Encouragement – Minister’s Letter Dec 25

Dear all at IPC,

As we come to the end of this year, I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite characters in the Bible: Barnabas. This wasn’t his real name. His real name was Joseph, Barnabas was the nickname that I assume other Christians gave him. It means ‘son of encouragement’ or ‘Mr Encouragement’. He’s the kind of person you want in church life.

He was a generous man. In Acts 4, he sold a field and gave the proceeds willingly to God’s work. Barnabas was a Levite and strictly shouldn’t have owned land, but Barnabas is from Cypress. It is possible he owned a property there. In any case, he sells the land. But what is interesting is that he didn’t take his gift to the temple in Jerusalem but he brought it and laid it at the Apostle’s feet. He’s a Levite and he’s keeping that ancient Levitical law from the Old Testament that for the Levites the Lord God of Israel should be their inheritance. He’s saying, that in Jesus and his church, he finds the fulfilment of the Old Testament. In taking the proceeds from the sale and laying them at the Apostles feet, he is saying Jesus ‘you are my inheritance, you are my security, you are my all in all’. The Jesus whom the apostles preach is the Lord God of Israel and is Barnabas’ inheritance. He is committed to Christ.

One of the high points of Barnabas’ life and ministry is when he is sent by the Jerusalem Church to Antioch to investigate this new church. When he arrives, we are told what he saw. ‘When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord ^rwith steadfast purpose,’ Acts 11:23.

How you look at things is very important. ‘Two men look out through prison bars, one saw mud the other stars’. Barnabas comes into this situation and if he was looking for something to worry about, there was plenty to worry about. It was a new and unprecedented situation in Antioch. God was at work and large numbers of the Gentiles were being converted in this great city. There seems to be no link at all with the mother church in Jerusalem. Headquarters, so to speak, had nothing to do with it! There would be lots to be concerned about, but when Barnabas comes into the situation, it was the grace of God at work which he saw.

Barnabas had the sense to see that when God is at work there will be problems. There would be very real issues, but the key thing is that God was at work. Seeing growth in Christ’s church brought him gladness, and he showed it. Quite literally he was delighted at what was going on in Antioch. The text tells us not only what Barnabas saw and how he felt but how he reacted. He was glad and he showed his gladness. Some of us are very good at criticising one another, damning one another with faint praise. But Barnabas is glad, and he shows it. I suspect you like me could probably do with more gladness.

In Acts 11 verse 23, ‘he exhorts them all to remain true to the Lord’. In verses 25 and 26, this is at considerable cost. He recruits Paul, brings him to Antioch and together they spend a year teaching the many disciples at Antioch. It was here that the disciples were first called Christians, which wasn’t a compliment. The work of God took a quantum leap forward in Antioch. God by his Spirit did something tremendous through this man. Maybe for the first time the Christian Church began to be the worldwide movement that it is today.

It is said that there are three types of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happening, and those who haven’t got a clue what is happening. Barnabas was in that first category. He was positive, encouraging and took initiative.

If you think of the ministry of the Lord Jesus, he needed encouragement. In Isaiah 53 we are told that the Lord upholds his servant. We read in the gospels the Father crying out from heaven, “this is my Son with whom I’m well pleased”. As he steps out into public ministry after years of obscurity; as he identifies with sinners in his baptism; taking that first step to the cross, the heavens open and the father tells him I’m pleased with what you are doing. The words of the Father put courage into the son.

Every single one of us needs encouragement. As we look around our church family, it is easy to see the frustrations, become frustrated, and then show that frustration. In every church there are problems, difficulties, and personality conflicts. It can happen even more so in a growing church like in Antioch. In a true church where there is life, with people from different cultures with different temperaments rubbing against each other, there will aways be the need to bear with one another. Even the nature of church life and the slowness of the work in sowing the seed in various ministries can be discouraging. Then there are parents who have to bear with the slow work of discipling their children, people bearing with difficult families and marriages. We could go on and on about the need for encouragement in the face of frustrations. If anything, the whole of the church in the UK in a hostile culture desperately needs encouragement.

I’m not arguing for an “always look on the bright side of life” attitude, but I am wanting us to look as Barnabas did, for evidence of the grace of God at work amongst us, to recognise it and be glad in it. We are not the people we should be and we fail and let each other down in countless ways. And yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, the grace of God has been, and is, at work in our church. We need to finish this year and start the new one by recognising this, rejoicing in this, and committing ourselves to the ministry of encouraging one another.

Your Minister and Friend,

Dust – Minister’s Letter Nov 25

Dear all at IPC,

What does God know about you and what does God remember about you?

In Psalm 103:14 we are told that amongst the many things that God knows, he knows our frame, and amongst the many things he remembers, he remembers we are dust. It is a beautiful reminder of how our Lord views us, and a reminder of our limitations.

Psalm 103 is one of the greatest of Psalms, full of wonderful expressions of God’s character and love and his overwhelming grace. We bless and praise him because he forgives, redeems and satisfies. He is a God who can be relied on and he has proved his faithfulness to his people from generation to generation.

The way he relates to us is by his covenant promise….
“The Lord is merciful and gracious,
    slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
    nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
    nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
    so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
    so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” (Psalm 103:8-13)

It is at this point we have this wonderful reminder of what he knows and what he remembers. We move from the cosmic and the extremes of the universe, the heights – ‘as high as the heavens are above the earth’ and the breadth ‘as far as the east is from the west’ – where they are talking about infinite measurements, and we come to v13. Like Google Earth, we zoom in from outer space, to the globe, to the satellite pictures of the continent, to the country, to the city, to the borough, to your street and to your very home. It is here God says, “I know your frame and I remember you are dust”

When the Psalmist thinks on this doctrine in Psalm 139 it’s no wonder he says ‘such knowledge is too wonderful for me’. He looks upon us with compassion.

The word ‘frame’ that the Psalmist uses, has the idea of ‘intention’ behind it. It is used of pottery and sees something being made with a purpose. So a cup is made to be drunk from, a vase is meant to hold flowers. God knows how you were made, he knows for what purpose you were made. How we look, who we are, our constitution, our temperament, our weaknesses and strengths: he knows our frame.

