Tag: endurance

Sermon: It’s Not The End of the World, Luke 21:5-19 (Ordinary 33 Year C)

Luke 21:5-19

Do you want to predict a date for the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ? If so, I understand there is a website that logs all the various dates predicted by different people. You can look on that website, pick your own date, and join that happy band of heretics.

Some read Bible passages like today’s reading and assume this is about Jesus prophesying his return. They look beyond the verses we have read to verse 27, where Jesus says,

At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

They then assume this is about the Second Coming.

Having done that, they then get tied up in knots, thinking that Jesus said he was coming soon, but got it wrong.

Not so.

Because this episode is not about the Second Coming. We heard right at the beginning that it’s about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which would happen approximately forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s what the disciples asked him about in verses 5 to 7.

And that’s why the heading of this passage in the NIV is misleading. It says, ‘The destruction of the temple and signs of the end times.’ There are no ‘signs of the end times’ here.

But what about all that ‘Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory’? Nope. Jesus is quoting from Daniel 7. In that passage, the Son of Man does indeed come in a cloud with power and great glory – but not to earth. He comes into the presence of Almighty God, the Ancient of Days. It is about his arrival in heaven. In New Testament terms, that’s the Ascension.

It’s not the end of the world.

What our reading today does for us is tell us how to live as Christians during difficult times in history. For sure, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple would have felt like the end of the world to pious Jews like the disciples, but Jesus says it isn’t. And he tells them how they should live for him in cataclysmic times. Much of what he foretells here is fulfilled in Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles.

I don’t know whether we are living in cataclysmic times, but we are living in times of great uncertainty and potential peril. Therefore, we too can learn from Jesus here about how to live as his disciples when our world is being upended malicious and unstable world leaders, by economic convulsions, climate change, and more.

How might we live when things are bad, even if it’s not the end of the world? For in such times there will be serious pressures to face. Jesus here refers to opposition to our faith (verse 12), division that even extends to our families (verse 16), and outright hatred (verse 17).

Here are three qualities that stand out from Jesus’ teaching that we would do well to embrace:

Firstly, discernment:

Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, “I am he,” and, “The time is near.” Do not follow them. (Verse 8)

How do we ‘watch out’ to avoid deception? How do we discern between what is of the Spirit of God, what is of the spirit of the age, and what is from a malicious spirit?

Well, Jesus has just spent three years grounding the disciples in his teaching, and that’s where we need to begin. Nothing less than a deep commitment to the Scriptures, remembering that their central focus is Jesus, will do. It is the sheer biblical illiteracy in our congregations that has left us so vulnerable to being blown every which way in recent times.

One of my previous congregations did a survey of everything about the Sunday morning experience, from arriving at the church building to departing. That included the worship, and one of the shocking discoveries was the number of church members who never read the Bible for themselves between Sundays, and only ever hear it once a week in the service.

Is it any wonder with practices like this that people get deceived by the world? An appealing and emotional story will tempt people away from Christian truth. Congregations that just want things kept as simple and unchallenging as possible and then wonder why they lose their young people to the YouTube videos peddled by atheists. The dilution of Christian truth leads people into error.

Only this week the Methodist Church reported about a church in Stoke-on-Trent that celebrated the Hindu Diwali festival, on the basis that Diwali is a festival of light and Christian too believe in the light and hope of God. The similarities, however, are superficial; the differences are significant. It’s honourable wanting to stand against racism. It was diplomatic of them to make it a community event and not a religious service. But it’s misleading to suggest a serious parallel between Christian and Hindu beliefs, and that the Holy Spirit was present when the work of the Spirit is to point to Jesus, not to a multiplicity of Hindu deities.

This is why I now have two of my churches starting to study a Bible Society resource called The Bible Course. It will help them see the overarching story of Scripture and help them to interpret the Bible sensibly.

Let me ask you what you are doing to get your faith rooted in the Scriptures, and focussed on Jesus? It’s something worth doing both on our own and in groups together. It’s critical to our discernment at all times, but it is all the more important in turbulent seasons.

Secondly, testimony:

12 ‘But before all this, they will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. 13 And so you will bear testimony to me.

Here’s one of the elements of today’s passage that was, as I said earlier, fulfilled in the Acts of the Apostles. Things got sticky for the early Christians on several occasions. They were hauled up before the authorities on trumped-up charges, much as Jesus had been.

