Selah2020: Pause and Reflect

[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 22/June/2021]

This year my daughter said how good it is that we can meet up with her family to celebrate Father’s Day together, and I guess that many others feel the same way. I was thinking back to when I was boy. I used to buy my dad a card and present, but sadly it wasn’t a day I used to celebrate. He used to verbally and emotionally abuse my mum and me by losing his temper, shouting at us and belittling us, and as result I grew up to lack confidence and feel deeply shy. This lasted for many years long after Barbara and I had married.

When he was a widower, and he was alone in his eighties, he read through the New Testament and believed that Jesus died for him and he trusted in Him as his Saviour. Over the next few years, he gradually changed and told me that he loved me, and thanked me and Barbara for all that we had done for him. When we were going on a holiday to Scotland, he wished us a happy holiday for the first time ever. On our return we found that he had died and had gone to be with the Saviour he had met so late in life.

Because of my resulting shyness from childhood, if I have done anything to serve the Lord in my life, it was solely because I believed that Christ Jesus our Lord has given me strength (1 Tim 1:12) and as God said to Paul “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness“. (2 Cor 12:9). I have the weakness but God has all the power.

I don’t hold anything against my dad for the years of unhappiness he gave us, and though it may not be to the same extent as him we fathers have to admit that we are not perfect in every way. Even in the Bible I can’t think of any father who was perfect. Only one. And that is our Father God. It is our Heavenly Father who gave us life and truly loves us. He carries us when we are weak and provides everything that we need. He even disciplines us when we need it. The most amazing thing is that He gave us Jesus as our brother, who sacrificed Himself to accept us into a new perfect family.

“Father God I wonder how I managed to exist,
without the knowledge of your parenthood and your loving care.
But now I am your son, I am adopted in your family,
And I can never be alone, ’cause Father God, you’re there beside me.”

Today we can celebrate Father’s Day with our perfect Heavenly Father.”

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Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube^[1], June 2021]

As we become more responsive to the Holy Spirit, and God changes our heart, we allow more mess to enter our lives and our churches. But how messy should we allow our churches to become?

On Sunday we were talking about being responsive to the Holy Spirit and that means that we allow some mess into our life. We lose some control but also we start to allow some mess into our church as well. I’m left with the question “how messy do we allow our churches to become?” So when we talk about our lives and our churches being messy it doesn’t sound particularly appealing because messy means chaotic, it means disorganized, it means dirty, it means grubby and therefore, unless we’re talking about hair gel, it’s not particularly a selling point for churches. You know we don’t want our churches to be defined by mess so therefore the temptation is to control our churches to the extent that we don’t allow mess to come in.

Although we may be writing on paper saying that we want our church to be messy, we want all to be welcomed, we want to be an inclusive church; in reality the way we welcome people who we deem as being messy really says far more than what we might say in words. We make them feel decidedly unwelcome. I know of many churches that said they want children and young families in their church until they’re actually in there and suddenly it doesn’t become the quiet sanctuary that it once was. So we can end up with a nice neat well-ordered church but one that doesn’t really reflect the love the heart of the God that we worship.

Now in the New Testament we have a letter called Timothy where Paul, one of the church leaders, one of the church founders, writes a letter to his young protege Timothy and gives him advice about leadership. In chapter three he talks about the qualities that Timothy should look for when appointing leaders within the church family and he comes up with a whole list of criteria: they need to be above reproach, they shouldn’t have lots of wives, they should be even-tempered, they shouldn’t be quarrelsome, they shouldn’t be violent, they should be respectful, they should be well respected within the community, they shouldn’t be a drunk, they shouldn’t be violent.

Paul comes up with a whole list of qualities that a leader should display and I was challenged to ask the question “why does Paul give this particular list of qualities to Timothy?” and the answer is, well, Paul needed to give Timothy this list because the church was full of people that were unrespectful, who were perhaps drunkards, maybe they had more than one wife or they were sexually promiscuous, they had bad reputations, they were quarrelsome. Paul says to Timothy “look, these people. It’s great you have them in your church. Church should be like this because that’s the people that Jesus wants us to reach out to, but don’t have them as leaders”.