He then tells us that he remembers something. When God tells us in his word that he remembers, we must never think that he forgot and it has come back to his memory. As if God’s memory needs jolting. When God remembers, he is recalling truth in order to act. So when God remembers the people of Israel in slavery in Egypt, he is saying he is getting ready to act.

In Psalm 103:14 he remembers a rich biblical term that we are ‘dust’. The word dust occurs around 110 times in our bible. In Genesis 2:7 ‘the Lord God formed the man out of the dust of the ground’. In Genesis 3 after the fall, the serpent is told he will eat dust (v14) and Adam is told ‘for you are dust and to dust you shall return’ (v19).

Gordon Wenham expresses this beautifully in his chiasm of life;

from dust

to dependence

to growth

to flowering

to giving

to dependence

and then to dust.

Job says to God, ‘Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust?’ (Job 10:9).

This is a wonderful reminder to us of our limitations. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the Prime Minister was nicknamed the iron lady, the heavyweight boxing champion was called ‘Iron Mike’. That prime minister has died, the boxer is a shadow of what he was. Both are just dust. Our lives, as we are reminded at funerals, are ‘from dust to dust’.

Too often we forget this. We push ourselves mentally and physically to the point of exhaustion. We can judge others who are – to our minds – not strong enough to bear the loads that we possibly can. It is a wonderful thing to know that our Father in heaven never overloads us and he never fails to gives us strength equal to what we need (2 Cor 9:8, 12:9) because he knows our frame and he remembers we are dust.

A good friend of mine says around this time every year he loses his wife for a few weeks because she goes into a Christmas frenzy of exhaustion, all of which pressure she puts on herself. God has no such expectations of you this Christmas!

WS Plumer writes beautifully, ‘This knowledge of God embraces our constitutional temperament, the feebleness of our understanding, the strength of our fears, the shattered state of our nerves, the violence of temptations, our readiness to sink into melancholy, and everything calling for tender compassions.’

The Lord knows everything there is to know about us. There is not a molecule he didn’t personally design. He understands the complexity of our brains, the unpredictability of our feelings, the subtleties of our genetics, the powerful influence of our upbringing, the lusts of the flesh, and the temptations that afflict us. He understands the mystery of birth and the terror of death, he knows temptations of Satan. There is nothing about a human being that God does not know. When the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, he knows. When I’m fearful and overwhelmed, that is not unknown to him.

There is of course an even more glorious truth to this verse and that is in the incarnation that the Lord of heaven became the dust of the earth. The Lord Jesus took on our humanity in its fullness – he was fearfully and wonderfully made in Mary’s womb.

He assumed our nature to redeem it and as he steps out to accomplish it to begin his public ministry, his father in heaven shouts down from heaven, ‘This is my son with whom I’m well pleased’. He lives a dusty life like we do – his father knows his frame and remembers he is dust. He lives for us, he goes to the cross for us, he is risen for us and he ascends to heaven for us and is seated at the right hand of the throne on high for us.

It is why Rabbi Duncan can famously and gloriously say, ‘the dust of the earth is on the throne of the Majesty on high’.

Our Saviour has been given a resurrected body and one day we will share in that – “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall[f] also bear the image of the man of heaven.1 Cor 15:47-49.

I recently heard of an old Welsh Minister whose final words were, ‘Thanks be to God for remembering the dust of the earth’.

It is a beautiful thing that God knows our frame, he remembers we are dust

Your Minister and Friend

Paul

PS. We used to sing this hymn in the church where I grew up. It is a magnificent meditation on the dustiness of Jesus by Joseph Hart, to the tune Beethoven

A Man there is, a real Man,
With wounds still gaping wide,
From which rich streams of blood once ran,
In hands, and feet, and side.

‘Tis no wild fancy of our brains,
No metaphor we speak;
The same dear Man in heaven now reigns,
That suffered for our sake.

This wondrous Man of whom we tell,
Is true Almighty God;
He bought our souls from death and hell;
The price, His own heart’s blood.

That human heart He still retains,
Though throned in highest bliss;
And feels each tempted member’s pains;
For our affliction’s His.

Come, then, repenting sinner, come;
Approach with humble faith;
Owe what thou wilt, the total sum
Is canceled by His death!

His blood can cleanse the blackest soul,
And wash our guilt away;
He will present us sound and whole
In that tremendous day.

Praying for Church Plants

In the last 10 years, the Lord has grown our fragile little denomination in remarkable ways. There are external factors which have contributed, but in the kindness of God, we are now 25 congregations, with 13 of these being church plants. In these past few months we have seen three IPC congregations begin in Salford, Carlisle and Lincoln.

There are times and seasons in church life as well as denominational life. We are now in a period of needing to see church plants grow and become sustainable. In many ways the crying need of the UK is strong churches, and so I thought it would be good for us to think about how we can be praying for these church plants using 5 points starting with P.

People

It is easy to be obsessed with numbers in church life, but we do need to see that God’s ordinary way of working is of adding to his Church. We are to be praying that our congregations would come to spiritual maturity and grow in depth of love and insight, and that as churches we would become more and more conformed to Christ. It is also right to pray that the Lord would bring people to our church plant. That people would be converted and added to the church, and that Christians who move into the area would join these churches. There is a strength in numbers. As a congregation grows it is able to reach more people, have different ministries, support other congregations, and see more churches planted. There is a reason why in the book of Acts numbers are recorded so that we can see and rejoice over how Christ’s church has grown.

It is true that many churches in the UK have stalled at the 40-50 people mark. It means that the church is always on the borders of viability. Vulnerability and fragility can be good things in a church’s life. There is a sense in which it can cause us to cast ourselves on the Lord. But for the sake of the gospel, for the establishment of new churches, for the work of the kingdom, churches that grow and have more people in them are able to often have a greater impact.

There is something in the British Christian mentality that is very nervous about churches growing big. I wonder how we might have felt on the day of Pentecost?

