Our Covenant God

The following was the sermon at the evening service at Bridgeton on 10 January 2010. It has been lightly edited for internet use. The Bible reading was 1 Kings 8:22-30.

Did you hear about the latest Bible to be released in the shops? It only costs £1.00 and it’s called the New Year’s Resolution Bible. It only has the first three chapters of Genesis in it.

New Year resolutions are promises we make to ourselves, aren’t they? But like the joke suggests, they aren’t promises we tend to stick to all that well. I’m going to suggest a new year’s resolution for you that I hope you will be able to keep, and that’s to grow as a Christian this year. That’s not just a good idea; as Christians, it’s what’s expected of us. 1 Peter 2:2-3 says:

Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

One of the best ways we can grow as Christians is just to spend time getting to know God better through reading a portion of his word regularly. The Bible is full of passages that help us understand better what God is like. And as we get to know him better and love him more, so this shapes our lives, not only in what we believe, but in how we live. This is what Paul teaches in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Our passage tonight is not particularly well-known. But it’s a passage that tells us many important things about God. So let’s look at this passage we have in front of us and see what God has to teach us about himself tonight because if we really grasped and lived in the knowledge of these truths, I think all of us would grow as Christians this year.

To begin with, just a brief word of background to the passage. One of King David’s unfulfilled dreams was to build a temple for the Lord to honour him and so that David's God didn’t have to 'live in a tent.' When David died, his son, Solomon, was his successor. And at the beginning of Solomon’s reign, there was a period of peace and prosperity in Israel. And Solomon decided that this was the right time to finally build a temple to the Lord in Jerusalem. The temple took seven years to build, although we learn something about Solomon’s attitude from the fact it took 13 years to build his palace in Jerusalem and the palace was nearly double the size of the temple! But that’s an aside. When it was finished, Solomon ordered that the Ark of the Covenant be brought from the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, and be placed in the inner chamber of the new temple, the holy of holies. And as the priests left the Ark there, 1 Kings 8:10-11 says:

‘When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the LORD. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled his temple.’

Imagine the scene. The new temple has been built – seven years in the making – and now God himself gives the work his seal of approval as it were by actually taking up residence and dwelling in the temple itself, symbolised by the shekinah glory cloud.

At which point, Solomon first addresses the assembled Israelites and tells them that he has built this temple in accordance with his father’s wishes and in accordance with God’s promise to David. He then stood before the altar in the temple and began to pray. And the passage we’re looking at is the first couple of paragraphs really of what is a long and mighty prayer that Solomon spoke that day.

We’re going to have a look at five things this prayer of Solomon’s teaches us about God:

• God is faithful
• God is loving
• God speaks to us
• God listens to us
• God is mighty and can answer prayer.

So, let’s have a look at the first of these five things this passage appeared to me to be teaching us. And it’s that the LORD is a faithful God. The very name of God speaks of his faithfulness. As you’ll know, when the Bible has the word LORD in capital letters, this is the personal, covenant name of God, that the Jews thought was so holy they wouldn’t write it all out, but just the consonants YHWH. This is God’s personal name, Yahweh, the name he revealed to Moses at the burning bush, the name that means I AM THAT I AM. And this was the name that God revealed only to his own people, Israel. It is a name that speaks of God’s commitment and love for his own people – and that includes you and me – everyone Christian is part of God’s special covenant people through Jesus Christ.

But it’s not just in his name that the passage speaks of God’s faithfulness to his people. The passage is full of the idea. Verse 23 is the key verse in the passage:

O Yahweh, God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven above or in earth beneath, keeping covenant and showing steadfast love to your servants…

The covenant relationship that God has with people speaks of faithfulness. A covenant is a solemn promise, a total commitment between two parties. A covenant resembles a marriage, which is a specific kind of covenant. God’s covenant with his people is little different. It’s not a bond between two equals entering into a commitment to love each other and share their lives; it’s a bond between the sovereign king of the universe and unworthy sinners, and so it is often called a covenant of grace. But like a marriage, it is nevertheless a bond of love between God and his people. The covenant of grace is also a sign of his faithfulness and commitment to his people.

Verse 24 also speaks of commitment and faithfulness. Solomon points out that God kept his promises to Solomon’s father, King David. ‘You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand have fulfilled it this day.’

Now when you stop and think about it, God’s faithfulness to his people is actually an amazing thing. It truly is amazing grace. Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament shows that the Israelites were anything but faithful to their God. Scarcely were they delivered from Egypt before they turned their backs on the invisible God to build themselves a golden calf. During their 40 years in the wilderness they continually grumbled and complained and turned away from God. During the time of the judges, the Bible says that ‘everyone did what was right in his own eyes’ and sin was rampant. Later they chose for themselves a human king to be like the other nations, even though God told them that he was their king. And so it went on and on through the time of the prophets and eventual exile in Babylon. God’s covenant people were anything but faithful to God. And the same is just as true of us. Rarely in Christian history has the church lived up to its calling and mission. If it were a matter of merit, how could God be faithful to people like us? People who sin in thought, word and deed every single day?

But thanks be to God that he is faithful, not because of anything in us, but because of his own grace and mercy. And this means God can be trusted and relied on by us all the time. He never plays us false. He never changes. He never gets fed up with us. And that’s really foundational for our relationship with him, isn’t it? All around us might fail and fall away, but God will stand by us, no matter what. He is faithful forever.

The second thing this passage teaches is that Yahweh is a loving God. Indeed, it is from God’s love that his faithfulness and grace to his people flows. He abides with us, because he loves us. Again, verse 23 brings this out:

O LORD, God of Israel, there is no God like you…keeping covenant and showing steadfast love…

The Hebrew word translated ‘steadfast love’ is ‘chesed’ and it’s a very rich word that occurs some 275 times in 27 out of the 39 books of the Old Testament. It is the word used to describe God’s covenant love. It means all of the following: a great, steadfast, unfailing, constant love, mercy, grace and lovingkindness. It the love that God has for his own people, his children and so it is a deep and special love, a love that is sure and steadfast, a love that sought us and saves us.

That’s the kind of God we know and worship, a God of love. In the New Testament, we even find the apostle John teaching that ‘God is love.’ Love is at the very centre of God’s being and personality. Love is the very reason God created the universe, the reason God is working to save the human race, and the reason why he will one day renew the whole universe at the end of the age.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

The challenge for us to somehow catch a glimpse of the greatness of God’s love. It is so great that to glimpse it, to recognise it, is like staring into a blinding light. It is dazzling and awesome and inspiring and life-changing.

The love of God is like a comforting presence with us all the time. No matter what we go through, we have this knowledge with us: God loves us and wants the best for us. And he’s in control of our lives, even when we’re not, even when bad things are happening to us. As Romans 8:28 says:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

That’s why we could sing earlier that he or she ‘who trusts in God unchanging love / builds on the rock that none can move.’

The third thing the passage tells us about God is that he is a speaking God. He is a God who communicates with us, a God who reveals himself to human beings. This truth is sprinkled throughout the passage in different verses.

Verse 24, ‘Who have kept with your servant David my father what you declared to him. You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand have fulfilled it this day.’

Verse 25, ‘Keep for your servant David my father what you have promised him, saying…’

Verse 26, ‘Now therefore, O God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you have spoken…’

As Christians we’re so used to this concept that we can almost take it for granted that God speaks to us. But consider all the pagan gods in the world, all the gods of wood, stone and metal that men worship. They are dumb idols. They do not speak. They do not communicate. Consider all the imaginary gods of other religions. People might think they are hearing from their god, but they aren’t because they are not real. There is only one god – Yahweh, the God of Israel.

