Selah2020: Pause and Reflect

[This is one in a series of mid-week Reflections published by Horley Baptist Church during May 2020]

Do you have any experience of being blind? At the age of eight I wanted to see what was happening in the street outside and so, like Zacchaeus, I climbed up into a tree, in order to get a better viewpoint. My eyes started itching and by the time I reached the ground I could not see anything – total whiteout. There followed some panicky hours involving eye wash and ice cubes.

I learnt a number of lessons from that experience:

• Don’t sneak out of your house just because the outside world seems more interesting.
• Don’t ignore the details – the Zacchaeus account specifies a sycamore tree, not the chilli-pepper tree that I had chosen.
• Don’t rub your eyes with infected hands.

Now, some sixty years on, the same lessons have a new significance.

Some years later, whilst in fire brigade training, I was charged with ‘rescuing’ a group of people from a blacked-out, smoke-filled room, leading them to safety along a corridor to the outside. I knew the layout of the building; it ought to be straightforward. However, surviving in a smoke-filled environment means crawling on the floor, using one hand to find your way. What my eyes had seen at five feet high was very different to that found by my hand at six inches from the floor.
In both cases the loss of sight was, thankfully, temporary.

In 2 Kings chapter 6 we read of another instance of temporary blindness. The enemies of Israelites had laid siege to the city where Elisha the prophet was living. Elisha prayed that the soldiers should be made blind and, once they could not see, he led them into the hands of the King of Israel who fed them and sent them home. We too are under threat; how will our actions be remembered once the threat is lifted?

This passage also recounts an incident with Elisha’s servant. As he looked out from the besieged city he could focus only on the problems facing them. Elisha prayed that he might be allowed to see the bigger picture; the forces of God were greater than those arrayed against them.
Surely, a similar prayer is appropriate for us today.

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[This is one in a series of mid-week Reflections published by Horley Baptist Church during May 2020]

Recently I saw a cartoon which made a big impact on me. It went ‘viral’ so maybe you have seen it too. I regret that I cannot remember the artist and so cannot give an appropriate credit.

Our viewpoint is that of looking through the window of a house; we can see a young boy, well dressed and sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a desk where he has plenty of stationery, a printer and a laptop on which he is participating in his on-line lessons.

By contrast, outside we see a boy of a similar age, barefoot, poorly dressed and with unkempt hair, standing on an upturned box. He is looking through the window and in his hand he has a pencil and a scrap of paper on which he is writing what he can see of the lessons.

The efficacy of this cartoon is that it conveys in one picture what a thousand words could not. It is a valid representation of the situation in many places throughout the world, not least in the area where I live. In my local kindergarten, out of 13 pupils, only one has access to the facilities necessary to join in with online lessons, and that one case is only due to the sacrifices made by his mother. When resources are limited, food and health take priority over new clothes, and the prospect of having to repeat a school year becomes an inevitable part of the price to be paid.

The Israelites were promised a land flowing with milk and honey but the Old Testament records with depressing frequency the occasions when they were facing poverty, famine or distress of some form. In most cases, the account makes it clear that these events have been allowed to happen because the nation turned away from God. Does it not exacerbate the present crisis that few, if any, of our public leaders seem willing to make a similar link?

In 2 Kings chapter 7 we read how God turned one such situation around overnight. The king had wanted to blame God for their problems but He provided for His people in abundance whilst those who were sceptical about His promise were left unable to enjoy the benefits.

God has our circumstances under control – but do you believe it?

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[This is one in a series of mid-week Reflections published by Horley Baptist Church during May 2020]

You know how it is when a tune or a phrase gets lodged in your brain. It might be an advertising jingle, a few lines from a song or a snatch from a melody. You might not even be able to name it or recall where you first heard it but now it has taken up residence in your memory. It disrupts your sleep and every effort to forget it simply reinforces the mental merry-go-round.

Today’s reflection is ‘inspired’ by one such melody. It comes from a video-clip that is broadcast rather frequently on a local Christian tv channel. The song is called “Come to Jesus” and it does have the mitigating feature of being spiritual in concept. In the video, the singer walks through town, encountering several people in their various circumstances and advising them of the benefits of coming to or singing to Jesus. The sentiment is very commendable but, please, it is crowding out other equally valuable thoughts.

