ‘clear the way’ to make a visit to Thessalonica possible. We don’t know what obstacles were preventing this, but Paul is expectant that with his greater free will, God will sort things out.

There is a fine balance here where Paul avoids extremes. On the one hand, he knows that as a servant of God he is not free to direct his own life simply as he pleases. God is in charge of his life. On the other, he is not looking for God to do and direct everything at the expense of human responsibility.

If we know that God is reigning now and that one day he will do so without opposition, then we are called today to live under that reign in anticipation of the Second Advent. We are neither to be the people who forget our Lord in between weekly Sunday services nor those who cannot get out of bed in the morning without knowing which clothes he is directing us to wear.

Many of you know how, despite an upbringing in the Methodist church, I went to an Anglican theological college to study when I was exploring God’s call on my life. When it became clear that the call was to ordained ministry, I was unsure whether to remain with my native Methodism or to go over to the Church of England, for which I was seeing a very good advertisement at college.

I consulted various people, but I got to the point that I no longer trusted the advice of any more Methodists or Anglicans, because I thought they all had a vested interest! So I went to see a friend who was the pastor of an Evangelical Free Church, outside both of the ‘competing’ traditions. As we chatted, Colin said something along these lines to me:

I am a pastor in this church, because I grew up in this tradition. I don’t know much about the Methodist or Anglican churches, but I would say this: if you have any belief in the Providence of God, however you understand it, then can you regard your upbringing in Methodism as an accident? And if your upbringing isn’t an accident, then you might have good reasons to leave the Methodist Church, but do you have overwhelming reasons? And if you have overwhelming reasons, are you saying that God has given up on Methodism?

Colin, then, is the person who helped me make that final decision to offer for the Methodist ministry.

Let’s see our lives as purposeful, not accidental, because we are under the Providence of God. In doing so, we anticipate the time when all the roadblocks will be clear and we will live with delight under his reign. We can point to that future by our living.

Secondly, we live in love:

12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.

What is this injunction to love? Is it a kind of moralistic command: ‘You must love!’?

No. When Christ comes again, all that will remain will be life in the context and atmosphere of love. Love will characterise the new creation. The new heavens and the new earth will be filled with love. The citizens of the New Jerusalem will live by love. God will rule and reign in love.

Therefore, to love now is to align ourselves with the destiny of the universe. It may be far from obvious now, but when we love we are going with the grain.

You may have heard the old story which depicts both heaven and hell as places with plenty of food, but with only extremely long chopsticks to eat it. In hell, everyone starves, because they cannot manoeuvre the long chopsticks to feed themselves. It is too clumsy, and even if they do get some morsels between the chopsticks, it falls out before they can get it to their mouths. But in heaven, the place of love, they know the secret: they use the long chopsticks to feed one another.

Loving now is the sign of that future. It is why we cannot be solo Christians. Simon and Garfunkel may have sung, ‘I am a rock, I am an island,’ in contrast to John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’, but John Wesley said, ‘The Bible knows nothing of the solitary Christian’, and I go with Wesley.

Over the years I have been struck by the way our Catholic friends habitually refer to Jesus as ‘Our Lord,’ in contrast to the Protestant emphasis on ‘My Lord.’ Is it any coincidence that they also often refer to themselves as a Catholic community? There is a sense in their speech that they know the Christian life is meant to be lived out together, and that means in mutual love. This is what makes us the community into which the broken and suffering can be invited. By love we can be the fellowship which gives advance notice of the day when ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain’ (Revelation 21:4).

This doesn’t preclude us from acting individually in love for others, of course. Take this story from Friday’s weekly email by James Cary, whom I have quoted a few times before:

You’ve probably not heard of Maria Millis. She was a housekeeper in a loveless upper-class British family. She showed the love of Christ to a little boy starved of affection. That boy came to faith in his teens and grew up to dramatically improve the lives of children, miners and animals. God used a humble, faithful housekeeper to bring blessing to many through that boy, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, celebrated philanthropist and social reformer. Lord Shaftesbury has a long Wikipedia page. Maria Millis doesn’t have one at all even though ‘she started it’.

If we want to point to the future, then, we also do so by love.

Thirdly and finally, we live in holiness:

13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

God’s great future age to come is one where there will no longer be any sin and evil. We don’t know how, and we puzzle over this, but this is what the New Testament affirms.

To be holy means to be set apart for God’s purposes, and putting that into action has moral lifestyle implications, as Paul indicates here by associating the word ‘blameless’ with ‘holy.’

And this call to be blameless and holy is one that Paul addresses not merely to individuals (although that is important) but to the Thessalonians as a church. He longs to see holiness not only as a characteristic of individual virtue, but of our corporate life.

And maybe this is more important than ever in our witness as the church. The scandal around the shocking behaviour of the late John Smyth is that rather than act in righteousness for the victims and survivors of this barbaric man, some key church leaders preferred to cover things up for fear of damaging the institution. I don’t think the world expects the church to be perfect, but it does have a reasonable expectation that we will root out evil when we encounter it.

Nevertheless, whether it’s individual holiness or what John Wesley called ‘social holiness’ we will readily admit it is not always an easy life to live. We therefore take heart from the fact that in this verse Paul begins by saying, ‘May [God] strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy.’ Yes, we need to commit to this, and we cannot avoid our personal responsibility for our actions, but at the same time we are fallible human beings and we seek the strength of God to live like Jesus.

And to strengthen our hearts is not to be taken in the way we talk of the heart today as the centre of our emotions; instead, in Jewish thought the heart was the very core of a person’s entire being. To pray, Lord strengthen our hearts, is to ask him to dig into the deepest parts of us and make us new by his Spirit. That may be painful surgery, but let us welcome it as we seek to anticipate God’s great future by living in holiness.

Conclusion

Live under Providence. Live in love. Live in holiness. How to summarise the spirit of this?

I go to a favourite story about Martin Luther. He said, ‘If I knew that the Lord were coming again tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.’

Friends, let’s go plant a tree.

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Jesus Wins! (Last Sunday Before Advent, Feast of Christ the King) Daniel 7:7-14 with Revelation 1:4-8

Daniel 7:7-14 (with Revelation 1:4-8)

World War One was called ‘The war to end all wars.’ The suffering and depravity of it shocked millions of people around the globe. Despair filled Europe. One Christian leader thought he could change the atmosphere.

That leader was Pope Pius XI. He believed people needed reminding of who was truly in charge, namely Jesus Christ. And so he proclaimed a new feast, the Feast of Christ the King. He said (and you’ll have to excuse the exclusive language of his day),

If men recognise the royal power of Christ privately and publicly, incredible benefits must spread through the civil community, such as a just liberty, discipline, tranquillity, agreement, and peace.

He directed that the feast be observed on the Last Sunday Before Advent, and that made excellent sense. It is the last day of the Christian Year. What begins in Advent with looking forward to the coming of Christ, continues with his birth, life, and ministry in Lent, marks his death and resurrection at Easter, then his Ascension, followed by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, reaches a climax with Christ reigning over all things.

There was just one problem. Not everyone heeded the teaching. Governments in places such as Berlin and Moscow ensured that the rest of the twentieth century was filled up with even more unimaginable and reprehensible evil as they rejected the rule of Christ.

To explore the reign of Christ now and in the future, and the tension with the presence of evil in the world, I’m going to take the final two verses of the Daniel reading as my foundation:

13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

I’m going to interpret this, as the New Testament does, with the ‘son of man’ (NIV) or ‘human being’ (NRSV) being fulfilled by Jesus. There is much more nuance than that involved, but that will do us for our purposes today.

Firstly, let’s consider the reign of Christ now:

You may remember that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record a conversation the disciples have with Jesus where they are in Jerusalem in ‘Holy Week’ and they point to the beauty of the Temple. Jesus replies by telling them that not a stone of it will be left standing, because Rome will come and destroy it. The disciples then ask him when this will happen, and Jesus launches into some prophetic words about the harrowing events that will come.

In that context, he quotes Daniel 7:13, about the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, and many Christians have jumped on these words to think he is now talking about the Second Coming. If Jesus is the Son of Man and he is ‘coming’ then surely this must be his return? People who believe this then get into all sorts of knots about what Jesus says regarding people alive then who will witness this.

But they forget one important detail. When the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven, where does he come to? In Daniel, he doesn’t come to earth: he comes to the Ancient of Days, that is, Almighty God. It is about him returning to heaven. In other words, Jesus is talking about the Ascension. Jesus is reigning at the Father’s right hand from the Ascension onwards.

However, we live in a world where not everyone accepts this. We would rather have others in charge, or perhaps run our own lives. How does that work out? The writer James Cary puts it like this:

We say things like ‘The Prime Minister is running the country’. Could this ever possibly have been true? This is not a comment on Keir Starmer, or his predecessors or successors. I seek only to point out the insanity of the notion that any one single person can run an extremely complex and diverse society of 65 million people – all of whom seek to be their own king or queen. Premiership after premiership has ended in failure with ever increasing rapidity. Keir Starmer, impressively, has saved time by starting with failure. That’s rare but, at least, efficient.