So how does God speak to us? Well, I think we have to say that there are several different ways. God can speak to us in any way he chooses. Sometimes, he speaks to us by putting thoughts into our heads. Sometimes, he speaks to us through what other people say to us. Sometimes, he speaks to us through events, through things that happen in our lives. Sometimes, he even speaks to people in visions or dreams. But the most important and authoritative way God reveals himself is through his Word, through his written Word the Bible, and through the eternal Word, Jesus Christ himself. As Hebrews 1 says:

In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.

The fact that God speaks to us, flows from the fact that he loves us, and leads on to the fact that he is faithful. Do you see what I mean? Because he cares about us, he wants to talk to us. He wants to tell us about himself. He wants to tell us the truth about himself, and about us and about life. He wants to warn us so we won’t make mistakes and do wrong things. He wants to promise us good things to come in order to encourage us. His words to us flow from his loving character. But they also form the basis of his faithfulness. God makes promises. He tells us how things are going to be. And God keeps his word. A promise from God is more certain than seeing something with our own eyes.

The fourth thing to note from the passage is that God is a listening God. It’s one thing to consider that the sovereign Lord of the universe might communicate with tiny little specks of humanity like us. After all, the 'great' sometimes communicate with ordinary people. Kings issue proclamations. Prime Ministers make speeches. Parliaments pass laws. Judges hand down judgements. These days, every famous person seems to write a blog or have a website to reach their fans. So it’s one thing to consider that God might speak to us.

But it’s simply astonishing that the creator of the universe might actually want to listen to us as well! Yet the passage tells us that it’s true. God listens to us. He hears our prayers and answers them. Solomon speaks to God in this passage and petitions him with requests in the belief that the Lord will hear and answer him. The very fact that he prays at all testifies to this, never mind praying in public before all the people.

Verse 28: ‘Have regard,’ he says (pay attention, listen to), ‘the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O LORD my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you this day, that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house…Listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.’

Does it sometimes feel as if we’re only talking to ourselves or to each other when we pray? Well it isn’t like that you know. God is listening and watching everything that happens in the world of course. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about. All our conversations are known to God. But our prayers are not heard in that way, like divine omniscient CCTV. Our prayers are heard in a special way because they are addressed to him.

Prayer is such a huge subject, I can’t go into it in much detail tonight, but taken together with the other things we know from this passage about God: that he loves us, that he speaks to us, and that he’s faithful to us and to what he’s promised, this should encourage us to pray. When we pray, we are not addressing some cold, remote deity. We are speaking to our heavenly Father, who loves us. God tells us in his Word that he wants us to pray to him and he wants to give us what we ask for in His name. So our prayers are neither falling on deaf ears, nor is he reluctant to give us what we ask for. There’s nothing he likes better. The only time God won’t give us what we ask is when it isn’t the best thing for us. And when we ask for something that isn’t the best for us, we are not really asking for it in his name, because his name is Yahweh, and that means that is the covenant God who always and only does good to his people.

Our fifth and final point is that the LORD is a mighty God. As a modern worship song puts it:

Our God is an awesome God,
He reigns from heaven above
with wisdom, power and love,
Our God is an awesome God.

Obviously that’s linked to the fact that God listens to us and wants us to pray. After all, what’s the point of asking God if he can do things in this world if lacks the power or ability to carry it out?

It’s not that the passage says that God is mighty in so many words in this passage, but it’s implicit in the whole passage that God is mighty and awesome. For one thing, Solomon speaks to God in the knowledge that he can carry out what is asked of him. After all, who but an almighty God can organise history so that promises to one king are kept years later after his death? Who but an almighty God can ensure that one of King David’s successors would rule on his throne forever? Solomon was a rich and powerful man, but he recognises that God is ‘way out of his league’. Even the great temple that they had constructed in Jerusalem was like a joke compared to God’s majesty and power. Solomon can scarcely believe that God would dwell in a building at all. ‘But will God indeed dwell on earth?’ he asks. ‘Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!’

God is so big that the vast expanse of space cannot hold him.

I was recently at the planetarium at Glasgow Science Centre. There you see how the night sky would look on a clear night in the dark, away from the city lights. There are hundreds of visible stars, and millions of stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is only one of millions of such galaxies in the universe. Millions of galaxies. Billions of stars. Possibly trillions of planets. And yet all that unimaginable expanse of outer space is not big enough to hold God. In fact He created it by his Word.

That means that God is powerful and mighty enough to deal with anything that happens in the whole of space. All the events on earth, all our lives, are just one infinitesimal part of the universe and God is more than able to answer our prayers to change things on earth.

The passage is all good news for us with five aspects of God to comfort us and lead us through this year: his faithfulness, his love, his Word, his listening ear and his might. There’s only one thing for us to do in response and that’s to have faith in this God. To believe in him and follow him in obedience. That’s what that little phrase at the end of verse 23 means where it talks about ‘your servants who walk before you with all their heart.’

God’s servants are people who have faith in him, and our calling is to walk with him with all our heart. In other words to be committed to him wholeheartedly is God wants from us.

So at the start of 2010, let’s re-dedicate ourselves to our God, because there’s no-one else like him. There’s no-one else who deserves our total commitment, because our covenant God is totally committed to us.

The Way of Holiness

This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 29 November 2009 on Isaiah 35:1-10.

I have a confession to make. I’m what’s affectionately known as a ‘Trekkie’ – I love Star Trek. I’m a moderate Trekkie though – I don’t actually dress up as Captain Kirk or Mister Spock, though when I was younger, I did own a set of Spock ears. But I do love Star Trek. In the second Star Trek film, The Wrath of Khan, there’s this thing called the Genesis Device. It’s like a torpedo that is fired from space onto a barren and lifeless planet or moon. And as soon as it hits, the surface of that planet is transformed: seas appear, an atmosphere and clouds, dry land, plants and trees. The place is transformed in a few minutes from a lifeless desert into a paradise capable of supporting all kinds of life.

That’s the kind of picture that came to my mind as I was reflecting on this passage in Isaiah 35.

There’s a very close relationship between the land of Israel and the people of Israel in the Old Testament. It persists to this day in the minds of the Jewish people. That’s one reason there’s so much political turmoil in Palestine, because of disputes about who owns the land.

In the chapter preceding this one, Isaiah has spoken of the LORD bringing desolation to the land of Edom, destroying the whole earth in judgment actually. He talks about the sky being rolled up like a scroll and the sun and moon turning to dust. He talks about God’s sword coming down from heaven and slaying so many people that the sword is covered with fat and blood. He talks about the land becoming barren. Isaiah 34:9-10 – ‘The rivers of Edom will turn into tar, and the soil will turn into sulphur. The whole country will burn like tar. It will burn day and night, and smoke will rise from it forever. The land will lie waste age after age, and no one will ever travel through it again.’

It’s against that dark background that the scenes pictured in Isaiah 35 are shown up in all their brilliant colours. There are three things I’d like us to look at tonight:

• The physical changes that take place in the land
• The changes that happen to the people
• The road of holiness

And then to finish, we’ll have a think about what these things mean for us here today, especially as we enter advent and look forward to Christmas.

So, let’s look at these three things in turn.

The first thing for us to notice is the physical change that takes place in the land. Verse 1: ‘The desert will rejoice, and flowers will bloom in the wilderness.’ Or more literally, in the NIV: ‘The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom, Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom.’

Isaiah has left his readers picturing a world of smoke and tar and destruction. Now, there’s a change. The empty and lifeless land comes back to life. Plants grow again. The desert becomes as fertile and green as the fields of Carmel and Sharon (verse 2). Carmel and Sharon were well-known as two of the most fertile areas of Israel, where many valuable crops could be grown.

The same images are carried forward into verse 7 – ‘The burning sand will become a lake, and dry land will be filled with springs. Where jackals used to live, marsh grass and reeds will grow.’

We live in a wet climate, so we tend to moan about rain and look forward to dry sunny weather. But in hot arid countries like Israel, it’s the opposite. There rain, rivers, lakes are prized as blessings from God. That’s the key to understanding these verses. The change in the land from desert to garden symbolises God’s blessing the land, and God blessing the land is a sign for God blessing his people who live in the land.

