The message and the messenger

Billy Graham was a man who shared the Christian message with more people than anyone else during the 20th century. He tells the story of a time when he arrived in a small town to preach. Wanting to post a letter, he asked a small boy where the Post Office was. When the boy told him, Graham thanked him and said, ‘If you come to church this evening you can hear me telling everyone how to get to heaven.’ The boy said, ‘I don’t think I’ll bother, you don’t even know your way to the Post Office.’

Have you been put off religion, the church or God by the very people who are talking, teaching or preaching about these things? Perhaps you’ve been collared by an over-zealous, patronising or intense friend or relative who’s seeking to ‘spread the word’.

When in my twenties, I was on the receiving end of such. In retrospect, some of what was coming at me was actually good but the delivery could have been better!

Those of us that own the name Christian are to share the news about God’s purpose for men and women, its immediate relevance and future consequences. We can feel overwhelmed by the privilege and responsibility handed to us. Personally, I’m encouraged that even the apostle Paul (of Damascus Road fame), having considered the seriousness and the ramifications of spreading the message, asked, ‘..and who is equal to such a task?’ The unspoken answer is that none of us are.

Have advocates of God, and in particular Christianity, put you off? If so, before throwing out the baby with the bathwater, consider the content of the message and not so much the messenger. Put simply, we are to listen to and heed the message that says we should place our faith (i.e. trust) in God for our present and future well-being.

There has been, however, a perfect messenger, Jesus: He not only brought us the word of God but is himself God’s Word. So, if you fall in the bracket of ‘not yet a Christian’ don’t focus on the merely human messenger who brings the word to you, but look to the Word itself which is Jesus.

Addressing our inner heart, Jesus says, ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in…’

Who's really in charge?

Several weeks have elapsed since colleagues of Boris Johnson withdrew their support of his leadership and this resulted in his resignation. We will know who his successor is to be in a matter of days. Sajid Javid has explained that it was listening to a speaker at a Parliamentary prayer breakfast that was the prompt in his own decision to resign his Cabinet post. He said, ‘I was listening to (Reverend Les Isaac) talking about the importance of integrity in public life and, just focusing on that, I made up my mind. I went straight back to my office and drafted the resignation letter and went to see the Prime Minister….’

I believe God’s Spirit was at work here and that he directs the affairs of we humans, whether we recognise it or not. Jewish and Christian scriptures repeatedly speak of the fact that God is really sovereign over his world. This being the case, God raises up leaders and then subsequently takes away their power as He determines. Such overruling doesn’t absolve any one of us from personal responsibility and all will be answerable to God for their conduct. How these two things (God’s sovereign overruling and our human responsibility) can be so at one and the same time has challenged theologians century after century. Everywhere within its pages, however, the Bible sets before us this perceived tension without explanation.

Such ‘tension’ is clearly seen in the New Testament when one of Jesus’ disciples, called Peter, was speaking about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He said, ‘This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.’

Why would God not restrain wicked people from carrying out such a crime? More shockingly, God actually purposed that Jesus be killed in this way. Jesus was the only truly righteous man ever to have lived. So why did he submit to God’s will by not resisting the spiritually-ignorant men who were determined to crucify him? Quoting Peter again, ‘Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.’

A few lines from the children’s hymn, ‘There Is a Green Hill’ puts it simply:

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin;

He only could unlock the gate

Of heaven, and let us in.

Have we the humility to trust a God as unfathomable as this? He says that we must, then gives grace that we may.

Notions about God

A friend of mine, before becoming a vicar, was a geography teacher. He would take students on field trips down to the Jurassic Coast. He tells of how part of their exploring covered an area of scrubland. Here, there was a hut where a hermit lived. He says, ‘I had a well rehearsed patter about who this person might be, where he was from and why he was here’. Then, on one particular visit and following his well rehearsed routine, he took his youngsters near to the hut; the door opened and there was the occupant. ‘Now I was going to see how those speculations of mine would stand up against the reality as we met him face-to-face.’

Similarly, many of us have our own ideas of what the unseen God might be like but will they stack up when it matters? One of the first Christian missionaries, Paul of Tarsus, turned up in the Greek capital. He found a multiplicity of idols and shrines to various gods. Like today, there was no shortage of religious and philosophical theories about life, purpose and the divine. Paul even found a shrine marked ‘to an unknown God’.

It was in this setting that Paul told them about Jesus. He assured them that God was mindful of their ignorance but now they needed to listen up because human history had taken a new turn. No longer did they need to speculate about who the God of all ‘gods’ was.

The Jesus that Paul told them about was the long-promised Jewish Messiah. He was more than the Jews had bargained for. Jesus’ own claims, backed up by his miracles and teachings, strongly indicated that he was the exact likeness of God himself; God in the form of man. Could this really be so?

God raised Jesus from the dead and he was seen by hundreds, most of whom were still alive when Paul was addressing the people. This resurrection was God’s vindication of Jesus; there was no longer room for speculation: know Jesus and you know God.

Having heard this, the people of Athens could not claim ignorance nor have an excuse for idle notions. Likewise for us. At this point, the command went out; they were to turn from trusting idols and instead trust and hope in Jesus. Will we?