When the subject of religion comes up we often hear comments like: ‘Religion is for the weak-minded’, or ‘it is poisonous’. We also hear, ‘All religions are the same’. And if the conversation continues, we might get told, ‘Religious people are so self-righteous!’ There are also those who tell us, ‘Everyone’s right in their own kind of way.’ ‘In any case, when I die, if there is a God, I’m sure he’ll accept me: I’ve led a good life’.

So, in this indifferent and sometimes hostile world, how do people come to faith in Christ? In 2 Corinthians 4 Paul provides some helpful clues. Let me identify them briefly.

In 2 Corinthians 4: 3-4 he writes: … even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Many interpret, the god of this world as a reference to the powers of evil. Satan is responsible for blinding people to the truth of Jesus. Certainly, there is support for this in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:12) where Jesus does say that the devil takes God’s Word from people’s hearts. But when we look more closely we see that the seed of God’s Word doesn’t take root or bear fruit for other reasons as well. It may fail in a time of testing or because people’s lives are dominated by the cares of or love for the world.

That said, the phrase the god of this world, can be understood another way. This understands the god of this age to be what is called an appositional phrase where one idea sits alongside another, explaining it.

Following this reading, the god of this agemeans ‘the god that consists of this age’. In other words people make this age their god. A total preoccupation with this world blinds people to the spiritual realities of the next. As someone has commented ‘it is because they have chosen to worship what is less than God that God has given them over to a darkened mind, and so yes, the devil finds it so easy to steal the word of God from their hearts’.

Malcolm Muggeridge, one time editor of the English Punch magazine observed that men and women are trapped ‘in a tiny dark dungeon of the ego… So imprisoned and enslaved, we are cut off from God and from the light of his love.’

How then do people come to believe? Paul answers that by telling us that there are two keys: the ministry of God’s Word and the supernatural miracle of God’s Spirit.

In 2 Corinthians 4:5-6 we read: 5For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Verbal communication about the Lord Jesus Christ is essential. To tease out Paul’s words here, he is saying ‘I just speak about and preach Jesus. I tell people who he is, what he has done, and why he has done it. I explain that Jesus is not just a great teacher or miracle worker, but God walking in our shoes. I point out that Jesus is more than a prophet; rather he is divinity who perfectly reveals God because he is truly God in the flesh.’

And, as we learn from his ministry elsewhere we learn that he explained the negative news that all men and women are fatally flawed, far beyond what we ever think. But amazingly, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God offered us all an amnesty when we turn to him in repentance and in faith. It’s an act of love and mercy far greater than we ever dreamed.

And, Paul continues with another necessary facet to people coming to faith. As he introduces men and women everywhere to the Jesus Christ, God through his Spirit takes the veil from people’s hearts and enables them to see the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ.

Paul explains that as we conduct a verbal ministry God chooses to accompany our speaking with something we can’t provide – his miracle of illumination. God has made his light shine in their hearts.

This necessary work of God raises another facet of our partnership with God: we need to pray – pray that God whose nature is always to have mercy will be merciful to the people of our age.

Yet, is it not true that often when we do start to look for opportunities to speak with friends or family about Jesus, we neglect to pray?

Let me urge you to commit to praying regularly for at least five people you know and who you would love to see come to know the Lord.

As to our verbal ministry of communication, over these next weeks I plan to set out seven suggested topics for coffee conversations drawn from Luke’s Gospel. I will welcome your comments.

With concerns abounding over the tensions within nations and between nations we wonder what the future might hold.

Psalm 146:3 says: Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs he returns to the earth;… How appropriate is this warning. Those with influence and power will never have the perfect answers to our deepest concerns, our security and our future.

The psalm speaks of the mortality of princes. A deeper layer of the theme is found in Isaiah 32:5 which says that the fool, one who denies God, will no more be called noble. And there is an even more sombre meaning, drawn from God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3:19: “… You shall return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. It is all rather depressing.