Pounds

To plant a church takes considerable expense. There is the Church Planter’s salary and accommodation, a decent website, the hiring of premises, the expenses go on and on. Our church planting committee estimates that it takes £100,000 for the first year. This means that our church planters as well as being Preachers and Pastors have to become fund raisers. Our church planting fund at Presbytery has been a brilliant thing in being able to give grants to enable plants to get going. We normally give grants for 3 years of about a third of what the planter has to raise. It would be wonderful to see this fund able to give more and see more churches planted and established.

Presbyters

Elders are a precious gift of the Ascended Christ to his church, to be able to share in the work and governance in our churches. The Church planter is not able to do all the work and is extremely vulnerable on his own. The pattern we see in the New Testament is of a plurality of leadership. We well know the danger of power in the hands of one man corrupting that man. The testimony of the whole of Scripture bears this out.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!” Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

“Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” Proverbs 15:22

It is for the health and safety of Christ’s flock that we believe elders are needed. Please pray that our church planters would see elders raised up in their congregations to shepherd Jesus’ church.

Properties

‘The church is not the building’ is of course true, but it is also equally true that buildings serve churches. Our experience is that a building enables you to be more established in a community, to have a base from which you can do ministry and mission. It says to the transient community around us ‘this church will outlive you’. Our church plants which are renting find themselves very vulnerable to the whims of their landlord. Some of our church plants have found themselves under attack for holding to a biblically faithful position on sexuality and been told they are unable to rent the space any longer because of that. Others of our church plants in places where space is at a premium, are paying thousands of pounds for two hours on a Sunday morning. Enormous amounts of energy can be taken up in church plants with set up and take down with only a very small number of volunteers.

I realise it is naive to think that having one’s own building will lead to growth, and yet we need to realise that seeing churches established for the next 100 years necessarily means having your own building. We need to have a long term mindset in planting. We are going to have to be creative in seeing how churches can get established in their own buildings. Please pray that those church plants which are struggling to buy properties would be able to purchase a building. Is there a way that you could financially support one of our church plants in obtaining a building?

Planters

We have been blessed in the last 15 years with men who have come forward with their families willing to sacrifice and give themselves to Church Planting with the IPC. We realise that the needs are enormous and that church planting does take a certain type of personality. It isn’t for everyone, and so it is right that men’s gifts are tested to see whether it is a good fit. Pray that the Lord would sustain these church planters and their families, who are often in isolated situations. The pressures in a church plant, where one is beginning from scratch, are significant. Pray that we would care well for those men and their families.

There are also more opportunities than we can currently meet. We are in need of more church planters. Jesus tells us, “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9:38,39). Pray that the Lord would raise up church planters. Pray for those considering planting with IPC.

As a denomination, we have so much to be thankful for. We recognise that unless the Lord builds the house, we labour in vain. Pray that the Lord would continue to build his church through us.

* I think I got at least 3 of these P’s from Jonty Rhodes in a Presbytery report he gave.

Give us today our daily bread – Minister’s Letter Oct 25

Dear all at IPC,

Every Sunday we say together what is commonly called the Lord’s Prayer, which is of course wrongly named. Jesus never had to pray this prayer, it’s the prayer he gave to his disciples. He didn’t pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”. It’s both a model and a form of prayer and we are to use this to base our prayers upon. But also, Jesus tells us to pray it, “when you pray, pray this… Our Father who is in heaven…” (Matthew 6:9)

The Lord’s prayer is in many ways Systematic Theology in miniature. It gives us the equipment to live out the Christian life. This prayer controls our Christian attitudes, it enables us to face life with all its ups and downs and uncertainties.

I’ve been thinking on the petition ‘give us today our daily bread’ and each word is worth meditating on. What is immediately striking is that this request doesn’t come until halfway through the prayer. The Lord’s prayer is first of all about God’s name, God’s kingdom and God’s will. Those things are the utter priority. The Lord’s prayer forces us to speak of his concerns before our own, before we come to forgiveness and our needs.

How often my prayer life is the opposite, the concerns of my daily life crowd in, my priorities are tragically the other way round.

This petition includes everything we need: our health, our food, our wants, our cares, our need to be sustained. It reminds us that the Lord provides, and reminds us of his overruling providence in everything. Every word is loaded with meaning.

Give – “What do you have that you did not receive?” 1 Cor 4:7. As we pray give us our daily bread, we are to recognise God is the generous giver. All good gifts around us are us are sent from heaven above. What we have is not earned, the home that we live in, the food on our table, the money in our bank account, the clothes on our back – all is given to us and to be received as gift. We need to recognise the source of what we have.

I often think of Nebuchadnezzar looking out, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30). While the words are on his lips, the Lord humbles him and after seven years, he recognises there is a God in heaven who is to be praised and blessed forever. He sees himself as he is – a creature, who is dependent and God has given him all that he has.

Our daily necessities are given to us by God.

Give us – I don’t think I had realised here that it is a corporate prayer – Give ‘us’

It does not say ‘me’ or ‘my’. So often I am keen to pray for me, myself and I. What patience God must have with me constantly being focussed in on myself. This petition puts me in my place, it shows me my concern should be with others. We’re even told to pray for our enemies by the Lord Jesus.

This prayer is a disciples prayer and Jesus is encouraging us here to be thinking of his disciples. It is right and fitting to pray this as a church Sunday by Sunday. Our own needs are prayed for in the context of others.

Give us today – Jesus famously said, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:34). Proverbs reminds us, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring” (Proverbs 27:1). To pray give us today our daily bread recognises that we are not in control, we are mortal, limited, finite creatures. We live by God’s daily sustaining grace. It is a great reminder that we live reliant on the daily care of God and when it comes to tomorrow, we can rely on God’s daily grace then.

For the Israelites in the wilderness they were given manna daily, they had to rely on God’s fresh daily provision each day. They weren’t able to gather tomorrow’s manna today, they had to trust God would provide it in the morning.

Our Daily Bread – speaks to us of daily necessity. In our culture we know exactly what this means – bread is a slang term for money, dough is used in the same way. It is the stuff of life. It’s not the fleshpots that the children of Israel longed for in Egypt, nor the extravagant food we see in restaurants. Jesus is speaking of Daily Bread as the basic food which keeps us alive. The bare necessities!

