New Beginnings 1: Isaiah 43:14-21

Isaiah 43:14-21

I was once talking with a Baptist minister friend about what our respective denominations do when one minister leaves and a new minister comes. I extolled the Methodist system where there is little or no gap between one minister going and the new one taking over. It saved congregations from enduring a vacancy or interregnum, I said. 

“But you’ve got that wrong,” he told me. “There is value in a church having a gap in between pastors. It gives them space to grieve the loss of a much-loved minister.”

And I think he had a point. I start with you today only a few days after David completed his time as your presbyter. Not only that, but he is also still in the circuit, and that’s a situation I know all about from the minister’s side. Five years into my last appointment, my responsibilities changed. I went from looking after Knaphill and Addlestone Methodist churches to having care of Knaphill and Byfleet. I missed Addlestone. And they were still close by in the circuit, which made it harder. 

So if today you are feeling the loss of David, and are wondering what things will be like with me, when I am largely an unknown quantity to you, I want to say I get it. 

You may not be wild that the first thing I want to highlight from Isaiah 43 is God telling his people to put the past behind them.

            Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past. (Verse 18)

This needs handling carefully. There are good ways to relate to the past, and bad ways.

But make no mistake, God is serious about us putting the past behind us. In the passage, the ‘former things’ he tells Israel to forget are when he parted the Red Sea for them and then closed it over the pursuing Egyptian army. It’s like he’s telling them to forget the Exodus – the central event in Israel’s history and the focus of the Passover. It would be like telling Christians to forget Good Friday, Easter, and Holy Communion – and did you notice how Jesus in the Luke reading referred to his forthcoming death and resurrection as his ‘departure’, or his ‘exodus’?

Of course, the Lord doesn’t mean it completely literally that Israel should forget the Exodus. Later in the chapter, he talks about Israel’s need to remember. This is shock language to get over a point, just as Jesus’ teaching, including his parables, often included shock language to make a point. 

We need to distinguish between living in the past (which is unhealthy) and learning from the past (which is life-giving). We live in the past when we make past events romantic and perhaps perfect when they probably weren’t. They become a mental prison for us. They crush our imagination and hope. 

For example, in one previous circuit there where I served there was one vociferous elderly lady who would not stop going on about the time when the Sunday School at the church had a hundred children in it. She expected us to get back to those days, and she loaded guilt on those who were serving in the Junior Church. She expected our two children, themselves only just on the cusp of starting school, to be among the pioneers!

Whatever you have enjoyed and appreciated in the past at this church, please do not allow those memories to blind you to what God wants to do today. 

Our reasons for living in the past are often not good ones. It may be that we don’t like the way things are going in our world today and that we fear the future. Well, there are bad trends in our society, but no Christian has reason to fear the future. We believe the future is in God’s hands. 

Indeed, one of my favourite quotes for sermons (and I’m nervous about playing this card right at the beginning of my ministry here!) is from the American preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo. When asked how he could be so positive and hopeful in a dark and depressing world he replied, “I’ve read the book and I’ve peeked at the final chapter: Jesus wins!”

So don’t live in the past out of fear. 

And don’t live in the past out of a sense of comfort. Yes, there are uncertainties ahead of us, but we are people of faith. We are called to put our trust in Jesus. Don’t go back in your mind to a comfortable time in the past in preference to trusting him. That isn’t our calling. 

The best thing to do with the past is to learn from it. We can learn about strengths and weaknesses in our lives, and in our families and institutions that influence us. 

Most important of all, learning from the past means we look back at what God has done in Jesus Christ, and we learn more about the character of the God that we love, trust, and serve. Isn’t that what we do in reading Scripture, for example?

So that’s my first point – let’s put the past behind us. Learn from it, yes, but live there, no. 

The second of the two things I want to emphasise to day is look for what God is doing now.

            See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland. (Verse 19)

In the case of Israel, they were in exile in Babylon at this time and had been so for a few decades. Older generations were dying off. New generations were being born there who had never seen the Promised Land. But now God promises to take them home: that’s what the way in the wilderness is. Our best guess is this prophecy came about ten years or so before they began to return. 

Maybe you are disillusioned about the state of the church today. I certainly get that way at times! There is a sense in which we are in exile, too. We are now a minority in our nation and our culture. Most people are not religious. We are strange to them. Sometimes they regard us as a threat. There may be Christian elements embedded into our unwritten constitution, as we saw in some ways at the coronation of King Charles earlier this year. But in practice, we are anything but a Christian nation (whatever that is, anyway). Spiritually, we live in exile. 

And when you live in exile for any length of time, either hope starts to fade, or we chase the latest fad, or we try to ape the culture we are living in. None of these is a good Christian response. 

We do need to live in the alien culture and to bless it, as Jeremiah told the first batch of Jewish exiles in Babylon, when we wrote them a letter. (You can read it in Jeremiah 29.) We can even get involved in its structures and power, as Daniel and his three friends did. What we can’t do is absorb the values. 

What will that look like for us? The COVID pandemic taught us the importance of the digital world as a way people live and communicate today. It doesn’t replace meeting together physically but is added to it. We are called to live in a hybrid of the two. 

We also look at how we can bless people outside the church today. We may or may not agree with their lifestyles, but we can still bless them. For instance, in my last circuit in one village the churches took boxes of chocolates to all the local shops and businesses at Christmas. We told them how much we appreciated them and that we were praying for them to prosper. We also gave them an email address if they wanted to send us any prayer requests. 