But the warning comes in the context of a big picture of God. For Psalm 146 is the first of the cluster of five psalms that conclude The Book of Psalms. Each of these psalms opens and closes with one Hebrew word: Hallelujah.

Hallelujah brings together two Hebrew words: Hallel a verb meaning praise, and Jah which is a contraction of the word for God – Jehovah or Yahweh. Put together they are a command: ‘Praise the Lord’.

This is the context of Psalm 146’s warning. No matter how powerful or how rich, how impressive or influential someone might be, they are still only human. The paths of human power and glory always lead to the grave. Despite the passing of the centuries Psalm 146 has lost none of its relevance. Only one person is worthy of our unconditional trust: the Lord God Almighty.

Which brings us to the second theme of the Psalm: Blessing.

In verse 5 we read: Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,…We are to put our trust in the God of good news.

And as the psalm continues to unfold, the focus is on God as creator, his faithfulness and his justice, his love and his commitment to give life and hope.

The notion of a creator God is aggressively dismissed today on social media and by opinion-shapers. Yet some of the finest scientific minds agree that at the very least, we are not here by chance. The universe is the work of a supreme intelligence.

(You may want to read Henry F. Schaefer III, Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence (Apollos Trust: 2003) and John C. Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking (Lion, Oxford: 2011).)

Furthermore, God is truly the God of good news. In verses 7 and 8 we read: …who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free;.. He opens the eyes of the blind. He lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The oppressed, the hungry, the prisoners, the blind, and the righteous, as well as the sojourners or immigrants, the widow and the fatherless (verse 9), are the recipients of God’s help.

The flow of the sentence tells us that these are not different groups of people, but the same people. This describes the people of God as a whole. The righteous are those who are righteous by faith. They don’t put their trust in princes. They put their trust in the God who is faithful, the God who has good news to offer, the God of the gospel.

Now the psalmist is not saying that there is no place for human agencies. That’s not his point. The question he is asking is this, ‘Where do you put your trust – in human princes or in God?’

When we open our minds and hearts to God, whose beauty and love are now perfectly revealed for us in the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s eternal Son, we will find Hallelujah will rise to our lips, again and again. We will find that whatever our song of experience was in the past, it can now finish with Hallelujah, the heartfelt song of praise, of hope and of joy, to the one true God.

In the words of Psalm 146:10 – The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord!

And now that the Lord Jesus Christ has come we can truly sing: And he shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

We regularly hear that social media and governments have powerful tools which reach into so many aspects of our personal affairs – phone calls, email, social media and our online searches.

Psalm 139 tells us of another powerful source that looks into our lives – not just our activities, but into our very thoughts. In his psalm, sometimes described as the crown of Hebrew poetry, David speaks of a Watcher who is not a mere passive receptor of information, like the prying of cyberspace, but someone who knows and understands every detail of our existence. ‘You have searched me, you know me, God,’ David says.  ‘I have no privacy, no place from which I can exclude you. There is no corner of my mind where I can shut the door against you. Everything I do, everything I say, everything I think, is wide open to you.’
‘You hem me in behind and before, you have laid your hand upon me’, he continues.

At first it seems that David is saying, everywhere I go, every step I take, I feel you breathing down my neck. But the larger context indicates that he doesn’t see it this way at all. The words you hem me in can also be translated, ‘you guard me’ or ‘you encircle me for my protection.’ He doesn’t view God’s all-embracing knowledge as a threat, but rather as a refuge. He is not at all resentful of God’s all-seeing intelligence.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? he asks. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast, we read in verses 9 and 10. David’s imagery of taking the wings of the morning is that of traveling at the speed of light to a far place. Even there he will still find God. The instant the thought enters his head that he might escape God, he realizes how impossible it is.

Many of us have felt the same as David, but we might have a note of frustration in our voice: ‘God, I want to get away from you.’ Perhaps surprisingly, David isn’t trying to run away. His reaction to God’s all-embracing knowledge is one of deep-felt gratitude. For unlike human prying eyes, God’s eyes are pure and he is just in all his ways. For when we truly turn to him, his presence is not a threat or a cause for anxiety, but rather a joy. David understood that God’s presence means guidance and protection.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”  even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you (vv.11-12). David was anticipating the possibility that in a moment of panic he might find himself saying, ‘God has left me and forgotten me.’