So what’s required of us? As God’s people, we are a colony of his coming kingdom. One classic definition of the church is to say that we are a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom. It is our calling to live under that reign and seek to bring people and all of creation under that reign, too. We see the vision of that in verse 14:

He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

We are junior partners in God’s project to usher in the day when ‘all nations and peoples of every language’ will worship Jesus Christ.

That means first of all bringing our own lives in order under his Lordship. The very fact that we have seen safeguarding scandals where church leaders were more concerned to protect the reputation of the church than the welfare of victims and survivors has had a devastating effect on the church’s witness. In the light of the John Smyth scandal, the radio broadcaster Nicky Campbell said on air that there was no way he would now ever consider the Christian faith. Campbell is on record as saying he was abused as a youngster.

But then a Christian woman came on his show and told her own story of abuse. And she told him how the church and her faith had helped her come through the experience. With great integrity, Campbell softened his position on Christianity as a result of her testimony.

We need then both to live our lives under the reign of Christ, which includes using power when we have it in a godly way, and taking the side of the last and the least in our world, as Jesus did. We also need to be inviting others to do the same.

And this links secondly with the reign of Christ to come:

I said that the Gospels use Daniel 7:13 about the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven to mean the Ascension. But Revelation 1 doesn’t. John chops off the bit about coming to the Ancient of Days and puts it with some words from Zechariah 12:

7 ‘Look, he is coming with the clouds,’
    and ‘every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him’;
    and all peoples on earth ‘will mourn because of him.’
So shall it be! Amen.

Now we do have the appearing of Christ again in view. This is the time when all nations and peoples of every language will worship him. It is the time Paul spoke of in Philippians 2 when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

We may long for that day when all will be good and true, when society will be just, when darkness in all its forms will be banished. This is our great hope. Just as God remade Jesus’ body in the Resurrection, so he will remake all things. It gives us that longing to say, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’ And when we come to Holy Communion, our sharing in a small piece of bread and a sip of wine makes us ache for the heavenly banquet, the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Our critics would say this is classic ‘pie in the sky when you die.’ But it isn’t, if we understand it properly. Because this vision makes us restless with hope now. This hope drives us to action.

On Tuesday, one of the greatest preachers of our generation, the American Baptist minister and sociologist Tony Campolo, died at the age of 89. I heard him preach a few times when I was in my twenties and his emphasis on true discipleship involving not just belief but also committed action on behalf of the poor influenced many thousands of Christians.

On Wednesday, I watched a video of an old sermon of his from Spring Harvest.

In it, he tells contrasting stories of two students he knew from the university where he taught. One went on a mission trip to a developing country and came back saying, I am going to train as a doctor and then go and serve these people. He did train as a doctor, but instead of keeping his promise he became a cosmetic surgeon. He didn’t practise the kind of cosmetic surgery that helps people who have suffered life-changing accidents: he practised the sort that only the wealthy and vain pay for. Yes, he was a lay leader at his church, and yes, he tithed his income. But in Campolo’s eyes he blew it, because he was seduced by wealth and didn’t serve the poor.

The other student went from Campolo’s university in Philadelphia to Harvard Law School, and qualified to practise law. He was offered a lucrative job with a $500,000 annual salary, but he turned it down. He moved to Alabama to defend prisoners on death row. Many of them were on death row, because they couldn’t afford good lawyers, so he didn’t charge the fees he could have earned elsewhere. For him, it was an outworking of Jesus’ Beatitude, ‘Blessèd are the merciful.’

Which one followed Jesus? Which one anticipated the everlasting dominion of Christ? I think you know.

Apart from the obvious teaching of Jesus, what motivated Tony Campolo to make this emphasis his life’s defining characteristic? He used to tell a story of how people would ask him why he was so relentlessly cheerful in a world so full of pain and injustice. His reply?

‘I believe the Bible, and I’ve peeked at the final chapter. And Jesus wins.’

In other words, his commitment to the poor of the world was driven by his vision of Christ the King. He is reigning now, but currently not everyone acknowledges it. While waiting for the glorious day, Campolo called all who call themselves Christians not to be mere believers: after all, he said, the devil believes all the right doctrines about God. Jesus didn’t say go into all the world and make believers: he said go into all the world and make disciples. And that will involve us doing Jesus-like things, such as caring and advocating for the downtrodden.

You or I may not be a lawyer or a doctor. We may not hold some socially prestigious position. But all of us have opportunities to serve the disadvantaged in some way. We do it, because on the great day when Christ rules as King without any more resistance, there will be no more downtrodden, no more disadvantaged, no more poor, no more suffering of injustice. So we prepare for it now.

Remember: Jesus wins. Let’s get ready for that day.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 8: A Grateful Receiver (Philippians 4:10-23)

Philippians 4:10-23

Over the years, I have learned as a preacher that there are a few topics you can preach on that can easily make your hearers feel guilty. One is prayer: who can honestly say that they pray enough? Another is evangelism: many of us feel nervous about that and so it’s easy to ladle on the guilt.

And one other is giving: it’s easy to tug on the emotions on that subject. Just look at the highly emotive advertisements many charities produce, if you doubt me. Preachers can do something similar.

Well, today’s passage is about giving. But it’s in reverse. Paul speaks as the recipient, not the giver. And although elsewhere he quotes Jesus as saying, ‘It is more blessèd to give than to receive,’ here he tells his friends in Philippi about the grace of receiving.

It struck me that this would be a helpful approach to adopt. Some of us find it hard to receive. Others of us are rather too keen to receive!

So you’ve heard all those sermons down the years about being a cheerful giver; this is about being a gracious receiver.

I’ve identified three traits of a gracious receiver in these verses.

Firstly, thankfulness:

10 I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it.

Paul was so grateful that he ‘rejoiced greatly.’

I expect that when you were young you were taught to write thank-you notes to people who had given you birthday or Christmas presents. The age of the handwritten note may be fading away, but our kids still ask us for the mobile phone numbers of the people who have given them presents, so that they can send them text messages. In fact, every Christmas Day at present-opening time I sit there with sheets of paper, recording who gave what to whom, so these lists can be used for the thank-you messages.

How different this is from Trick Or Treat at Halloween, which is like a small-scale demanding of gifts with menaces. At least some things happen now to moderate that and to reduce the fear some elderly people have, by kids only going to houses with pumpkins outside. Whatever would happen to the economy of Rogate otherwise?

Thankfulness is an important discipline that reminds us all of life is a gift. We don’t need to wait for our annual harvest festival to affirm that ‘All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.’

We may have saved for certain things. We may have earned them with hard work. But they are still gifts, because all that is good comes from the hand of God. We are dependent on the giving nature of our God for life itself and all its accoutrements.

God is a giver. The sun shines and the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. In the Parable of the Sower, the farmer distributes the seed everywhere with an almost reckless extravagance.

Therefore thankfulness, especially when practised towards God, is a reminder of God’s grace. Whether he gives directly to us or through someone else, it is pure gift. It is not based on what we deserve, only on what we need and what he delights to give us.

We are thankful to a generous God. But this is something it took me many years to grasp. I came up in a family where the default financial atmosphere was one of struggle. That my parents couldn’t give my sister and me as much as our friends received from their Mums and Dads is something I carried over into my image of God. Yes, God the Father was a giver, but he only just about gave what we needed to scrape by.

I have learned differently since. I still affirm that God is Father, and not an indulgent grandfather. He doesn’t want spoilt brats for his children. But he is good, and he is generous, and these are all reasons for thankfulness.

In the ancient form of Christian prayer called the Examen, each evening we review the day that is about to pass, and we look back for where we can rejoice with thankfulness at what God has done. It’s an encouraging practice. I commend it to you.

Secondly, contentment:

Paul goes on to say,

11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

Remember, Paul is sending this letter from prison in Rome. In those days, prisoners did not have their basic needs met by the state. If one of your family was imprisoned, you needed to supply them with the basics of life, even including food and drink. This is why Paul depends on gifts like these ones from his friends the Philippians.

What a contrast this is from when he was Saul, the up-and-coming scholar who also ran his tentmaking business. He was probably quite comfortably off then. He has experienced such oscillations in his standard of living.

But in the middle of such tumultuous changes in his lifestyle over the years, he can affirm that ‘I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.’

I don’t know whether you have been through similar ups and downs. I am sure some of you have. I certainly have. As I said a moment ago, my upbringing was financially challenging. But then when I was working as a single person, things were a lot easier. They were fine when we first got married.

Until we had children and Debbie ceased from paid work. Well do I remember the year when we would not have been able to afford new school uniform for one of our two unless I had received a funeral fee. For at that time, our friends at HMRC had managed to double-count my income and deny us the Child Tax Credits we were entitled to. On more than one occasion we only got the tax credits we were due thanks to the intervention of our MP.