We get on with doing things like this while we wait for a word from the Lord about the new things he wants to do with us and among us. They won’t be any old crackpot thing that someone suggests, but they may surprise us, and they will certainly be consistent with what we know about his will and character from Holy Scripture. 

Indeed, we shall need to be people who are soaked in the Scriptures in order to test various claims when they come along, saying, ‘This is what God is calling us to do today.’ We shall need to echo the cry of John Wesley when he prayed, ‘O Lord, make me a man of one book.’

It may even be that, just like the Jewish exiles in Babylon, the older generations like many of us die out and God does his new thing predominantly with younger generations who will be the vanguard of his renewal. Older forms of church like ours might go and the newer churches replace us. But if that is what takes the Gospel into a new day and age, we should rejoice. God did that when he raised up Methodism. He may do that again. 

Of this I am sure: God’s new thing will involve us going outward with his redeeming love and not merely inward to a religious club.

So in conclusion, are we ready to leave the past behind, learning from it but not living in it? Are we willing to hear God speak of his new thing and test all claims to it by Holy Scripture? And in the meantime, will we hear the call to bless this alien culture we live in?

So now you know why the hymn before the sermon was ‘Lord, for the years.’ Let us echo the final two lines in our lives and in our life together: 

            Past put behind us, for the future take us,

                        Lord of our lives, to live for Christ alone. (Timothy Dudley-Smith)

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Farewell 3: The End Is Not The End

Jeremiah 8:18-22 and 1 Corinthians 15:50-58

Last month, a poet friend of mine published a new anthology of his poetry. It is a series of poems for the end of life and beyond. He entitled it ‘The End Is Not The End’.

And if you want a title for the sermon today, that’s it: The End Is Not The End. That doesn’t mean I’m staying in this circuit after all, and that the farewells have all been part of a hoax.

No, I want to face head on the difficulties and discouragements we face in our churches here, and which of course so many churches in the western world do.

A few years ago, I was praying about my time here and I wondered in my praying what would summarise my time here. What popped into my head was a Bible verse I didn’t want to hear. We heard it in the Jeremiah reading:

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

(Jeremiah 8:20)

I knew that many of the hopes and dreams I had had when coming here were not going to be fulfilled. Situations that looked like they had great potential proved to have more style than substance. People who gave an initial impression of being deeply spiritual turned out to be like the seeds that the sower in Jesus’ parable threw on rocky ground or among thorns.

And alongside all this we are fighting an uphill battle in a culture that is increasingly hostile to our faith.

So what does the Methodist Church nationally do? Well, apart from its periodic attempts to impersonate your embarrassing trendy uncle, it chooses not to learn from history but to delete a historic document, the so-called Liverpool Minutes, that show how the first Methodists to face decline dug deep into their spirituality and turned things around.

Meanwhile, it buries its head in the sand when all the evidence is there that the structures we have are creaking towards breaking point and it adds more bureaucracy – the classic behaviour of a decaying organisation. Let’s have even bigger Districts. Let’s amalgamate circuits to such a size that if you are like the one I am moving to, they cannot meaningfully consult the entire circuit about the appointment of a new minister. We defend these structures despite all the evidence from other churches that we need greater continuity between churches and their ordained leaders. And we spread our leaders even thinner.

And we pile even more responsibilities on the leaders without taking anything away from them. Renewing my Safeguarding training has gone from a two-hour session four years ago to eight hours now. There are good ideas added, such as getting all the ministers into a pastoral supervision programme, but no-one tells us what we should drop. Conference clearly thinks we can make bricks without straw.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

And it’s not just the ministers facing this. I look at what we ask our congregations to do, especially those in leadership positions. Some of them are being worn down to the bone with the amount of practical work and administration we need them to do. Not only that, some of them are holding these responsibilities at ages well beyond that where we always used to let people retire gracefully from positions in the church and let them have a well-deserved rest.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

Now to some of you this might sound like I am just settling some scores at the end of thirteen years here. Please believe me when I say that’s not what this is about. I believe we need some honesty and reality about the situation.

Of course, that’s what got Jeremiah into trouble in his day. Relentlessly he told God’s people the stark truth of their situation. With no change in direction, they were going to be conquered by Babylon and taken into exile there. He didn’t deal in the frothy shallow positivity of the popular culture.

Or maybe you think I’m just here as a spiritual doom and gloom merchant. We call such people Jeremiahs. But I am not here to be a religious Eeyore. Nor am I here to be Private Frazer from Dad’s Army, crying, ‘Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed!’

I am here today to be a small-scale Jeremiah, but not in the way you might think. Let me explain.

Forty years ago, when I trained to be a Methodist Local Preacher, we had to sit four written exams. In my Old Testament paper, there was a question where we were asked to assess a statement that Jeremiah was a prophet of doom.

And like all good exam answers, the best response was to say, ‘Yes but’. You see, Jeremiah was about doom – in the short term – but in the long term he was about hope. Short term doom, yes – but long term hope.

He called on the exiled Israelites to find ways of living positively in Babylon and blessing their captors. And he looked beyond the exile to when they would return to the Promised Land.

So I want to proclaim to you today short term doom but long term hope. The End Is Not The End. Just as Jeremiah held out hope that it was still possible to live a fruitful life of faith in an alien and hostile culture, and just as he saw beyond that to restoration, so I want to say something similar to you today, but with a New Testament spin.

And so this is where I want to bring in our reading from 1 Corinthians 15. This is Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, and the verses we heard were the climax of that chapter.