Isaiah 35 harks back I think to Genesis 2, before sin entered the world, where human beings and God lived in peaceful harmony and happiness (reading from Genesis 2):

When the LORD God made the universe, there were no plants on the earth and no seeds had sprouted, because he had not sent any rain, and there was no one to cultivate the land; but water would come up from beneath the surface and water the ground...Then the LORD planted a garden in Eden, in the East, and there he put the man he had formed. He made all kinds of beautiful trees grow there and produce good fruit...A stream flowed in Eden and watered the garden.

These verses are a picture of a renewed and restored earth. They look forward to the new heavens and earth that the Bible promises will come at the end of time.
Human influence on the earth results in fertile land being turned into desert. It takes the work of God to make a desert become a fertile paradise.

The whole thing is a picture of a new age dawning, when the earth will be radically different from it is now. It is a time when the curse that came upon the earth as a result of Adam’s sin is reversed, and the previous paradise garden of Eden is restored – indeed, a greater paradise than Eden is created. For then it was but a garden in one place on earth; in the future, the whole earth will be a garden paradise where God and his people live together.

But, it’s not just the land being changed that is described in this passage. The second thing to notice is the change that is effected among the people.

Look at the end of verse 2: ‘Everyone will see the Lord’s splendour, see his greatness and power.’

Today, in fact all through human history, it’s only been a minority of people who have recognised God’s glory, his greatness and his power. Many don’t see him at all. Some don’t think he even exists. But at the time Isaiah foresees, everyone will see God’s glory or splendour. Everyone.

Next, Isaiah recognises that in this life, we can get tired; we can feel a bit down, we can feel worn out. But at the time when the world will be transformed and everyone will come to see the glory of the Lord, people will be changed. Verses 5 and 6 portray this in terms of miraculous healings: the blind will see, the deaf hear and the lame will leap and dance. People’s bodies will be restored to full health.

Isaiah calls on his readers to look forward to that time that will come and in thinking about how things will one day be, draw strength and encouragement for the here and now.

The third thing to notice in the passage is what the Good News Bible calls ‘The Road of Holiness’ in verse 8. Most other translations call this, ‘the Way of Holiness.’ This road is called a highway. And the picture is literally of a high-way. A raised road across the land, something like a railway embankment, with a road running along the top of it.

And notice what is said about that road: Sinners are not allowed to walk on it, but those who the Lord has rescued, or more accurately, the redeemed of the Lord, are allowed to walk on it. And note also in verse 9 that although there are dangerous animals in the land, like lions, they cannot harm those who walk on the highway because it is raised high and they can’t get up on it. The third thing to notice is where this highway goes. Verse 10 – it is a road to Jerusalem, or more literally, it is the road to Zion. In other words, this road leads the holy city where the covenant God dwells in his temple and meets his people.

So what is being said here? What does all this mean? And what does all this mean for us?

Well, the key to the incredible changes to the world and to people described here is in verse 4. Verse 4 explains what it is that leads to all this happening. In the Good News Bible it says: ‘God is coming to your rescue, coming to punish your enemies.’ In the NIV it reads, ‘Your God will come, he will come with vengeance, with divine retribution he will come to save you.’

The commentaries on Isaiah tell us that the Hebrew in this verse conveys the meaning that not only that God will come to save you, but that God himself will come to save you. And that’s emphasised strongly here.

Notice the two-fold promise of this verse. God will come to save his people and to punish their enemies. The message is one of comfort – you will be okay, God is telling his people. I will look after you, he tells them. But the message is also one of hope – that justice will come and will prevail. Those who have despised and persecuted God’s people will face God’s own vengeance. As Paul wrote in Romans 12: ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’

But although judgement, in the sense of justice being done, is part of this great visitation of God upon the earth, the emphasis is not on judgment here, but on God’s blessings poured out on his people and on the whole earth.

As the years passed, God’s people began to see in this passage that God was promising to come to earth himself to save his people. And they also began to recognise that the road or way that Isaiah spoke about was a symbol referring to God’s Saviour-King, the Messiah.

I think this view is confirmed by Jesus’ own words in John’s Gospel. ‘I am the Way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,’ Jesus said. ‘I am the Way.’ The Greek word is hodos. Literally, Jesus is saying ‘I am the road.’ And it is interesting that the Greek word hodos used in John 14:6 is the same word used in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, here in Isaiah 35 for the road of holiness.

As we enter the season of advent, and look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus at Christmas, let us remember that he is indeed the way of holiness. He himself is the road we are to follow. And that road leads to Zion – to God’s own city, and to God’s presence in heavenly city – the New Jerusalem.

But there’s a problem here, isn’t there? After all, if Isaiah 35:8-10 is looking forward to Christ. If Christ is ‘way of holiness’ talked about here – if he is the way that protects us from wild animals and lions (remember the devil is pictured as a lion in the Bible), then how come the other parts of Isaiah 35 haven’t happened? How come there are still deserts? How come there are still droughts? How come there are still people who are blind, deaf and disabled?

Well, the first thing to say is that there is no doubt in my mind that Christ himself is the way mentioned here in Isaiah 35. We have not only Christ’s own ‘I am the way’ words in John 14, but we also have the book of Hebrews that quite obviously draws on this image in Isaiah 35 of a safe road for God’s redeemed people to travel on to Zion. In Hebrews 10:19-20 it says: ‘We have, then, my brothers and sisters, complete freedom to go into the Most Holy Place,’ (that is the place where God dwells in the temple in the city of Zion), ‘by means of the death of Jesus. He opened for us a new way, a living way, through the curtain – that is, through his own body.’

No, for me there’s no doubt that the road mentioned in Isaiah 35 is looking forward to the Messiah and represents the Messiah.

So, if that’s true, what about the restored land, and the end of human suffering? Why hasn’t that part of the prophecy happened too?

The answer lies in a very important principle that will help us to understand the prophecies of the Old Testament, and it’s this: many prophecies have a three-fold fulfilment at different times of human history.

The first fulfilment refers to events at the time when the prophecy was first written. At that point, the imagery of a desert coming into bloom was interpreted symbolically. The desert was a moral desert where Israel was disobeying God. The blossom in abundance a symbol of a people restored to God and living for him.

The second level of fulfilment takes place when the Messiah comes and refers to the life and work of Jesus Christ.

The third and final level of fulfilment takes place, because of the second, at the end of time when the Messiah will come again to end this world and begin a new heaven and earth.

In effect, the road to Zion that is Christ has come, and God’s redeemed people, sinners saved by grace, travel on it, into God’s holy city. The paradise that is described has started to arrive, but has not come fully yet. This again is an important key to understanding the Bible. There is a tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ for many of the Bible’s ideas and promises. Christ the living way of holiness has come already. God’s promised King has come. We celebrate his birth two thousand years ago each Christmas. Christ the King has come and his Kingdom has begun also. Christ did make the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk. Indeed, he mentioned those things as evidence that he was the Messiah when John the Baptist asked him if he was the One. All that has happened already, but there is also a ‘not yet’ part of Christ’s kingdom. Still to come is the renewal of the universe, the final removal of evil and suffering from the universe, and the beginning of a new eternity of blessedness with God’s people living directly in God’s own presence, perfect and glorious, forever and ever.

The new age, the age of Christ’s Kingdom has already started to grow, but has not yet reached its zenith. Isn’t that the point of Christ’s parables, such as the parable of the mustard seed. The Kingdom grows from a tiny beginning until it fills the whole universe.

So, to finish off, we need to ask ourselves, what does this passage mean for us, who live in this in-between ‘already come but not yet complete’ period of history, this gospel age? And what does this prophecy mean for us? What can we learn from it?