And this pattern has continued through history. The Christian message rubs people up the wrong way, especially those who have so much to lose. And when the world is convulsing and people are under pressure, they sometimes look for scapegoats. We can’t rule that out happening to us at some time, even if we have many more freedoms than so many of our Christian brothers and sisters around the world.

Jesus says, when the pressure is on, you will bear testimony to me. Our lives will show how much of Jesus we have. Our willingness to speak for him when there is no advantage in doing so and perhaps even significant disadvantages is a commentary on our faith.

Our testimony comes not only in words in a courtroom, but in our deeds. The world will see whether our words and deeds match up.

And the focus of our testimony will not be ourselves, rather it will be Jesus. A testimony is not the preserve of those with a dramatic conversion story. Our testimony is our account of what Jesus means to us, and what he has done for us. Every Christian, whether their life has been dramatic or mundane, has something to say on that subject.

Thirdly and finally, endurance:

17 Everyone will hate you because of me. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 Stand firm, and you will win life.

Going back over thirty years to when I was a probationer minister, a report on my progress one year that my Superintendent Minister wrote about me said, ‘David needs to learn that ministry is a marathon, not a sprint.’ I had seen the need for change in the churches, and I saw it as urgent, but I was trying to rush things that would take a long time if they were to be done at a deep level and with substance. Eventually, I came to describe my work as like seeking to change the direction of an ocean liner: a task that takes time to achieve.

Likewise, over the years, I learned that the life of Christian faith itself is a marathon and not a sprint. We are in it for the long haul. ‘Stand firm, and you will win life,’ as Jesus says here.

Now I think that’s good news to us when we are seeking to live out our faith when the world is in tumult. How we would love to change things quickly.

I think we are particularly prone to that temptation in our technological society. We expect to be able flick a switch, press a button, click or tap on a link and things will change. O that it were so simple. But it’s not.

I believe that often God’s word to us in difficult seasons can be simply put: ‘Keep on keeping on.’ Remain faithful to Jesus. Obey the Word of God. Continue to do the Christian basics: worship, prayer, fellowship, discipleship, being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, speaking for Jesus, resist being squeezed into the world’s mould, be open to the Holy Spirit. And seek God that he will bring the change that is needed in his time and in his way.

It’s not glamorous, it’s not flashy, it can be mundane rather than exciting. But it’s the right thing to do. And we leave the consequences to God.

Conclusion

One time when I was young, my father said to me that there were times when he wondered what on earth he and my mother had done by bringing my sister and me into this world. There are times when I, as a parent myself, have wondered the same. COVID. A warmongering Russian President and an American President who caves into him. Will my son end up being conscripted one day?

These are the times for me to remember the Christian basics. Be discerning through fidelity to the Word of God. Maintain witness, even under pressure. And just keep on keeping on in the everyday one-foot-in-front-of-the-other tasks of Christian endurance.

May we all stand together in this calling.

Remember: it may not be the end of the world now, but we are Resurrection People. In the end, Jesus wins.

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Living A Life Worthy Of The Lord, Colossians 1:1-14 (Ordinary 15 Year C)

Colossians 1:1-14

When I decided I wanted to learn photography, I asked my Dad to take me to his favourite camera shop in London. There, we met a remarkable salesman who had had one hand amputated. Think about that: how do you manipulate something like a camera without one hand? He did.

He sold me a rudimentary 35mm SLR camera. The idea was that I needed to learn the basics first before I ever considered a more complicated beast. That’s what I did.

I even had to repeat the exercise when I moved from 35mm film to digital.

The nature of Paul’s thanksgiving for the Colossians is that they have learned the basics. Now they can go deeper.

What are the basics?

we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people (verse 4)

Faith in Jesus and love for his people. Faith and love. These come from the gospel and the hope it gives us (verses 5-8).

Now it’s time to build on the basics and go deeper in their faith. Specifically, he wants them to know God’s will (verse 9) so they

may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way (verse 10).

I’d like us to look at these next steps for the Colossians today. If the basics are in place for us – that we have faith in Jesus Christ for salvation and we love God’s people – then what qualities are our next steps? Paul lists four:

Firstly, good works:

bearing fruit in every good work (verse 10)

We know that good works don’t earn us salvation. That is a free gift of God that we receive by putting our faith in Jesus and his death for us on the Cross.

Instead, good works in the Christian life are a grateful response to God, once we know salvation by faith in Jesus. As I’ve said before, remember that God only gave the Ten Commandments to Israel after he had saved them from Egypt. It’s similar for us.