The whole petition tells us that the Christian life is one of reliance and dependence: we entrust ourselves to the Lord. I think this is one of our basic struggles, am I willing to live reliantly on the Lord? When I am forced to do that by my circumstances do I kick against it? As I’ve written before, dependence and reliance are coming to all of us whether we like it or not. It is just a case of whether we will learn to embrace them or be forced to.

The writer of proverbs tells us, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me,lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God”. (Proverbs 30:8-9). This is counter cultural living and it always has been. Where discontentment and envy of others can so easily creep in, Jesus is teaching us God gives us what we need and that is all ok.

He is teaching that we humans are like the rest of creation, we are as dependent as the birds who neither sew nor reap and so we are not to be overly concerned about what we wear and what we eat, what we look like (Matthew 6:32). God knows what we need before we ask it (Matthew 6:8). You can look at these physical provisions of the Lord and the prayer is certainly referring to them, but we realise that “man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

It would be incredibly foolish of us to set our hearts on the things and stuff of this life that we are given. To seek to hold on to it. To elevate ‘give us our daily bread’ above God’s name, God’s kingdom and God’s will. Jesus is teaching us to keep our daily bread in perspective.

This is obviously a prayer for today as we will not pray this prayer in the life of the world to come because there will no need to pray “your kingdom come” because the kingdom will have come, we will not pray “forgive us our trespasses” because there will be nothing to forgive. We will not have to pray in glory “Give us today our daily bread”, because we will enjoy abundance in glory forever at the wedding supper of the Lamb. We will feast in the house of Zion. But till then, let’s recognise that our lives are one of humble reliance on a generous God.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Your Minister and friend,

Elders and self!

When we think of self what do we think of?

I think our minds go straightaway to self denial. Tim Keller has written an excellent book on self forgetfulness. I have often found myself giving the advice to people that you need to forget your self, don’t focus on your self. We see self love as a problem. In our culture, when someone is described as being full of one’s self, that is a bad thing. Philippians 2 tells us to consider others as more important than oneself.

But I also think sometimes we present self too simply. Our view of self needs to be more nuanced than that. The New Testament speaks of self in different ways.

Before we come to the Lord’s Table, we are to consider ourselves (1 Cor 11 v 28). In 2 Corinthians 13, we are to examine ourselves to see whether we are in the faith. Romans 6 v 11 is one of the key verses for believers in how we live out the Christian life, “Reckon yourself, consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God.” (Romans 6 v11)

These verses tell us that our concept of self matters. We have to understand who we are and what is our identity.

If we have too high a view of ourselves, we will become proud and conceited. We will be devastated when we inevitably sin or face criticism. Too low a view of ourselves will show itself in looking for acceptance and identity by what we do or achieve. It can lead us looking for affirmation in all the wrong places. I have been been struck that those of us in Christian leadership can easily fall into these extremes, in fact we can find ourselves struggling with both too high a view and too low a view in one day!

So I want us to think about what we need to understand about ourselves as elders to enable us to fulfil this role. To consider ourselves, reckon ourselves.

First of all, an elder must have a belief in the sovereignty of God. He is the Lord of the universe and he rules over all the earth. Before the foundation of the world God set his love upon you, he chose you in Christ. There has never been a time when God did not love you.

In time, at a certain point of history, God sent his son Jesus Christ to live for you and to die for you, to rise for you, to ascend for you, to sit at his Father’s right for you, and one day he will come again for you. “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2 v 20)

We must know that it is this God who has worked in the elder’s life by the Spirit bringing him to faith in Jesus Christ and new life. It is by God’s Spirit he enables us to put sin to death.

There is nothing which I have written here that is not true for every Christian, but it must be the testimony of every elder. These things must be known and experienced: we are sheep before we are shepherds.

Secondly, an elder must have the belief that he has been shaped by God’s providence.

The elder must know that the Holy Spirit has been preparing him for service. Through years of experience as a christian and by means of his experience in church in which he serves, God has been providentially at work. His appointment to the eldership by the church and presbytery was not a mistake but God’s hand was clearly in it. Men do not put themselves onto the eldership. Good churches have a process for appointing elders where there is input from the elders and a vote by the congregation, and the involvement of Presbytery. Elders were not ordained by accident or mistake.

The elder can look back and see something – not everything of course – but something of the providence of God in bringing him to the point of Ordination and Installation.

Elders are where they are not by any mistake. Elders are in the church they are in because of God’s sovereignty. Elder: the circumstances of your life, the difficulties, all that you have gone through, are not an accident or have occurred by blind chance, but all has occurred due to the loving sovereign hand of God. God has so worked in your background and shaped you to this point.

Thirdly, the elder must know he’s been called by God through his Spirit and by his people.

The desire for the work of an overseer is an excellent thing (1 Timothy 3 v 1). There needs to be a willingness on the part of the elder to do this work and give himself to it.God’s people have recognised him and so there is a desire by the congregation for the elder to shepherd them. There has been a period of training for becoming an elder, and in our context, there is also the involvement of presbytery and the role they play in guarding, training, examining, appointing, ordaining.

All of that is to say elders have not put themselves into their position, but God through his church and by his Spirit has put the elder into it.

God is the one who calls and so an elder acts under Christ’s authority. Elders are shepherds, but are under shepherds.

This understanding of who elders are in Christ and what they’ve been called to do by Christ should give elders a dignity and a responsibility. Being an overseer of God’s people speaks of privilege and authority.

I think this is particularly helpful when it comes to pastoral work. Elders need to recognise they are not our own, but are stewards in God’s house. It is his church, his flock, his people, his work. Yet, he has delegated his authority to elders, he has given them keys to his kingdom. What do keys do? Open and close doors. So the elders are given these keys to use in Christ’s church.

Elders speak with an authority they’ve been given. In Ordination, an authority is given to the elder. I often say to a couple the night before a wedding that the most important thing that will happen tomorrow is what you can’t see. It is what God does: “What God has joined together let no man separate”. In Ordination, by the laying on of hands God sets apart his elders. There is something definitively different before an elder gets on his knees and after he get up from his knees – God has done something. Elders are different whether they feel it or not after the act of Ordination.

