Price: £9.00

This is an easy read for youth leaders to help us focus on what we are doing and why we are doing it. Teenagers can be a difficult group to work with as they search for their own identity and also along with their increased independence, they have a lot of personal choices to make. This books deals with these issues while keeping prayer, the Bible and Christ at the centre of our youth work. This is a helpful resource that encourages us to be positive about our teens and helps us consider our motives, our expectations and helps us to deal with these.

Written Work

Sometimes we need something to reinforce our story and something for the children to take home, and good old-fashioned worksheets are good for this.

Bumper Instant Art – Bible Worksheets

Kevin Mayhew

ISBN: 9781840037432

Price: £ £10.99

These worksheets use a variety of methods to explain a theme or story – on one worksheet you can get a picture to colour, a word search and 2 other activities. In this book there are 51 Old Testament worksheets and 40 New Testament worksheets. There is also a Book 2 so that is even more worksheets.

Youth Work

Teens

Unfinished Sentences
Les Christie
ISBN: 0310230934
Price: £5.99

This a great book for either discussion starters or to fill in a 10-minute slot with your teen group. There are 450 unfinished sentences, where it gives the first part of a sentence and the teens have to complete the sentence in any way they want. There is a wide range of topics including choices, parents, addictions, difficulties, success, television and also a wide range of spiritual topics.

Creative Christian Ideas for Youth Groups
Ken Moser
ISBN: 0 9581393 1 8
Price: £9.00

This is a great resource to help you keep your Youth Fellowship or teen group on track. It stops us getting into merely entertaining our youths, and helps us to deliver the Bible and the truths of Scripture in a real and relevant way. Activities such as ‘spotlight’ are loved and missed when we don’t do them. This book also contains suggestions for an 8-week programme and gives lots of ideas for Bible games, Bible quiz questions and memory verses. A must for any teen youth group!

Youth Work

Singing

Righteous Pop Music
One Way Street
ISBN: 1-58302-202-3
Price: £10 - £15 each

Trying to find songs that the children will sing can be hard, but here is a wonderful selection of CDs with songs for just about anything you are teaching from the Bible. They are written for use with puppets, but the children love singing them because they are all well-known tunes with extra special words, eg. He Loves You, I’m Getting Something Good (I’m Into Something Good), Washin’ My Sins Away (Twistin’ the Night Away).

Youth Work

School Resources

It’s Your Move!
Scripture Union
ISBN: 978 184427 212 9
Price: £2.99 for one copy or 10 copies for £12.00

This is a guide for moving to secondary school. It contains an A – Z survival guide and lots of articles on the experiences of young people in their transition from primary to secondary.

I think this is a great resource for Primary 7s to help them in the “big move”, with spiritual advice in there for them too.

This can either be used by going into primary schools and speaking to the Primary 7s, or can be given as a church moving-up gift.

Pick Up and Run Assemblies
Nick Harding
ISBN: 1-84417-537-5
Price: £10.99

Here is a wee treasure from Nick Harding. This book is for primary assemblies and contains material for 15 assemblies. These are all interactive and use simple objects to help with your theme, eg. a tin of beans, chocolates and a football scarf. They all have Bible teaching, but I have added more in to put more emphasis on what the Bible says. A good resource with lots of good ideas for you to build on.

Youth Work

Memory Work

Remember Remember
Andrea Marshall
ISBN: 9781905564750
Price: £8.00

It seems to be getting harder to get our children to learn Bible verses, so it is great to get a book that is full of good ideas. The various activities are divided into sections including black or white board activities, memory verse card activities, and lots of different games and ways to learn the Bible. Learning memory verses becomes fun and effective.

Youth Work

Crafts

Crafts are not really my thing, but the children love crafts, so I need all the help I can get. Here are a couple of books that I have found to be good.

Bumper Instant Art – Make and Do
Kevin Mayhew
ISBN: 9781840037692
Price: £10.99

All you need with this book is some card, colouring pens, scissors, glue and paper fasteners, and you can do just about every craft in the book! There are 22 Old Testament crafts and 43 New Testament crafts, so there is a wide range to choose from. Low-cost crafts with some amazing results!

100 Simple Craft Ideas for Children
Sue Price, Children’s Ministries
ISBN: 9781842912928
Price: £8.99

These 100 crafts are divided into 5 sections – Story Crafts (on specific Bible stories), Lesson Reminder Crafts (which can be adapted to different stories/themes), Worship Crafts, Crafts to Give and Seasonal Crafts. The crafts in this book use a wide range of materials and so, will give you a lot of variety in your crafts.

Click on the link below to download more resources for Bible Crafts:

Resources 16

Youth Work

Children’s Talks

144 Talks for Totally Awesome Kids
Chris Chesterton & David T. Ward
ISBN: 978-1-85424-789-6
Price: £14.99

There are lots of books with ideas for talks for children and when we get them home, there is only one or two that you will use. This book has 144 talks for children from 8 to 12 years of age. It does have an American slant, but the ideas are easily adapted to your own situation. Each talk is an object talk with some exciting objects including maggots, jewellery and Coca Cola. You may want to shorten them or lengthen them, but the ideas are good to start with.

Further resources for Children’s Talks can be downloaded below:

Youth Work

Camp

Resources for Camp

Great Talk Outlines for Youth Ministry
Mark Oestreicher
ISBN: 13: 978-0-310-23822-5
Price: £14.99
This book contains 40 talk outlines that have been tried and tested by experienced youth workers. As usual, I use these as they are intended – as an outline. The CD that comes with it contains all the outline talks for you to take away bits that you will not use and then add in your own bit. Themes covered include conversion, faith, God’s love, sin, discipleship and much more.

Talks done by Camp Leaders

People Jesus met (A diffrent person each night)
Eg. Zaccheus, the women at the well, the disciples etc.
The idea was to:
* Explain a bit about each person
* Show how they met with Jesus
* The difference on knowing Jesus

Young People in the Bible
God uses people and age is no barrier!
Samuel
David
The boy with the packed lunch (feeding 5,000) etc.

Life of someone in the Bible
Eg. Peter
Eg. Paul – sin, repentance, telling others, persecuted, protected etc.

“I am” sayings of Jesus
The Bread of Life
The True Vine
The Light of the World
The Way, the Truth and the Life
The Good Shepherd

CY Course
This is covered in another section on these Resource pages.

Using a Bible story and speaking in the 1st person
Eg. a Centurion during the ministry of Jesus
- whose servant was ill, was at the trial, at the cross, converted…

The Passion of the Christ (not the film!)
* Betrayed – Gethsemane & Judas
* Denied – The Disciples & Peter
* Condemned – Pilate & Herod
* Crucified – A Tale of 3 Deaths
* Buried – Joseph of Arimathea & Nicodemus
* Risen – Mary, The 10 & Thomas
* Ascended – Jesus and his Apostles

Click on the link below for tried and tested Camp Programmes:

Camp Programmes

Youth Work

Bible Games

Outburst – Bible Edition
Symphony
ISBN: G703
Price: £24.99

This is a board game that we sometimes use at YF. We divide them into teams, then play the game. There are 252 topics, with 10 possible answers for each question, to be given before the timer runs out. It’s good fun and it helps us all to know the Bible better.

Youth Work

Bible Study

CY - Youth Edition of Christianity Explored
The Good Book Company
ISBN: 1905564449 (Leaders’ book), 1905564430 (Users’ guide)
Price: £10.00 for leaders’ book and £2.50 for users’ guide

Ok, I had heard all about how wonderful this resource was, so I thought I would try it out and it’s true – it’s great! I didn’t use the video, preferring to do the interactive talks, and I think the teenagers liked that too, as it gave them lots of opportunities for discussion. I have used this at a Bible class and at 2 different youth fellowships, and have found it to be really good.

Sermon Excerpts

What Doest Thou Here Elijah? - Rev. N. MacDonald

Sermon given by the Retiring Moderator at the General Assembly, May 1997.

“What doest thou here, Elijah” - 1 Kings 19:11-13

From time to time, God raised up among the Israelite people men of unusual calibre to be leaders and reformers. They were supernaturally endowed to be able to perform the prodigious labours committed to them and, without such endowments, they would not have achieved anything of significance. They were head and shoulders above their contemporaries and, as we look at them on the page of scripture, they tower above the people of our generation too. We see them grappling with great dilemmas, which all but overwhelm them, but, if they stumble, it is to rise and take up the struggle once more with their zeal and vigour undiminished. They were not perfect or without flaw for “they were men of like passions with us,” but they were chosen instruments of God set apart for a designated purpose.

A distinguished place among them belongs to Elijah, the subject of this record. I would like to focus our thoughts under two main heads; first, The Dejection of the Prophet and second, The Sovereignty of God.

The Dejection of the Prophet

It would seem that Elijah had very definite and distinct expectations concerning the effects of the three and a half years of drought upon the character and conduct of the nation of Israel. There had been given a very clear and visible demonstration of the greatness and power of the living God. That power was evident in the works of nature in withholding the rain, and bringing real hardship upon man and beast. On Mount Carmel, Baal was shown to be the nonentity that he was, while the people were moved to cry repeatedly, “The Lord he is God.” Perhaps Elijah thought that such a visible and awesome display of God’s power could not fail to convince the people, and bring them to a better mind. This was what he had prayed and striven for, that false religion would receive such a devastating reversal that it would be unable to raise its head again. His expectation was that events would turn out in a particular way.
We too may have our preconceived ideas in relation to the Lord’s work and its anticipated development or may have had such ideas in the past, before maturer years or wisdom shaped us in a different mould. Experience teaches that we dare not anticipate the outworking of God’s plan and purpose in our sphere any more than Elijah could.

Elijah soon discovered that events were taking a very unexpected turn, for Jezebel directed a message to him that had a most chilling effect upon him. She threatened to bring upon him the same fate that he had exacted upon the priests and prophets of Baal. One would have expected, in the light of all that he had experienced on Mount Carmel, that he would not flinch, but in his customary, courageous way, bid defiance to her. That was not, however, the way in which he reacted. He seemed to sense, embodied in her threat, all the malicious power of false religion about to release itself anew against himself, the sole representative of the living God. So he succumbs to fear and takes refuge in flight. I suppose that the element of surprise in Jezebel’s action caught him off guard. But, added to that, was the fact that the sheer moral, mental, psychological and physical stress of the struggle he was engaged in was telling upon him.

All who are involved in the ministry of the Word will experience the tensions and pressures that are peculiar to their employment to a greater or lesser degree, and what may be surprising is not that some crack under the strain, but that comparatively few do. The credit does not accrue to them, but to the divine grace that upholds and sustains them.

When we consider Elijah’s situation, there are two important factors that have a significant bearing upon it. The first is that he was the object and victim of a war of nerves being conducted with demonic subtilty and skill. Consider how surprising it is that Jezebel gave any prior warning of what she proposed to do. One would expect that, if it was her intention to do what she was threatening to do, she would not want to afford him the opportunity to escape. There was another power behind Jezebel - the Devil, using her as his agent and timing her threat to co-incide with the prophet’s vulnerable condition. As a result, Elijah is thrown into a state of discouragement and dejection. He determines to get away as far as possible from the scene and deserts the post of duty.

The Devil is a master at adapting our circumstances to further his strategies and we have to be aware of how vulnerable we especially are under stress or illness, buffeted or battle-weary, dispirited by lack of success and failure. We need to pray, not only to be kept strong, but to be kept on our guard so that we may be able to stand in the evil day.

The other factor bearing on Elijah’s situation at this time, away from the post of duty, is the compassion and care of the Lord for him. Far from being abandoned by the Lord, He sends his angel to minister to his needs, for we read that, as he slept under a juniper tree, an angel touched him and invited him to eat, not once but twice, on the second occasion giving expression to the Lord’s understanding of his difficulties. God had loving concern for him, although it was by his own action he had got himself into this predicament. He will not let him famish with hunger. Nor will he send him back the way he had come for he has something important to show him at his destination. How amazing is the grace and forbearance of the Lord. His ways and his thoughts are higher than our ways and our thoughts, even as the heavens are above the earth.

The Sovereignty of God

Elijah arrives at Horeb and there God puts the question to him, “What doest thou here Elijah?”. The tone of Elijah’s reply indicates his dissatisfaction with the way events have gone in the religious history of Israel. “What had he expected?”, asks Krummacher and answers, “Nothing less than an immediate, penitent return of all Israel to the God of their fathers.” God’s response is to say, “Go stand forth upon the Mount.” He was going to witness initially successive and differing expressions of the power of God that were to be externally sensed in dramatic and awesome disturbances in the realm of nature, and, following upon these, a disclosure of power, not on the natural level but on the supernatural. We remember that it was in the exercise of his power in the natural realm that God had recently visited Israel in answer to the prophet’s prayer.
First, there comes a wind, which, in its irresistible ferocity, rips great rocks from the mountainside and hurls them to the valley below. But though Elijah is impressed with the strength of the wind, no awareness of God’s presence is borne upon him in it. Following the wind, there erupts an earthquake, causing the mountain to heave with terrifying motion and the rocks to split. But, while it is alarming in its effect upon him, it does not convey to his consciousness any sense of the nearness of God. Thirdly, there comes a fire, which in consonance with the other natural phenomena, we would understand to be lightning. But God was not in the fire.

Finally, there follows an expression of the power and presence of God that, in its manner and effect, contrasts completely with all that has gone before, for after the fire there is “a still small voice” - a gentle whisper. That gentle whisper that came in the stillness when the turbulence had passed, had a most profound effect upon Elijah, for we read that he wrapped his face in his mantle in the humbling realization of the holiness, power, awesomeness and glory of the living God that was borne in upon him. The voice of God that he did not hear in the awe-inspiring upheavals in nature now registers with authority and clarity in heart and mind and conscience.

Elijah is being reminded that what reaches home to the deepest level of human consciousness is not anything merely external like the phenomena he has just now experienced or even the terrible drought upon Israel recently ended, but the mysterious, inward, renewing grace of the Lord - the loving kindness and tender mercy that are able to soften hardened hearts and renew insensitive consciences. Perhaps Elijah was focusing too narrowly upon the anticipated effects of the drought upon the population, from a moral and spiritual point of view. Is there not also the suggestion that something was owed to his own faithfulness? “I have been very zealous for the Lord God of Israel….” is how he begins his querulous assertion. The Lord, however, is reminding him of his own supreme sovereignty.

May it not be the case that we too in our own thinking may be investing the measures we ourselves have taken with a special potency? Perhaps we have said, “God is bound to bless our labours in this direction or that direction. This cannot fail to produce results.” And we too have had cause to be perplexed and despondent. And we have had to learn to bow before the sovereignty of God’s will, who alone has power over the whole of human life.

The Lord does not prosecute his work in a way that is spectacularly obvious and visible, but through the imperceptible activity of his Spirit, operating in the hidden, inward recesses of the human heart. It is clear enough that God’s work in the experience of the seven thousand, whom God had reserved, was not apparent to Elijah, otherwise he would have had a very different refrain from, “I am left alone.” It is not always the means that we might predict that he will use. How often have our best-laid plans and most optimistic expectations been disappointed, and we have been reminded that he will fulfil his sovereign will and purpose by the means he chooses to use? We live in a religious climate in which many are looking overmuch to human activity, as if they themselves were able to organize how God will work. He makes clear, however, that He is answerable to no-one and that we are totally dependant upon the Spirit’s working by his still small voice.

Our part is to serve him humbly and faithfully, remembering that the doctrine of his sovereignty is no excuse for inaction. It is indeed the belief that he is mighty to save that is our great incentive to preach the Gospel, which is his power unto salvation. Faced as we are in preaching with our own utter powerlessness, together with human apathy and unbelief, what gives us confidence and reassurance is not the power of our arguments or our ability to appeal to the heart, important though these are. Rather is it the knowledge that “the Spirit of God makes the reading but especially the preaching of the word an effectual means for convincing and converting sinners .....”

“In the morning sow thy seed and in the evening withhold not thy hand for thou know’st not whether shall prosper either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.” The results are in his hands, not ours.

Rev. Neil MacDonald has retired but was formerly minister of Lochalsh and Fearn.

Sermon Excerpts

Why I Am Not an Atheist - Rev. Alex MacDonald

Why am I not an Atheist? The cynic might say right away, “I can tell you why you are not an Atheist - it’s because you are a preacher and you have a professional interest in keeping God alive!”. But, of course, I was not always a preacher; I was not always a Christian. So I would like to explain why I believe that God does exist, and what difference it makes in my life and the life of many others.

Like many people of my generation, I have felt the lure of Atheism at various points and in its many forms: from Pantheism - the belief that the universe is God; that there is not a personal God at all - to ideologies like Marxism or Communism, stressing social justice and what man can achieve.

I would like to consider first the reasons why I might have been an Atheist. Take freedom, for instance. I was brought up in what would be called today in the media - rather disparagingly perhaps - a Calvinistic home, indeed in a Highland Free Church home. For some people, that has been something to put them off Christianity, to put them off religion, to put them off believing in God. They have had some kind of Christian or church background and their reaction to it has been negative, to believe there is no God. But, in fact, I spent my teenage years, which are probably the most rebellious period of anyone’s life, away from home. That is because, in the part of the Highlands I came from, as in many parts of the Highlands and Islands still, to go to ordinary secondary school you had to leave home, live in lodgings in a town many miles away and attend school there. So, what I did rebel against at that particular point in my life was not what I would regard now as true Christianity, but against what would be called ‘bourgeois values’: the idea of a kind of respectable middle-class view of what religion and morality is, which now I would see as a Christless religion and a loveless morality. It was not at all what I have come to know as the truth that God reveals in the Bible.

Those days were the sixties, perhaps best summed up later in the Queen song, “I Want to Break Free” - break free from all kind of restrictions. There was the idea that there was no longer any meaning to life. The world seemed so horrendous in many ways, especially with the threat of the hydrogen bomb and nuclear warfare. What meaning could life have? Science itself seemed to have developed into some kind of great destructive juggernaut. It had disappointed our expectations and failed to provide the answers that we were looking for. And because life, it was thought, had no meaning, there was also no point in morality, no point in believing in what is right or wrong. It could all be summed up in the words of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist, Dostoyevsky: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” That was generally the idea in the sixties: it was called the permissive society. But someone who was writing a little earlier, Aldous Huxley, who himself was an atheist, said, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning, consequently I assumed that it had none. The philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” In other words, he wanted to break free and so he believed life had no meaning. It was not that he came intellectually to the honest belief that life had no meaning and therefore he could live any way he liked. He wanted to live any way he liked and therefore he said life had no meaning. So there was a certain amount of dishonesty going on at that time, and still is, in that kind of view.

But if we take that famous statement of Dostoyevsky’s, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted”, and turn it round, we realise that in fact everything is not permitted. If I look at my life and say, “Well, I would like to be as free as possible and I’d like to do everything I want to do”, I cannot logically grant the same freedom to everyone else because, if everyone else does what they want to do, they will impinge on my freedom. And I do not like other people doing the same things that I let myself off with. There is some kind of standard that we come up against, irrespective of what we really might like. There are certain standards of right and wrong: everything is not permitted. The most liberated person - the person who believes that the world is meaningless - if you stand on his toe, he will complain and say, “That’s wrong!”. That is the kind of unwritten law that is there: there is some kind of idea of fairness, of right and wrong. Everything is not permitted. So, if everything is not permitted, is the logical conclusion that yes, God does exist; there is some source of standards in this world?

But a second reason why I or anyone else might be an Atheist lies in the area of suffering and injustice. Like many other people - I suppose like everyone - I was aware of the cruelty of the world, even from an early age: in nature, red in tooth and claw, or in human beings’ treatment of one another. These are things of which we become conscious very early on and, as we get older, there are various things that reinforce our awareness. Again, in the part of the world I come from, in the north of Scotland, there was a consciousness of past history, an injustice done in the past at the time of what is called the Highland Clearances, when many of the people were turned out of their homes and great sheep farms were set up instead. These people had to eke out a living on the coasts or they were transported away to America and Canada. Many of them died on the voyage, others arrived at the other side, and eventually settled down there and made good lives. But there was this sense of injustice, of something wrong with a world where this kind of thing could happen.

Now, that of course is magnified many times over throughout the whole world and there are examples in human history - in recent human history - far more horrific than the Clearances. The most notorious of all is the Holocaust: the attempted destruction of the Jewish people and others by the Nazis in Germany, and the surrounding areas in Europe, in the time leading up to and during the Second World War. The case against God, it has been said, can be summed up in two words - the Holocaust. Such great suffering and injustice demonstrates that there is no God. There is such injustice in the world, there is such suffering - how could there be a good, all-powerful being looking after everything?

Ultimately, there is no easy answer to the question of suffering and I do not pretend to have one. But I would like to open up one or two questions of my own. First, who caused the Holocaust? The Holocaust was caused by Nazis holding a particular philosophy and outlook on life that was atheistic. They did not believe in God. They believed in human power. And if we look at the twentieth century - the countless millions of people who were killed, whole countries and societies and communities destroyed - it was achieved by various branches of atheistic thought, not just Nazism and Fascism on the Right but also various forms of Communism on the Left. In communist Russia and Eastern Europe, sixty million people were killed in fifty years, in China seventy million, and this was repeated in various other places to a lesser extent. So when we talk about what has caused such evil, we see not only that it is human beings, but particularly in the last century, we have seen this unprecedented destruction and savagery unleashed by atheistic philosophies.

We also have to consider this: if there is no God, as Dostoyevsky said, everything is permitted. If there is no God, if there is no ultimate being to whom we are answerable, then how can we complain about anything? We cannot say that the Holocaust was wrong, we cannot complain, we cannot plead for justice anywhere, we have just got to accept that life is utterly meaningless. Yet we do not. We cry out against the injustice of it. That seems to speak again of the fact that we have intrinsically a sense of justice, the sense that there is something unfair, the sense that some wrong has been done, and the more we complain about it and say, “How could God exist and allow this?”, the more we are actually complaining to God because we believe in an ultimate standard of justice.