The first thing is that we should be encouraged. Many of us are like the people mentioned in this passage. We are tired. Our knees tremble with weakness sometimes. It would be quite accurate to translate verse 3 as ‘Give strength to hands that are tired and to people with wobbly legs.’ We get scared and discouraged. To us, God says: ‘Be strong, and don’t be afraid!’ He doesn’t call us to find strength from within ourselves, but to draw strength from God himself.

Secondly, we should also be filled with hope. This new world that Isaiah and the whole Bible look forward to is not some vague dream of a few religious nutcases. It is a sure and certain hope. We know this because Christ has been raised from death. The resurrection proves that the new world is coming, and Christ is the first of us to have entered it. But he won’t be the only one. The Bible says he is merely the ‘firstborn of many brothers and sisters.’

Lastly, we should live our lives here with an awareness that we are part of God’s great plan to re-create the universe and dwell on earth with a new humanity of his own making. We are that new humanity, that new people, whom God has chosen to inhabit the new age to come. And Christmas was the beginning of the last stage of putting that plan into action.

Isaiah promised that God himself would come. The New Testament confirms that Jesus Christ is Immanuel, God with us, and he is the way, the road we travel on by faith.

The great Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, wrote:

Engineering has done much to tunnel mountains, and bridge abysses; but the greatest triumph of engineering is that which made a way from sin to holiness, from death to life, from condemnation to perfection. Who could make a road over the mountains of our iniquities but Almighty God? None but the Lord of love would have wished it; none but the God of wisdom could have devised it; none but the God of power could have carried it out.

This is our God. This is our great Saviour King, Jesus. His kingdom stands and grows forever and in his gospel he calls us all to turn from other paths to take his narrow way, the road of holiness that takes us safely through life and into God’s presence in Zion, where we will, truly, live long and prosper.

The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge

The following sermon was recently preached at our morning service in a series on the Parables of Jesus.

Imagine a scene. You’ve got to phone up a big company to make a complaint. It could be about your electric, or your gas, or your phone bill. Or it could be about some bank charges that you just can’t make head nor tail out of. So you get out the bill or the letter, and you phone the number on it. You get yourself all geared up don’t you? You think over what you want to say. You get your story ready. And your call gets answered, and an automated voice says if you want this, press 1, if you want that press 2, and if you want something else press 3, and you try to work out where your call fits into their scheme and then you press 3 and another automated voice tells you you’re in a queue, and then finally, at long last, you get to speak to a person, and 9 times out of 10 they’re in India and they can’t understand you, and you’re getting nowhere, and you can feel your temper rising, and finally you just hang up (or as happened to me once – they hang up on you!) and you decide either to just pay the bill to get some peace, or accept the substandard service you’ve received. Anything for a quiet life. It’s just not worth all the hassle.

Does any of that strike a chord with you? Have you ever tried to get something you want and felt you were getting nowhere? Have you ever felt that there’s a wall of bureaucracy that it is impossible to get past?

Well if you have, you’ll understand the parable of the widow and the judge that we’re looking at today.

You’ll identify with the poor widow in the story, and you’ll sympathise with her overriding sense of frustration that she can’t get her complaint dealt with – she can’t get justice from the system.

Picture if you will the court room scene Jesus paints for us in this story. This is a civil case. A poor widow comes to the court to ask for justice against her adversary. Someone has wronged her. We don’t know if someone’s committed a crime against her, or cheated her out of money, or ignored her rights. But something’s been done against her, and she seeks justice from the court to get it sorted out. And she comes up against the wrong kind of judge, an unjust and corrupt Judge.

The position of a judge in Bible times was in many ways similar to that of judges today. Judges were people who were supposed to command respect. Then, like now, they wielded enormous power over other people’s lives, and of course then, like now, people would look to judges to give them justice and punish evildoers. The judge was supposed to be person of wisdom and righteousness, someone to look up to.

But the judge is this parable is anything but a shining example of justice and righteousness. In fact he is a disgrace. Jesus sums up his character. “He neither feared God, nor respected man.” In other words, he wasn’t interested in doing what God’s law said. He wasn’t interested in doing the right thing. And he wasn’t interested in helping people, or sorting out their problems either. He was in it for himself. Jesus says he was a “corrupt” or “unjust” judge. I don’t think it’s going to far to say “corrupt” probably means this judge could be bought, and he was a man for whom justice had a price-tag. If you could come up with a bribe, a backhander, he would see you all right in court.

That’s the judge in the story. The other character is a poor widow.

When Jesus first told this story, everyone would have realised the signifance of the fact that the woman is a widow. In Bible times, there was no social security, and most jobs were not open to women. So a widow whose husband did not leave enough for her to live on, or who did not have other family to take care of her would be in dire straits financially. Widows were among the most vulnerable of people in Jewish society. That’s why time and time again in the Old Testament special provisions are made, and God’s people, especially the rich, are commanded to look after the needs of widows and orphans, the poor and the fatherless.

But although this was what God demanded, the fact was that a poor widow would not rate much attention from the rich and powerful people who ran her world. A poor widow was a drain on society and didn’t carry much clout.

We don’t know for sure, but I think it’s suggested in the parable that this widow was poor and destitute not so much because her husband didn’t provide for her, but because someone has robbed or swindled her out of property or money. And so she goes to the lawcourt to ask for justice and possibly to recover what she has lost.

But this judge has no time for her. You see, for a corrupt judge, a poor widow really was useless because he knew she wouldn’t have enough money to bribe him into deciding the case in her favour.

The only weapon she has at her disposal is persistence. She keeps on asking him, she harps on at him, she nags him, and pesters him, until finally he gets fed up and gives her what she asks for, not because it’s justice, or because he feels compassion for her, but simply to get rid of her. She’s become a pain in the neck, and his attitude is finally “Oh anything for a quiet life...”

It rings true doesn’t it? We know that keeping on at officials, ‘making their life hell’ to get what we want, isn’t that how we sometimes put it – the constant letters or phone calls in the end usually achieve results. In the end it did for the widow in the story.

It’s a pretty straightforward story. The question is, why did Jesus tell it? What point was he trying to make from it?

We might have expected Jesus at the end of the story to praise the widow for her persistence and condemn the judge as the lesson of the parable, but Jesus was a master story teller. And like all good story tellers, he delivers a twist in the story. Rather than focusing on the widow’s actions, which we might have expected, he actually focuses his attention on the judge, not to condemn him so much as to use him to tell us what God is like.

Now wait a minute, you might be thinking. How can a corrupt, dishonest, sinful judge teach us about God? It is an audacious story. Perhaps no-one but God the Son would dare make the comparison, but Jesus does exactly that. Jesus uses the bad things done by a bad man – in this case an unjust and corrupt judge – to show up the goodness of a good and righteous God.

Many of Jesus’ parables were stories designed to show what God is like. The most famous might be the picture Jesus gives us of a loving Father seeking his lost son in the parable of the Prodigal Son. But this story is different. Here Jesus does the opposite. He contrasts what God is like with what this corrupt judge was like. It’s similar in tone to what Jesus says in Luke 11:

Would any of you who are fathers give your son a snake when he asks for fish? Or would you give him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? As bad as you are, you know how to give good things to your children. How much more, then, will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

You see? In both cases a comparison is being made. In a nutshell, Jesus is saying here, if even a corrupt judge could be talked into doing the right thing by a widow’s persistence, how much more can you be sure your heavenly Father, who loves you and delights in you as his children, will hear and readily answer your prayers to him. God doesn’t have to be nagged into blessing us. He longs to bless us. He is ready, willing and able to hear the prayers, the cries of his chosen ones, his own dear children. That is the lesson Jesus wants us to grasp in this passage. He’s not saying God is like this judge, he’s saying if even this disgrace of a judge will do what someone asks him, how much more will God, the gracious judge and provider, give us what we ask of him.

So the key to this parable is this contrast between the judge and God.