This passage has the verse that has been dubbed the verse for the church crèche. It’s verse 51:

Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.

But to be more serious, here is God’s great promise that The End Is Not The End. For just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so shall we at the end of time. Death will be swallowed up in victory. Its sting will be neutralised. We gain the final victory through our Risen Lord.

It’s like the famous American preacher Tony Campolo used to put it. He would recount how people would come up to him and ask him how on earth he could be positive and hopeful in such a dreadful world as ours.

His reply? ‘I’ve read the last chapter of the book, and Jesus wins!’

Friends, The End Is Not The End. If it ends in death, then it’s not the end. Not in the light of Jesus our Risen Lord, it isn’t.

Well, you may say, that’s all very well, but isn’t that pie in the sky when we die? What can you say to us as we have to continue living in difficult times as Christians?

I want to give you two words of encouragement.

The first is this. Although we await the great resurrection at the end of time, we do experience in the meantime some little resurrections. Here’s what I mean by that.

Many of you know I was recently on sabbatical, and before I went, some of you asked what I was doing during my three months. One of the things I did was I spent five days at the Lee Abbey community in North Devon. I went there for a Christian conference on the theme of how to handle disappointment in the life of faith. I went knowing that I was wrestling with disappointment towards the end of my time here. I went knowing also that most if not all of us live with disappointments in our lives, and it’s therefore an important pastoral issue.

Now I guess one of the things we’re dealing with in this sermon is the theme of coping with disappointment. Our speaker at Lee Abbey that week focussed on what is commonly called ‘The now and the not yet’ of the kingdom of God. We see some signs of God’s kingdom now in our life of faith, perhaps when we see remarkable answers to prayer, but we also experience the fact that God’s kingdom has not yet come fully. Yes, Jesus reigns, but not everyone nor all creation bows the knee to him yet.

So it is part of the Christian life to live in this tension. And what I simply want to say to you about this today is that even as you find yourself immersed in disappointments, doom, and struggles, never lose sight of the fact that God in his mercy will grant you some little resurrections. He may be silent at times, but he is not absent. As I said to the Knaphill people last Sunday morning, sometimes he is like Jesus walking alongside the two disciples on their way to Emmaus, who do not realise who their companion is. You may not recognise his presence at times in the midst of the sorrows, but he is there, and he will grant you tokens of his grace.

The second word of encouragement I want to give you is this. The passage from 1 Corinthians 15 is very special to me personally, and I’d like to tell you why.

Many of you know that in my last appointment I had a rough time. I was a misfit in the appointment, and for me that meant five miserable years. We actually considered whether I might need to come out of ministry for a few years to recover and see whether I ever wanted to come back into ministry at all. Before we left, I went into counselling for some help.

In all those difficulties, this was the passage which was my lifesaver. At times I confess it only just kept my head above the water. But it did.

You see, you might expect that Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection would end with inspirational words about the life to come, but he doesn’t. His last words are words that earth how we are going to live now in the light of that resurrection hope. Verse 58:

 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Your labour in the Lord is not in vain – so keep going.

I have never really understood why God called us to that last appointment. I have the odd theory, but nothing completely makes sense. But, says Paul, your labour in the Lord is not in vain. Whatever I did for him and his kingdom there, Jesus will take and make into something beautiful because in the resurrection it will endure. It felt like five wasted years to me, but the resurrection means that in the economy of God it will not be wasted.

For those of you here who are particularly living at the coal face of our difficulties in the church today, I want you to hear those words: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my lovely ministerial colleagues who work hard and don’t always feel they see the fruits they long for: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my dear church members, not least some of you in my church leadership teams, who have put in sterling efforts that must at times feel like King Canute trying to banish the incoming tide, I say the same: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For those of you like me and some members of my family, who live with the dark clouds of depression, I say to you: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Just remember, dear friends, that if you think everything is ending in death and darkness, The End Is Not The End.

Jesus wins.

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Farewell 2: Jesus Makes Sense (Luke 24:13-35)

Luke 24:13-35

So we come to my final sermon here. When I think back to our beginning here, I remember the sense of hope and positivity I felt about this church. I thought there was huge potential here. I really thought something could happen.

So to come to the end of my ministry here at a time when the church is seriously having to consider closure before too long is something I never would have anticipated thirteen years ago.

I have reflected on why we have got to this point, and I have my theories. Could we have anticipated before it happened that we would be financially vulnerable? Possibly. Have we been a divided congregation? Yes, at times. Have we on occasion chosen fear over faith? I think we might have done. And did COVID-19 accelerate our problems? Without question.

You may have your theories, too. But it’s all academic now. This is the situation we are in. So what to say?

I may have told you along the way the story of the late Ugandan evangelist, Bishop Festo Kivengere, whose ministry came to prominence during the evil and violent dictatorship of Idi Amin in that country. One day, he was told he could address a group of men before they were shot to death by firing squad in a football stadium before a huge crowd.

Kivengere said he didn’t know what on earth to say to men facing that fate. But then he heard the quiet voice of Jesus speaking to him:

“Tell them about me. I’ll make sense.”

So that’s what I’m attempting this morning. To tell you about Jesus, so that he will make sense to you at this time, and bring you hope in whatever you face when I have gone.

This story of the Emmaus Road is one that is special to Debbie and me, because the preacher at our wedding chose this lesson and preached on it. But I’m not aiming to reproduce that sermon. Instead, I want to take two simple truths about Jesus in the passage, because I believe they will hold you strong in faith, whatever you face.