A third area that might very well have caused me to be atheistic in thought was the area of science - and that is true for very many people. The idea, put into the most popular terms, is that evolution has replaced God. One of its key proponents in our own day is Richard Dawkins. He appears on television, he has written various books, such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, and he emphasises all the time that natural selection is the blind watchmaker. Whereas before, God was viewed as the watchmaker, the designer of the universe, he says there is this impersonal force at work, natural selection, that is the blind watchmaker. There is no ultimate purpose to the universe, there is no good being looking after everything. Everything has just happened according to deterministic laws.

Some of those who hold that view have been perfectly honest about why they hold it. One evolutionary biologist, D.M.S. Watson, said, “The theory of evolution is a theory universally accepted, not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative is special creation which is clearly incredible.” In other words, we rule out the possibility that God is and that he has created, and then we are left with evolution, even though we have no coherent system of proof of it - and we cannot have, because we cannot put the whole universe back into the laboratory to test it. We are guessing at things that happened in the distant past. Colin Patterson, who was a senior palaeontologist at the Museum of Natural History, said, “I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them… Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils… I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument… It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test.” Although Patterson still held to evolution as the best explanation, he was casting great doubt on the evidence for transitional forms, a central pillar of present evolutionary thinking. Although, at the popular level, evolution is seen as explaining away any need for a God, there are many scientists who are entertaining serious doubts on various areas of evolutionary theory. This inevitably militates against building an evolutionary philosophy offering a complete explanation of how the world has developed.

There is another avenue along which I was tempted very strongly towards a form of Atheism, and that is what earlier on I called Pantheism. That simply is saying that there is no personal God, but the universe is divine. There is a mystery about the universe itself and, when we see the beauty of the created world, we are involved with this great process that is going on. I came at that view from perhaps a different perspective from most people. During the sixties, many people were drawn to Eastern religion. But it was particularly through the writings of Neil Gunn, the Scottish novelist, that I came in contact with a certain form of Pantheism, a Celtic Mysticism that feels that the universe is somehow spiritual. When you read Neil Gunn, there is always this kind of mystery element in the natural world and in human beings’ relation with it. It is something that is very appealing and very tempting: the idea that there is ultimately no personal God to whom you are answerable, but there is a kind of spirituality, a sense of awe - that feeling of the hairs at the back of your neck standing on end and of something exciting in this world, though it is vague and you cannot pin it down.

But if this is true, or if some form of Pantheism is true - if the universe is divine and we are part of it - then ultimately there is no reason for a distinction between good and evil. If everything is part of God, whatever God is, we are simply saying we are all part of this universe and everything that happens is part of it, whether it is good or evil: and how are we to decide what is good or evil? In Eastern religion, which is more consistently pantheistic than any other form of thought, the emphasis is that all distinctions are illusory, so the distinction between good and evil is also an illusion. Everything ultimately is part of the One. And so, we lose this firm line between good and evil, which is so essential, not just to our other complaints about the existence of God, but to our whole lives. How can we live without some sense of good and evil, of right and wrong, the things that we condemn, even if it is condemning them in others and letting ourselves off with them? We have this sense that there is this intrinsic distinction.

These are some of the ways in which I have been tempted towards Atheism. Now I would like to explain why I actually believe in God. It is not just because I have rejected these particular temptations to Atheism, but because of the more positive emphasis that I actually believe there is evidence that God exists.

First of all, I am not an Atheist because of the universe. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, said, “The basic philosophical question is that something exists.” That may seem very obvious, but in fact, it is the starting point. Something exists. The universe is here. We have not created it. We are here. We are part of the universe and we must make some sort of sense of it. But what is there is not just something, it is this incredibly ordered and beautiful and human universe. It is ordered, in the sense that we can discover uniformity in it, and frame scientific laws about it. It is beautiful, in that we can appreciate the beauty of the natural world and of human beings. But it is also a kind of human universe, and even in science there is the development of what is called the anthropic principle, the idea that things seem to be fitting together in relation to human beings. And this is what we discover: that the world is there for our benefit, and that there are all sorts of things that fit together for us. We discover and invent all sorts of things from this universe in which we are. We develop our life and our culture from it, it all seems to fit together. Now this poses a huge question - Why should it be so? The universe does not seem to be random and utterly meaningless.

The physicist, Roger Penrose (who worked together with Stephen Hawking, who wrote A Brief History of Time), computed the odds of the ‘Big Bang’ producing our ordered universe merely by accident. The odds came out at one in 10 to the power 10 to the power 123. I am not a great mathematician, but I know that that is a very big number! In fact, we are assured that it is so large that it has more zeros than the total number of particles in the entire universe. That is how big it is. In other words, he is saying that it is impossible that the universe as it is could have come about by accident. There seems to be some sort of design at work in the physical universe from the moment of the ‘Big Bang’, or however we describe its beginning. And it is interesting that science at the moment is definitely pointing towards the universe having had a beginning and a structured beginning, although we cannot fully understand it - which again, as we see, is exactly what the Bible says.

Voltaire, the French philosopher, said, “I shall always be convinced that a watch proves a watchmaker and a universe proves a God”. That argument is often ridiculed and people say that, if it is valid, all it shows is that a universe proves a universe-maker, which is different from a God. But if there is a Being - whatever we call him, Universe-maker or anything else - who has made this universe, this amazing, vast, complex, beautiful universe, then I will fall down and worship him. Voltaire and others have seen the power of this argument from design. The universe seems to be designed. It is not just chaotic, not just random, not just by accident. There is some meaning and purpose behind it.

In the very first words of the Bible, we have the explanation of this: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The first chapter of Genesis does not explain the mechanisms by which God did it. It may be the ‘Big Bang’, it may be that modern physicists are on the right lines in explaining how God brought the universe into being; but we are simply told the fact that it did not have an impersonal, chance beginning. God decided it and God designed it, by whatever mechanism. Similarly with the history of the universe - God has designed it, God has created it, God is working out his purposes in it. And this, to my mind, makes sense of what we see in the universe. I am not an Atheist because of the universe.

But secondly, I am not an atheist because of human beings. I am not an Atheist because of the nobility of human beings. We have thought already about the cruelty and the evil of the human world, but what about the nobility? “How like a god!”, Hamlet says - of a human being, of a man - how like a god. And there is much in human history that brings out the same emphasis. There is the creativity of human beings. If we look at Michelangelo’s statue of David or any of the great works of art, the gift of creativity that human beings have is breathtaking. If we look at York Minster, we see a medieval building that is astonishing today as we take in its complexity and vastness. Or as we look at modern inventions like Concorde or television or computers or whatever, we are amazed at the creativity of human beings.

But there is also a moral awareness that I have emphasised already. We have this awareness of right or wrong. We have what is called a conscience. Yes, there may be great evil and great brutality in the world, but there is always a voice raised against it. There is something within us that says this is wrong, this is evil. There is something about us as human beings that seems inexplicable in purely mechanistic or animal terms.

Supremely, there is love. I do not mean the kind of love of which we might see parallels in the animal world, such as my cat loving me because I feed it cat food. There is something much superior in the human world where love may be shown without anything gained in return - for example, in time of war, where people sacrificed their own lives for other people’s freedom. But examples occur also in time of peace - a mother dying for her children, people giving their lives or living their lives for other people, sacrificially, unselfishly. What is the explanation of it, how is there such nobility in human beings?

In contrast with that, we thought earlier about the cruelty and brutality that exists in the human condition. B.F. Skinner, a psychologist, paraphrased Hamlet when he said of man, “How like a dog!”. He was comparing human beings to animals and showing how animal psychology can teach us a great deal about human beings. But human beings are capable of far greater brutality or cruelty than any animal. A human being is capable of far more evil than a dog or a tiger or the fiercest animal we can think of. There is something intrinsically, worryingly, evil in the heart of human beings, so that even the most respectable person might turn out to commit some incredible wickedness. There is all the spite and the hurt and the abuse in this world just at the ordinary level of human society, let alone the great, horrific things like the Holocaust or Bosnia or Kosovo.

What is the explanation of this paradox - that there is this great nobility of human beings, these great achievements of human beings, and yet this cruelty and evil? I have never found a satisfactory explanation in any kind of atheistic thinking. The satisfying explanation I have discovered is the message that the Bible gives me; that we as human beings are made in the image of God. We are personal beings, not just some kind of advanced animal, not just some kind of computer. We are human beings made in the image of God - personal, spiritual beings with capacities of creativity and of love and all the rest of it - because we are made like God; we are Godlike. How like a god - Shakespeare was right. But, on the other hand, the Bible also explains why there is evil. God did not originally create us evil. He created us perfectly good, to enjoy the universe that he had made and to enjoy fellowship with him. But we rebelled against him. The origin of evil is rebellion. The origin of all the evil in the world is rebellion against the laws and the love of God: the refusal to put God in God’s place, at the centre, and the resolve to place ourselves at the centre. And then we make the absolute mess that we have made of the world and of our lives. To my mind this explanation we discover in the Bible is the most satisfying explanation as to who we are: made in the image of God, but sinners, rebels against him.

But thirdly, I am not an Atheist because of the Bible. I have referred already to some of the things it says. It is because of this book that I am not an Atheist. This is an amazing book. It is remarkable because of its survival. What other book of the ancient world - and we are talking here of two thousand years ago and earlier - has survived in the way the Bible has? We have bits and pieces of manuscripts, and books of the ancient world, but they are in libraries or museums and they are of no great interest to most ordinary people. This book is of astonishing interest to people and it has survived down through the ages. In spite of vitriolic attacks against it, in spite of attempts to suppress it, it has survived and it flourishes: it is still the world’s best seller. Back in the sixties, people were glibly saying that the Bible was being outsold by another book - ‘the little red book’, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. It might have been very popular for a short time, but it has disappeared. Nobody thinks about it now, nobody talks about it, hardly anyone reads it, but the Bible has increased its popularity. Even in China, where attempts were made to root out the Bible, it is going from strength to strength.

This book is also amazing because of its unity and complexity. The Bible is a complex book. I am not going to pretend that you can simply just pick it up, and start reading it anywhere and you will understand everything right away. It contains 66 books, written by about forty authors, so it is complicated. It was written over a period of about 1500 years by all these different people living in different cultures, writing in three different languages, and yet - this is the amazing thing - it all fits together. You can read it as one story. It has one purpose. It has one focus - Jesus Christ. No one human being or group of human beings could have engineered that. It came together over a period of a millennium and a half, from Moses right through to the Apostle John. And yet it makes sense. It has a power today that no other book has.

There is also its reliability. A great archaeologist from the beginning of the twentieth century, Sir William Ramsay, started off his investigations in the Middle East and in Turkey convinced that the Bible was inaccurate and unreliable. That was because of the kind of teaching about it that he had had at university. But when he investigated for himself, when he actually excavated in those ancient cities and pieced it all together, he confirmed the details of Luke’s record in the Acts of the Apostles time and time again. His conclusion was that Luke should be placed along with the very greatest of historians. He came to view what Luke said as completely accurate. That testimony has been given again and again about the Bible. When discoveries have actually been made and real work has been done, it has been shown to be accurate.

So we have this remarkable book that has survived, that has this internal unity, this reliability and this amazing popularity throughout the world. It is a book that commands our attention. And because of this book and its message, I believe that God exists: that this is God speaking to me. It has a vibrant, abiding and powerful message for every one of us.

But, finally, I am not an Atheist because of Jesus. There is a passage in 1 John, Chapter 4, that speaks about Jesus and about the love of God. God is love, and this is the love that he has shown to us; that he sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. I am not an Atheist because of Jesus. I am not an Atheist because I have come to know God’s love to me in Jesus Christ.

I have come to know that love in different ways. First of all, through my family. One of the strongest reasons why I am not an Atheist is that this love of God in Jesus Christ was communicated to me from a very early age. People today, as I said at the start, look disparagingly at Calvinism, as it is called. But what they are disparaging is simply what the Bible says. Its content was passed on to me from a very young age and I became aware of the great message of the love of God in Jesus Christ - that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. I have come to know that love through Christian friends, through the support and encouragement of Christian people, in ways that have been astonishing and beyond the call of duty, love that has not been shown by anyone else.

But, supremely, I have become aware of this love of God directly in Jesus Christ. The message of the Bible that I have tried to explain focuses on Jesus, this unique person who is the Son of God. He made extraordinary claims about himself, such as “I and the Father are one”. He said all sorts of outrageous things. And, remember, he was saying these things, not in India in the context of Hinduism where people would say, “O yes, we are all one with God”, but amongst the most monotheistic people in the whole history of the world: the Jewish people - and he himself was a Jew. There is one God, only one God - one God, who is high, majestic and holy, above this world and above human beings - yet he said, “I and the Father are one”. When at his trial he was put on oath and asked, “Are you the Son of the Blessed, are you the Son of God?”, he said, “I am”. Nothing could be clearer than that Jesus himself presented himself as the Son of God - the revelation of God in this world, God become flesh. Now we may say, as C.S. Lewis famously said, “We would put an ordinary person who said that on the same level as someone who believed he was a poached egg”. And people said Jesus was mad, they said he had a demon, but they could not really explain away the fact that Jesus showed perfect love and perfect sanity and yet clearly said, “I am the Son of God”. And this astonishing person, Jesus Christ, had this amazing love that he showed to the outcast, the downtrodden, the rejected, this love that broke through and still breaks through to us today. But, supremely, I have come to know God’s existence and his love in the death of Jesus Christ. Jesus said quite clearly that he had not come just to live or to preach: he came to die. “I have come not to be served but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom for many”, Jesus said, and that is what he did in dying on the cross. The answer to all our questions about God is right there at the cross, the very centre of all history, where Jesus died for our sins.

There is a little story, written back in the sixties in a students’ magazine. It is called The Long Silence. This is how it goes:

“At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly-not with cringing shame but with belligerence. ‘Can God judge us?’

‘How can he know about suffering?’ snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. ‘We endured terror . . . beating . . . torture . . . death!’

In another group, a black man lowered his collar. ‘What about this?’ he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. ‘Lynched for no crime but being black!’

In another crowd, a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes. ‘Why should I suffer?’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

Far out across the plain were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he had permitted in his world. How lucky God was to live in Heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred! What did God know of all that men had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty sheltered life, they said.

So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most. A Jew, a black, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly disabled arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the plain they consulted with each other.

At last, they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever. Before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their verdict was that God should be sentenced to live on Earth - as a man! Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him a work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind when he tries to do it. Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured. At last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die in agony. Let him die so that there can be no doubt that he died. Let there be a whole host of witnesses to verify it.

As each leader announced the portion of his sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled. When the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered another word. No one moved. For, suddenly, all knew that God had already served the sentence.”

God has experienced the depths of our suffering in this world. But more than that, it was the punishment of our rebellion that the Son of God endured. Jesus died the death that we deserved - without friend, without hope and without God. As the nineteenth-century preacher ‘Rabbi’ John Duncan said, “It was damnation and he took it lovingly.” The apostle Paul said, ‘God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ I am not an Atheist because I believe there is ample evidence that God exists and, supremely, that God is love. I know that my redeemer lives because I know the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

Rev. Alex MacDonald is minister of Buccleuch & Greyfriars. He also edits The Record and was Moderator in 2005.

Sermon Excerpts

The Way Back to God - Rev. William R. Mackay

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:I4

The chapter in which our text is found forms part of an account of a memorable day in the history of the children of Israel, namely, the day on which Solomon’s temple was dedicated. It was a day which would not be forgotten readily by those who were privileged to be present, for God seemed to be very near, and, in token of His presence and His approval, He gave a manifestation of His glory. The enthusiasm of the people as they offered their sacrifices appeared to know no bounds; but God knew the fickleness of the human heart and, so, on this day of national rejoicing when the people with unrestrained fervour proclaimed their allegiance to Him, He foresaw a time when there would be spiritual declension, which would bring His judgment on the land.

This promise was made, in the first instance, to those whom God describes as “my people”; that is, Israel as a nation. Israel had been chosen by God to be a nation which would be distinct from all other nations and, as such, was the heir of many promises. The Apostle Paul reminds us at a later date that “they are not all Israel who are of Israel” and, yet, I take it that the promise in our text embraced the nation as a whole. In like manner, in these days in which we live, God has His Church as distinct from the world, but not all those who profess to be members of the Church have been regenerated by His Holy Spirit. Yet there is a promise which embraces the whole of the visible Church; God still calls us, through His inspired Word, to return to Him, the King and Head of His own Church.

Four steps are outlined for those who would set their faces towards the road which leads back to God and the first of these is;

(1) The need for humility

“If my people shall humble themselves”. Pride is one of the most common of human failings and, yet, it is a deadly sin. I heard a psychiatrist say recently that, nowadays, the seven deadly sins are minimized and that pride, for example, is often described as “confidence in one’s own ability”. But call it by whatever name we will, pride is still that ugly thing which causes puny man to shake his fist in the face of Almighty God and say, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”. When a soul is humbled in the presence of God, however, this blustering attitude retreats into the background and the soul will be prepared to make acknowledgment of certain things. To begin with, there will be an acknowledgment of sin. Sin will be seen in its true colours as a “want of conformity unto, and transgression of, the law of God”. It will no longer be explained away in such terms as “an error of judgment”, or “a mistake”, but will be recognized as an act of rebellion. Moreover, the wrong which is done through sin will be regarded as a wrong, not merely against one’s fellow, but against God. In the spirit of true humility, the penitent soul will say, as the Psalmist did, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight .. .” (Ps. 51 :4·).

Coupled with this acknowledgment of sin, there will be an acknowledgment of failure. It is characteristic of the man whose religion is a mere formality that he is generally well-satisfied with his own attainments. The standard which he adopts is man-made and, by this standard, he compares very favourably with his fellows. “I’m as good as other men and a good deal better than most of them”, he is heard to say, as he seeks to boost his morale. On the contrary, the man who stands humbled in the presence of God is stripped of his self-assurance and readily admits that he has been “weighed in the balances and found wanting”. “Man’s chief end,” he remembers, “is to glorify God”, and, as he contemplates his own weak efforts, he realizes how little he has achieved towards the fulfillment of this end. A saintly man said to me recently, “I shall not be afraid to meet my Maker for I am resting on the finished work of Christ, but when I think of how little I have done for Him I shall be ashamed to look Him in the face”. And these are the sentiments of all who have learned the secret of true humility.

Arising out of this sense of sin and failure, there will also be an acknowledgment of need. When the eyes of men are opened by the grace of God, they are conscious, not only of a sense of sin, but also of their need of divine help and they are ready to say with Augustus Toplady:

Not the labours of my hands

Can fulfil Thy law’s demands;

Could my zeal no respite know,

Could my tears for ever flow,

All for sin could not atone:

Thou must save, and Thou alone.

(2) The need for prayer

Humbled in the presence of God by a sense of his own unworthiness, the subject of grace will, moreover, recognize his need of divine help as he faces the trials and temptations of life. If his own efforts are futile to effect his justification, they are equally futile to promote sanctification; and, so, with an enlightened mind, he implores the aid of the Divine Helper. Thus, by humility, the mind is conditioned for the exercise of prayer, which is the next essential on the road to spiritual recovery.

When Saul of Tarsus was brought to the house of Ananias following his conflict with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, it was recorded of him, “Behold, he prayeth”. This was no new occupation for Saul, for, as a Pharisee, he was well-accustomed to the regular routine of prayer. But now his prayers were no longer a mere formality, but a tremendous reality. They were the utterances of a man who had been humbled into saying, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”. Surely there is a worthwhile lesson for us here. The Church of God needs to be shaken out of her formality and to recapture the spirit of true prayer. That noted preacher of last century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, used to describe the weekly prayer meeting as “the heating apparatus of the Church”. Yet, in how many churches today is the heating apparatus never turned on! It is little wonder then that we find such a low spiritual temperature in our midst. The embers of the fire of our spiritual life are burning so low that they fail to bring comfort and cheer to people who seek these, and perplexed and disillusioned men and women are turning their back upon the Church because it has nothing to offer to them. Wherein then lies the remedy for the apathy and apostasy of this present age? “If my people,” says God, “... shall ... pray ... then will I… heal their land’‘.

(3) The need for earnestness

A further essential requirement on the part of those who seek the way back to God is earnestness. They must “seek my face”, says God. It is surprising how many people who are intensely earnest and persevering in their attitude to problems concerning their material welfare are casual, almost to an equal degree, in regard to spiritual matters. During the last world war, when many commodities were in short supply in Britain, the only way to procure certain articles was to take one’s place in the line and it became a common sight to see long queues in our streets. Consequently, many people developed a “queue complex” and some were even known to take their place without knowing what they were waiting for. The obvious reason was that they were afraid they would miss something. What a tremendous difference it would make to the life of the Church if its members showed the same concern in regard to spiritual things! There would always be crowded congregations because men and women would be afraid to remain away from services, lest they miss a blessing. Thomas was not present on that first occasion when the risen Christ revealed Himself to His disciples in the Upper Room and, as a result, we can believe that, for a time at least, his witness was impaired because his mind was clouded by doubts and fears. And who can deny that many today find themselves in “Doubting Castle”, and are not contributing as they should to the life and witness of the Church because they are not frequently enough in the company of Jesus.

Another practice to which those who lived in war-time Britain grew accustomed was that of granting priority. Certain projects were regarded as more important than others,and there was little prospect of any work being undertaken, unless it appeared on a priority list. What we are all too inclined to forget, however, is that the Lord has provided a priority list and right at the head of that list is the very thing which our text counsels us to do. “Seek ye first”, says Christ, “the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33)· Yet, many professing Christians are so deeply concerned with things which should be of secondary importance that they have little or no time left in which to “seek the Lord’‘; and, as a consequence, their spiritual growth becomes stunted. Is it not time, then, for all of us to check up on our priorities and to ensure that the Lord is given his rightful place in our hearts and lives? And, remembering that this is an urgent matter, let us do it now. In days of old, the prophet Hosea sent forth a clarion call to backsliding Israel and surely his words are apposite to the times in which we live: “Sow to yourselves in righteousness,” he says, “reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you’’ (Hos. 10:12).