There is an obvious danger to this: abuse of the position. This is seen throughout scripture. There have always been false shepherds, lording it over the flock which is a perennial danger, where leadership is domineering. The power goes to the elder’s head. The abuse of the position though does not negate the right use of the authority an elder is given.

This act by God in Ordination enables elders to deal straightforwardly with Christ’s flock. Elders do not have to manipulate. Sadly there is a lot of that manipulation in conservative evangelicalism. I sometimes think that the obsession with 121 bible studies and personal work can lead to an unhealthy dependence on one person. We need to say to people I’m your elder not your guru.

The ways in which elders can manipulate are manifold. Elders can make someone feel special, helping them feel like they have the inner track. The elder might not even be aware of it but loyalty is being bought in this instance. Even in communication by notes and messages, elders must do so out of genuine love and concern. I’ve known leaders who use those communications to keep people on side. It is a fine line between showing genuine concern and needing people to be kept on side.

In the last 30 years, it has been popular to decry a call to ministry. It a reaction against a false super-spiritual approach to people entering ministry. However, it has had devastating effects. People have been told any Christian should think and pursue full time ministry and we have ended up with many people who shouldn’t be publicly preaching. It has been to the detriment of themselves and the congregations they serve. That is not to doubt their sincerity, but just to say they would have been more fruitful in other vocations. In the last 5 years, with the cost of living and ministry being more difficult and with allegations thrown at leaders regularly, ministry has become less attractive to young people. The chickens have come home to roost. If you keep telling people there is no such thing as a call to ministry, it is no surprise that the long term effect of this being, unsurprisingly, people haven’t been called.

As ministers and elders in the UK haven’t had a sense of self and calling, leaders have led through manipulation. You remove accountability also, and that gives you some indication as to why some of the abuse scandals that have rocked the church have taken place.

The opposite problem – which is equally likely – is that elders become timid. There arise shepherds who are terrified of offending the sheep, nervous about leading and conflict averse. I suspect this may well be more of an issue than we like to admit. All of us want to be liked and the elder is no different. Elders like to be counted as peoples’ friends, the desire itself not being wrong, but it can get in the way of good shepherding. The parent who desperately wants to be their child’s friend will be incapable of disciplining them. Elders must love the flock, but must be willing to not be liked. The sheep don’t always love the shepherd.

The elder having an understanding of self will realise they are under shepherds, called by Christ to this work, which gives an elder dignity and poise, enabling them to speak the truth in love with gentleness. It also enables elders to be realistic, to evaluate and appreciate their particular gifts, understand their strengths and weaknesses. It should give them a willingness to take feedback and accept their limitations.

It also enables elders to persevere in their responsibilities even when faced with tremendous difficulties. What keeps an elder going is that they are called to this work by God. What this understanding should do is it give to an elder a sense of dignity and authority but it should also be humbling.

The model in many ways is the Apostle Paul in his understanding of himself, that he was the least of the least (which is impossible!). He lived his life in the awareness of his past sins: he could never forget that he was there when Stephen was stoned, giving approval. (Acts 8 v 1; 22 v 20). He lived in the light of his past righteousness – there things he once boasted in which now he realised were worthless. His present reality was struggles (2 Corinthians 11 v 23-29). Allied to all of this, he saw clearly the dignity and privilege of who he was. He was an Ambassador, an Apostle, a Minister of Christ Jesus.

We can see throughout his ministry the balance of authority and humility.

Elders can be like dogs! There are ones that growl at you grumpily but they scurry off if you come near them. There are those who will do anything for you if you scratch their ears or tummy. There are ones that cower and look with wide eyes at you desiring pity. There are elders who who grovel and compromise and apologise at the slightest trouble. There are men who will do anything if you give them a pat on the head.

If you are an elder, God chose you in eternity, he created you and he shaped you into the person he wanted and he called you to his service and ordained you. He has given you an authority. Dignity and humility is the biblical self concept. Elders should seek to develop and grow in these things as we live with its tension and complexity. We are sinners and we are saints. We are beggars we are princes.

Which is exactly what God says in Psalm 113:7

“He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
⁸to make them sit with princes,
with the princes of his people.”

I originally got the the idea for this article from Knox Chamblin’s book “Paul and the self” & an address given by Edward Donnelly at the Banner of Trust Ministers conference in the 1980s. I am pretty sure the elders as dogs illustration comes from him.

You keep him in perfect peace…- Minister’s Letter Sept 25

Dear all at IPC,

I was recently with an elderly friend who I visit. When I arrived he was unusually agitated, getting up to check the windows were shut, muttering to himself, feeling cold and then feeling warm, moving seats, tidying papers and then retidying, asking the same questions again and again. All the time I could hear him mumbling, repeating something under his breath as he moved around the room. He finally sat down for a moment and I was able to hear what he was saying:

“You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you.

You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you.

You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you.”

He regained composure and his breathing steadied. He looked at me and said, “I’m not sure what happened there”.

The verse he was quoting was from Isaiah 26:3. I knew it and yet I’m not sure I’d really seen it in action so powerfully before. It was as if I saw the power of the word of God before my very eyes doing its work.

The verse comes from the prophecy of Isaiah in chapter 26. The prophet is pointing forward, speaking of ‘that day’ (v1) in the city of salvation. Ultimately he is pointing to Christ and the salvation he brings. It is then, those who are right with God, will enjoy his peace v3, will know eternal security (v4), will participate in God’s victory (v5,6), will have security in the midst of the chaos of this life because of their God and the great longing of their life is to know God (v8). These people who will inhabit that city are characterised by a trust in God: “Trust in the Lord forever for the Lord God is an everlasting rock” (v4). It’s a picture of what God will bring in Christ, that day of salvation and judgement. In the midst of that is this great promise – put your mind on God and he will keep you in perfect peace. The words perfect peace are literally “peace, peace” – there’s an emphasis on how he can keep you in this ‘peace, peace’ when your mind is depending on the Lord.

As I’ve thought how my friend used this verse there are number of lessons.