Having failed to effectively delete the distraction maybe we should try putting something else in its place. We have all come across pearls of wisdom and said “That’s helpful – I’ll remember that.” It wasn’t and we didn’t. On the other hand, there are those things that we wish we didn’t forget, like “What was it I came upstairs to get?” or “How did I intend to finish up this Reflection?”

Recently, Chris Ginter wrote of her Easter Morning experience when, despite her best intentions, she could not remember the words of the songs that she wanted to sing. Maybe it was a blessing that she was in isolation mode at the time; image her greater embarrassment had she been with a group intent on praising God together.

Does God forget things too? If ‘not remembering’ equates to forgetting then yes. In Jeremiah 31 and again in Hebrews we read “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” The monotonous repetition of that unwanted melody in our heads confirms that we have very little control over what we can forget or remember. Thankfully, God is much better at ‘not remembering’ than we are and that, in itself, is a good enough reason to “sing to Jesus”!
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[Modified transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube^[1], May 2020]

What made the Good News of Jesus Christ so infectious? Why did the Christian church grow so quickly? Can we recapture that infectious faith?

I don’t know about you but I’ve been watching the daily updates from the government about coronavirus and just checking to see how things are going on. They’ve been talking a lot about an ‘R’ number. Now probably before the outbreak most of you didn’t know what an R number referred to but it’s the effective reproduction rate of a virus. The way it works is it measures how infectious a virus is if it’s R-1 then that means one person can infect one other person with the virus and if the value is over R-1 then what you’ll get is an exponential growth of a virus. It will spread quicker and quicker and more and more people will get infected with the virus. If it’s less than 1 then it’ll slow down, it will gradually decline, the virus will hopefully eventually die out. Fortunately at the moment, due to a lock-down, we’ve managed to get the R value of COVID-19 down to less than 1 so we’re seeing a slowdown in the rates of infection.

^01:21 Now I’ve been reading with some friends through the book of Acts in the New Testament in the Bible. It tells a story of those first few years of the church and how it grew rapidly in the Middle East and beyond, in the Roman Empire and even further than that. At the beginning of Acts we find the disciples emerging from hiding after the death of Jesus, full of the excitement of Jesus’s resurrection and also full of the Holy Spirit. In Acts chapter 2 we find Peter, one of disciples, telling everyone who could hear about the good news of Jesus Christ. After he told them this, three thousand people believed and gave their life to Jesus Christ.

^02:18 Now that is highly infectious, that is an R number of 3,000 where one person spread the good news of Jesus Christ to 3,000 other people. To give you an idea, COVID might get an R value, if left unchecked, of between two and two and a half so the good news of Jesus Christ was massively infectious. All those 3,000 people who came from all over the known world to Jerusalem for the Pentecost festival then went home and told people about Jesus. It spread more and more and quicker and quicker, and no wonder Christianity spread so quickly in the known world.

^03:01 Why was this story about Jesus Christ so infectious? Well, Jesus sums it up at the beginning of his ministry with these words “The Lord’s Spirit has come to me because he has chosen me to tell the good news to the poor. The Lord has sent me to announce freedom for prisoners, to give sight to the blind, to free everyone who suffers” (Luke 4 v18). Unsurprisingly, it was massively good news for people that the life and Ministry of Jesus Christ had made a difference and that, through his death and resurrection, Jesus had freed us from suffering caused by our slavery to sin, the consequences of which would be death

^04:07 In the Western world in recent years we kind of built up an immunity to the good news of Jesus Christ. It no longer seems to have it’s impact, it’s no longer as infectious. In fact, it’s R number has been lurking below 1; we’ve seen a church which is in decline, we’re seeing less interest in Jesus and Christianity. Yet my hope and my prayer at this time when so much has changed and so many of our foundations have been shaken is that people once again will become susceptible to the good news of Jesus Christ; that they will start to be open to the fact that Jesus really is good news, and that through online church services, conversation with friends and family and by Christians letting their light shine, that people will start to hear the good news of Jesus Christ and realise it is just as good news now as it was 2,000 years ago

[1]YouTube link: Spreading the Good News
Bible references: Luke 4 v18

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