(4) The need for renouncing evil

The remaining condition which was required of Israel as a harbinger of blessing was a renunciation of evil: they were to “turn from their wicked ways”. It is surprising that a people who had been chosen by God should be so ready to turn their backs upon him. Yet the Israelites were all too prone to follow the heathen nations round about them and to engage in, among other things, the practice of idolatry. From their history, we learn that, time and time again, they forsook the living God and worshipped the gods of the heathen, and we are confronted with such sorry spectacles as that which greeted Moses when he came down from the mount and found the people for whom God had effected a great deliverance, bowing down and worshipping a golden calf.

Unfortunately, the practice of idolatry has not ceased with the passing of the years and, while it is true that we may no longer worship golden calves as Israel did, yet, there are many idols to which men do homage and, as a result, Christ is dethroned. How many there are who, like the rich young ruler, are making wealth their God. In this material age in which everything is measured in terms of pounds or dollars, we may sometimes even be found guilty of assessing spiritual progress by the offerings of the people. It is true, of course, that where there is real spiritual life there will be sacrificial giving, but it is all too possible for a church to glory in her financial achievements, rather than in her Lord. Like the church in Laodicea, she may be “rich and increased with goods” and think that she has “need of nothing”, not knowing she is “wretched and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked”.

Another idol of which we must ever beware is popularity or the approval of men. We tend to become so afraid lest we may be thought odd or different from our fellows and, as a consequence, the voice of the Church is not raised as often as it should be against moral evil. When situations arise, as they so often do, when professing Christians are called upon to take a stand for righteousness and truth or to denounce that which is wrong, the voice of Christian witness is often silenced because the approval of men counts more than the approval of God. And, so, by our very silence, we become partakers of their wicked ways. One of the dangers of this ecumenical age is that ecumenicity itself may become an idol and that the Church, in order to win the approval of men and to maintain the spirit of unity among those whose views may be widely divergent, is tempted to compromise those great truths of which she has been made custodian. Is it any wonder, then, that the man of the world becomes perplexed and bewildered as he seeks to ascertain what the Church believes, and what benefits she has to offer him which he does not already possess? And the sad outcome is that, all too often, with a shrug of his shoulder, he dismisses the Christian faith as something which is not relevant to the world of today. Undoubtedly, there is need for Christian unity, but it must be a unity which has as its foundation an uncompromising belief in the Incarnation and finished work of the Divine Saviour who said, “I, if I be lifted up ..., will draw all men unto me”.

(5) The blessings assured

Two blessings are promised to those who fulfil God’s requirements. The first of these is a personal blessing and consists of pardon - “I will forgive their sin”. How gracious God is, both to the sinner and to the backsliding Christian. For the sinner who forsakes his ways and turns unto the Lord there is abundant pardon, and for the backslider who confesses his sins there is forgiveness and cleansing.

But notice that there is also a promise of national blessing - “I will heal their land”. God had warned Israel that one of the consequences of sin would be drought. “It may be necessary,” He said, “to shut up heaven that there be no rain”. Israel’s very existence depended on “the former and latter rains”, for, without them, there would be famine in the land. During the reign of Ahab, the land experienced a sore famine and only after the prayers of Elijah was the famine brought to an end, and the land healed.

Is there not much to remind us that the same healing power is needed in our land today? We live in times of spiritual drought and barrenness, and urgently need those refreshing showers which alone can revive the parched ground. The world is in a state of tension and men’s hearts are failing them for fear. But let us not forget that God has promised blessing when men turn to Him in penitence and faith.

Do you wish, then, to make a contribution to the national effort which can have far-reaching consequences? Do you wish to see that “righteousness which exalteth a nation” established in the land? Do you wish to see the “windows of heaven” opened and the blessing poured out? Here, then, are the conditions! “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” If we, by His grace, are willing and able to fulfil the conditions, God will surely honour His promise.

Rev. W. R. Mackay was Minister of Duthil, Buccleuch & Greyfriars and Kingussie & Alvie. He was also a chaplain to Inverness Hospitals.

Sermon Excerpts

The Thorn in the Flesh - Principal Donald Macleod

“And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure” - 2 Corinthians 12:7

It is fascinating to observe how little Paul was esteemed by the Christians of his own day. Despite his many gifts, his unceasing labours and God’s evident blessing upon his ministry, he was the butt of constant criticism. The Corinthians were especially vehement in their accusations. He was guilty of levity and vacillation. His motives were according to the flesh. His word was unreliable and self-contradictory, a matter of yea and nay.

In this chapter, Paul is coming to a new phase in his answer to these charges: “I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord”. God has honoured him, catching him up to the third heaven, and granting him such visions and revelations as were unspeakable and which, indeed, it was not lawful for a man to utter. Let us look for a moment at the outstanding features of this experience.

First of all, he was caught up to the third heaven. The meaning of this is made plain by the parallel statement in verse four, “he was caught up into paradise”. The third heaven is synonymous with paradise, the place of which our Lord spoke to the penitent thief, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).It is the place to which the risen Lord has ascended and where those are who sleep in Jesus.

Secondly, Paul cannot be sure whether this experience occurred “in the body or out of the body” (v. 3). It was so vivid that the possibility cannot be dismissed that he was caught up bodily to the third heaven. On the other hand, the experience may have been purely spiritual. He simply cannot tell.

Thirdly, he heard “unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (v. 4). He heard of aspects of the divine glory, which he was personally able to apprehend, but which he was not at liberty to disclose. This is one of many biblical reminders that revelation is not exhaustive. God knows more of His own glory than He has been pleased to reveal; and even Paul, on his own admission here, had seen more than he was permitted to utter.

Finally, something was given to the apostle to counterbalance this privilege: “There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.” There are some priceless lessons in Paul’s teaching at this point. Let us look at it more closely.

(1) The nature of the thorn

What was the nature of this thorn ? Many attempts have been made to arrive at a positive and specific identification. Some have suggested malaria, others epilepsy and yet others some form of eye disease. These enquiries are futile. We must content ourselves with the general features which Paul mentions.

In the first place, it was an experience from which he prayed to be delivered: “I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me” (v. 8). It was not something inseparable from the Christian life, like persecution or temptation or the sufferings of the present time. One could be a Christian without it, as indeed Paul himself had once been.

Secondly, it was satanic. It was “the messenger of Satan to buffet me”. It came from the enemy and looked very much like one of the means used by him to hinder or frustrate the Apostle’s work. Many a time, Paul - and others - must have thought that, without it, he could have served the Lord ever so much more effectively. Perhaps it made it painful for the Apostle to preach. Perhaps it made it painful for others to listen. We can never know how much anguish lies behind the words, “I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:3).

Thirdly, the thorn was in the flesh. It was something visible, and probably physical and obvious. He speaks to the Galatians of “my temptation which was in my flesh” (Gal. 4:14) and commends them because they did not despise him for it. On his own admission, there was a strong temptation for them to do so. There was something about him, off-putting and repulsive; a painful impediment to preaching Christ with boldness.

Yet, Paul could glory in the thorn. He could be content to have it remain. He could take pleasure in it. He could regard it as God-given. This immediately rules out the possibility that it was something sinful. It is often fatally easy to look at deficiencies in our own characters and say, “That is my thorn in the flesh”, and then take comfort from the fact that Paul and other Christians have had these same problems. But this is a perverse wresting of the Apostle’s teaching. The thorn is not some sinful propensity or some area of moral and spiritual failure in our own lives. It is not bad temper or lust or irritability or cowardice in Christian witness. Paul could not possibly glory in these or be content that they should remain or regard them as given by God. The thorn is something non-moral and non-spiritual to which no blame attaches. We have absolutely no right to dignify our sins with this title.

Finally, Paul describes this thorn as having a certain function. It was given “lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations”. God had given him a unique spiritual privilege, but in the very folds of that privilege there lurked the peril of spiritual pride. He could be exalted and even exalted immoderately. The thorn was given to prevent that. The danger exists for us all, not only for the eminently privileged, but for the recipients of any spiritual blessing and the holders of any spiritual office. It is easy for all of us to imagine that in one sphere at least we out-strip our fellows. It is easy, also, to forget that we have nothing but what we have received. Hence the counter-poise, the painful, humiliating reminder of our humanness and frailty and dependence, driving us day by day to the conclusion of inferiority and inadequacy.

It may be a repulsive physical condition. It may be a disability which seems to hinder our work. It may be deeply painful domestic circumstances. The great thing is that, however disagreeable or humiliating, it keeps us from being exalted above measure.

(2) Paul’s reaction

How, then, did Paul react? “I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.”

We should note that he prayed to “the Lord” - not to God the Father, but to God the Son. Jesus is Lord - Jesus is Jehovah - and, therefore, we pray to Jesus. Do we take His deity as seriously as that?

Then we see that he prayed with importunity. He besought the Lord thrice. He was disturbed by the thorn. He found it difficult to accept. He was desperate that it be removed. How comforting that is! We are so often told, when we find it difficult to be reconciled to God’s will, that this is unbelieving and sub-Christian. And, yet, here is Paul standing in the fellowship of those whose immediate reaction to this kind of experience is that they cannot bear it and that they cannot possibly serve God so long as it lasts, and who pray with all earnestness that it go away. It is not that at last Paul is not content. But he has to fight his way through to that. It is neither easy nor instinctive. Often, God’s will appears utterly overwhelming, as we see so clearly from the experience of our Lord in Gethsemane. The cup which the Father gave Him filled Him with sore amazement (Mark ‘4:33) SO that, in agony, He prayed with strong crying and tears (Heb. 5:7). Of course, there is an immeasurable gulf between the situation facing Him and any stress to which we may be subject. But His whole bearing underlines the fact that God does not ask that we face adversity with stoical indifference. In many situations, faith can attain composure only through an agony of strong crying and tears.

(3) God’s reply

So much for Paul’s reaction. But how does the Lord answer his prayer? “My grace is sufficient for thee; for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9). Paul’s crave is not granted. The thorn is not removed. He must live with it as a permanent accompaniment of his life and labours. That, unmistakably, was God’s will for Paul. May it not also be His will for some of ourselves? We have been praying for the removal of certain problems and the elimination of certain painful factors from our lives. Now God is calling upon us to desist. We have no right to persevere with this particular prayer. This pain or embarrassment or hindrance, whatever it may be, is to remain. We have to adjust to it and learn to live with it. In this very context, seemingly so unbearable and impossible, we have to serve and glorify our God.

But, from another point of view, the prayer is gloriously answered: “My grace is sufficient for thee.” Notice Paul’s definition of grace. It is not mere pity or mercy or vague intentions of benevolence. It is God’s strength put forth redemptively. It is not an emotion, but a power, an enabling and sustaining energy arising out of God’s invincible determination to help us.

Note, too, that it is in weakness that this strength is made perfect. Human helplessness is its ideal context. This is where grace is seen in its real glory - in the lives of those who feel hopelessly inadequate in the face of stress and duty and temptation. This is precisely what the thorn did for Paul. It created a profound sense of insufficiency. He might have looked at his gifts and his experiences and his pre-eminent privileges, and felt strong and supremely confident. But the thorn prevented that. It made him weak. It filled him with fear. It made him cry, “I cannot possibly serve so long as this thorn remains!” How often has the Lord placed His people in this kind of situation! Calvin had to serve in the face of appalling ill-health. Spurgeon had to preach through constant pain and depression. Whitefield was plagued with a chronic respiratory affliction. How often must these men have cried that, if only these problems were removed, they could serve the Lord ever so much more effectively! Yet, for Paul, the thorn was the very condition of his effectiveness, driving him beyond himself to the Christ through whom he could do all things.

(4) Paul’s final attitude

This brings us to Paul’s final attitude: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities” (v. 9). But glory in them rather than what? It is not so much that he will glory in infirmities, rather than in revelations, but that he will glory in infirmities, rather than pray for deliverance from them. He is no longer going to protest to the Lord about them. He is going to glory in them. He is proud of them. Indeed, he takes pleasure in them. He is pleased that they are there. He is glad not simply during them. He is glad because of them. But how is this possible?

First of all, because he sees that they are given. They have come from the Lord. They are part of His purpose and He has only one purpose - to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy. The thorn in the flesh makes an essential contribution to that.

Secondly, as we have already seen, these infirmities have a function. Without them, he would be exalted above measure. Paul recognises that danger and would rather endure the thorn than fall into the sin of spiritual pride.

Above all, however, he takes pleasure in infirmities, “that the power of Christ may rest on me” (v. 9). That is the most glorious possibility facing him as a Christian. But its fulfillment is conditional. He must be weak - “when I am weak, then am I strong”. This was the value of the thorn. It made him weak. It made self-confidence and self-reliance impossible. It placed him in a situation where it was only too vividly clear that he could not face any duty in his own strength. He had resented that. Now he glories in it.

Perhaps, through Paul’s word here, the Lord is calling on ourselves to look again at those factors in our own lives of which we wish to be quit. Is it not possible that, but for these, we should be immoderately exalted in self-esteem? Is it not possible that these are the very factors which keep alive the sense of helplessness and incompetence which drives us day by day to Christ? And, if so, ought we to resent them? Should we continue to pray for their removal? Ought we not, instead, to glory in them and even, at last, to take pleasure in them?

Principal Donald Macleod is Principal of the Free Church College and Professor of Systematic Theology.

Sermon Excerpts

Salvation: The Gift of God - Rev. Hugh Cartwright

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.’’ John 6:37

It is one of the remarkable features of inspired scripture that a portion of truth which confounds and condemns one, comforts and encourages another. Indeed, the same scripture can come to the same person at different times and produce different effects. The Word of God prospers in the thing whereto He sends it and if, at times, it acts as a sword “piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit” (Heb. 4:‘2), at other times, it is a balm which brings relief to the wounded soul and comfort to the broken heart. The Lord’s sermon recorded in this chapter was full of hard sayings to hypocrites, but disciples, indeed, were constrained to exclaim: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6 : 68).

Many of those to whom the Lord was speaking refused to acknowledge the claims which He made for Himself and refused to rest upon Him for salvation. But “what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?” (Rom. 3:3)· Jesus assures His hearers that, although they would go in unbelief to a lost eternity, He will not lose His people. His sorrow over the Jerusalem that rejected Him was the sorrow of compassion and pity, not the sorrow of frustrated desire and overturned purpose. All the elect of God shall come to Christ for salvation. He will lose none of His people. He will lose none of His glory. This is a blow to the pride of unbelieving men. It is a truth which has solemn implications for them. “Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves” (Luke 23:28).

But what comfort is in these words for the sinner who is coming to Jesus - no matter at what stage of “coming” he may be! They tell that the grace of God is behind his coming, in his coming and awaits his coming. This word of grace is a joyful sound to the awakened sinner. The news that God in His grace has provided a complete and effectual salvation is good news indeed to one who has learned by experience the sinful helplessness of man.

We shall endeavour briefly to underline the main aspects of the doctrine of our text, noting:

(I) The source of a sinner’s salvation

“All that the Father giveth me. .. .”

Here, our Lord traces the salvation of a soul - the coming of a soul to Christ for salvation - to the sovereign, electing purpose of God the Father, as it came to gracious expression in the Covenant of Redemption. The river of life flows from the throne of God.

The Father is, as Dr Kennedy of Dingwall put it, the representative of the supremacy of the Godhead and the fallen human race is in the hands of God, as the clay is in the hands of the potter. “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?” (Rom. 9:21)· Fallen man had no claim upon God, but God did not lose His claim upon man and God must press that claim, in whatever way pleases Himself and is in conformity with His own character. He must be glorified in man. Why is God not going to be glorified in the eternal perdition of the whole race? He will be glorified in the eternal condemnation of some, but He is going to be glorified in the eternal salvation of others. Why does God show mercy to any and why does He show mercy to those to whom He does show mercy? The ultimate reason revealed to us is that it pleased Him to do so. It is for Him to show mercy or not to show mercy just as He wills, until He commits Himself to do so. And, having purposed to show mercy, it was for Him to choose its objects. No man can claim God’s favour on the ground of justice. And no man can claim that, because God is merciful, He must be merciful to him. “For He saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Rom. 9:15) “God having, out of His more good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer” (Shorter Catechism, 20). God’s purpose to save, and His choice of those He was to save, was bound up eternally with the purpose to save them through Christ. God never thought of salvation or of those He was to save, apart from Christ. He was “set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was” (Prov. 8:23)· And His people were “chosen in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). The purpose to save included the provision of Christ as the Saviour.

The entire Godhead is involved in the salvation of a soul. This verse shows the distinction between the Father and the Son and, yet, the perfect harmony which exists between them in the work of salvation as in everything else. Christ did not take the work of salvation upon Himself in opposition to the will of the Father. It is not the work of Christ that makes the Father willing to save. The whole work of Christ for His people stems from the fact that the Father devised this way and committed this work into the hands of the Son. God put His people into the hands of Christ, that He might be and do all that was necessary for their salvation. As Calvin says, “the donation of the Father is the first step in our delivery into the charge and protection of Christ”. “Behold I and the children which God hath given me” (Heb. 2:13).

We tend to think of God’s giving of His people to Christ as an act of the past, but, here, the present continuous tense, “giveth”, is used. There is no past, present or future in eternity, and this decree is eternal. This emphasizes the permanence of the decree or, perhaps, that the decree is manifest or comes to fruition in the present, in the coming of sinners to Christ. That God gave His people to Christ to save them carries with it the guarantee that they shall come to Him to be saved. “The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever” (Ps. 33:11).

The main point to note is that the sovereign good pleasure of God the Father lies behind the provision of a Saviour and the coming of sinners to Him. Salvation has its origin in God, in eternity. At its fountainhead, salvation is of grace.

(2) The means of a sinner’s salvation

“... Shall come to me.”

Christ was proclaiming Himself as the bread which came down from Heaven - as God’s provision for the desperate need of those who are dead in sins. As bread represents what is essential to physical life, Christ is claiming that He is essential to spiritual and eternal life. And, as abundance of bread will do no good to one who refuses to eat, so no sinner will receive life from Christ without coming to Him and receiving Him. “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). See that you are not looking to your own works for salvation. But make sure, also, that you are not presuming upon some general kind of mercy in God, for God’s mercy flows to sinners only through Christ.

Christ alone meets the need of the soul because Christ alone meets the requirements of God. Do not think of Christ as just a means of making people happy and of salvation as merely deliverance from human misery. To be saved is to be saved from sin - to be reconciled to God - to be restored to harmony with God and obedience to His will - to be brought to glorify Him and enjoy Him for ever. To enter into this relationship with God, there must be deliverance from the guilt of sin, there must be a positive righteousness in the place of that guilt and there must be a breach with sin in heart and life. The chief aim of salvation is the glory of God: “that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared unto glory” (Rom. 9:23)· Indeed, salvation is so bound up with the glory of God that the Christian who is looking forward to the consummation of his salvation is said to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2)· It is obvious, then, that God cannot save in a way that is inconsistent with His glory - that does not reveal the perfection of His character and the harmony of all His attributes. He cannot just overlook sin. Justice, as well as mercy, must be given full expression if God is to be God. And it is in the Person and Work of Christ that these requirements are met. In the sacrifice of “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16), “mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Ps. 85:10). In His life and death, the law of God has received infinite obedience and satisfaction. Justice, as much as mercy, must demand that those for whom Christ acted be set free from guilt and accepted by God. And the glory of God is secured in meeting this demand.

Only in Christ can this salvation be secured. As a man, He had the necessary relationship to us to be able to act for us, and He had the capacity to suffer and to sympathize. His divinity gave infinite and eternal value, and efficacy, to all He did as Mediator. And that He is the Christ - the anointed, commissioned Servant of the Father - shows that all His work is in accordance with His will and satisfies His requirements. Thus, Christ, alone, is able to save.

But, to be saved, the sinner must come to Him. Those who are saved by Him are those who are given to Him. That is one side of the matter. The other side is that those who are saved by Him are those who come to Him (John 6:39, 40)· “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you” (John 6:53). There must be personal appropriation of Christ and of what Christ has done. The sinner must realize that he needs to be saved and that the salvation he needs is in Christ alone. There must be an abandonment of every other scheme of salvation and a willingness to be saved by Christ alone. There must be repentance, forsaking the wicked way, desiring Christ and resting upon Christ alone for salvation. What is required is not just intellectual acceptance of the truth that Christ saves, but the casting of oneself upon Him for salvation. “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life” (John 6:47).

(3) The sovereignty of grace in a sinner’s coming to Christ for salvation

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me.”

There are two sad facts which Christ records of all men in their natural condition: they will not come to Him for life and they cannot come. Christ is presented in the Gospel, in all the glory of salvation, as the Saviour who is suitable and free to all. To every lost soul to whom the Gospel comes, He cries: “Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live” (Isa. 55:3)· But, without the grace of God, sinners have neither the will nor the ability to come to Christ. No matter what pressure is brought to bear upon them by the promises of the Gospel and the threatenings of the law, and no matter how much their emotions may be worked upon, without the grace of God in operation there will be no turning to Christ. The sinner is spiritually dead - not just unable to move towards God or Christ, but an enemy of God. He neither will nor can come because his nature is diametrically opposed to God. Only the almighty, life-giving, renewing grace of God can bring a sinner to Christ.

The grace that gave a people to Christ will bring them to Him or they would never come. This truth does not limit the Gospel or put a barrier in the sinner’s way, as some allege, but gives effect to the Gospel and ensures its success. Of all men without grace it will ever be true that they will not and cannot come, and theirs is the guilt. But grace will bring all whom the Father gives to Christ. They were as dead as others. Some came from strange places and through strange experiences. The devil opposes their coming with all his power. Their sins, which should make them run all the faster to Christ, keep them back. They feel condemned and excluded. They may have many setbacks. But come to Christ every one of the elect shall, and the sovereign irresistible grace of God is the only explanation.

Coming to Christ is the evidence of election. There is much variety in the details of Christian experience and in the feelings of Christians, but it is true of them all that always they come to Jesus - even when they have to say, “Saw ye Him whom my soul loveth?” (S. of S. 3:3)· If you have come to Christ, it is because the Father gave you to Christ in an everlasting convenant and, by His Spirit, persuaded and enabled you to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered in the Gospel. The honour of your salvation is His alone. And you know and are glad it is so.