The battle still rages even in old age. When I became a Christian, I naively thought (and was taught) that the hardest place to be a Christian was school. There is an element of truth to that but the real truth is that the hardest time to be a Christian is now. The battle with self and sin and Satan never lets up. Each stage of life might be different, but there’s always a battle.

My friend is 100 years old, and I could see on that afternoon him fighting to keep his mind on the Lord. The devil attacking him, agitating him. In many ways old age presents enormous challenges to our faith, we’re stripped back to only relying on God, we can’t do what we did, we can’t serve as we have in the past. There are frustrations and our world shrinks. We are thrown back on the Lord. So don’t dream of easier days, don’t think there comes a time when we won’t be under attack.

There is incalculable value in understanding scripture as the living word of God – my friend was holding on to God’s word, he knew it was true, he knew it worked. He realised that if he could get his mind on his God, his God would keep him, would give him peace. In many ways that is how he has lived his life, resting and relying on the word of God.

The battle for our minds is so important. The apostle Paul tells us, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2), “set your mind on things above, not things on earth” (Colossians 3:2) we are “to take every thought captive” (2 Cor 10:5). What you think will effect how you live. We see it in sport when we say someone’s lost their head, or their head is not right. We are saying that their mindset has effected how they are performing.

Paul’s imagery in Ephesians is powerful: put on the armour of God, fasten on the belt of truth, use the sword of the Spirit. The battle is vicious, intense, and unrelenting and the weapon we have been given to fight with is scripture.

The Psalmist says, “I have hidden your word within my heart that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). Bury the truth in your heart and so when you are shaken, the truth will come out. Jesus says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. I look at the shelf by my desk and it groans with a number of bibles. We have more translations, more access to scripture than any generation before us, but alongside that there is greater biblical ignorance than ever before.

The practice of memorising scripture is out of fashion, it can be seen as antiquated, and tragically it can be seen as something that children do but not adults. I think we as a church are probably weak in this area. It seems to me that we need to work hard on getting scripture into ourselves. I’m not arguing for memorisation without understanding, but we need to put scripture to work. We need to learn it to use it.

In times of great anxiety and fear, in times of sadness, in every time, God’s word can keep you. That isn’t trite and isn’t simplistic.

“You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you.”

Your Minister and friend,

The Nicene Creed

We live in an age when people believe in all sorts of things and don’t know what they believe. People of God, what do you believe?

There is a subversive element to confessing our faith in God during worship. In doing so, we swim against the tide of our culture. When we confess the Nicene Creed, we are saying to each other and the world around us that we stand with the church through history. We are not the first generation to believe, and we have not just come to these things on our own. We stand with our brothers and sisters across the globe. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Its beginnings

The Nicene Creed is one of the ‘big three creeds’, the Apostles Creed and the Athanasian Creed being the other two. 2025 marks 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea met. From this meeting came the Nicene Formula and the more well-known Nicene Creed followed in 381.

In our churches, we preach that salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone and that Jesus Christ is Lord. At the risk of simplification, the Nicene Creed was born out of thinking through that and the implications flowing from it. In the early 300s, the church was struggling with how best to talk about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and how they relate to one another. What were the right words to use? How could one express that there is only one God and yet the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God? Who came first? Did one come after the other?

Arius was a pastor from the city of Alexandria in Egypt, and he wasn’t happy with what the church was teaching. He wanted to protect the holiness of God the Father. However, he couldn’t believe that the Holy Almighty God became a man, as to become human would be beneath him, and so Jesus Christ could not be God incarnate. Arius would not have sung, ‘Our God contracted to a span incomprehensibly made man.’ For Arius, Jesus was a created being. There was a time when he did not exist. He was not eternal, and there was a point when God the Father created him. Arius still held that Jesus was God, but that he was created and not eternal.

In the same city lived a minister in training, Athanasius. He was teaching that God the Father and Christ the Son were equally divine. The battle lines were drawn. Arius cried heresy. The church was divided, the city was divided, and very soon, the world was divided.

The Roman Emperor at the time was Constantine, and his recent conversion to Christianity was to have monumental implications for the Christian church, both very good and some bad. Constantine was worried that a divided church would lead to political instability. He gathered together more than a thousand Christian pastors and ministers who met from May to July 325. Around 300 of them were Bishops, and they debated the natures of Christ. This conference made a number of decisions, including when to celebrate Easter (you can blame Nicaea for it moving every year!) and whether kneeling in prayer at worship was permissible. In 381, at the First Council of Constantinople, the creed was expanded to clarify the teaching around the Holy Spirit. Athanasius boldly stood for the truth. At times he was alone, but in the end, he and truth won out.

Its importance

Within the creed, there are four main sections, each starting with ‘We believe’. These focus on the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and the church. The creed clarified the doctrine of the Trinity. There is no more central question than ‘Who is Jesus?’ It is essential Christianity and the Nicene Creed is a summary of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It tells us who God is and what God has done. Every Christian and every church ought to know it.

There is one God, not two. The Father is God, and the Son is God. The Son is God in the same sense as the Father, and there is divine unity. The Son and the Father are ‘of one substance’ and the Son is ‘begotten’ (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18), not made. As J. I. Packer tells us, ‘the Nicene Creed unequivocally recognised the deity of the man from Galilee.’

It is this truth that we need to often meditate on and think deeply about if we are going to be able to speak about who God is. How do we share the good news of the Lord Jesus with those who have never heard of him? When we engage with Muslims about Jesus being the Son of God, we are immediately into the Nicene Creed. When we speak with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the core disagreement is the issue addressed at Nicaea. We need to understand clearly who Jesus Christ is. It is the key to understanding the doctrine of God, the Holy Trinity.

As churches, when we stand together and recite the great grammar of the gospel in the Nicene Creed, we stand with the church in every age as she is strengthened and built up in the Christian faith. This is the shape of what we believe, the form of doctrine that we have been given.

The Nicene Creed is one of the greatest texts available to us in making our confession about Jesus.

Believe it. Learn it. Love it.

This article was originally published by the Evangelical Magazine (www.evangelicalmagazine.com) published by the Evangelical Movement of Wales and is reprinted with permission.