The Puritan, Matthew Henry, used this passage to contrast the many differences between the widow and the judge on the one hand, and God’s people and God on the other hand. He wrote:

She was a stranger to the judge, where we are known completely by our heavenly Father.

She was alone, where we are many – God’s own family.

She was kept at a distance by the judge, where we are welcomed into the very presence of God.

She came to an unjust judge, where we come to a righteous Father.

She had no-one to speak for her, where we have Christ Jesus himself pleading our cause before God.

She got no encouragement from the judge, where we have God’s own promises that he will hear our prayers and give us whatever we ask for in his name.

She could only go to the judge at certain times, where we can cry out to God anytime, day or night.

She had to rely on nagging the judge into giving her justice, where we know it is God’s delight to hear our prayers.

How much more then should be willing to persevere in prayer, to “pray without ceasing” as the apostle Paul puts it?

So, all this leads us to ask a natural question. What’s all this got to do with us today? Well, we’re fortunate because Jesus explains the purpose for this parable himself. So we know what he meant to teach with this story. As verse 1 puts it, it was to teach his hearers and us Luke’s readers, that we should “always pray and never become discouraged”.

All summer, I’ve been fighting an ongoing battle of wills with a spider who has taken up residence in the casing of the wing mirror on my car. Each time I get into the car, there’s a spiders web constructed between the mirror and the door or the window. Each time I get a cloth and clean the cobweb away. (There’s never any sign of the spider by the way). The next day, a new web is built in its place. Never fails. I suppose a bit like Robert the Bruce and his encounter with a spider, when I think of that spider, I the word that comes to mind is perseverence. It never gives up in its task.

That’s what we’re called to be like in our prayer lives. People who never give up. Who keep on coming back to God in prayer, every day, no matter what we go through. Sometimes the spider’s web is large and elaborate. Sometimes, it’s smaller and tighter. That’s what our prayers will be like sometimes. Some days longer, more complicated, other days, short and sweet, sometimes not in words at all, just inner thoughts too happy or sad for words. But present and persistent nevertheless.

Just before this parable, Jesus was asked when the kingdom of God would come. And Jesus gave a startling answer. The Kingdom of God is here he said, it is among you. That’s because the Kingdom of God exists wherever people like you and me believe in Christ and follow his teachings. In other words, Jesus said that the Kingdom of God was not some far future event that they would have to wait for. The Kingdom of God was already there in the hearts and lives of ordinary people who followed Jesus. The Kingdom of God is here and now!

It has already started, and yes it will grow and grow until it reaches its eternal fulness and glory, but it has been growing ever since the very beginning of history when God promised Adam and Eve that one of her offspring would crush Satan’s head and destroy him. The kingdom entered a new, decisive and final phase when God himself came to earth to rescue humanity from itself through his Son, Jesus Christ. And the kingdom will come fully and culminate when Jesus Christ comes again to earth in glory and triumph to bring about a new heaven and a new earth. That’s the future, but the change in the world has already began. It happens every time someone becomes a Christian. And yet, he is real with them. His followers will still have problems during this life until he comes again to complete the Kingdom project and make all things new, all things joyous, all things loving, all things perfect, forever. In fact, it’s in the knowledge of what is to come in the future, and what Christ has already achieved for us in the past – in the cross and the resurrection – that he encourages us to face the present. Life here and now. To live as his people, remaining faithful and never giving up, resolutely going forward with him as people of prayer.

I think that helps us understand what might otherwise seem like a curious last line to the story. In verse 8, Jesus ends the story with a cryptic question, “But will the Son of Man find faith when he comes?”

It’s really Jesus answer to the Pharisees question in chapter before this one: “when will the Kingdom of God come?” they asked him. Jesus’ answer is, don’t get caught up in when it will be. Instead, make your focus on whether or not you are prepared for it, are living for it and are praying for it. If he were to come now, would he find you or me faithful? That’s the question we all have to consider, and each must give our own answer to him.

For Jesus there is an inseparable connection between faith and prayer. By faith we enter into the Kingdom of God, by prayer we ask God to make that Kingdom grow. Isn’t that what we pray each week here? “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”?

Jesus calls us to be people who pray. Who pray expecting God to answer. Who pray expecting our prayers to change the world. And we should be persistent in our prayers, just like the widow in the story. Not because we think that we can talk God into doing what we want, but because persistent prayer is simply one of the ways, maybe even the most important way, that God uses to change things. Because persistence in prayer is evidence of a living faith in our hearts. For Jesus faith results in prayer, and prayer shows faith.

But will Christ find us faithful? Will Christ find us praying? Are we ready to put prayer at the top of our priorities? Or is prayer something we pay lip service to in church and then let others get on with. Is prayer important to you? After all it’s simply talking with God. Is talking with God something that matters to you?

Enthroned in heaven Jesus hears our prayers and knows he has a faithful people still here on earth. When he returns, where he hears prayer, there he will find faith on the earth.

Christian Struggles

This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 26 April 2009 on 1 John 3:4-10.

I’m going to start by reading you a number of statements. After each one, I want you to put up your hand if you agree with what I say. Okay? Hands up if you agree.

1. Becoming a Christian means you don’t have any fun in life.
2. All Christians are ‘loving people’ all the time.
3. Bad things don’t happen to truly godly people.
4. Christian churches are places where you can trust everyone you meet.
5. Christians never have any struggles and always feel close to God.

Well done, folks. Each one of these statements is wrong for different reasons. Of course Christians can have fun – as Christians we are people with a deep joy inside us and it should show in how we celebrate the fact that Jesus is alive and our living King and Saviour. Christians are not always ‘loving people’ – sometimes we get it wrong and act towards others in ways we shouldn’t. There’s little much clearer in the Bible than its teaching that bad things will happen to good, godly people. Just look at Jesus. He truly was godly – in fact he was God – but they crucified him. Look also at Job, Joseph, David, Daniel, Peter, Paul – there’s hardly a believer in the Old or New Testaments about whom we don’t read undergoing periods of pain and suffering. Christian churches are not always places where you can trust everyone you meet. They should be – but I’m sorry to say they aren’t. For example, there are churches where false and damaging teaching is taught. It would be wrong to trust those teachers, even if they stand up and the front and claim they are preaching God’s word.

But it’s the last statement we’re going to concentrate on tonight. It is simply not the case that Christians do not struggle in their faith and always feel close to God. Life is a struggle for the Christian as much as for anyone else!

As I said, we’re going to concentrate on verses 4-10 of the passage tonight. Last week we say how the passage teaches that God is our Father who loves us and adopts us as his children. We also saw how we will one day ‘grow up’ to be something so amazing that John can’t really tell us what it will be because it will be so wonderful and so much more than we could ever appreciate in this life. We also saw that though the future is sparklingly bright for the Christian, the present is also good because we are God’s children, and since we are we need to live as God’s children and keep ourselves pure. We also saw that the way John envisages us doing that is not by our own efforts but by looking to Christ, by confessing our sins to him, by trusting in him and believing that ‘the blood of Jesus purifies us from every sin’ (as chapter 1, verse 7 says).

Tonight’s verses follow on from this statement that God’s children purify themselves and I think verses 4-10 tell us about three distinct – though linked – struggles that we all go through in our Christian lives. They are our struggle against sin, our struggle with the devil, and our struggle to be people of love, to do good and be righteous in how we live our lives. And as I said, these three struggles though distinct are nevertheless closely linked.

The first struggle the passage talks about is the struggle with sin.

John begins, in verse 4, almost with a definition of what sin is. ‘Everyone who sins breaks the law ... sin is lawlessness.’

Most of you will know that when I left school I studied law. One of the hardest subjects you study as part of the degree is called jurisprudence which basically means the philosophy of law – or in simple terms, what is the purpose of the law. What’s it for? As you might imagine, there are many different theories about this but almost every one agrees on one thing – the purpose of the law is to help groups of people live together in peace and harmony. The law is a series of rules designed to make life better for every one, and help people to get on with other. You might even say that the purpose of the law is to produce right conduct and where there is no right conduct to both punish the wrongdoer and give justice to those who have suffered from wrong conduct.