Firstly, Jesus is present with us in our grief.

To some extent, the account of Cleopas and his companion walking along talking to the stranger about Jesus and not realising it’s Jesus is almost comical. It feels like a pantomime. Not so much, ‘He’s behind you!’ as ‘He’s beside you!’

But listen to them as they pour out their litany of dashed hopes about Jesus. All their dreams are gone. Jesus was going to change everything. They had pinned all their hopes on him. But now he had been executed. It had all gone.

Compare that to how many of us are feeling about this church now. W can remember so many happy times here. We have made great friends. There have been memorable special occasions. And most of all, the encounters we have had with the living God. The likely loss of these hits hard.

For me, I remember us visiting the church where we had got married and where the children were dedicated, a few weeks before it closed. I had been devastated when I heard it was going to shut.

But as Cleopas and his companion pour out their grief and sense of hopelessness, what is going on? Jesus is with them in their grief. I know they don’t realise it, and we read that ‘they were kept from recognising him’ (verse 16), which is a puzzle. Does their failure to believe in the resurrection stop them? Do dark forces prevent them? Or is the Holy Spirit closing their eyes until the moment of revelation to come in the house? We don’t know.

Many of us know the temptation to believe that Jesus has deserted us when we face troubles. But Jesus was with Cleopas and his friends, even though they didn’t realise at first, and he is with us, too. We may not recognise it. We may not understand why he has allowed a disaster to happen. But our lack of understanding is no reason to conclude that he has absented himself.

The fact is, disasters do happen to God’s people. Think of Israel being sent away from the Promised Land into exile in Babylon. They struggled at first with how they would sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Psalm 137). But eventually, with the encouragement of people like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, they found a way to live faithfully in their new situation.

So too with us. Even if this church disappears, Jesus won’t. Ask him to show you where he is and what he is doing. Ask him for the privilege of knowing that he is listening to you in your grief.

After all, he endured the worst injustice of all, when he died on the Cross despite being sinless. Do you think he doesn’t understand the human condition at its most desolate? Of course he does.

And this is why we sang Matt Redman’s song ‘You Never Let Go’:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Your perfect love is casting out fear
And even when I’m caught in the middle of the storms of this life
I won’t turn back
I know You are near

And I will fear no evil
For my God is with me
And if my God is with me
Whom then shall I fear?
Whom then shall I fear?

[Chorus:]
Oh no, You never let go
Through the calm and through the storm
Oh no, You never let go
In every high and every low
Oh no, You never let go
Lord, You never let go of me

Secondly, Jesus is still in the resurrection business.

Think how Cleopas and his companion are trapped inside their own beliefs. They are good Jews who believe that resurrection will come – but only at the end of time. So it doesn’t matter that Jesus has prophesied three times that he will suffer, die, and rise, and it doesn’t matter that some women in their group that morning had reported that he had been raised (verses 22-24).

What changes them is an encounter with he risen Jesus. They are not forgotten or forsaken. Hope is not lost, it is renewed. Jesus is alive!

In exile, Israel was depicted as like a valley of dry, dead bones by Ezekiel. But the Spirit of God brought them new life and eventually they returned to Jerusalem and the Promised Land. The dead bones were alive. Jesus is in the resurrection business.

And I believe that whatever happens here in the coming months and years, Jesus has not got out of the resurrection business.

I don’t have any specific word from the Lord about what that will look like, but I do know this: the resurrection body is different, and when Jesus raises up his work from the dead again here it will look different. The resurrection body of Jesus was on the one hand identifiable as him, but on the other hand had new and different powers. Think of how Jesus appeared inside locked rooms.

I believe there is a hint in the Emmaus Road story that resurrection life is different. When the three travellers get to Emmaus and Jesus is invited into the home of Cleopas, he shuns his rôle as their guest and behaves as the host when he takes the bread, blesses God for it, breaks it, and shares it.

Some people think this is a precursor of Holy Communion, where we also see the fourfold action taking the bread, blessing God for it, breaking it, and sharing it. But I think that’s reading too much into the text, because devout Jews offered these four practices with the bread whenever they are.

But if Jesus is the host and Cleopas and his companion encounter him (verse 31), and they realise that their hearts have been burning inside them Verse 32, surely a reference to the Holy Spirit), then what we have here is church in the home. Jesus raises up a new form of worship, and of course by the time he writes his Gospel forty or fifty hears later, the early Christian church is worshipping not in the Temple or in synagogues, but where? In the home.

This is another case of the resurrection body being different. And because of that, what I want to say to you is this: if this church dies, God is capable of raising up a new work. Just don’t be limited by your prior expectations. Don’t assume that we’ll still have church buildings, and we’ll have them where we’ve always had them, or even as to whether we should take such precautions.

Be ready, then, for the Holy Spirit to do something new and different here. Perhaps what we were offering had had its time, and God wants to do something new here in order to reach people in the name of Jesus. Think of Mr Spock in Star Trek, but not so much saying, “It’s life, Jim, but not as know it,” but “It’s church, Jim, but not as we know it.” Let old and dying ways go. Give them a decent burial.

And be prepared to walk with Jesus into something new and unfamiliar, but much simpler than Methodist rules make them, except for the fact that he is the host.

Let it be in the spirit of the way the prophets prepared Israel to come back from exile in Babylon to the Promised Land. In Isaiah 43, they are told to forget the former things, including even the Exodus from Egypt, because God was doing something new.