Stuck – Minister’s Letter Aug 25

Dear all at IPC,

One of the great struggles of the Christian life is when situations don’t change, when there is the realisation that unless God powerfully intervenes in an unusual way, things are pretty much what they are going to be for the rest of our lives. It is the problem of being stuck or feeling stuck.

It may be some flaw in our character, or a relationship, or a situation where we’ve prayed and prayed, we’ve sought help but still there is no change. There is the temptation to despair and to slip into deep discouragement. It can even tragically lead to people giving up the Christian walk.

Someone recently said to me that it is the loss of hope that is the most difficult thing. Psalm 13 expresses it well in that famous question “How long O Lord?”. DA Carson in his book by that title begins by saying when it comes to suffering all you have to do is live long enough for if you’ve not experienced it yet, you soon will. I think the feeling of being in a situation that doesn’t change is a common experience for every believer at some point in their life . It would certainly seem that way from the Psalms. Psalm 40, 61, 121, 142 amongst others all deal directly or indirectly with this issue.

In fact scripture tells us that since the fall, God has hard wired frustration into his universe. Creation is subject to it (thorns and thistles effecting the ground – Romans 8:20); frustration is shown in the breakdown of relationship between people (enmity with each other); and we have frustration with ourselves – we are not the people we were created to be, there is conflict within us. That is certainly the testimony of every believer.

There are times in this fallen world when we feel we’ve exhausted every possible option. It feels like we are cornered and stuck. The change that we might see is glacially slow and when it happens, it often hasn’t relieved the problem.

It is here the truth that God has ordered the times and seasons of our life may bring us some relief. In his sovereign providence we are where we are. We may well wish life was different, we may wish we hadn’t made the decisions we have made, but the situation we are in is not outside of his sovereign control.

The Apostle Paul knew something of frustration when he talked about “his thorn in the flesh” in 1 Corinthians 12. Three times he pleaded with the Lord to remove it and yet the Lord’s answer was no and that his, ‘grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’. God uses our frustrations, our difficulties, our heartbreak to show his power and his sufficiency.

That doesn’t suddenly make everything ok and relieve every difficulty, but it does bring us comfort. The sorrow and pain might not be taken away but it does enable us to know this isn’t meaningless.

How do we react as believers when we feel we’re stuck? And when change doesn’t seem to be happening? I think we need to recognise where we live in redemptive history. God’s kingdom has come but it hasn’t fully come, we live in the now and the not yet. Jesus Christ has come but the curse of the fall and sin has not been fully removed. There is a day coming when frustration will be taken away, when the intractable problems of life will be done away with. In the words of Sam to Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings, “where everything sad will come untrue”.

There will be a new heaven and a new earth, God will dwell with man. Every relationship will give the joy that it was always meant to. The battles we face will be no more, frustration will be removed in its entirety. That is the hope. The New Testament teaches that we are being changed in this life, wonderfully, we’ve moved from death to life, from darkness to light, from blindness to sight. We are indwelt by God’s Spirit and he is changing us but the wonderful promise God gives us to us is that one day when we see him we shall be like him. That is the transformation we are looking for. There is hope, it won’t be like this forever. The Apostle Paul tells us that our citizenship is in heaven and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are a waiting people!

I think we also need to recognise God gives grace to the humble. It is very easy to feel hard done by, to think that we are the wronged party (and no doubt in lots of circumstances we are). But the tendency of my heart is often towards thinking I am some kind of victim. The command in scripture is to humble ourselves before God, it means admitting we have no rights. There are not demands we can place on God, there are no deals to be made with him. At our very best we’re unworthy servants and he does not treat us as we deserve. The incredible promise is that God gives grace to the humble (James 4:6) and that he lifts the humble up (James 4:10, 1 Peter 5:6). In a situation where we can feel stuck, one of the keys to handling that is seeing ourselves as we are, and God responds by giving grace. It is simple but that does not mean it is easy. I think seeing the alternative that scripture presents is very helpful – that if we are proud God will resist us.

Knowing that our times are in God’s hands and he is working out his purposes, knowing the hope of a new heavens and a new earth, knowing that God gives grace to the humble, we can do the right thing. It won’t be like this forever and God’s grace will be sufficient until then.

Elizabeth Elliot popularised an old poem – ‘Do the next thing’

Do it immediately, do it with prayer;
Do it reliantly, casting all care;
Do it with reverence, tracing His hand
Who placed it before thee with earnest command.
Stayed on Omnipotence, safe ‘neath His wing,
Leave all results, do the next thing.

My experience is that when you are feeling overwhelmed and stuck, the temptation for paralysis is enormous. Recognising the truth about God and about ourselves can help us just to do the next thing, to do the right thing.

Don’t give up,

your Minister and friend,

Paul

‘You help us by your prayers’ – Minister’s Letter June 25

Dear all at IPC,

In 2 Corinthians 1:11 there is a beautiful little phrase, “You also must help us by prayer”, the NIV translates it as “You help us by your prayers”.

The context of this verse in 2 Corinthians chapter1 is that of suffering in the Christian life and ministry. Paul opens himself up to his readers in this letter more than in any other of his epistles. He speaks of the comfort he has received from the Father of Mercies and the God of compassion

In the midst of being under overwhelming pressure, far beyond his ability to endure, he has been strengthened by God. He was at the end of his rope, he’d reached his limits. He states that he even despaired of life. Some people might think it’s inappropriate for a Christian to speak in such a way but the Apostle is far more realistic.

There are difficulties in the life of every Christian which can lead us to say, “I do not know what to do and I don’t know if I can carry on”. Think of the woman with the issue of blood that Jesus meets, for 12 years she had struggled, spending a fortune on Dr’s who only made her condition worse. Did she not at times despair of life?

Think of the struggles that our fellow Christians know, those battling overwhelming grief, the hopes of some for marriage that have never materialised. Those who have relatives who are unwell with no seeming recovery in sight, those who have prayed that God would give them children but to no avail. For the Apostle Paul he felt such distress that in his heart he felt the sentence of death.

As he reflects on his life and tribulations he was enduring, he says that these things were not out of God’s sovereign control, they were not the result of random chance but these things had happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

For Paul, it was the stresses and strains of Christian ministry that drove him to the edge but, it was at that edge he discovered he did not have the resources to get through on his own but if he could rely on God’s strength he could cope.