And let those who are still away from Christ remember that it takes the sovereign grace of God to bring a soul to Christ. That is not putting any question mark against the ways of God, but against the condition of your own soul. Man is so depraved, so hostile to God, so unable to do any spiritual good, that, although confronted with the awful reality of an eternal hell and, although presented with Christ in all the glory and freeness of the Gospel, he will not flee to the Saviour, but when drawn by grace. If you are going to be saved, it is only as a debtor to grace for every part of your salvation.

“Rabbi” Duncan put it in a nutshell when he said: “The propositions that grace is necessary, and that it is sovereign, sum up my belief regarding it.”

(4) The certainty of salvation for every sinner who comes to Christ

“And him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.”

The harmony of the Godhead in salvation is the guarantee that every poor soul who comes to Christ will be welcome. When He says emphatically that He will in no wise cast him out, He is showing the certainty of the believing sinner’s acceptance and how different this is from what he deserves. He mentions what the sinner deserves, only to put a double negative on it for all those who come to Him.

To be “cast out” is what every sinner deserves - cast out from all blessing and hope, cast into hell - by the Lamb in the midst of the throne. And that is the destiny of every Christless soul. “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment’’ (Matt. 15:46).

But, on no account, will those be cast out who come in faith and penitence, as sinners to Christ. “This man receiveth sinners” (Luke 15:2), “O matter how great sinners they have been. Look at the welcome the returning prodigal received. No tongue can express the wonder of the provision that God has made for those who come to Christ. But we know enough when we know that Christ will take them in, for they are complete in Him. To be received by Christ is to “be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation” (Isa. 45:17)· And this is the encouragement for sinners to come to Christ, which the Gospel holds out.

There are two promises in this text: the first gives meaning to the second. For those who believe in the total depravity and inability of man, preaching the Gospel would be a most depressing task if they did not rest in the assurance that the purpose of God shall stand, that all that the Father gives to Christ shall assuredly come to Him. Yet, let the sinner who hears the Gospel remember that what he has to do with, first of all, is not the decree of God, but the promise of the Gospel. The first part of the text should keep men from presuming that coming to Christ is something within their own power. You must come to Christ and whether you can come or not makes no difference to your obligation, or to the sincerity and freeness of the call. But the fact that you cannot come to Christ, apart from the drawing power of grace, confirms your culpable helplessness and lostness. The second part of the text should keep the awakened sinner from despairing on the ground of the decrees. As C. H. Spurgeon says, “never fear that there is anything in the secret purposes of God which can contradict the open promises of God”. Here is all the warrant you need for coming - and remember that this is the language of the One Who is exalted “a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5 : 31) .

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.”

Rev. Hugh Cartwright was formerly minister in Urquhart and a Professor in the Free Church College. He is now minister of the Free Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh.

Sermon Excerpts

Psalm-Singing for All? - Rev. Donald G. MacDonald

“Oh come, let us sing to the LORD! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation”. Psalm 95:1

It is very easy for apathy, indifference and formality to enter into the place of worship. Perhaps even without realising it our worship can become heartless, lifeless and cold. Psalm 95 seeks to guard against such a thing. The latter part of the Psalm seeks to ensure that the people of God really listen to God’s Word, the first part that they really sing God’s praise. If we look at the opening verses of the Psalm, we shall discover a few things that should govern and influence our praise, and hopefully keep it alive.

Our praise should be directed

In worship, we don’t sing songs; we give praise and that praise is directed heavenward. “Come let us sing to the Lord”. We do not sing to each other or for each other; rather, we seek positively to glorify the real and living God in song. Realisation of this should expel silence. There are few things more ugly than seeing lips tightly shut when the praises of our great God are being sung. Not only should it expel silence; it should also banish a ‘that will do’ kind of praise. A real and living God is deserving of the best praise we can offer.

The psalmist reminds us that this real and living God that we sing to is also ‘Jehovah ... the Rock of our Salvation’. We direct our praises, not to a cold impersonal force, but to a God whom we know and with whom we are in covenant relationship. We sing to the God who gives us salvation and who keeps our souls secure. We sing to a personal being whom we profess to love and trust. How can our praises be cold and impersonal when directed to such a God as this?

Our praise should be compulsive

The most compelling reason for giving worship in praise to God is that he is worthy. The psalmist clearly demonstrates this.

He is the transcendent being (v3). There is nothing and no one bigger than God. There is none his equal - none his superior. Nothing in Heaven or earth or in hell can challenge his supremacy. He is not a being that, in turn, must give praise to a higher being greater than himself. He transcends all and, therefore, is worthy.

He is the great creator (v5). The whole of the created order continually invites us to praise the one who made it. The hills, the sea, the sky, the fields - all should remind us of the greatness and the glory of our God who created them, and, in turn, creates within us a compelling desire to praise him.

He is our maker (v4). The right response of the creature to the Creator is to fall down and worship. In the book of Revelation, the twenty-four elders worship, saying, “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created”. In recognising him as the one who made me and the one for whom I am made, I must recognise his right and my responsibility to offer him praise.

There is a fourth reason that compels us to praise. There is something greater than the creative brilliance of God. There is something more inspiring than the power and genius of God. It is that the same God who created all things, who transcends all things, loves me and is the Rock of my salvation. In Psalm 8, the psalmist stands outside on a clear starry night and scans the heavens. He is awed at the beauty and the vastness of all that God has made. He has a deep sense of his own puniness, in comparison to the huge universe out there. And then it hits him that the God who made this vast universe is the very same God whose heart goes out in love to puny little people like him. He can scarcely take it in. It is so perplexing that he asks, “What is man, that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him?”

The holiness of God is awesome. The power of God is frightening. The majesty of God is overwhelming, but it is the love of God that is truly mind-blowing. Who can take it in? Who can understand the God who fills eternity, who sits on the throne of the universe, who is unchallenged in his supremacy, who is flawless in his character and, yet, still loves and reaches out in mercy to sinful specks of his creation like you and me? We can’t understand. All we can do is worship. If there is one thing that affects our singing for the worse more than an ignorance of tunes and sol-fa, of pitch and pace, it is the ignorance of God, and of the greatness of his being and the wonder of his love. Once you know and sense this God, praising him is compulsive.

Our praises should be felt

What is more important than the key we sing in? It is the spirit we sing in. Heartfelt praise from a tone-deaf man is more acceptable to God than the offering of heartless praise with a voice like Pavarotti. Soul music is what we should offer, sincere and true. We are to sing with joyful hearts. The psalm speaks of a loud shout, a ringing cry of joy exploding from a heart touched by grace. We should be happy to give God praise. With unashamed enthusiasm, we should be joyful in song. We are also to sing with thankful hearts. Praise is a thanksgiving offering. It flows from a feeling of indebtedness to the Rock of our salvation. It stems from a felt sense of thankfulness to the One who has given me all that I have in this world and who has made me all that I am in Christ Jesus. Surely we should never be satisfied to mindlessly go through the motions of praise. “Bless the Lord O my soul; and all that is within me bless his holy name”.

Our praises should be together

Solos are great. There is much value in singing praise to God when alone during times of personal devotion. However, solos should only be performed when alone. When we are with God’s people, we should sing together. The psalm’s invitation is: “Come, let us sing to the Lord”. It is so much easier to throw yourself into the praises of God when the person beside you is giving it their all. Let us make it easier for others to give heartfelt praise to God by ourselves singing from the heart.

Come, let us sing to the Lord.

Rev. Donald G. MacDonald is minister in Portree.

Sermon Excerpts

Partnership in Service - Professor G. N. M. Collins

“Workers together with Him” - I COR. 6:1

From Paul’s many allusions to the Christian ministry, it is evident that he regards it as, of all occupations, the most exalted. He may speak of himself as “less than the least of all saints”, “the least of the apostles’’ and “not meet to be called an apostle”, but, invariably, he magnifies his office. The Christian minister, he declares, is an ambassador for Christ, a plenipotentiary of heaven, engaged in the service of the kingdom which lies nearest the King’s heart, the salvation of men. He had not been a follower of Christ during our Lord’s earthly ministry and, consequently, was not a member of the little group to whom Jesus gave the great commission, to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. But he had received his marching orders from Christ as directly as they had. On the Damascus Road, the life-transforming encounter had taken place and the former persecutor had gladly fallen in with his new Master’s purpose for him, to bear his name before the Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel. All the shining gifts, all the burning zeal, all the surging energy that had formerly marked the fanatical persecutor were now transferred and consecrated to the service of Christ. And the latecomer to the goodly company of the Apostles was just as keenly aware as any of his brethren were of the accompanying presence, in all his service, of the Master, Who, in the great commission, had said, “And lo I am with you alway”. The erstwhile persecutor was now a “worker together with Him’‘.

Let us note from these words:

(I) The position occupied

“Workers together with Him.” For He was no idle Master. It was as a worker that the Son of God Himself appeared among men and, in this, as in every other aspect of His character, He is the perfect example. His devotion was absolute. “My meat,” He said, “is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work”. And again, “I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work”. The work was arduous. “If Adam has not sinned,” says Matthew Henry, “he had not sweated.” It was hard work winning his daily bread from the ground that was under a curse because of his sin; but, if the sweat of his brow was the measure of his toil, who can estimate the travail that is marked in the sweat of the Second Adam, which, in Gethsemane, was as great drops of blood falling to the ground? Surely this supreme example of self-sacrificing service rebukes our self-regarding slackness.

Lord, when I am weary with toiling,

And burdensome seem Thy commands,

If my load should lead to complaining,

Lord, show me Thy hands—

Thy nail-pierced hands, Thy cross-torn hands,

My Saviour, show me Thy hands.

Christ, if my footsteps should falter

And I be prepared for retreat.

If desert or thorn cause lamenting,

Lord, show me Thy feet—

Thy bleeding feet, Thy nail-scarred feet,

My Saviour show me Thy feet.

O God, dare I show Thee

My hands and my feet?

It was as a worker rejoicing at the completion of His work that He cried from the Cross; “It is finished”. It was an echo of what He had previously said in His High Priestly prayer, “I have glorified Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do”. “Only once,” writes F. W. Boreham, “in the world’s history did a finishing touch bring a work to absolute perfection; and on that day of days a single flaw would have shattered the hope of the ages”.

We sometimes hear it said, as preachers press upon their hearers their obligation to serve the Lord, “God has no hands to work with but our hands. He has no lips to proclaim His message but our lips. He has no feet to carry the good news to other lands but our feet.” But, however good the intention that lies behind the words, they simply are not true; and they limit the Holy One of Israel. The fiat of Eternal Sovereignty alone was enough to bring all things into being in the creation of the universe; and, in the execution of the work of Redemption, it was a solitary figure that trod the wine-press. He did it alone and, of the people, there was none with Him.

And, yet, it pleased Him in extending His kingdom in the world to call His redeemed to become “workers together with Him”. He knew the joy and satisfaction of a congenial task, and He desired His people to share it with Him. The call of the Gospel thus combines emancipation and consecration. It promises rest, not in indolence, but in service. If it removes one yoke, it imposes another. The slaves of sin become servants of righteousness. Constraint is indeed exercised in the recruitment, but it is the conscription of love. For it is in the immediate context of the words we are considering that Paul tells how he came into the service of Christ. “For the love of Christ constraineth us,” he writes, “because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again.”

It was a constraint joyfully yielded to. It was the surrender of the now-liberated will and the conquered heart. It issued from a true knowledge of God in Christ and an experience of His saving grace. “Who art Thou, Lord?”, the humbled persecutor had cried when he came under the arrest of love. And, when the desired identification was made, the surrender followed; “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do”. Under a sense of undischargeable obligation, he gave himself without reserve to the service of his new Master.

Make me a captive Lord, and then I shall be free;

Force me to render up my sword and I shall conqueror be.

My will is not my own till Thou hast made it Thine.

If it would reach the monarch’s throne, it must its crown resign.

“Workers together with Him”; what surprising choices the Lord often makes in calling men into His service. And all the more surprising because they are not made under the pressures of need. When our nation was building up its armed forces at the beginning of the Second World War, many who, in normal times, would have been judged substandard for national service were called to the help of the Crown in a time of peril and unpreparedness. The situation of extreme urgency which had so suddenly arisen required that all available manpower should be mustered. Normal standards must be lowered, at least until the war-machine was fully operative.

But there was no straining of God’s resources when He called men into the warfare of His Kingdom. And it was not because no others were available to Him that He gathered into His armies the foolish things of the world; the weak things of the world; the base and despised things of the world, but because the weakness of men was His chosen medium for the displaying of the perfection of His power. The treasure was committed to earthen vessels that the excellency of the power might be seen to be of God and not of men, to the end that no flesh should glory in His presence.

Yet, it looked as if His cause were doomed from the outset. “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on Him?”, scoffed the religious leaders. Under such patronage and with such recognition, His cause might indeed prosper. But ignorant and unlearned men, people of the peasant stock, fishermen of Galilee, what possible influence could they exert? By worldly standards, the Pharisees were right when they measured the workers against the work. And Gamaliel was right when, having made his measurement, he said, “. .. if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought”. It was all a confirmation of what the Master Himself had said, “. .. without Me ye can do nothing”.

But this brings us, secondly, to:

(2) The power promised

For who will doubt that there is an assurance of empowerment implied in this description of the Lord’s servants as “workers together with Him”? The promise is made explicit in the parting words of Christ to His disciples on the Mount of Olives. “Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you’‘; and, in that power, they were to be witnesses unto Him, “both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth”. But they must “tarry in Jerusalem”, until they were “endued with power from on high”. “Workers together with Him” - break that partnership for a moment; measure those early disciples against the tasks assigned them and how pitifully inadequate they seem! A mere Gideon’s band against a confederate army, which was as grasshoppers for multitude…and as the sand by the seaside, which cannot be numbered. But at the battle-cry of that feeble army, “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon”, the Lord set every man’s sword against his fellow in the camp of the enemy, “and all the host ran, and cried, and fled”.

In the same empowering alliance, the stripling David counter-challenged the champion of the Philistines “in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel” whom he had defied; and his trust was honoured with resounding victory. Samson, weak as other men, when the Lord departed from him, regained his great strength in answer to prayer and broke the power of Israel’s enemy. “Workers together with God!” Moses saw how that alliance would work out in Israel’s future and, with prophetic tongue, exclaimed, “Happy art thou, O Israel, who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help, and Who is the sword of thy excellency, and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places”.

And Israel’s Psalmist, in later years, reviewing the long list of Israel’s triumphs over the centuries, gives the glory of them all to Israel’s God. “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, now may Israel say; if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us; then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul. ... Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

Israel’s sword was indeed active in these conflicts; but “they got not the land in possession by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them; but Thy right hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto them”.

And there we have the pattern of the Church’s warfare today. It is not without significance that she is compared to an army and that her activities in the world are compared to a warfare. She is an aggregate of individuals called and commissioned to press the claims of Christ upon a disaffected world, prosecuting the campaign in His way, waging the warfare in His strength, trusting for victory to His promise.

“If this work be of men,” said Gamaliel, “it will come to nought. But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.” And that it was of God the apostles themselves were always quick to testify. “Ye men of Israel,” said Peter to the people who came together to see the man who had been healed at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, “why marvel ye at this ? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk? The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers hath glorified His Son Jesus ... and His name, through faith in His name, hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know. .. .” And, when at Lystra, the people cried, “the gods are come down to us in the likeness of men”, because of the miracle of healing which they witnessed there, the disciples disclaimed all credit for the wonder which had been wrought, ascribing the glory of it all to the power of God which had wrought through them. “Who is Paul”, wrote this apostle to the quarrelling factions at Corinth, “and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man. I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.” If, in another epistle, he appears to us to change his testimony, is it because we have stopped reading too soon? For, if he claims, “I can do all things”, this ability, he immediately adds, is “through Christ which strengtheneth me”. It is thus that the “worm Jacob” is made a “new sharp threshing instrument having teeth”; and is enabled to “thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and ... make the hills as chaff”.

But let us look, finally, at:

(3) The prospect cherished

From the nature of the partnership described in our text, it is evident that failure is completely ruled out and success ensured. There are other passages of Scripture from the pen of this great Apostle which reveal the strength of his confidence that the cause to which he had consecrated his life would reach fulfilment, in spite of the relentless opposition of enemies and notwithstanding the apathy and lethargy of many who profess to be its friends. “Let us not be weary in well doing”: he urges the Galatians, “for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.” He exhorts the Corinthians in similar strain; “be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord”. Reverses there were, but his faith remained constant. From a prison cell, knowing that he was “about to be offered” and that the “time of his departure was at hand”, he expresses to his son in the faith, Timothy, his confident expectation of ultimate victory. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.” There is a cynical view of faith which defines it as “believing that which you know to be untrue”, but cynical definitions are notoriously untrustworthy. Faith, according to a truer definition, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. And Christian faith has always something trustworthy to cling to, even the sure promises of a covenant-keeping God. Trials of faith there will be; times when there is no awareness of the Divine yoke-fellow’s Presence; times such as the disciples passed through when they battled against contrary winds on the Sea of Galilee, “And it was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them”. But His eye was upon them in all their toil and terror; and, at the right moment, He joined them, saying reassuringly, “It is I; be not afraid”.

If they cast Paul into prison at Philippi, the result, for him, was a fuller awareness of the Master’s Presence; for that, surely, must be the secret of the song at midnight, which the prisoners heard issuing from the inner prison. If the situation became menacing at Corinth, it brought him that word of comfort and command, “Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace. For I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee: for I have much people in this city.” When the tempest broke upon the ship that was bearing him to Rome and all hope of deliverance was abandoned, it was Paul who became the rallying centre of the despairing ship’s company, saying, “I exhort you to be of good cheer; for there shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but of the ship. For there stood by me this night the angel of God, Whose I am and Whom I serve, saying, “Fear not, Paul: thou must be brought before Caesar; and, lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee .. .” If friends failed him at a critical hour in Rome, the effect was the deepening of his trust in his unfailing partner. “No man stood with me,” he records, “but all men forsook me. ... Not withstanding, the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me.” Scourged, beaten, stoned, imprisoned, constantly confronted by danger and the threat of a violent death, he, nevertheless, retains all his confidence in the righteousness and ultimate triumph of the cause to which he had dedicated his life. “Now thanks be unto God,” he writes, “which always causeth us to triumph in Christ. .. .” The taste of victory was upon the very trials which led to it! “Our light affliction which is but for a moment worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”

Sir Robert Stopworth, who commanded one of the ships with which Nelson dispersed and defeated an enemy fleet far greater than his own, wrote at the very height of the sore struggle which preceded the victory, “We are half starved, and otherwise inconvenienced by being so long out of port. But our reward is—we are with Nelson.”

To be a worker together with such a Commander was assurance and compensation enough for all the hardship involved. That Commander died in the hour of his greatest victory. He was given an honoured grave among the most famous of his countrymen; but the fame attaching to his name, despite the many memorials erected by a grateful nation to perpetuate it, was of a fading order; and little remained to the men who had served and suffered with him but their memories, their battle scars and the pittances allowed by the nation for their sustenance in declining years.

The fellow workers of Christ fare differently. The Captain of their salvation died, indeed, in the hour of glorious triumph. But He rose again. He ascended to the right hand of eternal majesty and, from that seat of power, He directs the warfare of His Kingdom, sending no man on a warfare at his own charges, but supplying the needs of all who rally to His standard until His sovereignty is universally acknowledged and His enemies are made His footstool. And the claim which He presents in the interests of all who are “workers together with Him” shall be fully met; “Father, I will that they also whom Thou has given Me be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory which Thou hast given me; for Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world”.

To speak of our Lord’s death upon the Cross - as some irreverently do - as “a splendid gamble” is really to charge Him with the imprudence of the king in His own parable who, failing to count the cost, marched with his 10,000 men against another king who completely outmatched him. Christ knew the cost of victory from all eternity and knew, also, that He was well able to meet it. The song of victory was composed before ever the battle was joined. More lasting His fame than that of any other victor and more abundant the rewards of those who serve under His standard than those of the men who subject themselves to other dominions.

His name for ever shall endure,

Last like the sun it shall:

Men shall be bless’d in Him, and bless’d

All nations shall Him call.

But, as “workers together with Him”, let us ever bear in mind that we serve under His direction. Obedience is the condition of power and the only power by which the Church can fulfil its purpose in the world is the power which energised her at the beginning - the power of Pentecost. She may improve her organisation, modernise her methods, increase her wealth, perfect her planning, bring to her task all that social influence and material resources can contribute, but she will stand discredited and helpless in the presence of a resurgent paganism if she departs from her marching orders. For the weapons of this warfare are not carnal. The energy of the flesh cannot do the work of the Spirit. The sufficiency of the Church is not of men, but of God and the communication of that sufficiency cannot be expected where His will is resisted, His command ignored.

The miracle at Cana of Galilee was made to depend on the obedience of the servants who, in a golden hour, became workers together with Him. “Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it” was then and is now the rule of Christian service. Reason may, at times, wish to sit in judgment on His ways and even presume to amend His orders. There seemed to be little point in carrying water into a festal chamber where the company were waiting for wine. There appeared to be no purpose in casting a net on the right side of the ship after having toiled all the night long and taken nothing. To anoint the eyes of a blind man with clay, and then bid him go and wash himself at the pool of Siloam, might be judged a mockery of his misery. To send men into all the world with the Gospel of the Cross was to cast a stumbling block in the way of the Jew, to provoke the ridicule of the Gentile and to invite utter failure, except for one thing; that in every case the bidding came from the Christ who, in issuing it, said, “All power in heaven and in earth is given unto Me ... and lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the age”.

And, as the workers receive their discharge, it will be with His commendation and His eternal reward; “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord”. Joined with Him in service, they will also be joined with Him in glory. For, if we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. For He is faithful Who said, “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne”.

Rev. G. N. M. Collins was minister of Greenock and St. Columba’s. He was also Professor of Church History at the Free Church College.