Rather he was saying, no matter how dark the situation seems, God has infra-red vision – he sees in the night just as well as he sees in the day. God’s reassuring hand is there in the tough times and in the good times. In another psalm (Psalm 23) David could say: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

‘Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done,’ are the words of a Christian song. How easily we forget to thank God for the countless good things he provides for us. We take it all for granted.

But there is something else we often forget: King David wrote about it in Psalm 103. It seems he wrote this for the great choir he established in Jerusalem, in the context of his personal growth in his understanding of God.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, David began. What is interesting for us is that he did not go on to list all the specific things God had done for him. Rather he focused on features of God’s character that I can only touch on here – God’s grace, his goodness and his greatness.

God’s grace: God will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever (v.9). Martin Luther once commented, ‘Wrath is God’s strange work.’ Anger is alien to God: it is his response to our failure to honor him and give him the thanks that is his due. There was a time when there was no anger in God; equally, there will come a time when there will be nothing further to rouse his anger.

God’s forgiveness: For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him (v.11). Children sometimes ask their parents, ‘How much do you love me?’ and they open their arms saying, ‘This much, or this much?’ When David said this to God, he realized that not even the expanse of the universe can illustrate the vast dimensions of God’s love. 

So he continues: As far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us (v.12).  We can’t watch the sun rise and set at the same time. We have to turn our back on one to see the other. Through the lens of the New Testament we see that through the cross of Christ, God found a way of detaching our sin from us, so he could condemn the one without condemning the other. The illustration means that when we ask God for mercy, he has to turn his back on our sin when he looks at us, because he puts us and our sin on two different horizons. 

God’s goodness and awesome power: We have even more reason than David to bless the name of God, for we live on the other side of the cross that once stood on Calvary’s hill. That cross is a far, far greater measure of God’s love than the unfathomable depths of the universe about which David spoke. The arms of the cross show us the grief that tears the heart of God because of our sin. In Christ, God not only lifts us out of the pit, he lifts us from the depths of hell and raises us to new life forever.

Is there any real praise of God in our hearts? It’s easy to go to church, to sing songs, and say Amen to the prayers, but to have no real personal connection with him. It’s easy to hear sermons that move us, but we’re not really listening to God because we’re more impressed with the preacher than we are with relating to God.

True blessing. Do you have a sense of God’s blessing in your life, a sense of connectedness with him that comes through knowing Jesus Christ? If you do not, then do what Jesus said: Ask, seek and knock. God promises to open our eyes to the truth.

People go to church where they love going to church. It’s a fact of life in our consumer society. They love the music, the architecture, and the popular preacher. What’s more, it’s the church where the family has its ties and friends attend. But going to church where we like going to church may not be the best thing for us. Psalm 96 tells us why.

Sing to the Lord a new song,… it begins. While new could be a reference to new music, there’s much more to it. The theme and tone of the psalm reveal that new refers primarily to God’s new work – beyond his work of creation – in rescuing fallen men and women. Further, it is a reference to God’s mercies that are ‘new every day’.

The words, the Lord touch on another theme that bubbles through the psalm: there is one creator and Lord. In Isaiah 45:5 we read: I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god…  And Paul the Apostle writes, we know that “no idol in the world really exists,” and, there is no God but one (1 Corinthians 8:4). The implications of this are enormous – encouraging and frightening. It is encouraging because we learn we are not alone in the universe: there is a purpose and direction to life. It is frightening because all men and women are called upon to do business with this one and only God, for he alone is the Lord.

Putting these ideas together, God’s people will want to sing to the Lord a new song, and praise his name together: he is our Lord and Savior. Further, verse 3 tells us we are to sing so that the city and the nations will hear. From the time of Kings David and Solomon Jerusalem was a busy international city. In Jesus’ day the temple layout included a court for Gentiles (the non-Jewish people) where the songs of God’s people would have been heard.