I am not sure we are fully aware of that constant temptation to rely on ourselves, in many ways it is the great battle of the Christian life. It’s a constant battle to remind ourselves day by day to trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding. I find myself believing the lie that I can do it, if I try hard enough, if I summon up enough willpower.

The great killer in the Christian life is not doubt. It sometimes can be quite healthy to doubt. If we handle doubts properly they will strengthen our faith. The thing that will destroy our faith is self-reliance.

The purpose of trials and temptations and struggles is to remind us, don’t rely on yourself, there is a God who is strong, whose omnipotent power can reach into the grave and raise the dead. Trials come into our lives to reinforce to prick the bubble of our self-reliance. Time and again in our Christian life we are thrown back on God to know that only the Lord can do it.

In 2 Corinthians 1 Paul is already trailering the big theme of his letter that God’s strength is seen in weakness and into this he interjects that the prayers of this church have helped him. In the sovereignty of God, the prayers of God’s people have caused him to persevere.

Immediately we think individually when it comes to prayer but, here Paul is saying the prayers corporately of God’s people have helped him. As this church in Corinth have prayed together, it is plural and not singular, their prayers have blessed him and the result is that many will give thanks for Paul and his colleagues in ministry.

It is a remarkable encouragement to pray as a church. One of my great failings is when I have that feeling of helplessness about a situation thinking, “all I can do is pray”, as if that is somehow second best. We often want to contribute, help and there will be many times when we can, but often I find myself thinking, “all I can do is pray”. I need to realise that our prayers help, our brothers and sisters keep going in God’s sovereignty because of our prayers.

If we could see as a church the power of our prayers, that our prayers sustain one another, help another, keep one another, it would encourage us to pray for Christians who are struggling. Geoffrey Wilson says of this verse, “we are no idle spectators of a drama in which we have no part to play”.

When we gather in our Prayer Meeting we are participating in the purposes of God, there is profound mystery here but our prayers help!

Your Minister and your friend,

One of us – Minister’s Letter May 25

Dear all at IPC,

In the last month I’ve found real help in thinking on the humanity of Jesus, to spend time meditating on him. We’ve seen in Hebrews, “He is not ashamed to call us brothers” (the word used there translates to include sisters), he has become one of us. It is beyond our comprehension and yet it compels us to worship.

We often sing of this truth glibly at Christmas. The creator of the universe we behold him lying helpless wrapped in cloths. He was an outsider even in his birth as the circumstances of his birth are a source of scandal and his family tree is nothing to write home about. It involved adultery, prostitution and pagan worship, laid out for all to read in the genealogy of Matthew. He was a citizen of a state which was occupied by a foreign power. His earthly parents were too poor to even offer a lamb when he was presented at the temple, they had to offer a pair of doves. For a time as a child he was an asylum seeker in Egypt, part of a refugee family.

He grew up in what seems to be a bit of a dump called Nazareth, a place that people looked down on. He had the normal tensions of family life with brothers and sisters, and the only incident we have of his childhood is his mum complaining ‘why did you stay out so late, where have you been?’ We know next to nothing about his father as he disappears from the narrative quickly. Later in life, his family misunderstood him, at one point they thought he was out of his mind and needed to be removed from public life.

Jesus was a working man, he worked with his hands and knew all about hard graft and sweat. He would have had sore muscles. He would have been aware of the pressures and strains of a small family business.

Each week he went along to the local synagogue and endured boring sermons. Each Sabbath day he heard men mistreat and mishandle the scriptures, and yet he went weekly. Can you imagine what it was like for Jesus a man in his late 20’s to hear how scripture was being butchered by those who should have been Israel’s teachers? Conversely, we can imagine what it would have been like for those who heard him in his early 30’s who remembered him fixing their coffee tables, asking one another, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?”

The stories he told reflected the community life with which he was familiar: a mother sewing patches on clothes; things that got lost; fishing nets; an unjust judge in a local court. He lived in a very down to earth world. There is an absolute down to earthiness and approachability about Jesus.

Women were numbered among his very best friends at a time when no man would appear in public with a woman and they were treated as second class citizens. Little children were drawn to him; we know his disciples didn’t have time for them but Jesus was different, he welcomed them and lifted them up in his arms. He kept all the wrong company such as prostitutes and other rejects from society. A political pariah like a tax collector who worked for the Romans, gravitated towards him. He was mocked as ‘a friend of sinners’.

He spoke with an accent, a country accent. He was a Galilean. He wasn’t a cultured man. We are told the common people heard him gladly, he spoke in a way that they understood. Jesus was blunt and witty. He described the clergy as whitewashed graves – clean on the outside but rotten on the inside. He poked fun at the Pharisees and told jokes about them: have you heard the one about – that kind of thing. Two Pharisees are sitting in a restaurant having lunch, and one of them notices a fly in the soup bowl of his friend but he hasn’t realised there’s a camel sitting in his own soup. He used that irony to expose the fact the religious leaders saw tiny things in the lives of others but they missed the massive issues that were in their own lives

Jesus got extremely angry at times. We are told that when he healed a man with a shrivelled hand and the Pharisees muttered about it being the Sabbath, he was deeply angry at their attitude. He once famously went into the temple and threw over the tables of the money changers when his Father’s house was at stake.

He knew the whole range of human emotions of hunger and thirst, bereavement and tears. He wept, crying with great sobs at the graveside of a friend. He experienced real disappointment in ministry. He was rejected by his family, betrayed by one of his best friends and let down by the others who forsook him and fled. His end in many ways was a failure, certainly from a human perspective.

He entered into our humanity and all the struggles you and I have in our lives and churches. There is no pressure or struggle that Jesus doesn’t know far more about than any of us.

It is wonderfully encouraging that this man Jesus gets you. He understands you and your world. He is able to sympathise with us with our every weakness. There is no one more worthy of our love and our service. As we meditate on him we are moved to worship.

There is an old chorus which says…

Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full on his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

Fix your eyes on Jesus,

Your Minister and friend,