Yet – did God change during that time? I would say ‘No.’ We still had whatever we needed, even if sometimes it was by the skin of our teeth.

God doesn’t change in his faithfulness. He doesn’t guarantee us wealth, but he does commit to looking after us in what he gives us. Perhaps Proverbs 30:8 puts it in a balanced way:

keep falsehood and lies far from me;
    give me neither poverty nor riches,
    but give me only my daily bread.

When we live in such an acquisitive society with its desire for more, more, more, what could be a more countercultural sign of living under God’s kingdom than doing so with contentment, because God is faithful?

Thirdly, reverence:

I’d like you to notice how Paul describes the Philippians’ generous gifts to him in verse 18:

I have received full payment and have more than enough. I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.

This is the language of temple worship: ‘a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.’ Paul sees the package Epaphroditus has brought from Philippi as way more than a food parcel. He treats the giving of the Philippians as being an act of worship to God. Therefore, he handles it with reverence. Their gifts are holy.

Now I am sure that in one sense that is exactly how the Philippians regarded their giving. To supply Paul’s needs was something they did as an expression of their faith. Their love for God is a response to God’s love for them in the gift of Jesus Christ.

Therefore, a fitting response of worship is for them to give. And just as the giving of sacrifices in the Old Testament often constituted support for the temple workers such as the priests and Levites who had no land of their own where they could farm animals for their food, so here the Philippians give as an act of worship to support a worker in the new temple, namely their apostle. Paul recognises what they are doing. It’s worship. Their gifts should be handled with holiness.

Some of you have heard me say that when I first wanted to go to theological college, I was denied a student grant. (Remember them?) God provided for me financially in a remarkable way. I cannot tell you the whole story now, but I want to pull out one example of the generous giving. An elderly and very prayerful single lady in the church gave me a cheque for a large sum of money. With it she wrote a letter. In it she said, ‘It seems that God is calling you to trust him to supply your needs. We will trust him to meet our needs, too.’ Those words told me that her giving was a sacrifice. It was an act of worship.

All this is why I’m not so keen to refer to the monetary gifts we bring forward in the service as ‘The collection.’ Collections are OK, if not good, such as when we hold a collection for a good cause. But what we give to the Lord is not a collection because he’s in need: he owns the cattle on a thousand hills, as the Psalmist says.

No: it’s an offering. We dedicate it. We treat it with reverence. We pray for those who will handle it. It’s part of our worship.

Conclusion

You may have seen the news story in the week about the death of the famous actor Timothy West at the age of 90. He had been married to the actress Prunella Scales for 61 years. And you may well know that in their final years together West was caring for his wife through dementia. One of the news reports showed a clip of them a year or so ago when they had reached their diamond wedding. The reporter asked what it was like being married for that long. Prunella struggled for words, but then planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek, and said, ‘Thank you.’ It was a beautiful moment.

There is a beauty in being thankful, being content, and treating gifts with reverence. It offers beauty back to the giver and gives glory to the Great Giver himself.

Sure, it is more blessèd to give than to receive. But this is one way in which that giver is blessed.

So let us never tire of being thankful. We have an eternity of thankfulness ahead of us.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 7: And Finally (Philippians 4:1-9)

Philippians 4:1-9

For many years now, ITN’s News At Ten bulletin has had the tradition of the ‘And Finally’ item: a lighter item of news with which to close the broadcast after half an hour of unremitting doom.

The tradition continues to this day, and even has its own website. Going there, I discovered that recent stories included a girl from Sunderland whose message in a bottle reached Sweden; a man who has made a calendar from pictures of the M60 motorway; and another man who hopes to be the first disabled skier to reach the South Pole.

When we get to Philippians chapter 4, we’re getting into ‘And Finally’ territory in the letter. It’s the final chapter. We might have thought Paul was about to sign off at the beginning of chapter 3 which begins with the word ‘Finally’, but like the enthusiastic preacher that just means, ‘Here come another two chapters.’

But now, and in next week’s reading, Paul is wrapping up his thoughts. This is almost like the ‘Any Other Business’ section of a committee meeting. There are a last few items he wants to cover that he hasn’t been able to fit under any of the themes earlier in the letter.

The ‘AOB’ we shall cover this week are mainly matters of pastoral wisdom; next week we’ll look at some personal remarks Paul makes.

Firstly, stand firm:

Verse 1:

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

Stand firm in what sense? Note that Paul begins with the word ‘Therefore.’ He’s referring back to what he’s just said, which I preached about last week. He urged his readers to stay focussed on Christ and the end of all things rather than leaving God out of the picture and only concentrating on earthly desires and making an idol of sensual yearnings.

This is a ‘stand firm’ in the sense of our lifestyle. To choose this way of life is not always easy. We will be subjected to pressure from our society. We are bombarded with messages, not only in advertising, that tell us we should buy things we don’t need. You could even argue that our economy depends on us doing so. If you want to see this in action, go back to 9/11 and remember that the first thing President George W Bush told the American people to do afterwards was ‘go shopping.’

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that Christians cannot enjoy good things. Of course we can, when we can in all conscience do so with thankfulness to God. But we have a higher calling than just satisfying materialistic desires.

Pray too for younger Christians living among the pressure to turn all romantic relationships into sexual ones at an early stage, rather than waiting for marriage.

And the church has got sucked into this, oscillating from its prude-like past to validating this, that, and all sorts of sexual experiences, to the point where many single Christians have felt alienated. But their witness – often costly – to the truth that ultimate meaning is not found in a romantic relationship but in Christ is one we need to hear, but which has been devalued.

So firstly, let’s stand firm in seeking our meaning and our value in Christ and in eternity.

Secondly, be united:

 2 I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

What has happened here? Two women who had been co-workers with Paul in spreading the Gospel have now so fallen out with each other that he needs to ask someone else to mediate in order to restore the relationship. Of course, we don’t know anything about people falling out with each other in the church today, do we?

Except that every time I say something like that in a sermon I get reactions that include nervous laughter and awkward facial expressions.

Because, tragically, today we know only too well. I expect you can tell tales of arguments and verbal fisticuffs in church circles.

My problem comes when people try to laugh it off or minimise it. “Oh, that’s just Mrs Jones, she’s always like that.”

I’m sorry, that just won’t do. People get hurt. Christian witness gets damaged.

Now maybe as a minister I end up in the firing line more than other Christians, especially when I don’t do what some people want me to, but I can tell you stories of when church members have made up false stories about me, and – with no exaggeration – libelled both my wife and me.

We talk about the Internet being a Wild West where keyboard warriors think they can say anything they like, however hurtful, behind the protection of a screen, and – they hope – anonymity. But similar things have been happening in churches for years.

And it’s serious, because the Gospel is a message of reconciliation. It’s not just personal, private reconciliation with God through the forgiveness of our sins – although it is that. It’s also about being reconciled to one another, and the building of a new community that is a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom.

So our commitment to good and healthy relationships in the church matters. Let’s never forget that Jesus died for our unity.

Thirdly, be positive:

4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Now I’ll be honest with you and say this is the section of today’s sermon that I most have to preach to myself. For those of you who don’t know, I live with depression. It runs in my family. I am blessed in that mine does not require medication.

So I can read this list of positive qualities to which Paul calls us – rejoicing, gentleness, turning anxiety to prayer and finding the peace of God – and know that too often I can be miserable, grumpy, and despairing. Maybe a negative incident will have triggered me. But sometimes, the dark cloud just seems to blow in over my life.

And maybe some of you also struggle to rejoice and be positive, too. The Good News for us is that these qualities of rejoicing, gentleness, and peace are not simply things that can be flicked on like a switch – if only they could – but are an outworking of the Gospel. They come to us as Jesus invites us to get our eyes back on him and away from ourselves.

Yes, every one of these flow from Jesus and the Gospel. His love for us despite our sin is a source of wonder and hence of rejoicing. His grace, mercy, and forgiveness engender gentleness in us, because we want to be like him in response. His trustworthiness and his reign at the Father’s right hand give us confidence to pray and reason to be peaceful rather than anxious.

Some of us will express this by jumping for joy. Others of us, especially more introverted types like me, will do it in a quieter way. And yes, my kids have asked me, “Dad, is there anything that gets you excited?” Actually, there is a good number of things that do, it’s just that excitability is not my default state of mind.

Even if circumstances are discouraging, let’s get our minds on Jesus and the Gospel. Because, as the title of a recent Christian worship music project says, we may have downcast souls but we can still have expectant hearts.

Fourthly and finally, be focussed:

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me – put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

Too often in the church we are what one author called ‘cultural Christians.’ It’s been happening since the earliest centuries of the church. We profess faith in Christ, but we imbibe so much of the surrounding culture that it dictates our thoughts and affections more than Christ does. Think of what we watch on TV, the books or magazines that we read, the music or other entertainment that we enjoy. All these things have their own moral values behind them, which may or may not be compatible with Christian faith.