Sermon Excerpts

In the Year that King Uzziah Died - Rev. D. K. Macleod

Sermon given by the Retiring Moderator at the General Assembly, May 1999.

It was a critical time in Judah - the year that King Uzziah died. He had reigned for 52 years and, under his rule, the kingdom had prospered, extended its borders and, for most of that time, been at peace with Israel, and, together, they had been strong enough to keep enemies at bay.

Now Isaiah was concerned. Three years before this, King Jeroboam II of Israel, their Northern neighbour, had died and anarchy had followed; this could not fail to have its effect on the peace of Judah. Over in the East, Assyria was increasing in power. At home, there were the usual questions raised when a young prince comes to power. Would Jotham be a good strong king as his father Uzziah had been for most of his reign? Would he try to follow his father in his attempt to usurp priestly authority? For we read, concerning Uzziah: ‘He was marvellously helped till he was strong. But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction’. He went into the temple to burn incense - something absolutely forbidden for any other than the priests. He was reminded of the sin involved, but persevered in his intention and, for this, he was stricken with leprosy and had to live apart for the rest of his days. His son, Jotham, acted as regent. Now he had full power. What would he be like?

Crisis

So it was a time of CRISIS. Crisis, we might say, in Church and State. Is it exaggeration to use this language of the situation in our Church and State today? Are there parallels to be found, I wonder, at any level - individual or congregational or denominational, to King Uzziah, of whom it is written that ‘He was marvellously helped till he grew strong’? What dangers there are in feeling strong in the work of the Lord, for we fight ‘not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’, and success comes, not by might nor by our ability, but by God’s Spirit.

What sin there is in feeling proud of ourselves - or of our church? ‘Pride’, we are told, ‘goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall’. Constantly, we need to remind ourselves of what the Lord has done for us and where we would be without His forgiving, sustaining grace. We are all too painfully aware of the picture that we, as a branch of Christ’s Church, are presenting to the world outside. Some are tremendously sad; while others ridicule.

Fathers and Brethren, servants of the Most High, we are called to show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvellous light. What are we showing to a watching world - a world in darkness - a world in desperate need? What of the condition within? What is happening to ourselves? Words of Samuel Rutherford, written at a time of controversy in the Church of his day, seem so apposite today; “We are now shouldering and casting down one another in the dark, and the godly are hid from the godly”. We know too much of this, as barriers are raised where no such things should be. Rutherford saw this as causing a universal deadness of spirit; and, in another letter, he writes, “Woe is unto us for these sad divisions that make us lose the fair scent of the Rose of Sharon.”

Can we say that we are unaffected in this way? Heat of controversy tends to have a deadening effect on the heart. Nothing can so melt the heart of the redeemed sinner like a fresh glimpse of the glory of the Risen Saviour, whose prayer for His church, before He gave His life for it, was that it would be ‘One, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.’ Is it surprising that there is so much unbelief in the world when there is so little of that unity shown?

Well might we have the concern of Habakkuk, who said, ‘I will watch to see what he will say unto me and what I shall answer when I am reproved.’ Consider one trying to split a log of wood. The axe will not do it. He takes a wedge, hammers it in, it gives a bit more, creaking all the time. But stop! A knot proves to be impenetrable. The Devil has been at us like that woodman - hammering away. Has he reached that solid bit that will not give? I pray so.

But many have been hurt in the process - some more than others. Oh, how we need the Balm of Gilead to soothe our sores and heal our wounds. And you know where and how that Balm can be had.

There was CRISIS in Church and State.

Many of our laws are at variance with God’s revealed will, and the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. There are many concerns regarding the new Parliament. Will its members acknowledge that God reigns and that we must all give account to Him for the way we conduct our affairs? Will they seek to know what His Law says, as they make rules for the realm? Will election pledges be fulfilled?

There was also a personal CRISIS in the life of the prophet. He was given to appreciate something of the Greatness and the Holiness of God, and it brought from his heart the cry, ‘Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.’ This was God’s servant - called to be His spokesman. Others have been similarly affected. When Ezekiel saw what he describes as ‘the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord’, he fell on his face. Ah, but, some will say, that was in the old dispensation. Things are different now. How are they different? When John saw something of the glory of his exalted Master, he fell on his face as dead. One has put it like this:

Oh how shall I whose native sphere

Is dark, whose mind is dim,

Before the Ineffable appear,

And on my native spirit bear

The uncreated beam?

Many of God’s servants get similarly cast down for these or other reasons. There is the immensity of the task before us; the antipathy of a materialistic and hedonistic world; the apathy of some from whom help might be expected; the weakness and sinfulness of the messenger, and simply the weariness of the flesh. Dwelling overmuch on these and the like can drag one down to despair. But here is a lifting-up for the downcast.

Comfort

There was COMFORT. Comfort provided by the living God. Isaiah’s felt need was dealt with. He heard a voice say, ‘Thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin purged,’ and he heard a Call issued, ‘Who will go for us?’. Confession, which the awareness of the holiness of God drew forth, was so quickly followed by Cleansing and Commissioning. How great is the Mercy and Grace of our God! Long ago, He said through Solomon, ‘If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn away from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and forgive their sin, and will heal their land.’

My friends, how we need that forgiving and that healing of our land, our church and, first of all, ourselves. Our Lord is the same - yesterday, today and forever. His ear is not heavy that He cannot hear the penitent’s cry. He has promised Grace sufficient for every need. He, to whom all power in Heaven and earth pertains, has promised never to leave us to ourselves. Here is lifting-up for the downcast, if we will, but remember the promises and lay hold of Him who has promised. He calls, ‘Come unto Me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest’. We may, at times, apply these words to the unconverted, but surely the believer who can often feel weary in the work may, and should, come to the One who has proved so often His ability to help, and seek grace to help again in this time of need. Oh friend, I trust that you will be able to sing over and over again -

I came to Jesus as I was,

Weary and worn and sad;

I found in Him a resting place,

And He has made me glad.

Commission

There was CRISIS experienced and COMFORT given, and a COMMISSION accepted. The humbled, cleansed and strengthened Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’, and he immediately responded, ‘Here am I; send me’. The COMMISSION he so willingly accepted would not be easy to fulfil. He was told the effect it would have. The people would not listen; they would not respond. There would be a deliberate turning-away from the message he was given to proclaim.

But he accepted it willingly. His eagerness has been likened to that of a hound straining at the leash. He accepted it - out of love and gratitude for the One who had cleansed him. In the course of his ministry so willingly accepted, he was to tell much of the One who was to come -The Servant of Jehovah, of whom it would be recorded that ‘He came unto his own but his own received him not.’

When the Lord Jesus spoke of the building of His Church, He said, ‘The gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.’ This implies forward movement on behalf of the Church. If we become too engrossed with ourselves, our situation, our sin, our lack of success, we tend to become stationary and the gates of Hell have nothing to resist. Our Commission continues, ‘Go - make disciples,’ and the promise stands firm, ‘I am with you’.

Oh! That, like Isaiah, we would get a fresh impression of the Glory, the Majesty, the Holiness of our God and receive a new understanding of His grace, and seek forgiveness from the One who delights in mercy. May we all know His Cleansing and Comfort, and be enabled to fulfil our Commission, forgetting those thing which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, and press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. ‘Consider Him,’ the writer to the Hebrews says, ‘that endured such contradiction against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.’

Let us, one and all, obey the Apostolic injunction and ‘put on, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, tender mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, forbearing one another and forgiving one another, if any man has a quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye’.

May the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect, in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Rev. D. K. Macleod has retired. but was formerly minister of Kingussie & Newtonmore.

Sermon Excerpts

Holding the Faith - Rev. Principal Emeritus Clement Graham

“Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us.” 2 Timothy. 1:13, I4

There is no hint of a generation gap in the relationship between old Paul and young Timothy. Out of deep affection, and in terms of their common loyalty to the Saviour, Paul speaks freely and frankly to his younger colleague; his topics including the deep mysteries of the faith, the supervision of the churches and the qualities of church leaders, and practical everyday things like money, sex and idle chatter.

Inevitably, Paul’s fondness for Timothy expresses itself in terms of gratitude for the graces evident in the young man and a yearning that he will not be daunted by the discouraging circumstances of Paul the prisoner. He recalls with thankfulness the faith that perpetuates a godly line from grandmother, Lois, through Eunice, his mother, to Timothy. This faith in Christ makes a man appreciative of every gift bestowed by God and Paul refers particularly to a gift (charisma) transmitted by the laying-on of his hands, which he wishes Timothy to exercise diligently. For the possession of the gift is one thing: the courage and discretion to use it properly is another. Paul is certain that the God who bestows gifts accompanies them with the moral and spiritual qualities for their exercise, “for God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power and of love, and of a sound mind”. So, far from being put off by Paul’s hardships, Timothy should welcome the opportunity to participate in the affliction of the Gospel as being, at the same time, an opportunity of a new experience of the power of the Gospel - specifically its death-denuding and life-giving power. The apostle indicates that his own experience runs parallel to this. He suffers: but he is not ashamed, for the God who has put him in a position of trust will sustain him in the discharge of that trust in view of the day of reckoning. Once again, therefore, Paul invites Timothy to partner him in apostolic service, bidding him “keep the pattern of sound words, which you heard from me in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit through the Holy Spirit who abides in us”.

Before attempting to elucidate some of the doctrines of the text, it is worthwhile glancing at two key phrases which Paul employs, our interpretation of which will determine the exegesis of the passage as a whole.

1. “The form of sound words.”

The expression raises the question whether Paul refers to a stylized and more-or-less stereotyped form of words in which the truth was summarized, or whether he refers to a more general pattern exhibiting the essentials of the truth without hardening its expression in conformity with a specific idiom. Elsewhere (I Tim. 1:16), Paul uses the same word to describe how the extension of mercy to him as the chief of sinners constituted a pattern or form of the long-suffering of Christ to subsequent believers. All rely on the same Saviour: all are succoured by the same mercy. All give evidence of the same pattern of long-suffering on the part of Christ: but there is nothing formalized in the application of truth in each Christian’s experience. We infer, therefore, that there is nothing in Paul’s use of this expression to justify inertia or laissez-faire in theological thinking or practical evangelism. In the presentation of the truth, we are not under obligation to retain the idiom of any age or the thought forms of any school. On the contrary, if we recognise the living quality of the truth and its essential concern with “faith and love in Jesus Christ”, we lie under the necessity of giving it contemporary expression in the actual situation which confronts us. This may expose us to risk for the truth’s sake. For we must be alive to the temptation to blunt the edge of truth by sheathing it in conventional forms of expression. There can be an avoidance of the relevance of truth, a shirking of the scandal of the Cross, which camouflages itself as concern for retention of “the form of sound words”, solidifying the pattern instead of recognizing it as Calvin does as “a living expression of things”. Our forms must not constitute an esoteric science, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, which are meaningful only to a few scholars. They must be the living expression of the truth, which is life “in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus”.

2. “That good thing committed to thee guard.”

Nowadays, one often hears this rendered “guard the good deposit”. The expression is the same as Paul uses two verses earlier, where he declares confidence that God is able “to guard my deposit against that day”. Whether by “my deposit” Paul means “what I have entrusted to God”, or “what God has entrusted to me”, will no doubt keep commentators arguing. What concerns us in the particular text before us is that the deposit entrusted to Timothy includes more than a written or oral embodiment of the Gospel: includes also the gifts and graces needful to the man who is put in trust with the Gospel. As priests and levites were together responsible, not only for the observance of the ritual, but for the maintenance of the whole fabric of tabernacle and temple, so the Christian, and especially the office-bearers of the Church, have a stewardship in regard to all that affects the Church as “the pillar and ground of the truth”. We have the pattern of doctrine; we have the gifts of grace. They healthily react upon one another, the appreciation of the truth stirring up the gifts of grace and grace exciting us ever more eagerly to study the pattern of sound words, and this living development of grace and truth is always energized by the Spirit of God who alone can make us sufficient for the things committed to our charge.

We propose to summarize the teaching of our text in four simple propositions:

(I) Christian activity must have the Word as its constant point of reference

Paul recognizes that Timothy is, and ought to be, a busy man - a student and a workman. But he insists that what busies mind and hand must be consistent with, and calculated to advance, the spread and understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Word will provide him with his syllabus of studies and his worksheet for life. This is a principle more easy to proclaim than to practise. For we are all disposed to develop interests and activities - legitimate in themselves, but which distort the Christian order of priorities. Who of us at the end of each day can lay our hand on our heart and say, “I was busy this day about my Father’s business?” To be busy about the right things, to be most in the greatest matters, we have to consult continually the Word of God - to consult and to obey.

Whilst we pay lip service to the supremacy of the Word in faith and life, we are always under pressure to accord practical precedence to something else. Unawares, we may lay chief emphasis on a theology of experience or a theology of expedience, and think that we have not deviated from the pattern of sound words. To be sure, experience colours our understanding of the Word and expedience dictates priorities in certain limited areas; but neither of these should ever become ultimates. It is just possible that our experience is perverse or that our expedience is a cover for cowardice, avarice or vain ambition. They are, themselves, subject to scrutiny in the light of the Word, to correction and even to overthrow, if the Word so directs.

When men take the Word of God seriously, they become bold, adventurous and confident. For it is in terms of the Divine mandate that they not only covet, but claim the world for Christ. Lack of physical resources, of popular acclaim, of visible evidences of success have never deterred those whose programme of activity is dictated by a conscience fully alive to the demands of the truth as it is in Christ. We are not to be like political parties having our confidence inflated or deflated by the results of opinion polls. Our task is delineated in the Word: we must examine our programmes in the light of the Word. This is our constant point of reference.

(2) The Living Christ vivifies the pattern of oral and written testimony

In advancing this proposition, we have no part with those who polarize the authority of Christ and of the Scriptures.

In an attempt to dissipate the embarrassment which acknowledgment of the authority of Scripture involves, these people deal with the Word as though it was the product of impressionist artists. Through the mists of myth and legend, they seek the figure of a real person who can speak to them with authority. We are conscious of no such disjunction between Christ and the Word His Spirit inspires. The authority of the Word is His authority.

But when we hear Paul speak “in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus”, we reflect not only upon the spirit in which the apostle ministers the truth to Timothy, but look to “the Author and Finisher of our faith”, in whom all Christian grace has its definitive exposition and its constant inspiration. In Him, faith and love are not abstract graces or distant ideals, but of the very essence of the life that is in perfect accord and fellowship with the Father. There can be no confusion in the thinking, no hesitancy or indecision in face of complex moral issues when faith and love are in perfect exercise. This is not the major part of the explanation of our Lord’s knowing always the things that pleased His Father - but it is not insignificant and belongs in the area where the Christian is to be conformed to His likeness. As one who has so learned of the Lord that he reproduces his accents, Paul speaks to Timothy; “In faith and love which is in Christ Jesus”. He would deem himself to have failed in his ministry, unless he had pointed his young friend directly to Christ himself. This is our perennial task and privilege. “We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord.” If we fail, it may well be because people see too much of us and not enough of Christ in us, and in our proclamation of His grace. Our graces are not on display for admiration. If our light shines and our good works are seen, it is in order that men may glorify our Father who is in Heaven. We need to become more and more absorbed in the glory of our Redeemer. This is the only sure cure for undue self-consciousness; the only certain disperser of that embarrassment and shame that lurks ever in the corners of the mind. “I am not ashamed for I know whom I believed.” Awareness of the living person; experience of the fellowship of Christ is what makes Paul’s testimony, not an official dictum, but the natural and irrepressible expression of the life that is in him.

This is a first principle. There is no understanding of the Scriptures; there is no reception of testimony until the reader and the hearer become aware of the living Person of the Saviour whom it all concerns. At whatever Scripture we begin, we must preach to our people Christ. He is the meaning of it all.

The worthy proclaiming of the Saviour involves us in the faith and love of which He is Author and Finisher. We cannot genuinely invite men to trust in a Saviour in whom we do not ourselves confide. We cannot hold up to admiration love, which in our own hearts goes unrequited. The elucidation of Biblical doctrine is never an exclusively intellectual exercise aimed at formal correctness of notions - but always a stimulation of the heart’s affections. What the systematizing of doctrine does is to assemble the information we have about our Lord and His work, so that our devotion to His Person will be more intense and intelligent. “Whom having not seen we love.” We do not love the unknown; we need to know more about Him that we may love Him better. This is our involvement “in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus”. It is not a matter of mere formal correctness of concept and practice, but of personal enthusiasm for Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. We move in the same area of thought where the apostle speaks of “faith and a good conscience”. They go together - the proclamation and practice of godliness. Would God that we all could say without blushing that our testimony is “in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus’‘.

(3) What God gives, the Christian must guard

“Guard the good deposit,” said Paul, as one who had, himself, a lively sense of stewardship in regard to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But here we have the paradox of Christian experience, so well-expressed in the proverb. “There is that scattereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet but it tendeth to poverty” (Prov. 2:24)· For the guarding of the Gospel and its graces is not by incarceration. He who hides his talent in the earth and says to His master, “Lo there thou hast that is thine” has opted out of his stewardship and invites the description “thou wicked and slothful servant .. .” The guarding of the Gospel necessitates the proclamation of the Gospel in its fullness and purity by word and life. It is not by accident, but as one carried on by the essential logic of the truth, that Paul, warning against “the sleight of men and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive)’, sets over against this “speaking the truth in love”. The truth is not guarded by silence, but by proclamation in love. In the constant human debate, we must, therefore, be in the thick of things, making known the Gospel of salvation. By all means, let us test every formulation of doctrine by reference to the Word. Let us try every spirit, whether it be of God. Let us not yield one jot or tittle of God’s revealed truth. But let us remember that we are holders, not of a treasure which is to be hidden in the dark vaults of theological banks, but of the minted currency of the kingdom of God, which is for use, for the enrichment of all who receive it. “Stir up the gift that is in thee ... and so guard the good deposit.’‘

(4) Christian guardianship can be discharged only in the power of the Holy Spirit

“Guard through the Holy Spirit” is Paul’s counsel and it confirms what we have said of the implicate of applying the truth to the existent situation. For the Spirit of God is not the spirit of inertia, but of power. His living energy is the life of the Christian and the Church. He it is who leads us into the truth, who teaches us the things of Christ. If, in our hearts, there is the glow of love to Christ; if zeal for His glory burns in us, be sure it is by the working in us of the Spirit promised by the Saviour - the Holy Paraclete of whom He declared - “He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear that shall he speak. ... He shall glorify me for he shall receive of mine and shall show it unto you.” Not to one unwilling and aloof do we cry, “Come, Holy Spirit, our souls inspire .. .”, but to one who was given to the Church at Pentecost to be in her for ever. So Peter proclaimed, “This Jesus hath God raised up. ... Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.” This was the power for which the apostles were bidden tarry at Jerusalem. This is the power which is the continuing gift to the Church. “He dwells in us,” says Paul. Elsewhere, he reminds us that our bodies are the temple of the Spirit of God. This is what assures us that the Christian Gospel is not the proclamation of an unattainable ideal. There is a communication of power: and, in the guarding of the truth, we do not go it alone. He who makes the truth “spirit and life” is with us and in us. Let us seek an intensifying awareness of His presence and power. So, let us “guard the good deposit”. May His blessing abide upon us.

Rev. Principal Emeritus Clement Graham has retired. but was formerly minister of Tain & Edderton, and was Principal of Free Church College and Professor of Apologetics.

Sermon Excerpts

He Will Baptize ... - Rev. Fergus A. J. MacDonald

“I indeed baptize you with water, but He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Mark 1:8

One result of today’s technological revolution is to make man’s activity increasingly mechanized. Much of what before was done by sheer physical effort is now carried out by mechanized and automatic equipment. Many of the calculations and correlations formerly done by the human brain are now taken over by the computer.

Few will dispute that the technological revolution has increased enormously man’s capacity to work and so to fulfil God’s creation mandate to subdue the earth (Gen. 1:28). On the other hand, it has also brought very serious problems, one of which is the temptation to view the whole of life in mechanical terms. All too easily, we find ourselves thinking that every aspect of our existence can be diagnosed, predicted and organized.

Of course, insofar as our bodies are organized on the basis of motor function, human living has indeed a mechanical aspect. But, according to the Christian Gospel, there is infinitely more to human existence than the operating of a highly complex machine of flesh, bones and brain tissue. The essence of our manhood arises, not only from our being created from the dust, but, above all, from being made in the image of God who is spirit. For this reason, the centre of human personality is the spirit or soul and the most basic elements in our experience - such as love and hate, good and evil - are essentially spiritual realities, which cannot be mechanically manipulated, mathematically measured or scientifically analyzed, except in a most superficial way. Motives, such as ambition or revenge, cannot be fed into a computer. There is this intangible, spontaneous, and often unpredictable, element in our make-up, which defies any precise analysis or control.

It is this element which we tend to lose sight of today. Our obsession with the material and the mechanical, at the expense of the spiritual and the spontaneous, is seen in the popular attitude to the sacraments. What counts with so many is the mechanics of the operation - the water, the formula, the ritual. If they receive these, they are content.

Therefore, we do well to heed John the Baptist’s reminder here that there are two aspects to this sacrament - the physical and the spiritual, water baptism and Spirit baptism. The clear implication of his words is that the second is far more important than the first. The Church can, and does, baptize with water, but only Christ can baptize with the Holy Spirit. A grasp of this distinction is crucial to a biblical understanding of this sacrament.

These memorable words of John define for us the power of this sacrament and thus, lead us into a deeper understanding, also, of the privilege of parents presenting their child for baptism and of the position before God of baptized people. We shall notice how our text illuminates all of these three aspects of the sacrament of baptism.

(I) The power of the sacrament

John indicates that while he baptizes with water, only Christ baptizes with the Holy Spirit. He is warning his disciples that baptism by him, while highly significant, is not enough. It is preliminary to the great reality which it symbolizes - baptism with the Holy Spirit by Jesus.