So too, because Jesus is still in the resurrection business, be prepared to put aside the old ways as he does something new in raising up a new work to replace the old.

Let’s go back to that Matt Redman song we sang. Here are some other words from it:

And I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on
A glorious light beyond all compare
And there will be an end to these troubles
But until that day comes
We’ll live to know You here on the earth

We may weep at the grave of this church. But make no mistake. Jesus will raise up a new work. Let’s make sure we walk with him.

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Farewell 1: Keep On Keeping On (Acts 20:17-38)

This week I begin a series of three farewell messages before I move to another circuit. This one is for my Byfleet church.

Acts 20:17-38

Here we have a story about a church leader saying goodbye to a church he loves. Therefore you can see why I picked it for today.

I want to make it clear that I am not taking it any deeper than that. I am not comparing myself to the Apostle Paul. I am not expecting to go to prison when we move to Liphook. And I am not saying we shall never meet again.

And to reassure one person who saw this passage in this week: no, I am not expecting you all to kiss me before I go! For the ‘brotherly kiss’ of the New Testament, think something of the way the French greet one another. We are not in France.

No: let’s just keep this story on the simple level: a church leader saying goodbye to a church he loves. Just like Debbie and I are today.

And within that, some of the things Paul says to the Ephesian elders are things I would urge you to remember, too.

Just to keep you going in my absence, I have six things to share! But don’t worry, this isn’t a double-length sermon! I’ll keep each point brief.

Firstly: keep to the basics (verses 18-21)

Paul says he has kept to what is helpful to preach and that he has preached repentance and faith in Christ to both Jews and Greeks. While I don’t doubt he brought his great learning to bear on his treatment of the Scriptures, it’s clear he didn’t share the minutiae of some obscure PhD thesis (or the ancient equivalent). He kept things at the basic level.

It doesn’t matter how experienced we are as Christians, we often need to return to the basics rather than think we are above such things. Repentance and faith in Christ are not one-off decisions at the beginning of our Christian pilgrimage, they are lifelong practices. I suspect that the closer we get to Christ, the more we shall realise what needs changing in our lives.

It’s rather like something a wonderful Local Preacher in my home circuit used to say. “Have you been converted? I’ve been converted many times.”

Never think you are above such things. Let the Scriptures and the preaching of the Word keep bringing you back to the basics of Christian faith and living.

My home circuit once had an exhibition of resources for churches to share. My father promoted a Christian basics Bible study course. One sniffy lay leader at another church looked down his nose at it and declared, “We don’t need that stuff. We’re beyond that.” Please never take that man’s attitude.

Secondly: keep following (verses 22-24)

Paul knew he had to move on elsewhere. The Ephesians knew they had to stay put. Debbie and I know we have to move on, and most of you expect you are called to stay put.

Although the basics God calls us all to are the same, the details can be different. Be sure you know where and how God is calling you to follow him. Are you open to new ways and new surprises? Might he be moving you on? Could he be showing you something new in the place where you are?

Sometimes the basic message is to ‘Go’, as in the Great Commission of Jesus in Matthew 28. On other occasions, the command is to stay where we were when God first called us, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7.

Just remember, the core message of Jesus was ‘Follow me.’ Following him involves both what we do and where we do it. Could he be calling anyone here to something new or somewhere new?

What matters is that like Paul we aim to finish the task of testimony that Jesus has given us. What might that involve for you or for me?

Thirdly: keep watching (verses 25-31)

Paul calls the Ephesian elders to keep watch over the flock in place of him, who has done that by ‘proclaim[ing] … the whole will of God’ (verse 27).

That, he says, is how shepherds watch over the flock of God. They proclaim the whole will of God, because the ‘savage wolves’ (verse 29) who will come after the flock are men who ‘will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them’ (verse 30).

So be on your guard. If anyone comes along, be they a preacher, a member of the congregation, or a friend, and urges you to do or believe something that you know is contrary to the teachings of Holy Scripture, then watch out. If you hear the seductive claims that you should follow the spirit of the age rather than the ancient wisdom handed down to us, then beware. This is how wolves snatch the sheep from the flock of God.

If they won’t accept correction, then complain to the Superintendent. Even if they are sincere rather than malicious, you still need to take action. Sincerity is not enough. I remember the story of an inquest after someone died on a hospital operating table. The anaesthetist had mistakenly administered the wrong anaesthetic, and this killed the patient. The coroner addressed the anaesthetist and said, “I have no doubt you sincerely thought you were giving the correct drug, but you were sincerely wrong, and it cost a life.”

It doesn’t matter whether someone is malicious or sincerely wrong, if they are trying to lead people down an unscriptural path they will take sheep from the flock. Keep watching.

Fourthly: keep giving (verses 32-35)

On the surface, here’s one way in which Paul practised ministry differently from us. He still engaged in his profession of tent-making, and used it to finance his ministry, which must therefore inevitably have been a part-time affair. In fact, he says he financed not only his own ministry but that of his companions, too. This model exists in Scripture alongside ones that are closer to our practice of setting ministers aside full-time.

But the point here is that we give in order to help the weak, because it is more blessed to give than to receive.

So I’m not talking about regular church weekly or monthly giving here. I’m asking that we continue to give in order to serve and bless the poor.

For example, here’s one thing I wish I’d thought of at the time. We’ve had the food bank running here for a few years now, and it’s wonderful that people from the village make contributions in the box at the Co-Op. It’s encouraging that people deposit gifts for it in the box in our foyer. It’s lovely when a local business or other organisation donates to us.