I believe this is one strong reason why a lot of our moral and ethical decision-making as Christians is often indistinguishable from the world, when Jesus expects us to be distinct.

I’m not saying that we should only listen to Christian music and only read Christian books – although frankly a lot more reading of good Christian literature would make an improvement to the spiritual temperature in many churches. But we must be careful what captures our hearts and minds. That is why Paul says we need to take care to fill our minds with what is good, pure, and beautiful.

And if we need to fill our minds with that which is good and godly, the other side of the coin is that we are not to empty our minds. One of the dangers with some forms of meditation that can accompany yoga classes and other practices is that it is based on emptying the mind. But if we empty our minds, then we leave them vacant for all sorts of unhelpful and unsavoury things. It is far better to take a Christian approach to meditation based on the sort of things Paul advocates here, where we fill our minds with what is good and virtuous.

So it’s worth seeking out recommendations of Christ-honouring and beautiful art and culture. And if we find ourselves in a situation where someone wants us to empty our minds in order to meditate, then we either need to withdraw or we need to disregard their instruction and meditate on a verse or passage of Scripture. These are practices that will help us focus on the truth and beauty of our God.

Conclusion

So these four items of Any Other Business are not immediately related to each other – standing firm, being united, positive, and focussed – but together they do form good practices for formation in Christ and hence for Christian discipleship. I commend them to you, and next week I’ll finish my series on Philippians with another virtuous discipline – thankfulness.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 6: Gotta Serve Somebody (Philippians 3:15-21)

Philippians 3:15-21

What do you think the Apostle Paul’s musical taste was? If he were alive in our generation, I would put him down as a likely Bob Dylan fan. Because today’s passage fits very well with his song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’:

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody, he sings. And there appear to be those same two stark choices in life laid out in Philippians 3. On the one hand we have

18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

And on the other we have

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

A nice, simple binary choice.

Or if you don’t like Bob Dylan, then maybe you’ll take someone I’ve quoted before, St Augustine of Hippo, who said that the key to our lives is not our thinking but our affections. Who or what are we devoted to? The great Augustinian scholar James K A Smith puts it like this: ‘You Are What You Love.’ He says there is spiritual power in what we devote ourselves to habitually.

So Paul asks us here: who are we going to serve? Who or what will have our love and devotion?

Let’s hear Option One again:

18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

At the end of every week, the BBC News website has a fun quiz on the week’s news with seven questions. This week’s finished with a question about the theft of luxury cheese from the famous Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, and the final screen, which told you how many answers you got right assigned you a famous quotation about cheese accordingly.

For those who got all seven right, the quotation was from the comedian Steven Wright: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” Those like me who scored between four and six were assigned words by the French man of letters Eugène Briffault: “Cheese complements a good meal and supplements a bad one.” Those who scored between zero and three had a Spanish proverb: “I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

“I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

The problem for many of us is that metaphorically we do want the cheese while still getting out of the trap. To change the food proverb, we want to have our cake and eat it.

For having taken God out of the picture, all we are left with is devotion to our senses: ‘their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.’ We place a priority on satisfying our bodily desires – not that food is unnecessary, but that we elevate things like that above the level of necessity and staple, because without God to satisfy our deepest needs we turn to lesser things to gratify ourselves. They become ends in themselves.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that in a world like Paul’s that was full of temple prostitution he says ‘their glory is in their shame.’ A good and beautiful gift of God is turned into something that is only about personal pleasure. Thus today, sex is no longer the sign of the covenant between a man and a woman for life, now it is something we purely do for our own pleasure, just so long as the other person consents. We have so detached it from the covenant of marriage that we now have ‘friends with benefits’, where two people, usually single, agree that if one of them needs their urges fulfilling, the other one will oblige, just so long as they don’t become romantically attached.

This is the world of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser, who infamously said, ‘We don’t do God.’ Campbell may have only meant that in in the context of politics, but in a culture where we generally don’t do God then people seek satisfaction elsewhere in merely human things. ‘Their mind is set on earthly things.’ That’s all you can focus on then. Our sensual desires are a natural avenue in such circumstances.

And as Paul says, that’s disastrous: ‘Their destiny is destruction.’ When the ultimate reality is actually God and not our own senses, but we put him out of the picture and devote our affections purely to our own sensory desires, then there can only be one end result. If God is going to make all things new but we are just interested in our physical satisfaction now, then there can be no place for us in eternity. It’s that bleak, and that logical.

So now let’s restate Option Two:

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Here’s where we place our devotion. Here’s where we set our affections as Christians. We look to Christ and to eternity. We gratefully acknowledge that Jesus knows all about the frailties and weaknesses of our bodies and he will make them new in the resurrection of the dead. Instead of loving the creation, we love the One who is the Creator and the Re-Creator of all he has made. To worship the creation is to set our hearts on an idol; to worship the Creator gives us proper focus and perspective.

Our guiding principle for living becomes that of Jesus’ teaching and considering eternity: what will the creation be like when it is made new? I do not know how our bodies will be sustained in eternity, but I do know Jesus refers to feasting in the life to come. I will leave the details to him. In the meantime, I will seek to look after my body because he made it, but that body will not be my focus, Jesus will.

And in contrast to our society’s obsession with sex, I will remember Jesus’ eternal perspective that there will no longer be marrying and giving in marriage in the age to come. For since death will have been abolished, we shall no longer need to replace those who have died.

More generally, if Jesus has ‘the power that enables him to bring everything under his control’, then my goal will be to place my life under his control. What he says matters, because in his life he showed us what a life under his control looks like.

If you ‘gotta serve somebody’ and you choose the Lord, it looks something like this, says Paul.

But here’s the problem. We know all this. I daresay we aspire to all this. But what about the times when we succumb to ‘Option One’ living instead of this ‘Option Two’? How about the occasions when we allow our sensory desires to dictate our actions, rather than Christ, eternity, and the new creation? Are we no better than anyone else? Are we condemned? Do we lose our salvation?

In response I’m going to follow material from a recent article by Dr Jason Swan Clark, a former church leader and college principal who is now moving into the area of spiritual direction. This is how he talks about his conversion when he was a young man:

As I consider my faith, I am grateful that the youth leader who led me to Christ invited me to follow Jesus and exchange my life, plans, and past for one where “I would have something to live for, die for, meaning, adventure and purpose, every day of my life”. My sin has always worked against that salvation story and sought to create an anti-story. To repent means to realise how my sin has disordered me and moved me away from my story with God and to return to my adventure in Christ. 

He says that for us, sin is like what we do when we are asleep and don’t want to wake up. Confession is to wake up – to the truth. And here’s how he describes sin:

The greatest lie of the enemy is that I am free to create myself into any image I want to and, even worse, expect God to comply with my directions to him about my self-creations.

God wakes us up to our true identity and destiny. The Good News is this:

God is very aware of our past sins, but what if his principal interest in them was how they stop us from discovering and living into and out of who he made us to be? God loves us into being and wants us to be free from how Sin forms us away from Him. God meets us within this at our affective and psychological levels.

Note that: ‘God meets us at our affective … levels’ – our affections and loves, the very things I set out at the beginning. He knows our affections are truly for him, but that we have let our desires become disordered, and he describes confession and forgiveness by recounting some words from St Thérèse of Lisieux, the famous nineteenth century Carmelite nun who died from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four. She wrote these to a priest:

I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that he deserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asked his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows.  He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by the heart.

Here is God’s discipline of those who fail but truly want to serve him: he punishes us … with a kiss.

So when we are faced with the fact that we ‘gotta serve somebody’, let us not choose the indulgence of our senses by not ‘doing God’; let us place our affections and desires on Jesus Christ, keeping our vision on his coming new creation, and knowing that when we fail him he will restore us with a kiss.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 5: The Wrong Passport (Philippians 3:1-14)

Philippians 3:1-14

When we go abroad, we have a problem at Passport Control. Many ports, airports, and train termini have automated electronic passport checking. No human being required. It makes things faster.

Or it should.

But not in our case. Because when our current passports were delivered by the postie, the dog collected them from the letterbox and added his own teeth-based signature to my wife’s passport. The teeth marks went through the electronic chip. Returning from her last foreign jaunt to see the ABBA Museum in Stockholm, the Swedish authorities were very sniffy about this, seeking additional ID, and telling her that she really needed a replacement passport.

The journey of our lives is meant to take us, in Paul’s word, ‘heavenwards’ (verse 14). What passport will get us in when we arrive?

What Paul talks about in our passage is how he knew he had had the wrong passport and how easy that is for religious people.