Similarly, the efficacy of Christian baptism does not derive from the Church, the Trinitarian formula or the water, but from Christ and Christ alone. And so, the Church must say to its people: “We baptize you only with water; Christ alone can baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

At this stage, we must ask what John meant by the phrase “baptize with the Holy Spirit”? It helps us to answer this question if we remember that John probably spoke Aramaic, a language closely related to the Hebrew of the Old Testament, where the word spirit, used to describe the Third Person of the Trinity, basically means “breath” and “wind”. It implies both life and power.

The precise meaning of the verb “to baptize” is disputed, but there is little doubt that it was widely used in John’s time in connection with initiation into a new religion or the beginning of a new religious experience.

Therefore, to be baptized with the Holy Spirit is to begin life in the Spirit or to be born again of the Spirit. In this experience, the Holy Spirit imparts both life and power to our souls, which, as a result of sin, are spiritually dead or cut off from God. The close association of water and washing with spiritual regeneration by our Lord (John 3:5) and by Paul (Titus 3:5) may well be allusions to Christian baptism - to the external rite (washing with water) and to the inner reality symbolized (regeneration or new birth).

All this leads us to conclude that it is not water baptism, but Spirit baptism which communicates the saving power of God. The notion of baptismal regeneration - that one receives eternal life automatically through water baptism - is alien to the teaching of the New Testament. Water baptism is but the outer form. True, it is a means of grace, but not in the sense that it confers the grace symbolized in it. Rather, water baptism is a means of grace, in that it points us to the One who alone can confer that grace to the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, unless Spirit baptism precedes, accompanies or follows our water baptism, we have the form, but not the power of religion (2 Tim. 3:5).

(2) The privilege of the sponsors

Infant baptism is given to parents as the sponsors of their child. A sponsor is a person who acts on behalf of someone else. Parents act as sponsors of their children in a variety of ways. For example, in legal matters, a child is represented by one or both parents because he is judged by the law either to be incapable (if an infant) or immature (if a minor). This fact of life operates in the religious sphere also. Because infants are incapable of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, their parents are asked to believe for them and, later, to teach them to believe for themselves.

The practice of infant (as distinct from adult) baptism is based upon both a biblical principle and a biblical promise. The principle is that the faith of believing parents brings their children into a privileged relationship with God; the promise, that if parents believe, their children will, in turn, believe.

These - the principle and the promise - are present in every covenant relationship God has entered into with men. For example, to Noah, God promised: “And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you” (Gen. 9:9). A similar promise is given to Abraham (Gen. 17:7, 8) concerning his descendants of whom God promises, “I will be their God”. And so, we could go on and examine all the recorded covenants made by God with His people - with Jacob (Gen. 35), Moses (Deut. 29:10-I2), and David (2 Chron. 21:7); in all these cases, this promise is central. Therefore, it comes as no surprise on turning to the New Testament or Covenant, of which Christ is the mediator, to discover that both the promise and the principle are re-affirmed in the new dispensation. “The promise,” says Peter, “is to you and to your children” (Acts 2:39). And the principle is illustrated in Paul’s words to the Corinthian Christians: “Your children are holy” (I Cor. 7:‘4), where “holy” is used in its primary sense of belonging to God.

The privilege of Christian parenthood rests upon the possession of this promise and the operation of this principle. It is these which enable Christian parents by faith to claim for their children the reality symbolized in this sacrament-engrafting into Christ.

The term sacrament, originally a Latin word meaning an oath or a pledge, was chosen by the theologians of the early Church to describe the two ceremonies instituted by Christ as a pledge of God’s covenant promises to His people. Baptism is like the guarantee we receive with a product, stating that the manufacturer will honour his promise concerning its reliability. Now one of the promises pledged through baptism is that the children of believers will be saved.

However, we must not forget that, like many guarantees, this one is not unconditional. Christian baptism is given on the basis of vows, which are to be kept in order that the promise be fulfilled. Baptismal vows can be summarized by the words “faith” and “obedience”.

First of all, faith. Parents who present their children for baptism have a duty to believe because the promise on the basis of which the sacrament is given is made concerning the children of believers. Further, believers must believe, not only on their own account, but also for and about their children. They must actively believe that God will keep this promise, claiming it day by day.

Second, there is obedience. The vows of baptism not only include the faith that our children will be saved, but also our promise to work towards this end by bringing them up in the nurture and discipline of the Lord, teaching and showing them the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Those of us who are parents of baptized children need to ask ourselves regularly whether in fact we are actively and earnestly seeking to fulfil our vows. Are we appropriating this precious promise? Are we seeking to make our children disciples by teaching and showing them the way of Christ? Or do we forget just how great is our privilege and how solemn are our vows?

(3) The position of the spectators

The people involved in a baptismal service are not only the parents and children receiving the sacrament, but also all baptized persons present. Every Christian baptism we witness is a call to renew our baptismal vows. This is the duty, not only of Christian parents among the spectators, but also of all baptized people, for the vows taken in the past on our behalf by our parents have, as we have come to the age of responsibility, devolved on us. Therefore, we must ratify or confirm these vows for ourselves. We are no longer young and dependent. Faith is now our responsibility.

Yet, is it not the case that, if we were honest, many of us would have to admit that we hang on to the “form” of water baptism much as others do to a lucky charm or mascot? We think that if we have been baptized and have not obviously repudiated our vows, this is something that God will give us credit for at the end of the day.

The fallacy of this attitude is seen when we note what Paul says about a similar dependence by the Jews on the corresponding rite of circumcision. “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter” (Rom. 2:28, 29). Because of both the general correspondence between the Jewish nation and the Church, and the particular correspondence between circumcision and baptism, we may legitimately paraphrase these words in Christian terms as follows: “He is not a real Christian who is one outwardly, nor is true baptism something external and physical. He is a Christian who is one inwardly, and real baptism is a matter of the heart, spiritual not literal.’‘

Or again, we can learn from Paul’s insistence that circumcision is of value only if the law is kept. “For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law; but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision” (Rom. 2:25). By analogy, unless we affirm for ourselves the vows of baptism and keep them, then our baptism becomes un-baptism. I wonder has it ever struck us just how tragically possible it is for us to unbaptize ourselves?

There is this very real danger that water baptism, given to be a blessing, may become a curse if we persist in distorting its functions by trusting in it rather than in Christ. Like all religious forms, it is meant to lead us to Christ (Gal. 3:14), but when it or any other worship form, becomes an end, rather than a means, then, rather than lead us to Him, it cuts off from Him (Gal. 5:4).

What is our position at this moment, regarding our baptism? Have we fallen for the fallacy of trusting in the form? Or do we realize that it is only if we trust Christ as our Saviour that the promise of baptism will be fulfilled in our lives?

Conclusion

In conclusion, let us never forget that water baptism is only a sign pointing to the reality of Spirit baptism and, therefore, substantially different from it. A road sign marked “London 500 miles” is not the city of London. In fact, it is a long way from it. Similarly, water baptism administered by the Church, while pointing unmistakably to Spirit baptism, is something quite different. Let us not rest content with the sign! Let us press on to the reality! Having been baptized with water, let us ask Christ to baptize us with the Holy Spirit!

Rev. Fergus A. J. MacDonald has retired, but was formerly a minister in Lima, Peru and Cumbernauld, before taking on the role of General Secretary of the National Bible Society of Scotland.

Sermon Excerpts

Happiness - Rev. James W. Fraser

“Rejoice, and be exceeding glad ...” - Matthew. 5:12

Each first of January, we wish each other a Happy New Year. In spite of the inauspicious auguries for the fulfillment of the wish, the greeting is not wrong or misplaced. The desire for happiness is an in-built aspiration of the human heart; we would go further and say that it is a God-implanted desire. It certainly is a perennial pursuit of the heart of man. It is also an ultimate of salvation, for the consummation of redemption will witness the redeemed of God made “perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God throughout eternity”.

Contrary to popular belief, the Christian religion is not anti-joy. This is a warped misconception fostered by a lying devil. The Bible certainly denounces and warns against the so-called pleasures of sin, but the religion it teaches is not kill-joy. There is nothing sour or ascetic about it. True, it has a place for the bitter herbs with the paschal meal; it inculcates the godly sorrow of repentance; it speaks of taking up the Cross and following Christ, but the bitter herbs are not the whole meal. The roast lamb of the Passover is the main part of the feast. The Christian life is a feast and not a fast. The Gospel is good news - not heavy tidings. There are “pleasures forevermore” at God’s right hand; “in His presence there is fullness of joy” (Ps. 16:11). Happiness, or blessedness (the words are interchangeable), is of the very essence of the Christian religion. Rejoicing is a continual exercise of the Christian life. “Rejoice in the Lord always; and again I say Rejoice” (Phil. 4:4).

(I) Happiness is a by-product

Yet, in a very real sense, happiness is a by-product of life.

If we make it our main goal, it often eludes us as the rainbow’s end recedes from the little boy who fondly seeks the legendary pot of gold! Though one of the main assets of the religious life, happiness itself is a by-product of duty and service, of righteousness and holiness. Those who see it independently of duty and service to God will find nothing but disillusionment and discontent in the long run. Like Moses’ shining face, a by-product of his fellowship with God on the Mount, happiness is given often as an unexpected bonus to faith and service. Wordsworth uses the phrase in one of his poems, “surprised by joy”, which C. S. Lewis aptly took as the title of his autobiography.

There are various recipes for happiness. They may be graded according to age. The child finds happiness (at least for a short time) in his toys, goodies and sweetmeats. Youth finds it in fun and excitement, seeks it in sex, the dancefloor or discotheque. The man, in a well-paid secure job, in a home, in hobbies. There is not much in the way of creature-happiness that age can look forward to with its limitations, physical and sometimes mental. There was a good deal of sound and sober wisdom in Barzillai’s courteous refusal of King David’s offer of a place at court. “I am this day four-score years old: and can I discern between good and evil? Can thy servant taste what I eat and what I drink? Can I hear anymore the voice of singing men and singing women? Wherefore then should thy servant be yet a burden to my lord the king?” (2 Sam. 19:35).

Obviously, we must look elsewhere for the ingredients of true and lasting happiness. These recipes for blessedness have an ingredient missing or, rather, they are the wrong ingredients. These kinds of joy may give temporary satisfaction. They may divert, but can never truly satisfy. There is an ingredient missing and it is the divine. God is left out of account and there cannot be any true happiness without God.

(2) The divine recipe

Scripture gives guidance here. Happiness, or blessedness, begins with God. One of Augustine’s prayers in his famous “Confessions” is quoted until it should have become threadbare, were it not for its intrinsic truth, “O Lord, our hearts were made for Thee and they are restless until they find their rest in Thee”. No man, woman or child is happy, truly happy, who is leaving God out, who has no room for Christ in the house of his soul. Israel of old were pronounced happy because they were a people “saved by the Lord” (Deut. 33:29). Jehovah God was in their midst.

(3) Happiness founded on reconciliation to God

For sinful man, one of the main ingredients in happiness is forgiveness. No man can be happy who is not at peace with God. An honest man who has unfortunately fallen into debt is miserable until that debt is cleared. We cannot be happy and be debtors to the Law of God, hopelessly, head-over-heels in debt! So, the Psalmist exclaimed, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity ...” (Ps. 32:’). John Bunyan, in his own picturesque way, gives expression to this when he tells how his pilgrim lost his burden. The heavy, galling load, the source of all Christian’s misery, unstrapped itself when the pilgrim came to the place where was a cross and a man hanging there - the Cross and the Man - and it rolled away, out of sight, into an empty tomb. A brilliant stroke of evangelical genius! In two or three sentences, Bunyan sums up the theological truth that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that He rose again (the empty tomb) for our justification. Little wonder the freed Pilgrim gave three leaps for joy and sang:

Bless’d Cross ! Bless’d Sepulchre! bless’d rather be

The man that there was put to shame for me.

For the sinner, happiness begins with forgiveness. And not just pardon, but justification. The pardoned man has his debt cancelled, but he remains poor; he has not a penny to his name. The justified sinner is, by way of imputed righteousness, a millionaire! He has Christ’s untold riches of righteousness laid to his account. He can never be poor again. To quote Bunyan, in another connection, though on a similar theme: “It was glorious to me to see His exaltation and the worth and prevalency of all His benefits, and that because now I could look from myself to Him and should reckon, that all those graces of God that now were given to me, were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunks at home! Oh! I saw that my gold was in my trunk at home! In Christ my Lord and Saviour. Now Christ was all; all my wisdom, all my righteousness, all my satisfaction, and all my redemption”. Christ, all my righteousness. It makes for happiness.

(4) Happiness linked with unselfishness

Another indispensable ingredient in true happiness is unselfishness. This is rather a negative way of expressing it, but then we live in rather a negative world. The positive virtue, or course, is love. No man devoid of love can hope to be truly happy. The selfish man has an insatiable appetite to cater for, like the sea, the grave and the barren womb; selfishness can never say, “Enough”. Selfishness eats up happiness: it is self-consuming in a horribly cannabalistic way! But love does not think of itself; it thinks of others, it serves others, it suffers for others. And happiness comes to it by way of bonus! Our exemplar in this, as in so many things, is the Lord Jesus Himself. A man of sorrows, yet, paradoxically, He could not be termed unhappy. It was His joy to do the Father’s will, and to save His people according to that will. He loved the Father, He loved His own in the world and Jesus knew what true happiness was. So may we, if we follow His steps and fulfil His new commandment to love one another.

(5) Happiness dependent on consistent Christian living

Again, happiness is linked with the consistency of a Christian life. The first Psalm makes this clear: “Blessed (or happy) is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked ... but his delight is in the law of the Lord .. .” (Ps. 1:1-2). For, if we are not saved by our keeping of the law, we are certainly saved to keep God’s holy law. “Freed from the law, O happy condition!” was never meant to be construed as a pre-requisite for happiness, for blessedness is to be found by those who “walk in the way of the Lord to all well-pleasing”. To stray out of the way is to court unhappiness. In spite of the ease of Bye-Path Meadow to pilgrim feet in comparison with the King’s Highway, it eventually leads to Doubting Castle and the dungeon of Giant Despair. David found this out when he sinned grievously over Uriah’s wife and, for a time, lost the joy of salvation. Without fearfulness, but in the fear of the Lord, we must look to our ways and watch our conduct, if we would know the sunny side of the Christian footpath. We have constantly need of this prayer:

Hold up my goings, Lord, me guide

in those Thy paths divine,

So that my footsteps may not slide

out of those ways of Thine.

- Ps. I7:5

(6) Happiness and the Cross of Salvation

The last ingredients in true happiness we would mention are, at first sight, surprising, even paradoxical. The characteristics of the happy man are set forth by our Lord in the opening of His great address to His disciples, the Sermon on the Mount. There, He declares that the blessed, or happy, people are the mourners, the poor, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek. These rather seem to militate against joy and gladness: they appear, rather, as intruders into happiness. Not so! They give flavour to the meal, like salt and vinegar. True, by themselves, they do not make a meal, but they give taste and quality to it, as the bitter herbs to the paschal meal. So, Jesus says, “. .. Blessed are the meek ... blessed are those that are persecuted for righteousness sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad ... !” (Matt. 5’ 3, 4·, 5, ‘0, 12). Such knowledge may be too strange for us, too high to understand. Yet, it was exemplified in the early Christians persecuted for the Gospel’s sake. They returned out of prison to their fellow-believers, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus. Paul and Silas not only prayed, but sang praises as they sat with bleeding backs and their feet fast in the stocks. Little wonder Luke records that the “prisoners heard them” (Acts 16:25). Heard them with astonishment. But they were merely repeating the experience of the Man of Sorrows Himself (though not in any penal, expiatory way), who is also the Man of Joy. And so, the Christian believer learns to “glory in infirmities” (2 Cor. ‘2:9), to “glory in tribulations also” (Rom. 5:3). He knows the secret, which grace alone can teach to be “exceeding joyful in all his tribulations”, not after they are all over. But, if the Christian believer knows the secret of joy in the midst of troubles, what will the joy be when they are all past!

Happiness? Not an impossibility, even in a world in which “man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7), rather a reality for those who are in Christ reconciled to God by His blood, stayed by His grace, for all who live by faith in Christ Jesus and are obedient to the heavenly vision.

Rev. James W. Fraser (deceased) was Minister in Wick, Plockton & Kyle, Buccleuch & Greyfriars and the Free North. He was also Professor of Old Testament at Free Church College.

Sermon Excerpts

The Grace that Brings Salvation - Rev. Donald Gillies

“Who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad and exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto the Lord.” Acts 11:23

It has often happened in the history of the Church that what was designed to bring about its destruction, was, under God’s hand, instrumental in its expansion. By the persecutions which followed the death of Stephen, many of the disciples were driven out of Palestine. Some made their way to Cyprus and other islands of the Levant, while others went as far as Antioch, the capital of Syria. Although those disciples could be banished, they could not be silenced. In Antioch, some Creek-speaking Jews proclaimed the Word, not only to their fellow Jews, but also to the Gentiles. The question of whether the Gospel ought to be preached to the Gentiles was one to which the Jews had for long given but one answer, an answer born of the spirit of exclusivism and national prejudice that had held sway among them for generations. However, God’s blessing followed the preaching of the Gospel in Antioch and many were converted, fully justifying the boldness and the zeal of those who had not hesitated to preach to the Gentiles the Lord Jesus.

It is not surprising that the news of the revival in Antioch excited interest among the disciples in Jerusalem and they resolved to send someone to Antioch to find out at first hand what was actually taking place, and to give such help as the situation there might require. For this mission, they chose Barnabas, a person well-fitted for such an undertaking. A Hellenistic Jew, a native of Cyprus, he was a spiritually-minded man of sound judgment, who could be relied upon to give a just appraisal of the situation.

It is interesting to learn from the words of our text his recognition of what was actually happening in the Syrian capital and we might, first of all, consider:

(1) What he saw on arrival there

He saw the grace of God. There is no word about his seeing or hearing things that cut across the early prejudices and traditions of the Jews. There is no word of his seeing what many of his fellow Jews would have deemed irregular or even offensive. He saw right to the root cause of all that was taking place where the Gospel was proclaimed; he saw: the grace of God.

This was a clear-cut answer to the problem that had given rise to a number of questions in those early days of the Church. God had set the seal of His approval upon this ministry to the Gentiles and vindicated the actions of those who would make known to all the world the unsearchable riches of Christ. Moreover, this is a glorious description of what underlay the change in men’s lives that was so obvious to Barnabas when he arrived there.

It is evident that Jews and Gentiles in that region had believed in the Lord. And it must be remembered that, however many privileges those Jews had previously enjoyed, and however much the Gentiles may have lacked them, nothing less than the grace of God could turn the hearts of men of either class to the Lord; while, on the other hand, that same grace was sufficient to convert as many as were made partakers of it.

If the blessings of which the fruits were seen in Antioch are traced to their source, we find that it is all of grace! The election of those predestinated unto eternal life is called the “election of grace”. It is not because of anything foreseen in those who are to be the subjects of that grace, but, according to the sovereign purpose of a gracious God, who loved His people with an everlasting love. The very heart of the revelation God has given of Himself speaks to us of grace - full and sovereign and free - and the Son’s giving of Himself to suffer and die for sinners is the exercise of His grace.

In the lives of those converts, grace is seen in its irresistible power. Those who had been enemies of the Cross of Christ, whether consciously and avowedly or in the darkness of their spiritual ignorance, surrendered to the claims of the Lord Jesus, and turned from idols to serve the living and true God.

Is not light cast also on the freeness and the sufficiency of God’s mercy? Those souls had been steeped in pagan darkness and enslaved by every conceivable vice, but God, in His loving kindness, did not pass them by. Nor can anything other than this mercy cover the sins of those whose conduct may appear to themselves blameless and who tend to rest in their own righteousness. All have sinned and have come short of the glory of God, but the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared unto all men.

No power other than that of the Gospel can change the human heart and enable sinners to render obedience, not only to the commands of the law, but to the invitations of the Gospel, and to rest upon Christ as the Rock of their salvation.

But, we ask, how could Barnabas see this grace? He saw the effects and the fruits of it in lives changed from being careless and unbelieving to being followers of the Lord. They accepted, without question, the testimony of Scripture concerning themselves as lost and ruined, and the testimony of Scripture concerning Christ, for the grace that saves works through faith, and such saving faith will prove its reality by its works.

It is not surprising that Paul says to the Ephesian believers that their salvation was to be to the glory of God’s grace and His is the grace of which the fruits were seen in the transformed lives of the converts in Antioch. By their fruits, they shall be known.

(2) His reaction to what he saw

Barnabas was glad. Nothing moves the heart of the believer more than the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the world, and that for various reasons.

The principal cause of such rejoicing is, we suggest, that God reveals a peculiar measure of His glory in the conversion of sinners. It may be said that the twin strands of God’s redemptive purpose in Christ are the glory of His own name and the salvation of His people. We are familiar with the thought that the chief purpose for man is to glorify God, but we must never forget that that was, and is, God’s chief purpose and aim in the salvation of the Church. In that redemptive purpose of God, the glory of His name and the good of His people can never be separated, as is so evident from the High-priestly prayer of the Saviour recorded in the Gospel, where the Son speaks of glorifying the Father and giving eternal life to His people. This thought was before the Psalmist’s mind when he declared: “When the Lord shall build up Zion He shall appear in His glory” (Ps. 102:16). In that glory, He appears wherever the Holy Spirit is applying the Gospel savingly to needy sinners, but none have eyes to behold the glory, save those who are, themselves, the subjects of God’s grace. As more than one colour can be seen whenever the rainbow is visible, so the attributes of the Godhead shine forth in holy splendour when the saving power of the truth is in operation in the hearts of men.

The gladness occasioned by the quickening work of the Spirit arises also from the knowledge that a blessing of inestimable value has been bestowed on poor unworthy sinners. When one thinks of what they had been in their unregenerate days - without hope and without God in the world - one cannot but feel intensely grateful to God that He has set their faces heavenwards, and their feet in the paths of righteousness. Not for them the condemnation of the law and the terrible doom that awaits all who die Christless. They have peace with God, based on a right and righteous relationship, for their sins are remitted and they are the sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus. Would not one rejoice in the accession to a fortune of one who had been poor and needy; or in the restoration to health of one who had suffered from a deadly disease? But what is the misery of temporal poverty or bodily illness in comparison with the effects of sin! Therefore, no blessing of wealth or health can compare with the riches of God’s grace in its ability to bestow happiness upon a human soul. Each believer is an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ.