But why on earth did I not think of suggesting that we had a regular time when we as a congregation specifically gave to the food bank, more than the annual donations at harvest festival? I do know that individuals from the church family have given to it, and done so generously, but I should have thought of some way of building a rhythm of such giving into the life of the church.

We need to keep giving not just for the maintenance of the church, but so that we can bless the poor.

Fifthly: keep praying (verse 36)

Paul and the elders kneel together before he goes and he prays for them.

Here’s a thought for you: many of you will know that what I am paid is called a stipend, not a salary. Now stipend is not a religious word for a salary, it has a distinctive meaning. Whereas a salary is supposed to be a fair recompense for the job undertaken, a stipend is a living allowance. It is meant to be enough for someone to live on without being in need. The idea is that I am set free to pray. That I may prayerfully determine my priorities. That I may pray for my churches and my members. If the stipend were taken seriously, then prayer would be at the heart of what ministers do.

But we also need you to pray for us. I have been blessed over the years to have four people who have prayed daily for me. Three of them are now dead. There may be others praying for me that I don’t know about.

Prayer is not a mechanical thing that ‘works’, like pushing a button – and that’s why I don’t like the expression ‘Prayer works.’ Prayer is an expression of our relationship with our heavenly Father, and at its heart that’s what the Christian faith is – a relationship with God.

So the reason to keep praying is because it’s a fundamental expression of our faith. Prayer is not just a list of requests, although it includes that. It is time with our heavenly Father, mediated by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Nurturing the relationship is as vital as filling up your car.

Sixthly and finally: keep loving (verses 37-38)

The weeping, kissing, and embracing tell us something about the strength of the love between Paul and the Ephesian elders.

Without love we are nothing. A church can have a mission statement but without love it is nothing. A church can have generous giving but without love it is nothing. A church can have wonderful building facilities but without love it is nothing. A church can have amazing worship music but without love it is nothing. A church can have exciting youth work but without love it is nothing.

Prioritise love for God and one another. When love grows cold, make sure you warm it up. When you fall out with one another, find ways to reconcile. When different personalities don’t understand each other, make sure you think the best of one another.

And I say this to you not because I believe love is absent here, but because it is present and you can build on it. I could think of many examples over the eight years I have been your minister, not least the way you have embraced your brothers and sisters when they have been bereaved. But one example is special to me, and that is the way you have taken my wife Debbie to your hearts.

It’s not start loving but keep loving. Not only will you make your church leaders happy, there will be joy in heaven as the Almighty and the heavenly host behold you.

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Engagement, Not Attendance, Matthew 10:24-39 (Ordinary 12 Year A)

Matthew 10:24-39

Let me begin with an observation from a wise church leader:

If you want to grow the church, don’t concentrate on church attendance.

Does that shock you? Don’t we want to grow numbers at church?

Let me give you a fuller version of the quote:

If you want to grow the church, concentrate on engagement, not attendance.

The point is this: anyone can attend church, and that’s fine: all are welcome. But that doesn’t make them a Christian. What Jesus said was, ‘Follow me.’ That’s more than attendance. We don’t merely seek more attendees or even church members. We seek more disciples of Jesus. People who will engage with him.

So it’s fitting that in today’s passage Jesus concentrates on discipleship. If we listen to him, we will know more of what call we put out to those whom we desire to be his followers and part of his family.

Firstly, discipleship is essentially imitation:

It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. (Verse 25a)

I hear those words and what comes into my mind is the old song from The Jungle Book, ‘Oo-be-do, I wanna be like you.’

In the culture of Jesus’ day, disciples were the students who learned from their teachers. But it wasn’t classroom knowledge. It was the kind of learning where the disciples learned from their masters how to live. They learned by imitating their teachers.

Some disciples of rabbis took this to extremes, and I could offend delicate sensibilities if I gave some examples. But the basic point was that a disciple wanted to learn how to live the godly life by imitating his rabbi.

The Christian tradition soon took this up. Not only did disciples follow Jesus, but the Apostle Paul would tell people to follow him insofar as he followed Christ.

In the late medieval era a Dutch-German Christian called Thomas a Kempis captured the spirit of this when he published a book entitled ‘The Imitation of Christ.’

That’s our priority: more people looking more like Jesus. We need to organise our priorities and our practices as a church around things that promote that. It means, for example, an emphasis on small groups – but not just ones that study the Bible and then close it. It means groups that look at how they are going to put into practice the teaching and example of Jesus, and the next week discuss how they got on.

Of course, we will all fail in imitating our teacher Jesus. But he has provided for the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross, and so we get back up, dust ourselves off, and go again.

It’s not enough for us simply to say that the Gospel is inclusive. If we say that God loves everyone but do not include the need to change, then that will never attract people, because they will think they can stay just the way they are. There is no need for Christian faith and the church on that basis.

But if we build on the fact that many people still have a warm regard for Jesus even if they are less positive about the church, then we have a real chance. We can say to people, ‘Come and see what it’s like to follow Jesus and be like him.’ That is a Gospel message. Just saying ‘All are welcome’ isn’t.

Secondly, discipleship is rooted in God’s love:

Jesus was loved – but not by all. The common people loved him, but the powerful generally didn’t. It earned him conflict, suffering, and eventually death.

If we are going to imitate Jesus then without us being provocative that is going to earn us opposition and pain at times. When bad times dominate, we may be tempted to despair. Is it worth it if the evil people come out on top?