How might we approach this, then? We have just completed the Bible Society’s study course on Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the final session on Thursday, we were challenged as part of our mission to pray a prayer every morning: ‘Lord, who can I bless in your name today?’ I think that would be a helpful approach in knowing at least some of the good deeds God is calling us to do as our thankful response to salvation.

I have encouraged other people to consider the question: how can I make a difference for good in the world? It might be through pursuing a particular career. It might be in other ways. We might seek to live less extravagantly and give more to those who are doing things we aren’t able to do. This might involve our support for organisations working to transform things in the developing world, for example. Or we might cut back our own spending in order to give to those who are bringing positive change for those in poverty in the UK. Where can we make a difference for good in our deeds and in our giving?

Another way to approach this is found in a favourite quote of mine. It comes from the American Christian writer Frederick Buechner, when he was writing on the subject of vocation. Now you may hear me say the word ‘vocation’ and think, this doesn’t apply to me, I’ve retired from paid work. But vocation is about everything we are called to do and to be in response to God’s love.

So here are Buechner’s words:

Your vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

In other words, is there something you are passionate about that can be set to the purpose of making a difference in the world?

Secondly, knowing God:

growing in the knowledge of God (verse 10)

Now before anybody gets worried, I’m not suggesting we all need to go off and study for a Theology degree! I enjoyed the two I took, but they’re not for everyone.

We do however all as Christians need to know more about God’s character, God’s plans, and what God loves. If we know God more in these ways, we shall want to love God more deeply. It seems strange to me that some Christians just want to stop at the bare minimum knowledge of God. Surely, given all he has done for us in Christ, we would want to know more about him and his amazing love.

And that’s why I’m always banging on about not simply coming to worship on Sunday, although that’s a good start. It’s why we need to read the Bible daily for ourselves and also meet with others to study it so that we can learn from each other. I was so pleased that everyone who filled in a feedback form at the end of our Romans course was looking in one form or another for us to keep meeting and looking at the Bible together. That’s encouraging.

It’s why we need to pray regularly, because prayer is not just us talking to God, it’s about waiting and listening to him.

Also, sometimes we get to know God better merely by doing what he says, even when we don’t understand it. Because in the doing of his will we get to know him better. Jesus said,

Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. (John 7:17)

So – how are we getting to know God better?

Thirdly, endurance:

being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience (verse 11)

Often when we read words like ‘strengthened’, ‘power’, and ‘might’ in the New Testament, we think it’s going to be about the dramatic or miracle-working power of the Holy Spirit, and I’m not about to poo-poo that.

But here, Paul prays that God will strengthen the Colossians so they ‘may have great endurance and patience.’

We need those qualities in the Christian life. To follow Jesus is not a spectacular 100-metre sprint, it is the endurance of the marathon. And over the marathon course of our lives, there will be ups and downs, joys and sorrows, peaks and troughs. The early Christians got to realise that quickly, through their experiences of suffering and persecution. Many – if not the majority – of Christians around the world today are familiar with this, too.

When we are finding it tough to follow Jesus, we can ask the Holy Spirit to help us. Sometimes, that will be an individual experience. God will give us an inner resilience that we didn’t know we had – perhaps because we didn’t have it before – and he will help us to keep on keeping on, even if it is just tenaciously putting one foot in front of the other, or living day to day or even hour to hour.

Sometimes, God will strengthen our endurance through the help of our sister and brother Christians. I had a couple in one church who underwent five bereavements in a year. Both of them lost both of their parents, and a beloved uncle died as well.

The wife of the couple said, ‘At times like these I find it hard to pray. But I am encouraged to know that the church family is praying for me when I can’t pray.’

Is life and faith difficult for us at present? Let us ask God to strengthen us in patience and endurance, just as Paul asked God to do that for the Colossians.

Fourthly, joyful thanksgiving:

and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light (verse 12)

This is remarkable, coming straight after the prayer to have the strength to endure. If our situation is such that we need the gifts of patience and endurance, then presumably life is not easy. And if that’s the case, how are we going to give ‘joyful thanks to the Father’?

Paul says it’s all because it’s a response to what God has done for us. Paul tells the Colossians it’s all because the Father

has qualified [them] to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.

It’s a case of remembering and rehearsing all the wonderful things God has already done for us, and all the amazing things he is promising to do for us. When we ponder these things in our hearts and minds, isn’t ‘joyful thanksgiving’ the natural reaction?

