Keep doctrine in its place!

The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They replied, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved – you and your household’. Acts 16:29-31

We maintain that a person is justified by faith, apart from the works of the law. Romans 3:28

The man responsible for keeping Paul and Silas under lock and key was in fear of his life.

In spite of the very strongest precautions (they had been dumped “in the inner cell” and their feet were fastened “in the stocks”), an earthquake in the middle of the night had torn the prison open and set the prisoners at liberty. His bosses, the Roman authorities, were likely to show no mercy if any of them got right away, so he was as good as dead. Sensing that Paul and Silas were more than your usual run-of-the-mill prisoners, he cried out in fear, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And back came the wonderful answer that has echoed down the centuries, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved”.

It’s worth noticing that the man who spoke those simple, glowing words is the same man as the one who wrote the letter to the church in Rome: the apostle Paul.

Now, Romans 3, from which I have quoted, is quite a dense and complex chapter, much of which takes a bit of grappling with by our modern minds - multiple Old Testament quotations; rhetorical questions that we may find it hard to see the point of; the use of theoretical-sounding words like “law”, “righteousness”, “sin”, atonement” and “justified”… Not easy!

The result is that many Christians rarely ever read Romans 3, much less get seriously to grips with it. This is a shame, because what Paul is talking about is right at the heart of the Christian faith, with roots going way back into the pages of the Old Testament. The essence of it is in fact summed up in verse 28: “We maintain that a person is justified [which means “put right with God”] by faith apart from the works of the law”.

We might heave a sigh say and say, “Look, Paul, if it’s that simple, why bother with all the theological stuff!” But he has his reasons, and like the rest of scripture even the stuff that seems heavy to us is valuable and ultimately nourishing.

But it’s a fact that the heart of what he is explaining is indeed simple. And this is nowhere better demonstrated than in the story of the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, the story of a man wonderfully “justified by faith” – witness, please, the wordy theologian doing the work of a street evangelist!

Romans 3, like many other passages of Paul, is what we often call “doctrine”. This is really just a fancy word for “scriptural truth in a systematic form”, and, yes, it can sometimes seem pretty heavy going. But it’s important to try and get an overall grasp of what God has done (and is still doing) in Christ, to provide a solid foundation for our faith; so, Christian, persevere!

But – and this is the key point - thank God that the Bible also provides very down-to-earth illustrations of what it all means in practice. For me, the story of the Philippian jailer is the perfect example. When he cries out in alarm “What must I do to be saved?”, Paul doesn’t reel off a brief summary of his complex argument in Romans 3; no, he gives a simple word of comfort and hope: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…” In essence, that’s all the jailer needed, or anyone else needs, to know.

True, further teaching followed – “they spoke the word of the Lord to him” (verse 32) – but, given that it was the middle of the night and they’ve all been through a pretty traumatic experience, I doubt if that did much more than enlarge on a few essentials. This night was a night for sheer rejoicing, not a time for furrowed brows and an attempt to understand heavy doctrine. (No wonder, by the way, that the gospel is called “good news”.)

As I’ve said, doctrine is important – but it needs to be kept in its rightful place. Tragically, wars have been fought over it; people have been killed for it; churches have divided over it; friends have quarrelled over it. But: “Believe in the Lord Jesus…”; it’s hard to imagine two Christians falling out over that, isn’t it!

Sadly, we in the church can be guilty of turning Paul’s beautiful gospel invitation into something like an ultimatum, even a veiled threat delivered with a wagging finger: “If you don’t believe in Jesus, you can’t be saved, so you’d better start believing!” Whereas it should be a glad response to a cry of need: “You want to be saved? Wonderful! Just believe in Jesus!”

In effect, we can be guilty of turning “faith” itself into just another “work” that the would-be-convert needs to do. And, as the jailer discovered that memorable night, that’s exactly what it isn’t!

Our God is a generous God. He welcomes all who turn to him in simple, child-like faith; he doesn’t hand us a tick-box which we must complete in order to “qualify”.

A Christian friend and I had a conversation where we disagreed. We knew our disagreement was unimportant, so we smiled and let it drop. My friend remarked, “Well, it’s not a salvation issue anyway”.

I’d never heard that expression before, and it lodged more and more insistently in my mind. It prompted the nagging question, What precisely does qualify as a “salvation issue”?