So Jesus tells his disciples not to worry – God will expose the deeds of the wicked to the light. That’s why Jesus tells his followers not to be afraid of those who can kill the body, but not the soul (verses 26-28a).

Sure, there is a proper holy fear of God, but at the root of it all is a God who loves us so much more than anything else in all creation, sparrows included. We have a value to our heavenly Father (verses 28b-31).

And so just as Jesus’ security was in his Father’s love for him, our security as disciples is in the Father’s love for us.

There can be plenty of things to discourage us as Christian disciples. We are a minority. We are misunderstood. People reject us. Even family members take issue with us. It isn’t unusual for us to go through phases in life where we feel there isn’t much hope for all that is good, beautiful and right in the kingdom of God. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to chuck it all in and go along with the ways of the world?

To that experience, Jesus says,

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Is anyone here in a situation of discouragement or even despair about their life of faith? If you are, then Jesus says to you that his Father’s love for you has not changed. You are so valuable in his sight. After all, he made you in his own image. He knows you so well that he can count the hairs of your head – even if that gets progressively easier for him as time goes by!

You are loved. You are loved with the everlasting love of heaven. Whatever bad things happen to you in this life because you follow Jesus, nothing changes the fact that your heavenly Father loves you and that he will do justice in his time.

Remember: for the Christian, if the end is bad, then it’s not the end.

Thirdly and finally, discipleship is our priority:

Here I’m referring to what Jesus says about not bringing peace but a sword, how family members will be divided against each other, and how we must choose following him even above the desires of our families (verses 32-39).

This might get us worried. Is Jesus telling us to neglect our families? No, he isn’t. But he is telling us that because he is Lord our allegiance to him trumps everything else in life, even our families.

When we commit to Jesus Christ we are not joining a social club. We are not taking on a new leisure interest. We are reshaping our entire lives around him. This is not like taking out a monthly subscription to the new branch of PureGym.

And of course many of us already know the pain of divided families, where some of us are committed to Jesus Christ and other family members are not. Jesus reminds us here not to compromise our own commitment to him in order to appease our loved ones.

By implication, he also reminds us here not to make excuses for those relatives who do not follow him. Wishful thinking about their eternal destiny is just that: wishful thinking. God doesn’t suddenly lower the bar for someone just because they are related to us.

What should we do, then, when we are faced with this division in our families and perhaps our friends as well? We know Jesus doesn’t want us to back down on our commitment to him or to dilute it, and we also know we don’t want to be harsh.

I believe this should drive us to regular, sustained, and passionate prayer. Pray regularly for those loved ones who do not follow Jesus. If you can, pray every day for them. Prayer is what moves spiritual mountains. Prayer is what removes blockages in people’s lives.

The evangelist DL Moody prayed daily for one hundred of his friends to surrender their lives to Christ. During his lifetime, ninety-six did. The other four gave themselves to Christ at Moody’s funeral.

So keep up the praying. Don’t give up, and don’t compromise, because you’ll be surprised in the long term what God can do. Let your tears for your loved ones drive you to your knees for them.

Conclusion

It may seem a paradox, then, but according to Jesus the way to grow the church is not by lowering the bar but raising it, not by making entry easy but by being frank about how difficult and challenging the Christian life is.

Are we ready to embrace that challenge for ourselves, and to take it to the world?

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And The Book Is Published!

Yes, really, it’s out there in the wild now! It’s available for £9.99 in paperback or £5.99 in Kindle from Amazon.

I don’t yet have my author copies, but when I do I’ll advertise signed copies and the odd launch event. I’m also arranging a blog tour for around three weeks’ time.

But in the meantime, here’s a rather excited me (or about as excited as this introvert ever gets) in the back garden this morning:

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Coming Soon: My First Book

I’m just taking a break from my sabbatical to share with you the video trailer I have made for my forthcoming (and first-ever) book: ‘Odd One Out: Good news for those who don’t belong.’

I don’t have an exact publication date yet but I don’t expect it to be that long. Watch this space – and/or my Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feeds where I shall also be posting news.

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You Are Not Alone: The Temptations Of Jesus, Matthew 4:1-11 (Lent 1 Year A 2023)

Matthew 4:1-11

So we begin Lent and our journey with Jesus to the Cross. When we get to the Cross, we are used to saying things such as, ‘Jesus died for us,’ and indeed he did.

But one thing we miss is that Jesus could only die for us because he lived for us. Yes, his death was an atoning sacrifice for our sins, as the New Testament says, but there is more to it than that. In his death and our faith in him, we are united to his life and the benefits of his life for us. He did not only die for us (as if everything up until Calvary was just filling in time), he also lived for us.

I think that’s important when we consider the temptations of Jesus. It’s important to say he was tempted for us. And that’s the way I want us to explore this oh-so-familiar story that we read in one of the Gospels on the First Sunday of Lent every year.

So here are three strands of the temptations story that help us because we are united with Christ:

Firstly, fellowship.

Most weeks when I prepare a service I have to choose the hymns before I have written the sermon or even know what direction I’m going in with the Bible passage. More often than not that works out all right, but I have to confess that this week we’re now going to be singing a hymn after the sermon that takes a completely different tack from what the passage says.

What we’ll be singing is the hymn ‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us.’ It imagines Jesus in the wilderness and the hymn-writer says,

lone and dreary, faint and weary,
through the desert thou didst go.