Look how he lists his religious qualifications to prove what an impeccable Jew he was:

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

You couldn’t be better than that. And that little word ‘zeal’ points us to what kind of Pharisee he was. In his day, there were two competing schools of Pharisees: those who followed Rabbi Hillel, and those who followed Rabbi Shammai. The Hillelites were lenient, and the Shammaites were strict. The Hillelites had a ‘live and let live’ approach to the political authorities, just so long as they could study God’s Law in peace, but the Shammaites said peace would only come when Israel was free from Gentile oppressors. Guess which one Paul was? A Shammaite.[1]

But whereas for the modern Christian ‘zeal’ is something you do on your knees, or in evangelism, or in works of charity, for the first century Jew ‘zeal’ was something you did with a knife.[2]

You wanted a pure, undiluted Jew? Paul thought he was pretty much there. But on the Damascus Road he had discovered it wasn’t putting him in God’s favour: it was putting him in opposition to God, even persecuting him.

I had a pretty good passport, too, or so I thought. Methodism was almost embedded in my DNA. When my sister took over the family ancestry work from our father, she concluded that she and I had been ‘fifth generation, same congregation.’ Our family’s involvement with our home church, Edmonton Methodist, had gone back five generations to a woman who joined the ladies’ meeting.

It did me no good. In fact, it led me astray. I thought that Christianity equalled believing in God plus doing good things. Salvation by works, as we call it. I thought I was close to God. In reality, I was a long way away.

As a minister, I have had people start attending one of my churches on a Sunday, having moved into the area and previously belonged to another church. They have asked to be considered for membership ‘if [they] were good enough.’ Those words are a sure sign of someone who holds the wrong passport.

And I still get people who, on their first meeting with me, want to tell me all about their Methodist heritage and what good Methodists they are. My heart sinks. If they are relying on their Methodist credentials, then they have the wrong passport.

What I need to hear about is their love for Jesus. Because that is the right passport.

And Paul tells his readers that our passport for our heavenly journey is – Christ:

7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

That old passport based on his religious credentials? He considers it ‘loss’, in fact he calls it ‘garbage’ in our refined and delicate English translations. The word is actually a little less cultivated than that. It’s what we flush down the loo. I’m sorry if you’re shocked, but that’s what it is.

All that relying on our Christian heritage as our way to heaven needs to be flushed away. When we rely on that, it’s toxic. It needs to go.

The right passport is Christ, not us. Our heavenly destiny depends on our union with him and on his virtues, not ours.

Think of it like marriage vows. At the giving of the rings in the current Methodist Worship Book service, the words the bride and groom say to each other include these:

All that I am I give to you,
and all that I have I share with you[3]

In older generations, the words will have been, ‘All my worldly goods I thee endow.’

Coming into relationship with Christ is like this. We give him all we have. He gives us all he has. We give him our sin (which he disposes of at the Cross). He gives us his righteousness. And having the righteousness of Christ by repentance of those sins we have given him and by faith in him is what qualifies us for the passport for our heavenly journey.

The problem with the wrong passport, the one that lists our religious bona fides, is that it is about pride. Look at me. Look at how good I am. Look at what I’ve achieved. Me, me, me.

But the right passport is him, him, him. Christ has died for us. Christ has been raised to new life for us. Christ reigns on high.

When our daughter recently wanted to change jobs, she updated her CV and sent it off to various employers. But it is no good presenting our religious CV as our heavenly passport. It does not pass muster. It cannot reach the heights of the heavenly standards, because those have been set by Christ.

If we want the heavenly passport, we need to be relying entirely on Jesus.

Why say this to a group of people, most of whom have embraced the Christian faith for decades? Because Paul knew there was a danger of lapsing back into old ways of thinking. It had happened to the Galatians. He seems here to be wanting to put in preventative measures so it doesn’t happen to the Philippians.

Let’s examine ourselves and make sure we haven’t lapsed back into using the wrong passport. Let’s make certain that we are relying entirely on Christ as our passport to glory.

Now that might be a good place to conclude. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He has something else to say here, and it’s about living with the right passport:

10 I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

This union with Christ where we give him all we have and he gives us all he has leads to certain implications. Just as in a healthy marriage the couple get to know each other more deeply (even if men will never really understand women, and women will never really understand men) so we shall want to know Christ. And just as a couple will share one another’s sorrows and joys so we shall enter more deeply into both the suffering and the resurrection of Jesus.

But what does all that mean? Knowing Christ means we engage ever more deeply with his teaching. We read it in the Scripture. We ponder its meaning. We start putting it into practice.

Sharing in his sufferings and becoming like him in his death means that we too pay the cost of doing what is right and godly. And we also allow our hearts to be broken by the things that break his.

Attaining to the resurrection of the dead shows where we are heading, just as Jesus did, who was the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead, according to 1 Corinthians 15.

All in all, that union with Christ that provides our heavenly passport is like taking up all the marriage vows with him:

For better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
from this day forward[4]

We just delete the words ‘until we are parted by death’, because this is a union for eternity.

Therefore, union with Christ which provides our heavenly passport is not simply a ticket to heaven. It is a relationship that stretches into eternity. But it begins now.

Moreover, this is not just an individual thing. For we in the church in all our marital diversity – single, married, divorced, widowed – are together the Bride of Christ. And therefore this union with Christ that takes us to glory is something we work out together – not just united with Christ but united with one another. We cannot take the journey alone. As the church we are not just a bunch of snooker balls who bounce off each other every Sunday morning, we are a community that together works out the joys and sorrows of union with Christ.

And it’s OK to admit that we haven’t got our act together perfectly yet, that we are a project in the making, that – as Paul said in chapter 1 of Philippians, he who began a good work in us will complete it on the day of Christ Jesus. It’s OK to admit that – as long as we are committed to the relationship with Christ and each other and to its continual deepening. Paul himself knew he wasn’t the finished article, but he put his name to that development of the relationship. For as he said at the end of today’s passage:

12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, 14 I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.

I hope and pray that’s what we’ve all signed up for. Rejecting the wrong passport of boasting about our religious credentials; taking up the true passport of Christ; and living out that union with Christ together.

That is what church is.

[1] Tom Wright, What St Paul Really Said, p26.

[2] Op. cit., p27.

[3] Methodist Worship Book, p375.

[4] Op. cit., p374.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 4: Shining Like Stars (Philippians 2:12-30)

Philippians 2:12-30

I’ve talked before about how my late father was an amateur astronomer, and how he shared his love of the subject with me as a child. I never picked up his level of interest, but he was understandably proud of one of my sister’s boys who went on to study astrophysics as part of his first degree.

But I still have fond memories of gazing up into a clear night sky with him, while he pointed out various constellations, and the names of the stars.

When my daughter as a teenager started asking me the same questions when we were walking home at night from her youth club, I installed an app on my phone that we could point to the sky and it would show us what all the stars and constellations were.

And recently my wife has been noticing these heavenly objects when we have been out on late night dog walks. So for her birthday I bought her a planisphere, a printed resource that helps you identify the planets and the stars.

I still get a thrill – and a poignant memory – when I see Orion or The Plough. I often think of Psalm 8 and get a sense of wonder and even of worship:

3 When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?

In today’s passage Paul doesn’t call us to gaze in wonder at the stars but figuratively to emulate them:

Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky (verse 15b)

In the world, our calling is to shine like stars in a dark sky. We are to be those points of light in the darkness. Rather than just moan about all the darkness around us, we get on with shining with the light of Christ.

We do this, says Paul, under his call to

continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose.

God has saved us for a purpose. He has made us new. Now we live out that newness of life – but not on our own, because God is at work in us to make it possible. And this will make us like shining stars in the darkness of the world.

So what qualities does Paul say will enable the Philippians to shine like stars in their dark world? I think we’ll find that things haven’t changed that much.

Firstly, kindness:

14 Do everything without grumbling or arguing, 15 so that you may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’

Well, that should be a shoo-in, shouldn’t it? Don’t grumble or argue.

Unfortunately, it isn’t in some churches. It is more widespread than some of us would like to believe, especially when we tell ourselves that our churches are friendly and welcoming.

Now I freely admit that as a minister I am sensitive to this one, because we church leaders are often the target of the grumbling, when people don’t like what we do or what we don’t do. You may know the old joke where the question is: ‘What’s the favourite Sunday lunch in a Christian household?’ The answer? ‘Roast preacher.’

And I also know that some of this grumbling comes our way because in these days of declining and aging congregations, people pin massive hopes on a new minister being the one to turn around the losses. Which is why at one previous circuit welcome service I quoted the famous line from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ The job of Messiah was taken two thousand years ago.

I’m also sensitive to this, though, not for the barbs thrown at people like me, but because in my position I hear the stories of those who have left a church, having been wounded by cruel words and actions. Do you know the damage caused by a harsh word in church?

More positively, did you notice just how highly Paul rates the idea of avoiding grumbling and arguing? He says it contributes to us being ‘blameless and pure.’ So often when we think about what makes us blameless and pure we think about the avoidance of certain ‘big’ sins, not least those involving sexual impurity. And I’m certainly not denying that these things are important.

But here, Paul says that if we want to be ‘blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation’’, then saying no to grumbling and arguing in the church is also part of this.