So we need to have some sort of order. We need to have some sort of discipline and that’s often the way that we choose our leaders. We want churches to be led in a good way with good people who aren’t going to make a complete mess of things and take advantage and lead the church in the wrong direction. But having said that, we need to be really careful. We don’t use those criteria that were given for leadership as criteria for those that can belong to our churches.

There’s the old adage that says ‘if you behave and if you believe then you can belong’. Well actually, the challenge is that we should be saying “look, you belong whether or not you believe or whether or not you do behave, but we are confident that if you belong to our church family that will lead to you becoming a believer in Jesus Christ and that’s the thing that will change your behaviour, not rules and regulations that we give you”. So how messy should our churches get? Well, a lot messier than most of our churches are because if we don’t allow some a mess, some chaos, to enter into our doors then we’re not really reflecting the heart of a God who stepped down into the mess of humanity.

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[1] YouTube link: How Messy Should Church Be?
Bible references: 1 Timothy 3 v 2-7

Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[This is one in a series of devotional reflections prepared for Horley Baptist Church during June 2021]

The story is told of two brothers visiting their grandparents’ house. The first said “I’m hungry! Let’s eat, grandma.” The second said “I’m hungry! Let’s eat grandma.” Did you notice the difference? The fate of grandma rests on a simple point of punctuation – the comma.

In 2003 Lynne Truss, the British radio personality, gained a certain degree of fame, and notoriety, when she published a book^[1] deploring the declining standards of punctuation in written English. Punctuation is an unlikely choice of subject for a best-seller but subsequent sales far exceeded the author’s expectations.

It seems that punctuation can be a surprisingly emotive topic. We have all seen the grocers’ apostrophe (potato’s, tomato’s, etc) but the debate becomes more heated when joined by those whose use of ‘English’ is within the context of a foreign culture. As Henry Higgins declares in ‘My Fair Lady’: “There even are places where English completely disappears – in America they haven’t used it for years!”

Some time ago, I had an in-office discussion with a colleague about the punctuation of Luke 23 v43 which, in the NIV, is rendered as:

Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.’

His argument was that the comma should be placed after the ‘today’. This simple typographical adjustment is enough to change the whole meaning of the passage; it removes the immediacy of heaven for a dying believer and delays it to some unspecified time in the future. This places it at odds with the apostle Paul who, in writing to the Corinthians, argues that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647^[2] is often regarded as setting out the common basics of Protestant Christian beliefs. In Article 37 it states:

“The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection.”

I suspect that the immediacy of heaven is the common belief of most of those who will read these notes. We can draw great comfort from this promise, both for ourselves and for those who are about to leave the stage. But we do not have to wait for such circumstances in order to receive encouragement. Elsewhere in his letters to the Corinthians Paul wrote:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. [2 Corinthians 1 v3-4 NIVUK]

[1] ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’, Lynne Truss, ISBN 978-1-86197-612-3.
[2] The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647)

Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 13/June/2021]

At HBC we recently celebrated ‘Trinity Sunday’. This gave us an opportunity to think again not just about an obscure theological doctrine, but about the nature and character of the God we serve and worship. The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that God isn’t a thing or an object, but rather God is a Person, or – to be precise – God is a Community of Three Persons. God is a personality, not just an abstract concept; God is a community, rather than an individual. God, as Trinity, will always resist the attempts of theologians (i.e. people like me!) who might try to reduce God to human concepts and language.

To say that God is a Community of Three Persons means that God is personal in the sense of being loving, relational and capable of sharing in all our joys and successes as well as in our pain and failures – as God showed us in the most amazing way when Jesus died on the cross for our sins and when He rose again to bring us the hope of eternal life.

The doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t just tell us what God is like; it also tells us about what God does and how He acts in the world. Whenever God wants to build His Kingdom, He always seems to start by calling people to work together in community. When Jesus started His ministry, the first thing He did was to call a community of disciples to share the message of God’s love to the world. Likewise, when we come together out of a desire to serve Jesus, God gives us all a role to play in building up His Kingdom in our local communities, families and workplaces. This means that as a community at HBC, we’ve all been commissioned by Jesus to build up His church and to help the Kingdom of God come to Horley so that God’s will be done here in this little corner of East Surrey.

I hope this gives you some encouragement as you go about your daily tasks this week. I hope, too, that you’ll look for opportunities to share God’s love with your friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, etc. As you do this, I pray that we’ll start see more people being drawn into the community of grace that God (i.e. the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) is building in Horley through the ministry of HBC!

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Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[Transcript of a midweek message published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube^[1], June 2021]

We are called to be distinctive, but what does that actually look like? How can we strike a balance between operating ourselves off from society, and becoming too much like society? How do we know if we’ve got it right?

Last Sunday we started a new teaching series ‘Back to Basics’ where we look at those values that we want to exhibit as a church, as we go forward into this new new era of of being church. This last Sunday we looked at the value of being distinctive, being different, but my question is “Well, how do I do that? How do I navigate this world and remain distinctive? How can I, as the Bible says, be in the world but not of the world?”

You see, life is a lot easier when there are rules and regulations, when things are black and white, when you know what to do and what not to do because then it’s simple, isn’t it? You know the course in life that you need to follow. But things get difficult when those rules, those regulations are taken away, when black and white becomes a mushy grey colour. That must have been what it was like for those early Christians, those followers of Jesus Christ as they moved away from their Jewish roots and became a separate faith in its own right.

Those early Christians would have been pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, there were the Judaisers, the circumcision group, those people who said to those Christians: “Yes, we’re saved by Jesus; yes, we’re saved by grace, by faith not by works” but you still need to follow all of these Jewish rules, circumcision being one of them. I mean that’s enough to put anyone off becoming a follower of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand there was the culture around them. There was the background for many of these new Christians which was Hellenistic, it was Greek in its style and the way it viewed sexuality and life and how it revolved around idol worship and temples. These early Christians had to walk this fine line, this tightrope walk between on the one hand being very black and white, very rule-focused, about separation, and on the other hand there was this kind of, well, anything goes really – we just go with whatever the culture believes and values that you find yourself within.

It’s not that much different for us these days. There are Christians who live out their faith by separating themselves. They wear different clothes, they don’t associate with people who aren’t like them, who aren’t part of their group; and some people go to extremes, the Amish being one of them, but there are groups similar to that in the UK, in Horley. Actually, there’s Christians in most mainstream churches that feel that way.

I know that I err towards that kind of black and white view of faith in Christianity, separating ourselves off, because of my conservative Christian upbringing but on the other hand it’s very easy for many Christians to kind of compartmentalize their faith to such an extent that their faith really only expresses itself through Sunday morning and maybe occasional midweek group. Beyond that, outside of that framework, their faith and their values are pretty much exactly the same as anyone else in the world; you wouldn’t be able to spot the difference between them and the world around us.

So how do we navigate that, how do we strike a balance between being segregated and separate and rule based, and on the other hand being no different to the world around us, not being as Jesus said, salt and light.

Well the first thing I think is resist rules and regulations. It’s so easy for us, particularly me, to add on conditions to our salvation, to our faith: that actually to be a follower of Jesus Christ we need to do this and this and this and that this way and behave this way and dress a certain way. We need to resist that. In fact, Paul said in his letter to the church in Galatia which was struggling with these sort of problems, particularly with the influence of that Jewish group; the only thing that matters is your faith expressed through love, the only thing that matters is your faith expressed through love. That means that we serve people humbly, we stand up against injustices. So often the churches, unfortunately in this country particularly, are the last to stand up for those injustices that we see around us.