And that’s how I’d conceived Jesus’ wilderness experience – as a tough, solitary time.

However, then I began to read and consult scholars about the passage, and I’ve had to admit I was wrong. Ian Paul points out that Jesus wasn’t alone. At the beginning, the Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness (verse 1), and at the end of the story ‘angels came and attended him’ (verse 11).

So if last week when we thought about the Transfiguration we sang the old 80s song ‘Weak In The Presence Of Beauty’ by Alison Moyet, this week we sing with Michael Jackson, ‘You Are Not Alone.’

Jesus was not alone in facing temptation. Neither are we, and that’s good news. It’s easy to feel that we are on our own when temptation comes, but it’s not the case that we are isolated. The Holy Spirit is with us to give us strength to do what is right. God’s angels are not far away to encourage us in the ways of the kingdom.

We may well feel alone when temptation comes, but that is all part of the lie. God’s Spirit is on hand to help us to say no to temptation and yes to Christ. It may be that all the noise and pressure of the temptation is there to stop us recognising God’s presence with us, but present he is.

Or it may of course be that really to our shame we want to give in to this particular temptation, and so we ignore the presence of the Holy Spirit with us in our hour of testing.

But God is there. He is our escape route. He is our strength in times of weakness.

When we are tempted, let’s look for God. He won’t abandon us.

Secondly, obedience.

I once heard a preacher declare as if it were blindingly obvious to everyone, ‘Of course Jesus was unable to sin,’ but I sat there thinking, well if that’s the case, the whole story of the temptations is pretty pointless!

I think the preacher’s error came from so wanting to defend the divinity of Jesus (which is a right and noble thing to do) that he forgot Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. And because Jesus took on sinful human flesh, it would have been possible for him to sin.

The Good News, though, is that he didn’t. Here at the temptations as at every stage of his life, Jesus, in the words of John Calvin, took sinful human flesh and turned it back to obedience to the Father.

You can’t miss the parallels between Jesus in the wilderness for forty days and Israel in the wilderness for forty years. But whereas Israel disobeyed and her life became futile, Jesus obeyed. He redeemed sinful human flesh by his obedience.

So when you and I find ourselves facing temptation, our union with Christ means that we have his obedience available to us. Before we resist the devil we submit to him and say, ‘Lord, give me the gift of your obedience.’

Our world doesn’t appreciate talk of obedience. It claims we are only answerable to ourselves and only need take others into account by ensuring we don’t hurt them. Obedience to anyone – let alone the Almighty – is out of date and repressive.

But you know what? Obedience to God is nothing of the sort. It is in fact the way we enter into true freedom. For true freedom is not the chance to do anything we like, but freedom to do what is right instead of being enslaved to sin. And as such, obedience to God is the most liberating of practices.

The expression, ‘Do what thou wilt’ is actually one of the cardinal tenets of Satanism. But ‘Do what God wills’ is the road to freedom. It may seem difficult, if not unattainable at times, but it is possible for the Christian because we are united with Christ and he gives us the gift of his obedience.

Thirdly, example.

The thing about the temptations story when it comes to us preachers is that it looks like an easy shoo-in for one of our favourite three-point sermons, one point for each temptation. And I’ve done that plenty of times over the years.

But while I’m still giving you three points this morning, I’m trying to show you the bigger picture. And so I want to think about all three temptations under this one heading about Jesus’ example. Because the temptations that the devil tries on Jesus come in some form to every generation. And Jesus’ example shows us how to rebut them.

So the devil tries to attack Jesus’ identity – who God says he is. God has just spoken from heaven at his baptism to say that Jesus is his beloved Son, and so the devil kicks off two of the temptations with the words ‘If you are the Son of God.’

Likewise to us he would love us to take on any identity except that of being beloved children of God. I could say that my identity is male heterosexual, a husband, a father, a Methodist minister, and a photographer, but these all pale into insignificance beside the fact that God loves me as his child. There is no more secure identity than that, and it’s important not to let the enemy to tempt us into skewing what our most fundamental identity is.

The devil wants Jesus to live by bread alone, just as much of our society, especially that influenced by atheists, wants us to believe that life is solely comprised of material things, that there is no soul or spirit, and unless something is material, it doesn’t exist. You and I know otherwise, and we cannot afford to compromise or forget that truth.

The devil wants Jesus to test God by jumping off the top of the Temple to certain death, and many people today say they will only accept the existence of God if he passes a test they set for him. It even comes in apparently heart-rending forms: ‘I will believe in God if he heals my auntie from cancer.’ Now it isn’t that God lacks compassion, but it is that allegiance to him must come first, whether he blesses us by fulfilling our requests and tests or not.

Finally, the devil comes out with his most naked temptation: you can have all the kingdoms of this world, Jesus, if you will only worship me. And this reminds us that we are all worshippers, whether we accept it or not. As Bob Dylan sang,

You’re gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

To what do we give our time, our affections, our money, and our energy? This will give us a good idea of who or what we worship. Those which are lesser than God may well be good things, but if they command our affection ahead of him then in our lives they are instruments of Satan.

Conclusion

Lent can be quite severe as we engage the spiritual discipline of warring against evil. But Jesus teaches us here not to lose heart, and to be encouraged.

For he is with us, and we can draw on his presence when we fight evil.

His obedience is available to us through our union with him so that we can conquer.

And his example shows us that what we face today is nothing new but rather simply old tricks given a new polish. They can be resisted in his name as he did, and we can live for the glory of his Name.

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