That might help us understand what John means here in verse 4. Sin is lawlessness. The particular Greek construction used here means the terms are interchangeable: sin is lawlessness, and lawlessness is sin. Sin is breaking the rules, flouting the law. Sin is anything that goes against the law including wrong thoughts, words and wrong behaviour. But at its heart, sin is anything that goes against right conduct designed to help people live in harmony with each other and with God.

The law John is speaking about here is not Roman law – the law of the state though – it’s God’s law he means, God’s rules of right and wrong. Not so much the particularly Jewish laws about kosher food, or Sabbath observance, but the moral principles shared by every society in the world – God’s law condemning dishonesty, pride, hypocrisy, anger, violence and so on.

And it’s in breaking this law and committing sins that is the first of the Christian struggles identified in the passage.

John isn’t mealy mouthed about it – he ‘shoots from the hip’ as the saying goes. He gives his readers it straight.

You are God’s children, he’s just told them. Jesus Christ is your big brother and as you’re all in the one family, you’ll keep yourself pure just as he is pure. That’s what John expects of Christians. We’ve to be pure. He is also very realistic and knows that we fail to do that – and we looked at that last week – the importance of coming to Christ for forgiveness and restoration to purity through his blood.

I hope you can follow John’s train of thought here in verses 5 and 6 and again in verse 9. You know, he says to the readers, you know that when Christ appeared he took away your sins. This is reminiscent of John the Baptist’s words about Jesus quoted in John’s Gospel – ‘Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ He took away your sins, and there was no sin in him, so no one who is in union with him, who lives in him, who abides in him, and has his Spirit living inside him or her, keeps on sinning. And he even goes as far as to say in verse 6 that any who does ‘keep on sinning’ has not really met Jesus or trusted in him.

These are strong words that John says. And I don’t want to minimise the forcefulness of what he says. Christians – you and I – should have nothing to do with sin. If we are in union with Christ, joined to Christ by faith, then sinning should never happen. There’s never a good excuse for sinning. It’s never ‘okay’. It’s always serious, it’s always wrong, and it always hurts our relationship with God. But at the same time there is always forgiveness, pardon and restoration available to a sinner who truly comes again in repentance and faith to Jesus for the first time or the millionth time.

However, at the same time I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression. Notice that John does not say that a true Christian never sins. John knows very well that Christians sin. As we’ve seen before, he actually says in chapter 1 of this same letter that if we say we don’t sin we make God out to be a liar and the truth is not in us! What John says – and it’s well brought out in the TNIV we’re looking at – is that real Christians don’t keep on sinning. Other translations say things like ‘No one who lives in him makes a practise of sin’. In other words, Christians don’t go on and on sinning continuously. Yes, there are sins we might struggle with for years – maybe even our whole life – that’s not what John means. He means that if a person goes on and on sinning and it doesn’t bother him or her – if you can sin and not feel guilty about it, then you might ask yourself how real your relationship with Jesus Christ really is.

The point is reiterated in verse 9. ‘Those who are born of God will not continue to sin because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.’ In other words, we are God’s children, so we will act in a different way - we will act like God is our Father and his ‘seed’ is in us. This is a metaphor which means God’s life changing, life growing power is inside us - and we know this probably refers to the Holy Spirit who lives in us. John’s point is basically that when Christians sin they are acting ‘out of character’, which is the opposite to the situation for the people of the world. They are sinners by nature; when they sin, it’s no more than them acting in character. But for Christians to sin is unnatural because they have a new nature and a new life as God’s children.

Nevertheless, although the Christian has a new nature whose inclination is not to sin, we have not totally got rid of our old selves. And so, our struggle with sin remains very real. It exists and we shouldn’t minimise it, and though it should be fought against, it shouldn’t consume our lives with guilt either. We need to cling to verses like Romans 8:1: ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus’ and remember they were written to sinners, not to perfect stained-glass saints.

Also remember that the best way of combating it is not by trying to live a stricter and stricter moral life, keeping yourself out of harms way, out of the way of temptation. That’s almost the worst thing you could do. I know – I’ve been there. When I was younger I was like a young Pharisee. I would avoid sins by avoiding certain places, by avoiding certain activities, by avoiding certain people, by cutting myself off more and more from the world around me. The trouble is that the more and more effort you put into overcoming sin through your own moral efforts, the less and less you look to Jesus and the less and less you are living under the gospel. You are actually going backwards and living under the law. The way to tackle sin is yes to break bad habits of actually committing sins (the Bible says we are to put sin to death – we are to murder sin in our lives) but alongside that we need to keep the cross of Christ and the forgiveness we find there firmly in view. Whether it’s a law of nature for all of us or not, I don’t know. But I do know that I find it much much easier to do something because I want to than if I have to. By that I mean, paradoxically, it’s actually easier not to sin once you realise you are living to please God because you want to and not because you have to.

If I can use a sporting analogy – have you noticed how well the Scottish football team or Rugby team play when there’s nothing at stake? You know how it is, they’ll get beaten by Peru and draw with Iran and then when they’re out of the World Cup, they’ll beat Brazil or Holland. It’s because the pressures off, isn’t it? There’s no weight of expectation. The team can go out and just play for fun, and guess what – suddenly they are playing like world beaters and it is fun!

That’s a bit like the struggle against sin. If we live fearing God won’t accept us because we’ve sinned again and again, if we live guilt-ridden lives that focus only inward on how bad we are, if we are always disappointed with ourselves, then we end up failing more and the pressure becomes too great. But once we know we’ve already ‘qualified for the next round’ (because unlike the Scotland team, we are ‘more than conquerors’ and our name is already on the trophy so to speak), we can play for fun and actually sin less.

So that’s the first struggle – the struggle against sin.

The second struggle is our struggle against the devil.

The Bible is very clear that the devil exists. I know that nowadays there are many people who scoff at such things. Some of them are even in the churches. But as we are Christians who take the Bible seriously, we’re faced with clear teaching in passage after passage – from Genesis to Revelation in fact – that the devil is very real. The Bible is sketchy about his origins. It seems he was one of God’s angels who rebelled against God and was thrown out of heaven. He is known as ‘the Prince of the air’ or ‘the Prince of this world’ which could mean that he was originally meant to help God rule on earth, but decided instead to take over and rule himself without reference to God. What we do know is that he is the implacable enemy of God, he is opposed to Christ and he is the enemy of Christ’s people.

This passage teaches us a couple of things about the devil. In verse 8 it says that the devil has been sinning from the beginning. He is in fact the worst sinner of all because he is the first sinner, he is totally evil and he is never going to change. He is going to be sent to hell one day forever.

The devil is not just a mere personification of evil, he is an evil being – a fallen and depraved angel – who is determined to wreck as much of God’s creation and as many lives as he can before his time runs out.

Our struggle as Christians against the devil is two-fold I think. First, it is clear that the devil will try to get us to commit sins. He will tempt us. The very first time we encounter this figure in the Old Testament is in the Garden of Eden when he appears in the guise of a snake, tempting Eve to disobey God. We also know that the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness at the beginning of his public ministry. He comes to tempt us too. In fact several times in the New Testament, he is called ‘the Tempter.’

Each one of us will be tempted in different ways, but all of us will be tempted in some way. I know that’s the case for me anyway. The devil always seems to come to me in areas where he knows he can get at me. And it will be the same for each one here. I suppose it’s in the nature of ‘temptation’ that it is only felt in areas of our life where we are actually susceptible to temptation.