Another factor that contributed to the gladness felt by Barnabas was, in all likelihood, that his own soul was refreshed by what he saw and heard. Those who have experienced something of the power of the Spirit-charged atmosphere of a revival can understand, while they cannot describe, the blessedness of feeling in their own hearts, and of sharing with others, the abundant joy of the Holy Ghost. No doubt, Barnabas had been praying for the coming of Christ’s kingdom and, perhaps, had thought of that in terms of the spread of the Gospel throughout Palestine, and the Lord answered in a way that was far above what he had asked or even thought. This is always the manner of God’s working and, however much the believer sees of the power of the Gospel, each fresh token of the working of His grace causes, and calls forth, fresh admiration and a holy gratitude that move His people to give the glory to Him alone.

(3) His exhortation to those who had believed

In our consideration of his exhortation to them, it is worth noticing how our text sets forth the sovereignty of God and man’s responsibility. Their salvation was all of grace, but that salvation was not to be worked out in such a way that exhortation and edification could be dispensed with. In all ages, there have been those thoughtless enough to imagine that the doctrine of the sovereignty of God undermined or rendered invalid the doctrine of man’s responsibility, but the very opposite is the truth. It is because God is sovereign that we are duty-bound to act as responsible creatures and, therefore, accountable to Him. It is because we are indebted to grace alone that we ought to render willing and whole-hearted obedience, as those redeemed by the blood of Christ.

Moreover, as we notice, there were to be no exceptions to this rule. He exhorted them all. The Gospel places all believers on the same level, as far as relationship to God and relationship to His word are concerned.

Probably all the duties of our Christian religion are comprehended under the one duty that Barnabas urged upon his hearers in Antioch - to cleave unto the Lord, and the word suggests that believers are to make God Himself their goal. Close attention to this counsel would have saved the Lord’s people from many a sad situation and prevented many a tragic happening in the history of the Church. All too often, allegiance has been given to a party; liberty of conscience sacrificed to the dictates of a so-called leader or truth compromised in order not to give offence, all with baneful results for the cause of Truth. Barnabas mentioned neither party nor leader, but directed them to follow Him who, alone, is worthy of their worship. This did not mean a going forward in the dark, but an advancing in the way of holiness, in accordance with the mind of the Spirit revealed in the Scriptures.

This cleaving to the Lord, moreover, implied the bringing into full exercise of all the faculties of the soul. It is an activity of the head, as well as of the heart. It calls, on the one hand, for a holy diligence in the use of all appointed means and, on the other, for a humble dependence upon the grace of God, without which no progress in sanctification can be made.

Those who value most highly the grace that saves, will, of all people, be most conscious of their obligation to follow the Lord in sincerity of heart. Saving faith has Christ, and Christ alone, for its object, but it, as surely, has the inspired Word for its rule, by which the conduct must be regulated, as the believer goes forward to the fulfillment of that destiny for which he has been called by the Spirit.

It would be well for us all to seek this grace. This is the substance of the counsel addressed by the writer to the Hebrews to those who had received a kingdom which could not be moved - let us have grace and, if we receive it, we shall inevitably be partakers of the glory.

Let us, therefore, cleave unto Him until, in God’s appointed time, He shall, in the words of Zechariah, “bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying Grace, grace unto it” (Zech. 4:7).

Rev. Donald Gillies (deceased) was minister of Lochcarron and Lochs.

Sermon Excerpts

God’s People in a Hostile World - Rev. Hugh G. Mackay

“But the God of all grace, who has called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you” - 1 Peter. 5:10

Peter is writing to groups of Christians in Asia Minor, weak and isolated, with little opportunity of fellowship with other Christians. Around were hostile pagans and perhaps still more hostile Jews. They were suffering persecution and they feared worse to come. Peter does not comfort them with wishful thinking. He can hold out no hope of respite. His aim is to put iron into their blood. He does not expect them to escape trial, nor does he particularly wish that they should. He does desire that, in the hour of trial, they should acquit themselves as Christians ought. The message of our text is addressed to Christians in a hostile world. The world is hostile still, and increasingly so. The message remains apposite today.

(1) The Christian’s situation

The peculiarity about the Christian is that he lives in two spheres.

I. He is in Christ. The phrase “by Christ Jesus” can also be rendered “in Christ Jesus”. You remember how Paul speaks of himself as “a man in Christ”. The position of the Christian as in Christ is indeed fundamental to Paul’s thinking. The Christian is united by faith to Christ in a relationship as intimate as that of a member of the body to the head. God looks at Christ and, in Him, He sees all believers. God looks at each believer and sees him in Christ. Because he is in Christ, he is secure as Christ Himself is secure. Satisfaction for his sins has been made by Christ and it has been accepted on his behalf, as if he had made the satisfaction himself. Moreover, the knowledge that he is in Christ affects the believer’s character. It should colour his every decision. The mind of Paul dwells much on this. The believer when he rejoices, rejoices in the Lord; when he marries, he does so in the Lord; when Christian children are enjoined to obey their parents, they are to do so in the Lord; when the believer makes his plans, he does so in the Lord, that is to say, he seeks to make his plans according to the mind of Christ. It is not only that this ought to be the case. The believer, being united to Christ by faith, is a child of God and that fact must be evident, at least to some extent, in his character. We read that: “Everyone that doeth righteousness is born of Him”. This means that sin in the believer is out of character. It is there, sad to say, but it is out of character. You know what we mean by that. A father has a son who does something wildly out of keeping with the character he had fondly ascribed to him. We can hear him say in the grief of a broken heart, “That is not like my son”. Can we say that God is grieved? Of course we can. Does not Paul say, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God ?” How much grief we must cause to the Holy Spirit of God in a single day - every day! Yet, in spite of all our lapses, our standing remains.

But if his children shall forsake my laws and go astray, and in my judgments shall not walk But wander from my way: If they my laws break and do not keep my commandments; I’ll visit then their faults with rods, their sins with chastisements. Yet I’ll not take my love from him, nor false my promise make. My covenant I’ll not break, nor change what with my mouth I spake.

We should remember the faithfulness of God when we are tempted to despair of ourselves. We should remember it, too, when we are tempted to criticize others. Who are we to judge? If a person is in Christ, God has accepted him.

That then is one side and, let us remember the more important side - the Christian is a man or a woman in Christ. But The Christian who is in Christ is, at the same time, in the world and, because of this double sphere in which he moves, there is tension and hence, there is suffering. There is, of course, suffering which is common to all mankind and the Christian does not escape. But there are sufferings which are peculiar to the Christian; and even such sufferings as he shares with the world take on a new meaning. They are all part of God’s discipline to further his sanctification - “After that ye have suffered .. .”.

(a) There is suffering which is of the nature of chastisement. The Christian may have to suffer sickness, pain, loss, disappointment and sorrow. We are not suggesting that every such experience is to be traced to some particular sin. To try to connect sin and suffering in this way can become a morbid obsession. On the other hand, we should seek to accept everything that comes our way as part of God’s discipline - perhaps to solemnize us, perhaps to lift our thoughts from things temporal to things eternal and to show us the folly of building for this world, but always to further our growth in grace. It is true that some have to endure more suffering than others. Jacob had a life of more severe trial than Abraham or Isaac. We do not know why. Perhaps he was made of more intractable material. In the end of the day, he could speak with gratitude of “the God who hath fed me all my life long unto this day; the Angel which redeemed me from all evil”. The Christian can rest assured that:

“My Father’s hand shall never cause His child a needless tear.”

The silversmith heats the furnace, not because he hates the silver, but because he wants it as pure as it can be made.

(b) There is also suffering which is of the nature of conflict. We are engaged in a warfare from which there is no discharge. We have enemies without and enemies within. Verse 8 leads us to the root of it all: “Your adversary, the devil, goeth about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” We speak of the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil, but the primary source is the devil. The devil uses the world. Those to whom Peter was writing were experiencing this in an acute form. They were subject to persecution or, at least, to the constant threat of persecution. Today, in this country, persecution is absent in its cruder forms. But the difficulty of living the Christian life in a hostile world is always present. Think of a young Christian witnessing for Christ before hostile or indifferent companions. Think of the howl of protest the world raises when anyone in the name of God tries to thwart its selfish plans. Think of the mockery that often greets a statement of the Christian Gospel, or even an assertion of Christian moral standards. Think, especially, of the subtle influences that cool our ardour, that mute our witness, that lead us to compromise. The devil also attacks us through the flesh, that is to say, through ourselves. We are not ignorant of his devices. We know with what cleverness and subtlety he works. He is busy when we have had a season of blessing, for if he can catch us off our guard, he can rob us of much of the blessing received. He is never more dangerous than when he is quiescent. We are flattering ourselves that we are making progress and, just then, the devil is planning a more devastating attack. We find ourselves like the allied armies in France during the “phoney war” of 1939-40, being told that Hitler had “missed the bus” and believing it, until he arrived in a cloud of aeroplanes and a swarm of tanks.

We may think of some of Satan’s methods.

(a) He sows seeds of unbelief. He tries to make us doubt the foundation truths of the Christian faith. He instills doubts as to whether we can really claim the power of God and, thus, undermines our Christian lives.

(b) He sows discord among brethren. He plants seeds of suspicion, he exploits natural antipathies and, so, breaks the fellowship of Christian people.

(c) He makes the most of our frailties. He has studied us more deeply than any psychoanalyst. He knows our weak points, he knows when we are weary, or not in good health, or inclined to be careless, and he works upon that knowledge ruthlessly.

Such is the situation. What hope can we have? Peter holds out no prospect of respite. He does direct us to recollect the Christian’s assets.

(2) The Christian’s assets

What have we to set against so powerful an adversary? Peter mentions two things.

I. The inspiration of a noble calling.

God has called us to “His eternal glory”. Does that mean that we are called to happiness for ever in Heaven? No doubt! But that is a poor paraphrase. Glory is far greater than happiness, eternal means far more than lasting for ever and this is a calling, which, though fulfilled in Heaven, is entered upon now. What, then, is “His eternal glory”? Is it not just the character of God? Can you imagine a more salutary thought than that we are called on to reflect His character? “When He shall appear, we shall be like Him”. That is the ultimate goal - that we should reflect His likeness and, towards the attainment of that goal, all God’s dealings are directed. Towards that goal, our eyes should be set. That we may progress towards that goal, our eyes should be fixed upon Jesus. “We all, ... beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.”

2. We are reminded of the availability of inexhaustible resources.

“The God of all grace!” That is the answer to “your adversary the devil”. The word “grace” is a great word. It reminds us, first of all, that we are undeserving. God’s gifts have been merited by nothing in us. It reminds us of the price at which these gifts have been made available. “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor that ye through His poverty might be rich.” It reminds us, also, of the munificence of God’s gift. The word seems to sum up all that is made available to us in Christ. There is justifying grace by which we sinners are accepted as righteous, because the righteousness of Christ - His obedience to God’s law, and His satisfaction on the Cross for our disobedience - is accredited to us as if we had done it all. There is reconciling grace by which we who were enemies are made friends and, not only friends, but sons and daughters, of Almighty God. There is illuminating grace to guide us through each perplexing path of life. There is restraining grace to keep us from turning aside out of the right way. There is restoring grace to heal our backsliding and to return us to the paths of righteousness. There is sustaining grace to uphold us in times of sorrow and in those times when everything seems to go wrong. There is strengthening grace to enable us to face temptation and to prevail.

Against me earth and hell combine,

But on my side is power divine.

Jesus is all, and He is mine.

What excuse, then, can there be for failure? The word “cannot” should not be in the Christian’s vocabulary. What God commands, He gives grace to perform.

So, finally, we are bidden to believe.

(3) The Christian’s promises

The words of our text can be treated as future tenses and, so, can be taken as promises - “shall perfect, shall stablish, shall strengthen, shall settle”. I want you to look at these words for a moment. Some of them are very interesting and must have been precious to Peter.

I. Shall perfect. The word means “repair” or “restore”. Tradition has it that Mark received much of the material for his Gospel from Peter. We can imagine how Peter would have told him of the day when Jesus called Andrew and himself from their fishing boats, and then called James and John when they were mending their nets and, as Mark sets down the story, the word he uses is this word.

Fishermen must mend their nets; and as Peter looked back on his experience as a fisher of men, he realized that not only nets need to be repaired. The fisherman needs to be repaired too. If the fishing is good, it takes toll of our energies and spiritual resources. If the fishing is bad, it leaves us disquieted and depressed. I am sure Peter often felt himself more desperate than a torn net. But he knew One who restores and refits for service.

2. Shall stablish. Here, again, is a word that had a gracious history for Peter. When Jesus foretold his denial, He added, “When thou art converted, strengthen (stablish) thy brethren”. This is the word that Jesus used. Peter’s denial was a shameful, bitter and humbling experience. It shattered his self-confidence. But it led him to God confidence. He was not only restored, he was stablished, so that he became rock-like in his steadfastness. Now he is showing his brethren how they can be stablished as well.

3· Shall strengthen. So shall we be strong for every battle we have to fight.

4· Shall settle. The word means to ground upon a sure foundation, like the man whose house was founded upon a rock.

That brings us back to the primary question. Are we building on the right foundation ? Can we say:

“My hope is built on nothing less

than Jesus’ blood and righteousness?”

If not, none of the gracious promises to God’s people applies to us. But we need not remain in this woeful condition. The Gospel invitation is still open. Nay more, the command rings in our ears, “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, Call ye upon Him while He is near”. There is also the promise, “Let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, and He will abundantly pardon”. Then, if our lives are resting upon this sure foundation, whatever be our lot, we can claim all the promises of God. They are guaranteed to us in Christ and we shall be “Kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation”.

Rev. Hugh G. Mackay was minister of Kinglassie, Aberdeen and Killearnan.

Sermon Excerpts

For Me, to Live is Christ - Professor Donald M. MacDonald

Sermon given by the Retiring Moderator at the General Assembly, May 1998

How do you define your life? If you were asked to give a crisp, one-sentence definition of your life, what would your answer be? It is natural for us to think of our lives in terms of who we are, what our family background is, what work we do, what our aims in life are and what we have achieved. Natural, for that is the way the world thinks. But followers of Christ must refuse to be pressed into the mould of the world. “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions,” said Jesus (Luke 12:15), thus warning against the ever-present danger of materialism and defining our lives in terms of this world’s categories. There are other, more subtle dangers for the Christian: seeing one’s identity primarily in terms of ethnic, cultural, political or nationalistic factors, or in terms of doctrinal, denominational or group allegiance.

What, then, is the answer to this problem of identity and definition of one’s life as a Christian? Paul sets forth his understanding of his Christian identity in this text, one of the most profound statements of Christian experience in the New Testament. “To me, to live is Christ” is his succinct way of identifying Christ as the centre of his identity and life. Let us study this remarkable statement together and apply it to ourselves. I would like Christ to be at the centre of our thoughts as we begin our meeting together in General Assembly, for it is in him that we find our identity and the true focus of our unity.

The Context

The text is intimately related to its context. Paul is writing to the church in Philippi, with which he had a special relationship. His pastoral concern for the Philippian Christians and their practical sharing in his ministry are evident throughout the letter. He is writing from prison in Rome, while awaiting the outcome of his appeal to Caesar. He explains his situation and his response to it in this chapter. What strikes us forcibly is his realism, combined with an optimism born of an unshakeable faith in the Christ he has come to know. He looks upon his imprisonment, which many would have regarded as an unmitigated disaster, as having served to advance the Gospel (verses 12-14). His witness in custody led to Christ being made known throughout Caesar’s palace and beyond. Because of his courage, other believers were emboldened to witness for Christ more fearlessly. Despite the fact that some were preaching Christ from wrong motives, Paul refused to be discouraged (verses 15-18). He rejoiced that Christ was being preached, whether from false motives or true.

Furthermore, he rejoiced that even his imprisonment would turn out for his final salvation, through the prayers of the Philippians and the help of the Holy Spirit (verse 19). And then his realism comes to the fore. In verse 20, he faces squarely the possibility that he might be called upon to face a martyr’s death for the sake of Christ. He is confident that, whether he lives or dies, Christ will be exalted though him. Why? Because for him to live is Christ, and to die is gain. The reason he was able to face with equanimity the possibility of martyrdom was that his life was so Christ-centred that death would lead to the great gain of being “with Christ, which is better by far” (verse 22).

This leads him to contemplate the future as if he had some choice in the matter (verses 22-26). Would he choose life or death? He would prefer death, not to escape the suffering of this world, but to be with Christ, to know him fully and to be made like him in glory for ever. But his sense of duty prevents him from making that choice. He is convinced that it is better for the Church that he remain alive meantime and, so, he is certain that he will be spared for some time yet, to labour for the Lord and His Church.

A Personal Testimony

It is against this background that we must understand our text. The first thing we notice is the personal nature of the statement. “To me” is placed at the beginning of the sentence in Greek. The whole passage contains the personal pronouns “I” and “me”, again and again. Paul is not afraid of giving a personal testimony. He is not reluctant to talk about his personal experience of Christ. Although he is reticent about the extraordinary spiritual experiences he sometimes had (2 Corinthians 12:1-10), he never tires of relating his own experience of the grace of God in Christ. When he reluctantly recounts his experience of being caught up into the third heaven, he introduces himself as “a man in Christ”, thus highlighting the most important aspect of his identity - his relationship with Christ, his love for Christ, his desire to glorify Christ, his aim to be conformed to the image of Christ.

Although Paul is giving his personal view of his own life, he is not drawing a contrast between himself and others who may have a different view of things from him. Some have suggested that Paul is implicitly contrasting himself with the preachers he criticises in verse 17 (NIV) (verse 16 in AV), who preached Christ from wrong motives, but there is no hint of that in the text. Rather, he is explaining how he is able to contemplate the possibilities of life and death from the viewpoint of his faith in Christ.

Is there any significance in Paul’s choice of the title ‘Christ’ to refer to our Lord? I believe that it is not merely a stylistic variation, but that it stresses the office of the Lord Jesus as Messiah and Redeemer, and, thus, draws attention to His saving work and, in particular, His cross. Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul took seriously the words of our Lord recorded in the Gospels (for example, Luke 9:23), “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Joined to Christ by faith, he knew that the cross was not merely the symbol of the atoning death of Christ, by which he was reconciled to God, but the symbol of his own death to self, sin and the world, and of his new life in Christ. Christ now lived in him by the Holy Spirit and he was no longer in control of his own life. Saul, the proud, self-righteous Pharisee, had become Paul, the humble bond-servant of Christ.

A Christ-Centred Life

When Paul says, “to me, to live is Christ”, he is talking about his ordinary, everyday life, not some secret, hidden or mystical aspect of his spiritual life. This is borne out by verses 20 and 24, which refer to his life “in my body” and “in the flesh”, thus grounding his experience of Christ in the here and now. The tense of the Greek verb “to live” refers to an ongoing present activity or process. In Colossians 3:3, Paul speaks of our life being hidden with Christ in God. This is a glorious truth expressing our objective union with Christ and guaranteeing our eternal salvation. But, here, he is referring to his subjective experience of that union. He is joined to Christ in such a way that his life is now identified with Christ and the whole aim of his existence is to give expression to that.

How are we to understand his equating of his life with Christ? Some have interpreted this as “Christ is life to me”. While this is a truth, it is not the emphasis of this text. For instance, it is clear from texts, such as Colossians 3:4 (“When Christ who is our life appears”), that Christ is the source, the preserver and guarantee of our eternal life. But what Paul is stressing here is his personal experience of life as “a man in Christ”, his identification with Christ and the effect this has on his life in the present. Paul is setting forth the motive power of his life in terms of his personal relationship with Christ. It was because his life was Christ-centred that he could face the possibilities of life or death, not only with equanimity, but also with joyful acceptance. He had learned to put Christ first in his life and was being conformed to the image of Christ.

How did this Christ-centred life express itself? By his imitation of Christ, by his being conformed to the image of Christ. There are many ways in which this can be seen, but I would like to highlight just four.

First of all, Paul showed that for him to live was Christ by his concern for the Gospel. Paul has been telling of his joy in the fact that, despite and even because of his imprisonment, the Gospel is advancing. Since for him to live was Christ, his life was bound up in the proclamation of the good news of Christ. He says in 1 Corinthians 9:16, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel”. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, the great pioneer missionary, never forgot his sense of indebtedness to bring the Gospel to all people, both Jew and Gentile (Romans 1:14). Thus, he rejoiced that the Gospel was advancing, even during his enforced absence while imprisoned. He even rejoiced that Christ was being preached by some who had wrong motives, seeking to cause trouble for him in some way.

Paul did not call into question these men’s Christian profession or doctrinal orthodoxy. Elsewhere, he is unsparing in his condemnation of false teachers who teach wrong doctrine, another gospel (for example in Galatians 2:7), but, here, the reference is to those who appear to be sound in doctrine, but they are critical of Paul for selfish motives. However, Paul is willing to let his reputation suffer for the sake of the advance of the Gospel.

This shows an important aspect of his life being Christ-centred. He followed the example of Christ, who, when he was insulted, did not retaliate, but entrusted himself to him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:21-23). We are also reminded of Jesus’ words in Mark 9:40. When his disciples told him that they had tried to stop a man from driving out demons in the name of Jesus because he “was not one of us”, he replied, “Do not stop him; for whoever is not against us is for us.” Paul put the advance of the Gospel above personal reputation, personal safety, personal gain and party spirit. To the Corinthians, who took pride in personal allegiance to leaders such as Paul, Peter and Apollos, he points to the Christ who had been crucified for them as the true focus of their lives. He urges them to stop quarrelling among themselves about secondary matters. He directs them to centre their thoughts and lives on Christ, who has become for them wisdom from God - that is their righteousness, holiness and redemption. What a challenge for you and me!