On Thursday morning, I paid my monthly visit to a local Christian care home. In alternate months, I either lead devotions for the residents and staff, or I bring Holy Communion. This time, it was a Holy Communion month.

So, I led a short service in the lounge, and then Deborah and I took the bread and wine to those residents who had not been able to make it to the service. We offered the elements in each room where someone was, because all the residents are Christians.

Entering one room, we found a lady who had lost most of her sight and a lot of her hearing. But in her adversity, this beautiful saint had still found a way to give thanks and praise to her God. She had an A4 notepad and a Sharpie pen. In her large handwriting (due to her sight loss) she was writing out on one sheet after another the opening verses of her favourite hymns. This was how she expressed her devotion despite her limitations. She presented me with a sheet on which she had written the first verse of ‘Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing.’

That lady’s witness was a challenge to me.

How is each one of us growing in our faith? Are our good works making a difference? Are we growing closer to God? Do we know his strength enabling us to endure in faith even in difficulty? Do our hearts leap with joyful praise?

We have every good reason:

13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

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Understanding and Experiencing The Trinity, Romans 5:1-5 (Trinity Sunday Year C)

Trinity Introduction

Knaphill friends have heard me tell the story before about how I was once visited by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses and when they knew I was a Christian, they pointed out that the word ‘Trinity’ is not in the Bible.

“Neither is the word ‘trousers’,” I replied, “but I’m not about to take mine off!”

My point was that we needed to invent a word like ‘Trinity’ to describe what underlies the biblical teaching.

Because the Christians of the first few centuries were faced with a dilemma. Their faith clearly originated in Judaism, which emphasises that there is but one God. However, Jesus appeared on the scene doing things only God was allowed to do. For example, do you remember how the religious leaders criticised him when he pronounced the paralysed man lowered through the roof as forgiven? They said only God could do that. They were faced with two alternatives: either condemn Jesus as a blasphemer, or rethink.

And this was further complicated after Pentecost, when the Spirit came, also doing divine work. So how do you account for a God who is one but who is revealed as Father, Son, and Spirit?

Muslims and others will tell us this is just plain nonsense: three persons cannot be One. However, the tribes Muhammad encountered and condemned for this reason were probably ones who were actually ‘tritheists’ – people who believed in the three gods. And there is a genuine difficulty with the word ‘persons’ that we use in connection with the Trinity. It’s the nearest English word we have, but it’s not exactly the same.

And so eventually, after three centuries or so of wrestling with these questions, the Church promulgated the doctrine of the Trinity. And we should think of that doctrine not so much as a tight definition but rather a set of boundaries: while you stay within the boundaries, you are describing the true God; go outside the boundaries, and you are not.[1]

Essentially, those boundaries are three lines of a triangle and we need to hold all three lines. Erase one of the lines, and we fall into heresy.

The three boundaries are that there is one God, eternally in three Persons, who are equal. What happens if you remove one of the three lines?

If you keep one God and three Persons but remove the equality, you get the ancient heresy promoted by a man called Arius, called ‘subordinationism’, where Jesus and the Spirit are subordinate to the Father – they are less than him. This is what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe.

If you keep one God and the equality but rub out the idea that God is eternally three Persons, then you get another ancient heresy, this time called ‘modalism’, which was advocated by a man called Sabellius. He said that God was the Father in the Old Testament, Jesus in the Gospels, and the Spirit from Acts onwards. God changed his mode. You can see it in poor sermon illustrations that compare the Trinity to H2O, saying that it can be ice, water, or steam. But Jesus addresses the Father in prayer and promises the Spirit, so this cannot be right.

Finally, if you keep the three persons and the equality and but remove the ‘one God’ line, then you end up with what I said I think Muhammad encountered, not trinitarianism but tritheism, a belief in three gods, contrary to our Jewish heritage.

Now you may say this is thoroughly brain-bending, and perhaps it is! But why should we expect our understanding of the Almighty to be simple? When Albert Einstein’s theories became popular a century ago and they replaced much of Isaac Newton’s thinking, some commented that God would not have had to have stretched himself that much to come up with Newton’s equations. There was something appropriate, if you believed in God, that Einstein’s work was so complex.

Perhaps that is a principle worth bearing in mind when we find the doctrine of the Trinity difficult.

I could say more, and in the past I once preached a series of five sermons to explore the Trinity. If you want any reading on the subject, I particularly recommend ‘Experiencing the Trinity’ by Darrell Johnson.