That happened some months ago; and I’m still wondering. Any suggestions?

Father, we recognise that the good news of the gospel is deep enough to plumb the deepest depths, but also simple enough to be grasped by a little child. Please help us, when talking to non-Christians, to get the balance right, and so enable them to receive Christ in all his love and compassion. Amen.

What's in a name?

The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. Acts 11:26

Every few months I get literature from a missionary organisation which works in many parts of the world and which, as far as I can tell, does a very good job of making Christ known. I have noticed recently that it seems to have dropped the word “Christians” when talking about believers, and replaced it with “Jesus-followers”. At first I thought this might just be a one-off, but it seems to have become the settled policy.

Does such a change puzzle you, perhaps even shock you? I wasn’t quite sure what I thought about it at first. The church, after all, has been called “Christian” for 2000 years, an honourable title surely, so somehow it didn’t seem quite right to let the name disappear. But on the other hand I thought of how easy it is for it, however time-honoured, to cause misunderstanding.

Words are slippery; they have a habit of changing their meaning over time. For Shakespeare, for example, “naughty” meant “wicked”, far more than just, well, what we might mean by it today, perhaps a light-hearted rebuke to a child.

Sometimes words pretty well die altogether, emptied of their meaning by constant wrong or exaggerated use. I once received a message from a charity after sending them an extremely modest donation: “Thank you for your incredible generosity…”. Incredible? How overblown is that! What word will they use when something happens that really is incredible – ie, impossible to believe?

I have personally sometimes wondered if the word “Christian” is, in fact, exhausted and needs to be decently buried in the grave of history. When first coined – in the ancient city of Syrian Antioch (Acts 11:26) – it had a very clear meaning: “followers of the recently crucified prophet Jesus of Nazareth”. But now it means a million and one different things, depending on who happens to be speaking.

I was talking once to a woman who had shown an interest in the Christian faith, and it seemed natural to me to ask the question, “so you aren’t at the moment a Christian, then?” She immediately reared up at me, “Of course I’m a Christian!” Oh dear! How dare I suggest such a thing! The trouble was that we were using the word in two quite different ways, and by asking that question I had obviously insulted her. For me, “Christian” means a believer in Jesus; for her, I think, it meant any person who reckons to live a respectable and decent life.

So, as I thought about it, I began to wonder if that missionary organisation was in fact onto something sensible. Acts doesn’t give us any indication of how much time elapsed between the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem and the coining of that new word in Antioch (coined quite possibly by mocking opponents of the first disciples) but it may well have been months rather than weeks – which means that for a significant period there was no such thing as “Christianity” at all, just a message – a “gospel”, good news - about Jesus crucified and risen from the dead.

A prominent theologian was keen to show how generous and non-judgmental Christianity is; he proposed that any sincere adherent of another faith – Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever - should be regarded as “an anonymous Christian”. Well, that was all very well and all very welcoming – but then an angry message was received from a non-Christian who felt he was being patronised: “I am not an honorary Christian! – I am a Buddhist  (or Hindu or Muslim)” (I can’t now remember which).

You can always tell when a word is exhausted or dying by the instinctive need we feel to prop it up with qualifying words, like those wires they use to support drooping, ancient trees: fantastic becomes “truly fantastic”, amazing becomes “absolutely amazing”, and so on.

And that’s how it is with “Christian” – even within Christian circles. To say “I am a Christian” is not enough: we have to narrow it down to either a “born again Christian” (but how can you be a Christian and not be born again!) or a “practicing Christian” (but how can you be a Christian and not practicing!) or a “sincere Christian” (but how can you be a Christian and not sincere!) or a “Bible-believing Christian” (but how…?).

By substituting “Jesus-followers” for “Christians” that missionary society is, I think, acting wisely, not least because in many parts of the world the church has earned a not-so-good reputation, and it may be best not  to identify too closely with it.

In Acts 4 we read that the apostles Peter and John were taken to task by the religious authorities but maintained their witness with great boldness. And so… “when they saw the courage of Peter and John, and realised that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.” (Acts 4:13).

Great words! – “they took note that these men had been with Jesus”.

That’s what matters! Never mind names and labels - even the worn-out label “Christian” - which are open to all sorts of misinterpretation and confusion. Our prayer must be that people look at us and “take note” that we have been with Jesus. God grant it may be so!