And doing this also makes us shine: we become ‘without fault in a warped and crooked generation’. A Christian community that chooses kindness over harshness will stand out in society. Indeed, we shine like stars in the dark sky.

When we are among our friends outside the church, can we truly say that the congregation we belong to is such a wonderful place of kindness and care, where people are not ripped apart by the words of others but rather are built up? Wouldn’t it be great if our churches were known in their communities as the places where people receive kindness?

Secondly, faithfulness:

Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky 16 as you hold firmly to the word of life.

Faithfulness – to the Gospel: ‘hold firmly to the word of life.’ This isn’t just an internal thing in the church, by the way: it’s also outward-facing, since it can also be translated, ‘hold out the word of life.’ In the church and in the world, we are called to hold faithfully to the Gospel, because that will make us shine like stars in the dark sky.

For too long now, we have heard church leaders say that we should adapt our message to the society we live in, because parts of it are unacceptable today. But the moment we just make Christianity like a religious version of the wider culture, then there is no longer any reason to join the church. Why join something that is just like how you are already, anyway? There is no point.

No: the only hope for the church to be like shining stars in the dark sky is if we keep to the Gospel, even and especially where it differs from the culture in which we live.

And if you don’t believe me, then listen to the respected historian Tom Holland. He has been on quite a journey in his thinking and in his life. In 2016, he wrote,

It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.

He realised that we owe the good things in our society to our Christian foundations and began an excursion into the message of Christianity.

Recently, he has publicly urged churches to ‘keep Christianity weird’, and to ‘preach the weird stuff’. All those crucial values we cherish actually have their basis in the weird stuff of Christianity like the miraculous, not least the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus.

The church leaders and members who trumpet how the resurrection is just a way of saying someone stays in our memory, or that the ascension is a fairy-tale and the second coming is science fiction are not doing the church any good at all. They are doing the church a grave dis-service. They are removing all power from the Gospel and leaving it like a limp lettuce leaf.

If anyone comes into your church’s pulpit and starts preaching this stuff, do not just dismiss it and say, ‘It’s interesting to hear diverse opinions’, or ‘Let’s live with contradictory convictions.’ No! See them for what they are: wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Let’s stay faithful to the Gospel in all its weirdness: that’s where the power to transform lives is.

Thirdly, service:

Here I’m thinking of what Paul says at the end of the reading about Timothy and Epaphroditus. Paul says that Timothy will be concerned for the Philippians’ welfare, that he doesn’t spend his time on his own interests, and he has a track record of serving (verses 20-22). Epaphroditus, who didn’t enjoy good health, almost died for the Gospel and risked his life to help Paul (verses 26-30).

It’s not enough to be ‘nice’, which might be what you would think had Paul stopped after his admonition to avoid grumbling and arguing. A faith based on Jesus, who suffered and died on the Cross, cannot be reduced to ‘niceness.’ Timothy and Epaphroditus, with their modelling of selflessness and sacrifice, show such a faith in action.

People like Timothy and Epaphroditus are true Christian heroes. These are the kind of people we rightly celebrate. We write books about them. We use them as sermon illustrations! They are exceptional.

But why are they exceptional? Isn’t their example simply what should be the Christian norm? Aren’t their lives of service, sacrifice, and risk-taking the natural consequences of Jesus’ teaching and example?

And if they are, then why aren’t more of us like them?

Is it that it’s easier and more comfortable to opt for niceness rather than sacrificial servanthood? Have we bought into ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ but not the rest of him? Are we keen to scoop up the blessings of faith while not taking the responsibilities and the challenges?

Jesus certainly shone like a star in the dark sky, and so as we work out our own salvation, that is going to involve beginning to imitate him. That’s what Timothy and Epaphroditus did. They found ways to imitate Christ, and in doing so they shone brightly.

So I wonder in what ways Jesus is calling us to imitate him? Who are we being called to serve, as Timothy did? For whom are we being called to take risks, as Epaphroditus did?

And let’s remember that both of these men had their frailties. We read explicitly here that Epaphroditus had his health issues. We read in other New Testament Epistles that Timothy was timid. These were not people who were somehow genetically wired to be heroes. They had the same imperfections and weaknesses that we have.

Much as we might like to believe otherwise, the New Testament doesn’t have two categories of Christians: the ordinary ones, for whom a fairly modest standard of lifestyle is required, and the keen ones, who are held to higher standards, and in whose reflected glory we can bask. Jesus never made divisions like that.

The call to kindness, to faithfulness to the Gospel, and to sacrificial service is for all of us. Do we want to shine like stars in the dark sky? Or do we want our light to be snuffed out?

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Harvest Festival: A Harvest of Restoration, Joel 2:21-32

Joel 2:21-32

Many years ago, listeners to Radio 4’s Sunday morning service choked on their corn flakes when the minister leading a harvest festival announced: “And now, the children will bring up their gifts.”

I am glad I never witnessed that!

At harvest festival, there are certain themes that we regularly celebrate – not least the goodness of God in creation but also God’s concern for justice, because not everyone receives what they need from the harvest of the land. These are important themes to consider, even if harvest festival as we know it was merely the invention of a Victorian clergyman in the Cornish village of Morwenstow in 1843. In case you ever need to know it for a quiz, his name was Robert Hawker.

But our reading from Joel prompts another harvest theme, and that is restoration.

The context of Joel’s prophecy is that a locust swarm has invaded the Holy Land, devastating all the crops, and leaving the people facing starvation. Joel says that this is a warning from God to call the people back to him in repentance, although it’s hard to be sure what particular sins have been committed. Part of their returning to the Lord includes fasting – which they may already have been doing involuntarily due to the food shortages.

But now it appears God has heard their cry for mercy. Crops are growing again and he has driven out the locusts. In this context we hear the wonderful words of restoration in our reading. The people truly have reason to give thanks for having crops to harvest again.

Moreover, Joel tells the people that God’s restoration project is bigger and better than they ever asked or imagined. What does it include?

Firstly and most obviously, restoration of the land:

We hear that once again there will be pasture for the wild animals, autumn and spring rains, threshing-floors filled with grains, and vats overflowing with new wine and oil, and that these are reasons for rejoicing, not fear (verses 21-24).

We are used to supporting charities that help with disaster relief – whether it’s earthquakes, floods, droughts, or war. But in the popular mind we are often only thinking about helping those who are in trouble there and then. Yet many of these organisations will want to be in the affected areas for the long haul. Providing temporary accommodation, food, and medical help is only the beginning for them. They know there is a rebuilding job to be done. It’s not for nothing that ‘All We Can’ used to be called the ‘Methodist Relief and Development Fund’.

So, for example, if I visit the ‘Stories’ section of Tearfund’s website, then yes, I will find one account of emergency relief in South Sudan following floods. Homes, infrastructure, and farming land have all been destroyed, and relief workers are trying to bring in temporary shelters, food supplies, and clean water.

But I will also find the story of a small church in Bangladesh that is transforming its village. Many of the people come from lower castes. One consequence of this is they are often not well educated. Only menial jobs are available. But the outcomes from this church of just 33 members studying the Bible have been listed by their pastor:

‘We have seen financial development along with spiritual development.

‘We don’t only do church-based work, we also do various other things outside of the church. For example, we plant trees on behalf of the church. We also do awareness work about hygiene – not only in our congregation, but we also discuss these things in our community. We teach health awareness about toilet issues, such as having to wear sandals, what to do before going to the toilet, and having to use soap after coming back from the toilet.’

Their communication with the government has led to 24 new homes being built. With a water supply that contains toxic levels of arsenic and iron, they have built a water pump. They soon plan to campaign against child marriage.

All this is because they believe in a God who restores the land. God wants to make his creation new. If a small church of poor, uneducated people can make such a difference in their village, what can we do? By all means let us give our harvest gifts, but can we not be more ambitious than that?

Secondly, we have restoration of the people:

In verses 25-27 we hear that God will repay the people for the years the locusts have eaten. They will eat again and praise God. Twice he says, ‘never again will my people be shamed.’

There is a human toll to disasters: not just things like hunger, but also shame. Given that Israel had suffered the plague of locusts due to some unspecified sin, there will have been shame at the wrongdoing. The Gospel says that in Jesus God restores us from the shame of our sins. Those burdens we have carried are ones we can lay down at the foot of the Cross and find them burned up by the holy love of God. The blood of Jesus deals with them – for in the Old Testament blood symbolises life and Jesus replaces our shame with his life.

But shame is not limited to the guilty. Tragically, it is also felt by those who have been sinned against. If you have been following the news story about the monstrous abuse perpetrated by the late Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrod’s this week, and if you have heard the stories of women coming forward to say they were raped by him, then time and time again you will have heard those women say that one of the reasons they said nothing for years was their sense of shame. Abusers control their victims by seeking to transfer shame onto them.

And here the Gospel is again by definition Good News for the shamed. Jesus is as much in the business of healing the broken as he is of forgiving sinners. We know that from the Gospels, don’t we?