Romans 5:1-5

I said the Trinity underpinned the biblical witnesses to the one God, eternally and equally subsisting in three Persons. Here I’m going to look at their various rôles once – as Paul says in the context – we have been justified by faith.

Firstly, God the Father brings peace.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (verse 1)

Living under the Roman Empire, Augustus Caesar had established peace, the so-called Pax Romana, and he claimed to have done so by the principle of Iustitia, or justice. His successors had taken titles such as ‘Lord’ and ‘Saviour’.[2] Does any of this sound familiar?!

Paul takes this language and utterly transforms it. God the Father, not Caesar, has brought justification, treating people as if they had never sinned, through a Lord and Saviour not called Caesar but Jesus Christ.

And from that he had given the gift of peace, not peace brought through the sword and jackboots of an army but by Jesus suffering on the Cross.

It is peace with God. The barriers are broken down, and the relationship of peace between God and humans is now possible.

Moreover, that peace between God and people leads to peace between people in the community of the kingdom that we call the church. And so the church witnesses to God’s alternative kingdom that is so strikingly different from the Roman Empire. Instead of peace by subjugation, we have peace by suffering. Instead of peace by force, we have peace by putting others’ needs ahead of our own.

It becomes a question for us as a church: not only have we individually found peace with God through Jesus justifying us at the Cross, but also do we live out God’s life of peace together in fellowship? Are the quality of our relationships a sign of God’s kingdom, in contrast to the ways of empire that surround us?

Secondly, Jesus brings grace.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. (Verses 1-2)

‘Gaining access’ and ‘standing’ are clues that what Paul has in mind here is a room that Jesus has brought us into with the Father. It’s like coming not just generally to the Temple but specifically to the altar with a sacrifice. But that sacrifice is of course Jesus himself and we now stand in a place where we experience ‘grace’ not as a one-off encounter with the forgiveness we don’t deserve but more as an ongoing expression of God’s continuing love.[3]

Just think of that for a moment. The grace that Jesus brings us into is so vast that we stand and remain in it – well, we do, unless we choose to walk out on it.

That is why Paul says ‘we boast in the hope of the glory of God’, because God’s intention is to have us in his temple of grace for all time. We have something to enjoy now and to look forward to. This gives us hope. It’s based on God’s enduring love.

When things get bad in ministry, I sometimes look forward to retirement – perhaps more and more as I get older! The knowledge that we have a house in Sussex is something that tells me life will not always be like this in the bad times.

The followers of Jesus celebrate the good news that he ushers us into the presence of a God who has not promised to love us ‘until we are parted by death’, as the marriage service says, but ‘for ever and ever.’

Be encouraged! Jesus gives us a firm foundation by grace in the love of God.

And from that firm foundation let us be prepared to take risks in his name, rather than forever playing it safe.

Thirdly, the Holy Spirit helps us to love.

3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Verses 3-5)

As I said, things may be tough, but with the enduring presence of God’s love and grace, we have hope. And so Paul goes on to explain how we are enabled to endure, because we have hope.

And so we come to the point where Paul says that the hope we grow into does not disappoint us, ‘because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.’

‘God’s love.’ The Greek literally says, ‘the love of God’, and most translators, like the NIV, take it that way. But it could be translated ‘our love for God’, and given that the context is things we do, such as suffer and persevere, I (following N T Wright on this point[4]) favour that translation.

This would mean that what Paul is talking about here is that the Holy Spirit enables us to love God, especially during those times when we persevere and suffer, leading to the formation of our character and hope.

For in the difficult times it is often harder to love God. When we are up against and we want to complain, love is farthest from our minds. Yet we are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength, and there are no get-out clauses.

Loving God does not always come naturally or easily. But the good news Paul tells us is that this is one reason the Holy Spirit is sent to us: to help us to love.

And that takes us full circle. The peace of God is not just a personal gift but something we live out in community as an alternative kingdom, doing so reassured that Jesus has brought us into the place of God’s enduring grace and love. But living out that love is difficult. We cannot do it alone. For this we receive the Holy Spirit.

Thus the Trinity is intimately involved in the whole life of Christians, and the Christian community.

[1] What follows is based on Darrell W Johnson, Experiencing The Trinity; Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2002, pp 41-45.

[2] N T Wright, ‘Romans’ in The Interpreter’s Bible Volume X; Nashville: Abingdon, 2002, p 515.

[3] Wright, p 516.

[4] Wright, p 517.

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