The other struggle we have as Christians against the devil is in his primary role of being the Accuser. In fact that’s what the devil means. In Hebrew his title is satan, in Greek diabolos from where we get ‘devil’ and both mean ‘the accuser’. It could mean that, as one commentator puts it, he was indeed God’s appointed Accuser – the chief prosecutor in heaven – and he got so caught up in wanting to find things to report to God that he ended up encouraging heavenly beings to disobey God so he could accuse them.

Whereas the devil’s role as tempter is uppermost when he’s trying to get us to sin, his primary function as accuser comes to the fore when we have sinned. That’s when the devil comes and really goes to work on us.

You probably know how it is when you realise you have committed a sin? You get that feeling inside - the feeling of guilt. Now, let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that feeling. Guilt is supposed to be there when we do things wrong. God put it there in that part of our mind or our spirit that we call conscience. Feeling guilty when we sin is not the devil’s work. No, he moves in after that. Maybe we’ve realised we’ve sinned, we come to God and confess our sin and ask him to forgive us, or we go to the person we’ve sinned against and say sorry. Then the devil goes to work on you.

Because according to God’s Word, when we confess our sins, God forgives us. We start off again with a clean slate and are to move forward with God again. But the devil comes along and whispers in your ear: ‘You’re not really forgiven. There’s no way God is going to forgive you this time. You’d be as well giving up now. You’ve had it.’ Or he comes and says: ‘Call yourself a Christian? How could you do what you’ve done if that’s the case? You’re a sham. You’re no more a Christian than all those other hypocrites.’ Make no mistake those accusations from the devil are very real and they are very powerful. They get to us deep inside, don’t they?

The devil’s accusations can be like having a monkey on your back. They stop you in your tracks - they make you change your focus from looking outward to Christ to looking inward into yourself. They can make you feel so much false guilt that you become totally paralysed and ineffective as a Christian.

Both of these works of the devil are a real struggle for every Christian at times I think, maybe even a lot of the time!

I have to say verse 8b is one my favourite verses in the whole Bible. It’s a verse it’s worth memorising and coming back to again and again when the devil is tempting or accusing you. ‘The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.’ There’s a whole sermon in those words. All I will say tonight is that we need to remember that Christ has already destroyed the devil’s work and defeated the devil through his death on the cross.

So, when the devil comes to us as tempter, we can say to him - Christ has defeated you and so sin has no power over me. I have died with Christ through trusting in his work on the cross. As Paul wrote in Romans 6:11: ‘Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.’ If we’re dead as far as sin is concerned, we are free from sin. We don’t have to give into temptation, not through looking towards our own efforts, but in looking at the cross.

Similarly, when the devil comes as accuser, we need to remind ourselves that we are saved through Christ’s work and that work is complete. We do not need to fear. ‘It is finished, it is accomplished’ was Christ’s shout of victory on the cross. The devil can have no hold over any child of God any more. The penalty for my sins has already been paid in full by Jesus Christ; God cannot punish me for sins for which Christ has already been punished.

As an old hymn by Augustus Toplady puts it:

‘If Thou hast my discharge procured,And freely in my room enduredThe whole of wrath divine:Payment God cannot twice demand,First at my wounded Surety's hand,And then again at mine.’

As it was in the Garden of Eden, Satan can only have a hold over us if we let him, not as of right. So when we struggle with the devil’s words in our ear we need to remember that Jesus has already destroyed his works, and put the apostle James’s advice in practice: ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.’ (James 4:7-8).

Very briefly I want to look at the third struggle Christians face - the struggle to love, to do good and be righteous.

There are a couple of verses in the passage that touch on this struggle. In verse 7, ‘Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.’ And again in verse 10, ‘Those who do not do what is right are not God’s children; nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.’

The first two struggles we’ve looked at have been against one thing and another - the struggle against sin and against the devil. The third kind of struggle is very different. It’s a positive struggle if I can put it that way: the struggle to do the right things, to love other people.

Maybe you’ve heard the scientific principle that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’? Basically it means that in the world around us, the scientific laws mean that any empty space gets filled in very quickly. A vacuum is a space where there’s no air. As soon as that space is opened, air rushes in to fill the gap. A similar principle means that if you clear a piece of ground, before long weeds will grow there. If you dig a hole in a field, it will soon fill up with mud or water. A clean shelf soon gathers dust.

The same thing is true of our lives. We cannot live empty lives. We will fill our time with something. The only question is what things will we spend our time doing. If we’re going to try to do better in our struggles against sin and against the devil, we need to spend time doing positively good things. No-action neutrality is not an option.

The positive things we are to do are good things. We are to love others and show it in our words and actions. We are to do what is right - in other words act in ways that the Bible calls righteous. We are to be kind and generous, we are to do good. In Galatians 5:22, the apostle Paul says that we are to have the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ in our lives, which are: ‘Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’ He also gives a picture of the kinds of things we are to fill our lives with in Philippians 4:8: ‘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.’

If only it was as simple as just getting on with doing that. But the fact is that we often find it a struggle to do those positive good, loving things we want to do. All the struggles we have looked at are related to each other. We find it hard to live righteous lives because we find it all too easy to sin (to live unrighteous lives). Finding it hard to do good is the flip side of struggling with sin.

That means that both struggles are intimately connected. They’re like a see-saw that goes up and down. When doing good increases, sin decreases; when sin increases, doing good decreases. It also means that one of the important ways to combat sin is to do good.

Fortunately, Christianity isn’t about following a set of rigid rules that constitute ‘doing good’ or that equal ‘love’. So I can’t stand here and tell you what to do different tomorrow, or next week, or from now on. Because each one of us is different. Christianity is about relationships - with God and with other people. Christianity is about great principles that stand immoveable. But how you put the principles into practice can be done in hundreds of different ways.

The thing to grasp, the thing to actually act on is to consciously try to love more and do good more often. If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit living inside you. He will tell you what putting it into practice means for you. Listen to that still small voice that is prompting you to speak to that person you ignore every day on the way to work, or send a cheque to that charity, or write that letter, or visit that friend you haven’t seen in ages, or pray more, or whatever it is.

The main thing is to live as righteous children of God. Not in a legalistic way because we are not under law but under grace. Not for fear of hell, because there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not even just because it’s the right thing to do, though God delights in our obedience. But if we centre our lives on love - love for God and love for our brothers and sisters and our neighbours, then may, just maybe, we will live as God’s children should and show the devil and the world who our Father really is and live lives that are offerings of thanks to him for all he’s done for us.

Children of God

This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 19 April 2009 on 1 John 3:1-3.

I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.

Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.

If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:

· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.

So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.

There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.

As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’

In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’

In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’

However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).

So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’

That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.

We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)

The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:

‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)

Later on in this Letter, John writes:

‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)

I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.

It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?

The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’

The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’

But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?

The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’

All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.

The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.

John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’

The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.

Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.

I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?

Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’

We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.

That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.

There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.

I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.

This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:

‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’

That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.

The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.

As John taught in his Gospel:

‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)

A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.

Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.

Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’

We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.

As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:

‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’

John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’

In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.

The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:

‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)

The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.

It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.

You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.

That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.

I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.

You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.

John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.

On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:

‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’

So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.

John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.

John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.

After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’

And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.

It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.

Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.

As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:

‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).

Jesus is Lord

The following was a series of Bible readings and reflections at the evening service on 7 September 2008.

First Reading: Luke 2:8-16

We probably read this passage every year at Christmas, but probably don’t think much about Jesus’ birth at other times of year. That’s a pity really, because the fact that Jesus came to earth, born as a human being, is something we should celebrate all year round. The verse I want us to focus on tonight is verse 11: “This very day in David's town your Saviour was born—Christ the Lord!”