Many years ago, I read a book called ‘The Locust Years’. It is the story of a woman called Jacqui Williams who went travelling in the United States but became caught up in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church – the cult popularly known as the Moonies. They took over her life, reducing her to an existence of little more than selling flowers, sweets, and trinkets on the street to support the cult’s income. When she had to return to the UK to renew her visa, she thankfully found faith in Jesus and her new-found Christian faith was her liberation. The book is called ‘The Locust Years’ after this very passage in Joel with God’s promise to restore the years the locusts have eaten – in her case, her time with the Moonies.

The Christian Church is about the business of seeing people restored in Christ. And if we’re not about that, we barely deserve the name ‘church.’ What used to be called ‘the harvest of souls’ is the restoration of people through the love of God in Christ. It’s why John Wesley said we had no business except the saving of souls.

Thirdly and finally, we have the restoration of all things:

Here we’re moving to the famous verses at the end of the reading (28-32) about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh – sons and daughters, old, young, and servants alike. And I hope you’re thinking, ‘I hear that every year on Pentecost Sunday, because Peter quotes it in his sermon.’

It’s set in the middle of language about ‘the great and dreadful day of the LORD’ and contains references to the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood. The nature of this language is clearly not literal. After references to the sun going dark and the moon turning to blood, do not expect someone like Carol Kirkwood or Elizabeth Rizzini or Tomasz Schafernaker to pop up and add, ‘These will be followed by sunny intervals and scattered showers.’

So we’re in ‘end times’ language here, but that doesn’t mean a short countdown to the Second Coming. We have been in the end times since the Resurrection, and that’s one reason this language occurs at Pentecost. God’s kingdom has come and is coming, but it’s overlapping with the old order of things.

Therefore, God’s goal of ‘making all things new’ with a new creation that includes new heavens, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem that we read about in Revelation 21 doesn’t just all pop up at the end of history as we know it. That stuff begins now. Salvation and deliverance in every form have begun.

Hence, even now God wants to bring restoration in every way. And we the church are his agents of transformation. You name it, God wants to do it. The restoring of relationships with him. The restoring of relationships between people. The restoring of our broken relationship with creation. The restoring of the body. The restoring of a just and peaceful society. All these (and probably more!) are the many and varied harvests of restoration which God desires.

Naturally, not all of these things will come in all their fulness before Jesus appears to wrap things up. Don’t we all have the agonised experience of unanswered prayer? But let’s go for as much as we can get. Let’s not give up in despair, because some things have gone wrong. Let’s set out on this wonderful ministry of restoration that we have been given as the people of God. With the help of the Holy Spirit who is poured out on us, as these verses from Joel say, let’s confront the brokenness of this old order with the ministry of restoration that Jesus began and entrusted to us.

Who knows how much of a harvest we might see?

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Paul’s Favourite Church 3: Christlike Relationships (Philippians 2:1-11)

Philippians 2:1-11

What are our ambitions for our church? Is that a good question to ask at my first service at a ‘new’ church?

Typically, people say, we want to attract more members, especially younger people. Or we want our worship to be more lively. Or – well, you add in other examples.

Wouldn’t a better ambition than all of these be to say, we want our church to be Christlike?

Because it sounds to me like that’s what Paul is encouraging the Philippians to set as their ambition. He loves that church, and he wants the best for it. So far he has told them how he is sure God is at work among them and he has encouraged them with ways to bear their suffering for the faith.

But at the root of all of this is that he wants them to be Christlike, and especially to demonstrate that in their relationships with one another.

The quality of our relationships is so important. I don’t know the latest research in the UK about why people leave the church, but recent studies in the United States show that forty-two percent of all church leavers gave ‘hypocrisy’ as a reason for leaving. It was the top reason.

Now I know there is that witty rejoinder to people who say they want nothing to do with the church because of all the hypocrites where we say, ‘There’s always room for one more,’ but I think we should dwell on the issue for a moment. Hypocrisy means that our words and our actions don’t match up. In terms of our relationships, it means we talk about love but then don’t love one another.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what a lot of those American church leavers had experienced.

I therefore think it’s important that we give a priority to Christlike relationships, and in today’s reading Paul tells us what that will involve.

The first sign of Christlike relationships that Paul describes here is unity:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.

Christ is united with the Father and the Spirit; we are united with Christ and experience the fellowship of the Spirit; it’s only natural for Christians to experience unity of love, spirit, and mind.

What makes us one? Well, it’s not simply being members of the human race, because sin has fractured that unity. It’s unity in salvation by grace through faith in Christ, a salvation that comes to us from the Triune God, whose mind is authoritatively revealed to us in the Scriptures.

We don’t necessarily believe all the same things as other Christian traditions. We may differ on things like who may be ordained as leaders and our understandings of the sacraments. But if we hold together on salvation, the Trinity, and the supreme authority of God being revealed in the Bible, then we can have a united relationship that transcends our differences, even when those differences mean our unity is imperfect.

But Paul wasn’t thinking about our wider ecumenical debates of today. They didn’t exist then. He was addressing a local church. He wants them to hold together on these basic issues and live out their faith as one people.

Are we a church where we can count on one another when the chips are down? Are we a fellowship where we will speak well of one another, even when we disagree on secondary matters? Or are we just a collection of snooker balls, who bounce off each other every Sunday morning?

I grew up in an increasingly multi-racial church in north London. When my grandmother, who lived with us, died, our church friends rallied around. The West Indian and West African members of our house group treated us the way they would have treated bereaved friends at home. They turned up with meals they had cooked for my parents, my sister, and me. They came and took domestic duties off my mum. They did everything they could so that we as a family could spend time together, talking about my grandmother and grieving her loss. What a profound experience of united love that was. I shall never forget it.

If you know your Methodist history, you will know that the preacher who got John Wesley preaching in the open air was George Whitefield. However, later Wesley and Whitefield had deep theological differences. And one day, one of Whitefield’s followers spitefully asked him whether he would see Wesley in heaven.

But Whitefield’s reply was a model of Christian unity. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘but that will be because Mister Wesley will be far closer to the throne than me.’

How do we practise our unity in Christ?

The second sign of Christlike relationships is humility:

3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

As we go on to hear in verses 6 to 11, the Jesus story shows that he is the very example of humility, in giving up his status and position in the Incarnation and the Cross. If Jesus, with his ranking in the universe does it, then how much more us?

Yet too many churches have members who jostle for position, like James and John wanting to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand in glory. Too many Christians have the pathetic ambition to be a big fish in a small pond. I see it in church members full of self-importance and ministers chasing the ‘big jobs’ in the church nationally.

How sad that building for God’s kingdom and its vision of a new creation where earth and heaven will be renewed is too small and unsatisfying for these people. Yet what could be more rewarding than playing our part in God’s eternal purposes?

At the other end of the spectrum we have people who so undervalue themselves that they see themselves as worthless. This too is not humility.

What are we looking for, then?[1] The American pastor Rick Warren put it well:

Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others. Humble people are so focused on serving others, they don’t think of themselves.[2]

And CS Lewis described it beautifully:

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.[3]

You know what? I think those words of Lewis sound rather like a description of Jesus. We are looking for people who are thinking about others above themselves. And so the challenge is to ask whether that is a predominant characteristic of people in our church.

Finally, the third sign of Christlike relationships is servanthood:

The final verses of the reading may (or may not) be taken from an early Christian hymn, and they tell the Jesus story – from pre-existence with the Father through the Incarnation to the Cross and Resurrection, the Ascension and eventually the Last Judgment.

It’s a story we often tell in the church with the purpose of describing what Jesus did for our salvation. And that’s right. But it’s not what Paul does with it here.

In this case, Paul tells the Jesus story not to call people to Christian commitment, but to show us what living as a Christian disciple looks like. It’s ethical.

So we hear that Jesus ‘did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage’ but ‘made himself nothing’, took on ‘the very nature of a servant’, and ‘humbled himself by becoming obedient to death.’

And maybe ‘servant’ is the most important word in that cluster. For a servant was ‘nothing’ in that society. A servant had to be obedient. And so on.

If we want to look like Jesus, then we will serve others.

This is such a contrast to much of what we see promoted in our culture, where the talk is of self-fulfilment, meeting our own needs, charity beginning at home, and so on. The Christian church is meant to look different from this.

But sometimes we too imbibe the values of the wider world. We turn the church into a consumer organisation where the job of the church is to please me and give me what I want. This is not the spirit of Jesus.

I’ve been told to my face by people in the past that my job as a minister is to please everybody. Well, no it isn’t. That isn’t servanthood. That’s capitulating to consumerism.

I’ve also been told when arriving to take a service as a visiting preacher that I was there to entertain people. But that is an attitude that is all about taking and not remotely about giving. Therefore it is the opposite of servanthood. And once again, the church has become infected by the world.