(By the way, I’d be incredibly interested to know what you think.)

Dear Father, thank you that by your grace I can bear the honourable name of “Christian”, like those people so long ago in Antioch. But please help me to be sensitive to the fact that for many people it may mean something very different from what it means for me, and thus be a cause of confusion and misunderstanding. Help me to make it my great priority not to claim any particular label, but to live daily a truly Christ-like life. Amen.

The sin of the blind eye

If you falter in a time of trouble, how small is your strength! Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering towards slaughter. If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Proverbs 24:10-12

My wife and I recently watched a dramatization of the end of the Second World War. One particularly harrowing scene showed American troops entering a concentration camp, and the sheer horror of what they found: prisoners in a state of near starvation, more dead than alive, dressed only in those striped pyjama-type outfits. We sat shaking our heads, hardly able to believe that such cruelty could be inflicted by people on fellow human beings.

The Bible Book of Proverbs (a great book for browsing, by the way) contains a wide mix of sayings. Some of them (15:12, for example) are pretty banal, leaving you thinking “Yes? All right, but… so what?” But others pierce right to the depths of your conscience, and 24:11-12 is one such – and it came to my mind as I watched that film: Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering towards slaughter. If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

The key words, for me, are that claim “we knew nothing about this…”. The film made it clear that within a few miles of that concentration camp there were villages with people getting on with their normal everyday lives. Could they really claim not to know about what was going on just down the road? Did they not notice the sinister-looking trucks, the comings and goings of military personnel, the smoke rising into the sky, the terrible smells of death and disease? Had they not picked up rumours of what was going on in their country?

It must, surely, have been a case of what we sometimes call “turning a blind eye”? The effect it had on me was not so much to lead me to criticise those ordinary local people, but to ask myself the question, “What would I have been like if I had been in their shoes? Would I have been any better?” And I have to confess that I couldn’t answer that question with any great confidence… (How easy it is to condemn sins or failures that we personally have never been tempted by!)

So here, plucked straight out of Proverbs, is a direct challenge to all our consciences: Do I have a tendency to look the other way when I see or hear things I really don’t want to have to think about? It’s easy to make excuses - and, of course, there may be times when we have valid reasons not to get involved. But… often that But is a pretty big one…

Broadly speaking there are two main reasons why we tend to turn a blind eye to bad things: Fear, or Indifference. Putting it more simply, either we’re scared, or we just couldn’t be bothered.

I can only guess that those German villagers, in the main, were scared. They were living under a cruel and repressive regime and they felt the need to “keep their heads down” in case they too ended up in such a place. That’s understandable, but of course it flies in the face of the example of Jesus himself and, throughout history, of many heroic men and women who have risked their lives for what they felt was right.

The Nazi concentration camp is an extreme example; our circumstances are no doubt far easier. But still we can hide our fear of getting involved in difficult issues under excuses which, in our hearts, we know are feeble: “Well, what difference could I make anyway…?”; “Really, it’s none of my business”; “I don’t like to judge others – there’s two sides to every story, after all”.

No, we don’t want to be busy-bodies or trouble-makers; “whistle-blowers” often make themselves seriously unpopular. If we do decide to act we must be determined to do so prayerfully, thoughtfully and only from pure motives. But there are times when our consciences tell us only too clearly that we have a difficult choice to make, and nobody can make it but ourselves.

I’m afraid that more often when we turn a blind eye – certainly in my case anyway – the real reason is indifference. I may care in theory – of course I do! - but to tell the truth I don’t really care enough... It’s just too much trouble… I really haven’t got the time… I simply don’t want to have to bother.

The Anglican church, when praying prayers of confession, speaks of “sins of commission” – that is, wrong things that I do – and “sins of omission” – that is, good and right things that I fail to do. It’s a worthwhile distinction; remembering it can help us to keep our consciences sharp and pure, for there are times when the sins of omission outweigh the sins of commission.

I have found over my years as a pastor that people with no interest in church sometimes feel the need to excuse themselves (quite why I don’t know: why not have the courage of their non-convictions?): “I admit that I am not a church-goer myself,” they say, and then they eagerly add, “But I will say this: I never do anybody any harm”. As if that makes everything all right, then. It doesn’t, of course.

We are put on this earth to love and serve God and to be a blessing to our fellow-men and women. We know he loves us and is forgiving, but we’d better not take him for granted! Let’s take seriously the warning of Proverbs 24:12: “If we say, ‘But we knew nothing about this’, does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?”