The logic of the psalm is this: the majesty and glory of God are to be promoted throughout the world because there is only one God who holds out the gift of forgiveness, new life and new hope to men and women who are ‘trapped in the dark dungeon of their own ego’, as Malcolm Muggeridge once put it. So the focus of the exhortation shifts from the Jewish people to the nations (96:7-10). As God’s people sang of God’s mercies, people in Jerusalem would come to know Israel’s God, the Lord who made the heavens. 

Worship and witness. Through the flow of Psalm 96 we see a connection between worship and witness. True worship will manifest itself in witness. Inward-looking worship is just that – self-directed. Psalm 96 expects God’s people to be outward-focused – not only to God and one another, but also to the nations. We are to introduce them to the one true Lord. We are called upon to do this, not simply because God will one day judge the world (yes, verses 10-13 tell us this will happen), but also because there is only one Lord. Our reaching out to others is about stating a ‘reality’. 

Ask. We need to ask ourselves why we go to church. Simply to see our friends or fulfil an obligation? Or to hear afresh and be challenged and renewed by God’s Word? To sing of the majesty and the mercies of God? To encourage others by our presence, mutual confession of sin, and common profession of faith in Jesus Christ? Is your church welcoming to ‘outsiders’ providing a clear, unambiguous message that Christ is the one true Lord?

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Doubt. One of the things I love about the Bible is its earthy realism. It understands the world we live in – the good and the bad, the joys and the sadness. It also understands how we feel about life’s injustices especially when we see people who mock the notion of God, enjoying success. Nothing ever seems to go wrong for them. And as well as the unfairness we often feel, there are the realities of droughts and famines, floods and destruction, earthquakes and despotic rulers. Why doesn’t God step in? It seems so out of character.

Questions. True faith will always have questions. In fact, the faith that refuses to ask questions is one that leaves itself open to the contempt of the skeptic. True faith will want to address tough questions and be willing to experience the doubts that arise.

To have doubts is not to lack faith for doubt is not the opposite of faith. Doubt and unbelief are two very different things. Doubt is something that only a believer can experience, for you can only doubt what you believe.

People who believe in God often find their relationship with him grows stronger and more intimate when they are willing to face their doubts by asking tough questions. Psalm 73 is a good example of this. The writer tells us that he came close to abandoning his faith in God: But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped. Yet by the end of the psalm, he can say: But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge,… (73:28).

Through the psalm, he recounts his spiritual pilgrimage – how he progressed from doubt to a complete trust in God. He touches on his reasons for doubt and then the solution. One of the big questions for him is framed against the principle that God is good to the upright (73:1). ‘So why is it’, he asks, ‘that many who are godless find life easy while I suffer? Where is God?’

Solution. As he reflects on this, he perceived their end… God would bring about their downfall – and it would be eternal. The idea of a final day of accounting is often mocked today. But, as thoughtful people point out, if there is no final judgment, morality becomes irrelevant. Indeed, unless we see that there is a future accounting, goodness itself has no value.

Strategy. In Psalm 73:15ff we learn how the poet worked through his doubts. He went to ‘church’: When… I went into the sanctuary of God… I perceived their end. Good churches not only read God’s Word, they believe it to be God’s authentic, written, self-revelation, and teach it. Confronted with God’s Word the psalm-writer began to see what happens to those who choose not to believe: They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms (73:20).

We today have all the more assurance about this because we have the evidence of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without him we will not know life in all its fullness and joy. C.S. Lewis once put it this way: All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.

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© John G. Mason – www.anglicanconnection.com

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Getty Music Worship Conference: ‘Sing…!’ – August 19-21, 2019, Nashville, TN

Theme: ‘The Life of Christ’ – www.gettymusicworshipconference.com

John Mason speaking – Breakout Group: Monday, August 19, 3:00-4:00pm.

Topic: ‘Thomas Cranmer and Christ-Centered Worship.