I once knew a church where a minister called people to take on certain jobs to serve the fellowship. But people replied, ‘We don’t do these things. We pay others to do them for us.’

We need to recover the call to imitate Jesus who served. It was by an attitude of servanthood that he transformed the world. Let’s stop assuming that this is something that is done by others.

It means we take Jesus and his example seriously. He is not our comfort blanket. He is our Lord and Saviour.

If we serve one another, copying (however imperfectly) Jesus, then alongside our humility and unity there will be something distinctive about us that differs from so much of what the world offers and yet encapsulates what so many people long for.

This is central to our true identity as church. Let’s make sure we’re about this Jesus work.

[1] Both of the following quotes were found in Aaron Armstrong, C.S. Lewis on Humility: What He Wrote is More Powerful Than What He Didn’t

[2] Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 149

[3] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers) 128

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Paul’s Favourite Church 2: A Model For Suffering, Philippians 1:12-30

Philippians 1:12-30

Arline was one of my church members in a previous appointment. In her sixties and suffering from a cruel lung condition, her husband David was devoted to her care. But when I went to visit them, I habitually made them my final call of the afternoon, because although I went to pray with them, they always blessed me with their faith. I thought I had gone to encourage them, but I came away encouraged myself.

They asked me to conduct a renewal of marriage vows for their fortieth wedding anniversary. Arline arrived in her wheelchair and with her oxygen tank. But when it came to the actual renewal of their vows, she pushed herself up out of her chair to stand next to David.

Not a dry eye in the house.

Maybe you too have known people who radiate joy or peace or faith in the middle of extreme trials. What a blessing – and a challenge! – they are.

The Apostle Paul was one such person, too. Dictating his letter to the Philippians from his prison cell in Rome, he speaks of his faith and joy in today’s reading.

But why? Is he boasting about what a great disciple of Jesus he is?

No. Near the end of the reading we hear how he has learned that the Philippians are facing opposition and suffering for their faith. I believe he hopes that his example will be an example of perseverance for his great friends in Philippi (verses 27-30).

What is behind Paul’s strong faith in the face of adversity? It is his belief in what we call the Providence of God. He believes that God can and does still work out his sovereign purposes even when life is not what it should be.

Two thousand years later, the Holy Spirit can take his inspired words and use them to encourage us too when we face troubles, especially when they are related to our faith, but not only then.

Firstly, says Paul, God is at work despite the circumstances.

In verses 12 to 14, Paul tells us that his imprisonment in Rome is not an unmitigated disaster, because the palace guards have learned about his faith, and the local Christians have become more courageous in proclaiming the Gospel.

It’s an outworking of what Paul says in Romans 8:28:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

This is divine Providence. God will make a way, even when it seems there is no way. Circumstances do not prevent him. He will be at work in surprising ways.

As many of you know, I have two Theology degrees. My second degree was achieved purely by the academic research of a thesis. My supervisor was a theologian called Richard Bauckham. At the time he was quite well-known in academic circles, but his career went into the stratosphere in his next appointment, where he was the Professor of New Testament at St Andrew’s University in Scotland.

Richard retired early from there to devote the rest of his life to academic research and writing, without the responsibilities of teaching and supervising students, let alone the administrative burdens of a professor.

So for him, working away reading and writing, and with a lifelong love of books, his eyesight was very precious to him. However, he suffered a deterioration of sight in his right eye, and by the time it was diagnosed it was too late to recover the loss. Then, around the time of the first lockdown in 2022, the same began to happen in his left eye. He was fearful of losing the ability to follow his calling and do what brought him joy.

Thankfully, despite an initial blunder by a doctor, he eventually saw a consultant who gave him some injections that brought back some of the sight in his left eye – but not all of it. To this day, he still sees straight lines as wavy lines. But he has been able to resume his scholarship.

He has written about this in a recently published book called ‘The Blurred Cross’. The title comes from him not being able to focus clearly on a cross in a hospital chapel, and his reflection on the thought that Jesus’ vision would have been blurred with blood and sweat when he was hanging on the Cross.

The book is worth the price just for the chapter on providence. He sees all sorts of reasons why he or others might reject the idea that God was still at work for good in his life, but discounts them all. His testimony through this traumatic test is that he was still held in the loving arms of God, and that God had good purposes in allowing him to go through this suffering. I am sure that part of those good purposes will be the fruit of this book, which I am sure will bring hope and encouragement to many people who are facing difficulties.

This is what Paul wants the Philippians to know. He is going through adversity, but God is using it for good. He will do the same for them as they face opposition for their faith.

This is the testimony of Richard Bauckham, too. God will still work for good in the bad times, even if what he does is not always what we would ask for. Our circumstances are no barrier to his good and loving purposes.

May that be our testimony, too.

Secondly, God is at work despite sin.

In verses 15 to 18a we have what always sounds to me a slightly strange passage. Unable to preach publicly himself due to his incarceration, Paul talks about those who are preaching while he is chained up. Some, he says, preach Christ out of goodwill, but others do so out of rivalry.

And you might expect someone with the strong convictions Paul has to have something negative to say about those who preach the Gospel out of rivalry. Surely he doesn’t approve? Wouldn’t we expect him to be annoyed that such people are muscling in to the space he has had to vacate?

But no. Paul is just glad that Christ is being preached.

There are some modern equivalents. One would be when we see some of the dubious TV evangelists, especially those who rake in millions of dollars from poor followers, and who make questionable claims about people being healed. Perhaps surprisingly, though, what some of these charlatans say about repentance and the forgiveness of sins is relatively orthodox.

I get angry about the TV evangelists. Their exploitation of the poor so that they can have another private jet is especially egregious to me.

But yet I also have to admit that a good number of people have become followers of Jesus through their preaching.

It’s not that Paul is silent about wrongdoing. We know from other passages that he isn’t. But it is to say he is confident that God’s plans cannot be stymied by human sin.

Goodness and evil are not equal opposites in the universe. God’s grace and mercy are bigger and stronger than sin. A battle may be going on, but God will not allow sin to have the final word. The end result is certain, and it has been certain ever since the Cross, when God took the very worst of human actions, the greatest injustice ever, and used the death of this Son for the greatest good. If we believe that Jesus died for our sins, then we believe in a God who is at work despite sin. He will not be thwarted.

What is going on in our world today that discourages or depresses us? Is it Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine? Is it the conflict between the Netanyahu government of Israel and Hamas? Is it abuse scandals? Or two hundred and fifty thousand abortions in the UK last year – clearly most of them were not when the mother’s life or health was in danger?

Whatever troubles you, remember, along with Paul, that God can work despite sin, and he does work despite sin. The Cross assures us of that.

Thirdly and finally, God is at work through prayer.

From the end of verse 18 through to verse 26 we read of Paul’s confidence that God will work for good in response to the Philippians’ prayers for him. He expects he will be released from prison but realises there is still a possibility he might be executed. But no matter, he says: to live is Christ, and to die is gain (verse 21). However God chooses to respond to the prayers of the Philippians, and whether it is what he would prefer or not, it will still always be for the good.

But just because Paul doesn’t know for sure how his imprisonment is going to work out, and because he can see that either outcome could be possible within the will of God, he doesn’t want people to stop praying for him. He wants to be held in the loving embrace of the Father by his friends.

And likewise, I’m sure he doesn’t know how the trials the Philippians themselves are enduring will work out. He isn’t surprised they are suffering. For one thing, it was his own regular experience. And for another, more specifically, he and Silas had faced suffering when they first proclaimed the Gospel in Philippi. You may remember the story in Acts chapter sixteen where Paul casts a spirit out of a slave girl, and when her owners then lose the income they had gained from exploiting her, the evangelists are thrown into jail.

But Paul will not give up praying for the Philippians. He knows God can and will be at work through their persecution and despite it. God is not confounded by opposition to his will. In prayer, Paul supports the heavenly battle to oppose evil and bring good out of it.

This is good news for us when our lives are under the cosh or we are praying for others who are going through unjust pain. We may not know what God’s will is for the situation in question. We can seek to discern his will and then pray for that, but we still may not discover what God wants to do.

And if we are praying for a need where we do not know the will of God, we can still do better than praying something like, ‘Lord, please heal Mrs Smith – if it be your will.’ Sometimes tacking on ‘if it be your will’ to the end of a prayer is a lazy way out or a way of moving onto the next thing. Would it not be better to pray an honest prayer where we say, ‘Lord, I do not know what your will is for Mrs Smith, whether you want her to be healed or to endure her suffering and go to be with you. But whatever it is, I pray that you will be glorified, and that you will bring good out of this situation.’

I still have to learn to pray more like that. What about you?

Conclusion

Paul loves the Philippians so much that he wants to use his own experiences of adversity to encourage and strengthen them. They can have faith to believe that God is at work despite their circumstances, despite sinful opposition, and despite not always knowing how and what to pray for.

As we face challenges, both new and old, may we look to the Holy Spirit to help us follow in their footsteps.

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