Father, when I’m frightened of doing right, give me courage. When I’m lazy and indifferent, rebuke me. So help me to fill my days with actions and words, however small, which are honouring to Christ and which bring blessing to others. Amen.

"They came to Elim..."

Then they (the Israelites) came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water. Exodus 15:27

There remains… a sabbath-rest for the people of God. Hebrews 4:9

We can only imagine how blissful the sight must have been – “twelve springs and seventy palm trees”! - and with what joy the people of Israel “camped there near the water”. The word “Elim” means “trees” or “oaks”, and, of course, trees speak of refreshment and life, especially in a desert place.

The people of Israel have been through a gruelling time. Under the leadership of Moses they have been miraculously delivered from captivity in Egypt, but even though they have been spared the plagues which afflicted the Egyptians, that dark period must have been massively stressful. The crossing of the Red Sea likewise took them right to the brink – not until the last minute could they be sure that the Egyptian horsemen wouldn’t overtake them, cowering by the sea, and either drag them back into captivity – or slaughter them all.

But now they are lost in the wilderness: what water they can find is undrinkable, and food also is soon to become a problem. As so often, unhappy people have a tendency to turn on their leaders, and so here the people “grumbled against Moses” (Exodus 15:24), who is pretty much at his wits’ end.

I wonder what sharp-eyed person first asked the question, “Look! Could those be trees over there on the horizon…?”, and with what breathless wonderment the people turned to look. Yes! Twelve springs and seventy palm trees! – riches indeed! So when we read that “they camped there near the water” we feel like adding, “You bet your life they did!”.

The experience of Israel between the escape from Egypt and reaching the Promised Land was anything but easy, and we can read it as a kind of parable of our experience as Christians, delivered as we are from slavery to sin but still with a journey to travel before our true resting place.

Are you in a situation in your life where you just long for a personal “Elim”? You are desperately tired, bowed down with responsibilities and worries, finding it hard to worship or pray. God, to be honest, seems a long way off. The hope of that heavenly “rest” – oh to lie down and be at peace, to close your eyes and be perfectly free of the stresses and strains of life! – seems just a dream too good to be true.

It seems little consolation to be reminded that Jesus said it would be thus: the gate is small and the road narrow “that leads to life” (Matthew 7:13-14); still less that as we travel we have a load to carry, for we must “take up our cross” in order to follow him.

We may be tempted to look with envy at fellow-believers whose lives seem to be just one permanent Elim – though we must be careful: nobody knows what troubles the heart of even the strongest, happiest-seeming Christian; appearances can be very deceptive.

But whatever, the fact is that there is no cheap, easy comfort.

What there is, is an assurance of faith. For, as Hebrews 4:9 says, “there remains a sabbath-rest for the people of God”. I’m sure the people of Israel quickened their tired steps as they got closer to those twelve springs and seventy palm trees; I’m sure that they luxuriated in what must have seemed – well, sheer luxury indeed. But, of course, they knew that they weren’t “there” yet; they had only just started their journey and, while only too glad of the refreshment of Elim, they knew that soon they would have to repack their bags.

And, of course, even when they had made it to the Promised Land they still had a journey to pursue, even if of a different, more purely spiritual type.

The whole idea of travelling through hardship to a final place of rest is very important in the Bible; the letter to the Hebrews in particular focusses on it. And the Bible climaxes as a whole with a description of what we might call the final heavenly Elim. Never mind the twelve springs and the seventy palm trees – I invite you to let your imagination dwell on this picture…

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. Revelation 22:1-5

Beside that the earthly Elim pales into insignificance! But that doesn’t mean that earthly Elims aren’t important. And so I finish with a promise that if you answered to that earlier description of tiredness, anxiety and sheer hardship there will be prayer for you that God will lead you to your own little Elim, and so give you the refreshment you so desperately long for. And if, like me, your ways are presently easier, please join with me, perhaps holding in your heart a particular friend or other person…

O God our Father and Shepherd, you are the one who leads us through this earthly life until the day comes when we enter for ever our perfect, heavenly rest. Please look kindly today upon all your children for whom the journey is specially hard and discouraging. Bring them to a new, personal Elim, so that they may be refreshed for the rest of their journey. Amen.