He was Christ the Lord from his birth. Even as a baby lying in that manger, he was King of kings and Lord of lords. The wise men knew that Jesus’ birth was the birth of a king. After all when they travelled from the east and arrived in Palestine they went to Herod’s palace in Jerusalem and asked “Where is the baby born to be the king of the Jews? We saw his star when it came up in the east, and we have come to worship him.” (Matthew 2:2)

They may have originally been seeking the birth of a "just another" royal baby. But the message of the angels to the shepherds recorded by Luke means more than this. By telling them that the birth is of “your Saviour, Christ the Lord” this means not only that the people’s Saviour has come and he is God’s long promised anointed King, the Messiah, but he is the Lord. I believe that by calling him “Christ the Lord” the angels were saying that this baby is God, the LORD, of the Old Testament, now come to earth in flesh and blood.

You probably know that wherever the covenant name of God, Yahweh, appeared in the Old Testament, the Jews would not pronounce it, but substituted the word “Adonai” which means “Lord” each time the name “Yahweh” appears. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the Septuagint used the Greek word “Kurios” which also means “Lord”. And this is also what you find in most English translations of the Old Testament. So we usually have “The LORD is my shepherd” rather than “Yahweh is my shepherd”. Anyway, the point is that when Luke wrote his gospel in Greek, he was well aware of the Greek Old Testament, and when he wrote: “Your Saviour is born, Christ the Kurios” – Christ the Lord – I believe he was saying that “the LORD” – Yahweh, the God of Israel – was born in Bethlehem.

That is what the apostles taught about this child when he grew up. That is what they believed and confessed before men. That this king – who lived as a humble carpenter’s son and became an itinerant rabbi – was no less than God, the Creator and ruler of the universe.

But they also taught that he was born as a servant – one who came to help and look after the needs of others. That is part of the glory and strangeness of the Christian gospel.

Jesus is Lord – Yahweh born on earth as a human baby, but born as a Servant to help people.

Second Reading: Matthew 27:11-14, 27-31

The King grew up, lived the life God called him to live as a teacher, a healer, a prophet, a royal Son obedient to his Father. But then it all seems to go wrong, doesn’t it? His words and actions challenge the religious leaders of Israel. His message of truth and love, salvation by grace through faith, and living a peaceful life of love and caring for others is radical and challenging to the hypocrisy and legalism of the religious leaders. So, the king is rejected by the people who should be loyal to him. He is put on trial by officials of an earthly empire with blasphemous emperors as its head who claimed to be gods. And he is put to death for crimes he did not commit. The crucifixion of Christ is no less than regicide – the murder of a king. The notice that the Roman soldiers put above his head was true though they didn’t know it: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews”.

The wonderful thing is that it is through his death, through the King laying down his life because he loves his people so much, that the salvation he proclaimed and the destruction of evil that he stood for are actually accomplished. The Lord sacrifices himself, he becomes the suffering servant portrayed in Isaiah 53 (reading from verses 3 to 10):

“We despised him and rejected him; he endured suffering and pain. No one would even look at him – we ignored him as if he were nothing. But he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment he suffered, made whole by the blows he received. All of us were like sheep that were lost, each of us going his own way. But the LORD made the punishment fall on him, the punishment all of us deserved. He was treated harshly, but endured it humbly; he never said a word. Like a lamb about to be slaughtered, like a sheep about to be sheared, he never said a word. He was arrested and sentenced and led off to die, and no one cared about his fate. He was put to death for the sins of our people. He was placed in a grave with those who are evil, he was buried with the rich, even though he had never committed a crime or ever told a lie. The LORD says, ‘It was my will that he should suffer; his death was a sacrifice to bring forgiveness. And so he will see his descendants; he will live a long life, and through him my purpose will succeed’."

Jesus is Lord – the Lord who became a sacrificial lamb to take away the sins of the world and saves his people through his death on the cross.

Third Reading: John 20:24-29

Sometimes I think that we glory so much in the cross of Christ that we are in danger of downplaying the importance of the resurrection. But the truth is that without the resurrection, the cross doesn’t have any good news in it. It is once Christ is risen that we can really know that his sacrifice was accepted by God the Father and our sins have been taken away.

And I think it is in the resurrection that Christ reveals more clearly than anywhere else that the claims that he is indeed the Son of God are true. Who else but God can rise from the dead? The disciples seem to have grasped this very quickly. Once they encounter the risen Christ, they are changed men. Before the crucifixion they ran away in fear and hid themselves. After the resurrection, they know absolutely in their hearts that Jesus is the Lord and so they preach him fearlessly and in public, facing persecution, imprisonment and martyrdom with courage. The risen Jesus changes people.

This is particularly true of the apostle Thomas in this passage we read. Thomas is a fascinating character. From what we read of him in the gospels he seems to be a bit of an enigma, he was a pessimistic man and a skeptic, but he was also one of the most loyal followers of Christ. When Christ decided to go to Jerusalem for the last time, Thomas showed both sides of his character in his remark to the other disciples: “Let us go along with the Teacher, so that we may die with him.”

But he is changed when he meets the risen Christ face-to-face. He changes from doubting the resurrection to confessing Christ as his Lord and his God.

Jesus is Lord – our King has conquered death and lives forever, able to change our lives and help us grow in faith, hope and love.

Fourth Reading: Philippians 2:5-11

Today, Christians all over the world proclaim that Jesus is Lord. But we’re the only ones who do – even though there are millions of us. But most people deny Jesus is Lord. Paul tells us in this passage that it will not always be so. One day, everyone will have to confess that Jesus is Lord, even those who have to acknowledge it only when he comes again to judge them.

The fact is that Jesus is Lord, whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we like it or not. Jesus is Lord, and for two thousand years the world has hated, mocked and derided that proclamation. Christ is King, higher than any earthly monarch, higher than any spiritual teacher or religion, higher than Satan and the powers of evil.

This was the message that shook imperial Rome to its foundations. This is the message that godless dictators down through the years have tried to stamp out. Jesus is Lord and so no man or woman is Lord. No one else has the same authority. He is higher than anyone else.

He is Lord of all and that means as his followers, he is Lord of our lives. Lord of our time and money, Lord of our friendships and relationships, Lord of our work and leisure, Lord of our pleasures and dislikes. If we are to be faithful to our King, we must obey our King. And I know how hard that can be. I find it hard in my own life certainly. But I know in my heart that Jesus is Lord and deep down I want him to be in charge. I fail him, but I don’t reject him. I think that’s what living as a Christian is like.

Jesus is Lord – one day everyone will acknowledge him. Until then it is our duty and delight as Christians to follow him in faith and obedience.

Fifth Reading: Revelation 19:11-21

I have to admit that I find the Book of Revelation both to be one of the most difficult books of the Bible to understand and one of the most encouraging in the bits I do understand. And I think this passage in Revelation 19 falls into the latter category. It is a glorious picture of Christ as a warrior king, mighty in battle, defeating his enemies and securing victory for his kingdom and the children of his kingdom. He leads a mighty army of heaven’s angels in this vision, riding on a white horse. Everything about this vision says majesty, glory, power and victory for Christ, who is given various titles here that tell us about him.

He is called “Faithful and True” because he has always been faithful both to his Father and to his people. Never disappointing us, never leaving us or failing to do what we need him to do for us. And he is true because he only speaks the truth. He never lies or deceives. He is the greatest prophet who communicates God’s will to us in his teaching.

His eyes are like fire because he sees everything and knows everything. He wears many crowns because he is Lord of all things, all peoples and all times. His robe is covered in blood to show he is the sacrificial lamb, the Saviour of the world.

He is the Word of God. He is the divine Word through which God creates and sustains the universe.

And he is King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the overlord of every other earthly or heavenly or spiritual power. He is the supreme lord and master of all of creation.

And he is the victorious leader of the forces of righteousness which do battle with Satan and his forces and destroy them.

Jesus is Lord – he is Lord of all things, the King to whom everyone and everything else must bow down in worship and one day render total obedience. The amazing thing is that he is also our brother and our friend, the humble carpenter from Nazareth is no less than King of kings and Lord of lords forever.