So resist rules and regulations, love people, serve people. stand up against injustices; but also ask yourself the question: “Am I any different in my values, about the way I think about sexuality, the way I think about money, the way I am on a Friday night if I’m out on the town? Am I any different to my non-Christian next-door neighbour, my non-Christian work colleagues?” We are called to stand up and to stand out. The people will know that we are different, not because of the way that we look, not because of the way that we separate ourselves off, but because of the way we view life, and that requires conversations. It requires us to explain why we don’t watch this particular thing on TV, why we don’t go out and get drunk, why we’re not spending all our money on holidays, on our credit cards.

Are you different in that way? I think both of those groups – whether it’s the separating yourselves off or blending in, is a way of self-protection. It’s a way of escaping any form of persecution, any way that people can pick up on us. Either we close our ears and separate ourselves off from society so we don’t hear the jeers and the jaunts, or we merge in so much that no one notices any difference and therefore there’s nothing to complain about.

You should be persecuted. We are called to be persecuted just as Jesus was persecuted, just as those early Christians were persecuted, because we are different. We have different values; we are salt and we’re light, we show the darkness for what it is. We show those injustices, we show the ways in which culture around us is broken and sinful and wrong; and you know what, when you do that people don’t like it. So I think the litmus test really is are you getting flack for your faith? Because if you’re not then maybe you’re not different enough.

[1] YouTube link: How can I be distinctive?
Bible references: ~

Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

[This is one in a series of devotional reflections prepared for Horley Baptist Church during June 2021]

We can think of fences in many different ways, both physically and metaphorically. In psalm 62 David describes himself as ‘a tottering fence’; he feels that his enemies are attacking him, hoping to exploit his insecurity and bring him down. Nevertheless, David can look to God who has provided a firm foundation and will uphold him.

In physical terms, fences represent a demarcation, a dividing line between two conditions: essentially, you are either inside or outside. A popular American song included the words “Don’t fence me in”; in Australia a fence 3,500 miles long was built to keep the dingoes out. We use fences to protect people or things that we value from those that we distrust.

In Anglophone societies there is a third state: ‘sitting on the fence’ carries a metaphorical message rather than just a description of a physical location. How do you react when you hear the expression?

Perhaps it has a positive connotation of being open-minded, able to see both sides of an argument. It offers an opportunity to be distinct from the monotony of the unthinking masses. Sitting on the fence offers a vantage point from where one can see whether the grass on the other side is actually greener – or the worms juicier.

Or is your reaction a negative one, associating the phrase with the reluctance to make a decision, insecurity and a lack of consistency? Are you firm in your opinions and secretly hope that the fence sitter will be returned to earth with a degree of abruptness? Perhaps you worry that you might, yourself, be sitting on the fence but you are not sure?

After the Israelites had moved into the promised land they started to forsake the worship of the God who had given it to them. Joshua told them to make up their minds, one way or the other.

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve … But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
[Joshua 24 v15 NIVUK]

Later, during the reign of king Ahab, the people were again led astray. This was brought to a head at the showdown on Mount Carmel.

Elijah went before the people and said, ‘How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.’ But the people said nothing.
[1 Kings 18 v21 NIVUK]

In Matthew 25 we read of another demarcation, that between goats and sheep. I have always had a certain degree of sympathy for the goats – they were born that way and no amount of bleating will change a kid into a lamb. By contrast, this is a metaphorical grouping based on our relationship with Jesus Christ. Towards the end of his conversation with Nicodemus Jesus spoke of the ultimate demarcation:

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
[John 3 v18 NIVUK]

You cannot sit on the fence for ever.

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Bible quotations: Unless otherwise specified, quotations are taken from the resources of Bible Gateway or Bible Hub, in accordance with the licencing conditions outlined on our Site Policies page.

Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.