We are so ready to take offence at personal criticism. We are so prone to be suspicious of those who do not share our particular doctrinal and denominational distinctives. And, now, we are even attacking one another within our own denomination. Fathers and brethren, these things ought not so to be! Surely we should rejoice that Christ is being preached and people are being converted to him through those who may differ from us on certain matters. Are we willing to talk about these things on which we may disagree, on the understanding that it is the Gospel of Christ that is at the forefront of our agenda? Are our personal, congregational and denominational priorities decided on the basis of what will lead to the spread of the Gospel of Christ and the bringing of many people into a living relationship with him? The Gospel of Christ crucified must take priority in all our thinking and acting. Until we have this kind of concern for the Gospel, we cannot claim with Paul, “for me to live is Christ”.

Secondly, Paul showed that for him to live was Christ by his concern for the Church. Again, we can see the self-denial that he learned from Christ. Christ made himself nothing for the sake of His Church. Paul had learned to say no to self and yes to Christ! He would prefer to leave the body and be at home with the Lord, but he knew it was best for the Church that he remain on earth until the Lord should call him away. Again and again, we see in Paul’s letters his deep concern and heavy burden for the churches, not only the ones he had founded, but the whole body of Christ on earth. For instance, in 2 Corinthians 11:28, after recounting his many labours and sufferings, he says, “Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin and I do not inwardly burn?” We see this tender pastoral care throughout his letters to the young churches as he pours out his hearts to them, pleading, praying, instructing, admonishing. And remember that he calls them saints - even the proud, contentious, undisciplined Corinthians! What a breadth of vision, what a self-denying, Christ-glorifying care of the Church! How do you and I measure up in this regard?

We are so quick to find fault, to criticise, to condemn, to write people off if they do not measure up to our standards. What a travesty of a true Christian pastoral concern! We are preoccupied with our petty squabbles, while the world around is perishing for lack of the good news of Christ. Meanwhile, many people are quietly leaving our church in silent protest at what they see as a lack of evangelistic zeal and pastoral love. We have to ask ourselves, “Are we responsible for turning people away because of our attitudes, words and actions?” We are privileged, as a church, to be able to support Christian mission work in many parts of the world. God forbid that our current troubles may lessen our commitment and ability to continue to support this work. May we be filled with a Christ-like concern for the welfare of His Church.

Thirdly, Paul showed that for him to live was Christ by his concern for Christ’s glory. He had the eager expectation and hope that, whether he lived or died, Christ would be exalted in his body. The glory of Christ was his prime motivation in life. Paul expressed this in his humility. For instance, in Philippians 3:4-11, he lists all the things in his background that might have been thought to be in his favour. Then, he goes on to say that he regards them all as loss, as rubbish; that he might know Christ; that he might gain Christ and be found in him, so that he might share in his sufferings; become conformed to him in his death and, so, attain to the resurrection from the dead. In Ephesians 3:8, he calls himself the least of all saints. In 1 Timothy 1:15-17, he calls himself the worst of sinners, and goes on to ascribe all honour and glory to the King.

I ask you, as I ask myself, “Is the glory of Christ our chief motive? Or are we driven by selfish, self-centred motives?” It is all too easy for us to fool ourselves into thinking that our pre-occupations are his priorities too and that his glory is served when we get our own way. May God humble us all in the dust, that we may learn to seek Christ’s glory, above all else.

Fourthly, Paul showed that for him to live was Christ by his freedom in Christ. In Galatians 5:1, he says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” This freedom is freedom from the slavery of sin, from the law as a system of works, righteousness, and from the doctrines and commandments of men. It is freedom to obey Christ. The law is no longer an outward standard to threaten us, but an inward guide written by the Holy Spirit on our hearts to direct us how to glorify and enjoy God - the law of Christ. Christ delighted to do the Father’s will and, when we are in Christ, we share that delight. In 1 Corinthians 9:19, Paul says, “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible”. In verse 22, he says, “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” Paul was willing to limit his freedom in Christ for the advance of the Gospel and the upbuilding of the Church, being especially considerate of the weaker brother.

Do we know this freedom and flexibility in our Christian lives? Paul was firm, but flexible. Where the integrity of the Gospel was at stake, he would not compromise, but, on other matters of lesser importance, he strove to find a way of peace and co-operation. He exemplified his own instruction, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18). We may argue that sometimes it is not possible and sometimes it does not depend on us, but we must be willing to go the second mile, to turn the other cheek and to strive for a peaceful solution to our differences. Think how many weak brothers and sisters are being hurt by our refusal to live at peace.

Paul said, “I can do all things through him who gives me strength.” (Philippians 4:13). He had learned the secret of being content in all circumstances, conscious of his own weakness, but fully confident that God would give him the strength to overcome. Because for him to live was Christ, he could rise above his circumstances, whether favourable or unfavourable. Thus, he was able to reassure the Philippians and us: “My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:19). May God supply what we need in this Assembly, beyond our asking.

Hope for the Future

In light of this confident claim that for him to live was Christ, Paul was able to say “and to die is gain.” This is not a contrast to the first part of the sentence, but a consequence of it. Were he to die a martyr’s death, Christ would be glorified and the Church encouraged to witness more boldly, as they were already doing due to his example. As Tertullian said later, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” So, his death would not be a loss to the Church. But the greatest gain would be for Paul himself. He would gain the prize for which God had called him heavenwards in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:14). He would be for ever with the Lord, fully conformed to his image.

Paul’s testimony is a fitting challenge for us as we begin our General Assembly. May we have the mind of Christ, giving us humility; faithfulness to the truth; love for Christ and His Church; concern for the advance of his Gospel; and respect for, and trust in, one another. May misunderstandings and imputations of false motives be removed. May Christ be exalted.

Only if we can say that for us to live is Christ, will we be able to look forward to death as a gain. If we cannot live in harmony with one another in this life, in our common allegiance to Christ, how can we look forward to living together in glory? I appeal to you, fathers and brethren, in the words of Philippians 2:1-5: ” If you have any encouragement from being united to Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only on your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.”

May the Lord apply his word to each one of us.

Professor Donald M. MacDonald was Professor of Practical Theology in the Free Church College.

Sermon Excerpts

Facing the Dark Days - Rev. Hector Cameron

“Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me: For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry. And Tychicus have I sent to Ephesus.” - 2 Timothy 4:9-12

Paul’s placement of Timothy as pastor-superintendent of the Christian community at Ephesus, with its complex of always difficult and sometimes very vexatious problems, was an interesting one. Timothy had been, of course, specially set apart and endowed for the work of an evangelist by the laying-on of the hands, both of Paul and of the presbytery. He had already given excellent service to the apostle as his missionary companion over a considerable period, and had been sent as his trusted delegate on a variety of short-term missions to encourage and to steady churches, which were facing serious internal problems or else bearing the heat of persecution. There was in Timothy, too, something which appeared to Paul to fit him preeminently for the sort of work which Ephesus would demand. Speaking to the Philippians, he said of Timothy, “I have no man like-minded who will naturally care for your state. For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s. But ye know him that as a son with the father he hath served with me in the Gospel” (Phil. 2:10—22). Leaving aside the minute details of interpretation, this tribute identified Timothy as someone possessed to a quite remarkable degree of unselfish and genuine Christian concern for the welfare of his fellow-believers, and, equally, for the furtherance of the missionary enterprises of the Church; and as going far beyond the general run of Christians in devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, if we take the apostle’s language literally, the description of Timothy was that he figured as a “coslave’’ of Christ, along with Paul himself.

On the other hand, Timothy was now faced with an unusually stiff and long-term exercise in missionary organization. Of him, Paul expected the establishment of the Ephesian church on a regular basis, the appointment and the training of officials as a main step in that direction, and the combating of a particularly subtle, and also stubborn, collection of false teachers. All this from a man who was still young, timid by disposition, frequently unwell and subject, we can gather, to depression, and deprived at a critical juncture of the benefit of the apostle’s close supervision and advice.

We shall consider four of the mainline reasons offered by Paul as inducements to Timothy, to apply himself both vigorously and unfalteringly to his assignment in Ephesus.

(1) The second coming of Christ, the righteous judge

“I charge thee before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom, Preach the word, etc.”

The general idea is that Timothy, if he is faithful to the charge about to be developed by Paul, will share in the glory of Christ’s coming and reign.

The servants of Christ are bound to concern themselves at all points in their Christian life and service with the solemn fact that we must, one day, every one of us, give an account to Christ, the righteous judge. And the consideration that, even now, the quality of our work is open to the scrutiny of Heaven, is stressed in the words, “I charge thee in the presence of God and the Lord Jesus Christ”.

At the same time, the Lord Jesus Christ is to be regarded as the unfailing Saviour of His people, as He is also their loved and respected Master, to give pleasure to whom must rank as a high incentive to offer the best in service. It belongs to Him to bring the good work He has begun in His people and which, also, He prosecutes through them to perfect fruition. He is the righteous judge (v. 8) who will make certain that the righteous man shall not fail of a proper and glorious reward; even if circumstances on earth may seem, at times, likely to frustrate it.

For Timothy, especially in the dark days which he was destined to face, there would come, inevitably, the temptation to view his work as a monotonous and meaningless round of routine procedures, or, on the other hand, as an unavailing series of distressing encounters with the forces of evil. It was imperative, therefore, that he should keep before him the truth that Christ is in undisputed charge of the Gospel’s onward movement.

(2) The Proper Christian reaction to dark and difficult times

Dark and difficult days were on the way for the apostolic church and in Ephesus, notably, the threatening clouds were already hanging low over the Christian scene. “The time will come” - Paul is completely frank with Timothy - “when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And they shall turn away from the truth and shall be turned unto fables”. Yet, the last thing that we might expect Paul to do would be to paint the picture in sombre tones, merely in answer to some foreboding or other of his own heart, or because he believed a tragic cathartic experience of soul would, in the end, be good for Timothy. Paul had the mind of Christ and Christianity does not operate on such lines. His very next word - one of those celebrated Pauline “buts” - should alert us to something far removed from a gloomy contemplation of the turn of events for its own sake. “But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry”. The verb “watch” carries the force of the “be sober”, and calls upon Timothy to maintain unruffled and alert commitment to all of his Christian undertakings, in distinction from running panic-stricken away from them. The command to endure afflictions repeats the exhortation of chapter 2:3, where Paul urges Timothy to “endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ”. Because there is a war on Christ and His Church versus Satan - Christ’s followers must accept austerity and put up with hardship as rigours which are quite inseparable from the campaign, and as being experiences without which they cannot reasonably expect to share in Christ’s victories. We may summarise the main points of the apostle’s teaching as follows:

1. Christian ministers and Christian witnesses, in general, have, according to Paul, all the greater reason for maintaining a steady witness to the Gospel (fulfilling their ministry), all the greater reason for maintaining Christian teaching and promoting Christian evangelism vigorously and unfalteringly, in days when the professing Christian Church, over a wide field, is unsteady and uncertain.

2. Whenever there is a general drifting away from solid Christian instruction, that is the very time to take special steps to defend and promote the doctrine of Christ. Says Paul, “preach the word”, the original, undiminished Gospel of Christ. “Be instant in season, out of season”: i.e. be unfailingly at your post as pastor, teacher and evangelist, whether or not the times are propitious and whether in your immediate environment you are met with encouraging reactions, or, equally, the reverse. And, of course, even a saint, proverbially, can be provoked to say and do unsaintly things. So, Paul enjoins Timothy to “reprove, rebuke and exhort”, by all means - in the situation emerging, it would be completely necessary - but let him do it “with all longsuffering and doctrine”. Christian courtesy and affectionate patience are always, under God, powerful inducements to people to give to the Gospel a reasonable hearing.

3· And do not forget to “do the work of an evangelist”, is Paul’s next advice. Just because the days are becoming dark, and people themselves are becoming dark in relation to Gospel truth, the duty of maintaining an evangelistic initiative, and not simply the duty of holding the Christian fort as it stands, will be of prime importance. The temptation is strong, at such times, for the orthodox Christian community to turn in on itself. The temptation is strong to, so to say, keep the pot of churchly activity just simmering until revival takes place. No, Paul would say, such an attitude is quite wrong. It is here and now, if ever and anywhere, when the difficult days are actually upon us, yes and growing, that Christians must address themselves to the inalienable duty of evangelizing the world.

4· Timothy, moreover, would be compelled to witness people forsaking his own faithful ministry in favour of teachers who would cater for people’s “itching ears” and who would accommodate what doctrine was offered to people’s “lusts”, succumbing, that is to say, right, left and centre, to popular demand and suppressing, in the process, the Biblical insistence, both on personal holiness and on the exclusive Gospel-way of salvation. Timothy, however, must not be induced by that painful experience, to relax either his standards or his efforts. A cheap convert here or there might easily enough be obtained. But at what a cost to his loyalty to Christ and to the true salvation of his hearers! The temptation to pique and self-pity would, on such occasions, too, be human enough. Thus, Paul recommends Timothy to “watch”, to be sober, to be quite unrelenting with himself in the direction of holding to his Gospel perspectives. For the sake of genuine Gospel results, he must endure such afflictions and make full proof of his ministry.

5· It is instructive, incidentally, to see how much weight Paul lays on the place of Christian doctrine, and the study of it, as a prime factor in the strengthening of Christians for their duty. “Consider what I say”, he exhorts, when, in chapter 1, he calls upon his young colleague to behave in his Christian witness after the style of a good soldier, a dedicated athlete and an industrious farmer. “Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things.”

This means that spiritual strength will come to the Christian through careful attention to doctrinal considerations. We have no right to expect a spiritual uplift, the surge of Christian optimistic feeling or a better resolution to face difficult undertakings, however much we pray and however much we seek the Spirit’s help, without careful and continual meditation on the teaching of Holy Scripture. The continuance of Christian courage is guaranteed only in the closest possible conjunction with the continuance of Christian Bible study.

(3) The logic of Paul’s death for Timothy, his colleague and successor

Paul produces further support for the charge which he gives to Timothy to be faithful to his ministry, from the fact that he, himself, is now ready to die as Christ’s martyr. “Watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry: For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.” The duty of faithfulness on Timothy’s part takes on urgency from the impending removal of his senior colleague from the missionary scene.

The apostle saw no virtue in concealing the fact from Timothy that the old and cherished partnership between them was on the point of being broken up irretrievably. Such concealment would, at best, have secured only a cheap and short-lived and paper-thin protection from reality for young Timothy. For himself, distasteful the mere article of death, and such a death, might be - he had, above all else, a sense of grateful satisfaction at having, in Christ’s strength, fought a good fight, and finished his course, and kept the faith. And he had nothing but confident expectation of receiving from Christ’s own hands the victor’s crown. One or two points are deserving of special notice.

I. Here, Paul’s steady purpose throughout the epistle, that of urging Timothy on so as to give his ministry in Ephesus his undivided and active attention, is not, for one minute, being forgotten by him. The apostle has not suddenly turned autobiographical in any sort of isolation from what he has been saying. He is not even preparing Timothy simply for his death so that the young man will not be too personally upset when it actually happens. No, rather like a wounded field commander, whose own time on the battleground is about up, he is anxious to devote the short time that is left him to deploying the forces still on the field to maximum advantage. The leadership is being transferred from the shoulders of the aged apostle to that of his youthful subordinate. The last thing Paul wants Timothy to do is to give way to overmuch sorrow as a result of his chief’s departure from the scene. And he has in mind the furtherance of the Gospel’s cause, even more than concern for Timothy’s personal comfort.

2. If the removal by death of the admired and loved leaders of one generation, people on whom we have so much depended in earlier days, has this effect upon us, that it inspires us to take up those duties upon which the once strong, but now nerveless, fingers have finally lost their grasp, and urges us to view more seriously than ever before our existing Christian work, then it is well. Paul would approve.

3· In Paul’s martyr testimony, there is implicit the assurance that Timothy, too, with the same divine help, will succeed in fighting the good fight, in finishing his own course and in keeping the faith; let the forces of evil at Ephesus, or anywhere else, do their worst. Timothy will require not to be taken off his guard and not to think that some strange thing is happening to him, by the discovery that there is a fierce fight to be fought and a strenuous race to be run, and that the faith has to be kept inviolate when profane hands reach out to wrench his testimony away from him. Paul’s God will prove to be Timothy’s God throughout.

(4) The implications of Paul’s attitude to the experience of loneliness

Paul at Pome was as open to the temptations projected by loneliness, and the painful experience of desertion, as any man. It is a cry from the heart of a Christian man in great need of fellowship, when he says to Timothy, “Do thy diligence to come shortly to me…. Do thy diligence to come before winter.” Certainly, he had good friends overseas, some of whom he specially mentions: Prisca and Aquila, and the household of Onesiphorus. They were at Ephesus with Timothy, as possibly, by now, was Tychicus. Several of the others he mentions were away on far-flung missionary errands: Crescens, Titus and Erastus. Demas had disloyally forsaken him. Trophimus he had left at Miletum, sick. Luke was with him indeed, but he could scarcely keep Paul company all the time, nor assist him with every problem. Eubulus, Pudens, Linus and Claudia and “all the brethren”, who no doubt had visited him at one time or another, and were resident in Pome, must have been limited in their contacts with him - perhaps (in the light of v. 16) too often from fear. They were probably not able, in any case, to provide the sort of fellowship which a man of Timothy’s calibre, experience and closeness to Paul could provide at this juncture.

This allows an interesting commentary on fairly normal Christian experience. How often in a trying situation does the Christian, who may be at the height of his devotion to the Gospel of Christ nevertheless, find himself deprived of helpful fellowship. Some of his best Christian friends - the ones who could be of most value at the time - are in some distant place or are, perhaps, sick. The result is the same. And those Christians who are nearer at hand and mobile are either not presently available or are not, for some reason, capable of giving the quality and the degree of sympathetic encouragement necessary. And how specially painful when some previous fellow-campaigner (like Demas) has walked out on one, having succumbed, perhaps, to the attraction of worldly considerations. Paul was not complaining. Rather, was he illustrating his need and forewarning Timothy, at the same time, that this might very well be his line of experience sooner or later. Timothy must, thus, be prepared to take his share of the hardship, which, one way or another, was inseparable from being a servant of Christ ( I : 8) . Faced with this situation, Paul asked Timothy for three items of help and each separate request made is not without instruction for all Christians.

1. Company. Timothy was to come, himself, bringing Mark as well, and he was to do so before the winter storms would make sailing out of the question. One Commentator underlines at this point the interesting fact that Paul, who “loved the appearing of Christ” (v. 8), longed, at the same time, for the coming of Timothy. It is being more spiritual than the apostle Paul! - for people to claim that they can dispense with human fellowship since they have Christ. We neglect Christian fellowship at our peril. Christ ministers to His people through their Christian friends. And we require to adjust our doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, by the apostolic doctrine implicit in this chapter, that that same Holy Spirit generally comforts the Christian through the fellowship of other Christians.

There is this point too. Paul had, earlier in life, enjoyed marvellous fellowship with the apostles and other members of the apostolic missionary establishment. But those days were past. Darker, more deprived, more meagre days, so far as Gospel fellowship was concerned, had arrived. Paul knew well enough, also, that he could not put the clock back. He could not return simply through wistful reflection to the earlier state of affairs. But what we find him actually doing was developing what fellowship he could, by inviting Timothy and Mark to come and join him for that purpose. And Christians in our own time, some of them able to recall days of outstanding fellowship, instead of wistfully harking back for ever to those days, would be better employed in taking steps to develop fellowship on a more modest scale here and now, and wherever possible.

2. Warm clothing. Paul owned an overcoat which - whether with typical ministerial forgetfulness or not! - he had left with his friend Carpus at Troas. With the winter temperatures, even of Rome, in mind, he foresaw that it would be a handy article to have by him. He did not expect the Lord to work miracles unnecessarily. Timothy could stop off at Troas and collect the coat for him. As well as catering in an obvious way for his own need, Paul may very well have been serving advice to Timothy, who had certain impractical weaknesses in his make-up, never to undervalue the factor of common sense in the pursuit of his ministry.

It is not unreasonable to suppose, in the present context, that, apart from making a very effective gesture towards forestalling a loss of body temperature, which, if it happened, would also complicate his temptation to feel deprived and forlorn, the apostle Paul, knowing his man and well aware that there would be others like him to follow, was consciously placing an instructive estimate before Timothy on the importance of being practical in the Christian life. Getting things done that need to be done, however down-to-earth their nature, is not at all unrelated to the furtherance of the most spiritual objects of the Gospel as a whole. And the calculus of level-headedness, given its proper place by the Christian alongside the doctrinal and spiritual interests of his life, cannot but enhance his preparedness for the Lord’s next call upon him.

3. Books and parchments. This could, conceivably, refer to the Old Testament Scriptures and to some of Paul’s correspondence. We cannot be sure. Calvin comments that “this passage commends continual reading to all godly men as a thing from which they can profit”. It may well be costly in terms of loss of morale and of a sense of Christian purpose for any Christian to be twiddling his thumbs, or doing something else equally ineffective, when he might be getting down to some worthwhile reading. Finally, the apostle’s testimony to the Lord’s standing by him when, for whatever reason, he had been deserted by his Christian friends at his first appearance before Nero, is intended, without doubt, for Timothy’s special attention as the pastor-evangelist in Ephesus. Such forsaking could happen - might very well happen - to him too. In that event, the Lord would stand by him, as He had stood by Paul.

The Lord had, however, done more for Paul on that occasion than supply him with courage and protection, and suitable words of defence. He had strengthened him so that “all the Gentiles might hear”. We may suppose that it was not simply Caesar and the officials of court, and the military escort, who were present at the trial. There would, very likely, have gathered a large assembly of curious onlookers. And what the Lord did precisely was supply Paul, in his most grievous misfortune, with the largest congregation of Gentiles he had been privileged to address in many a long day, and equip him to present to them a very full account of the Gospel of Christ. And the same Lord, let Timothy take note, was able and ready, in his case too, to turn his sorest strait into an effective Gospel opportunity.

Not only this, but Paul was satisfied that the Lord would “deliver him from every evil work, and preserve him unto his heavenly kingdom.” Paul did not allow himself to think that the successful negotiation of one severe onslaught from evil sources was the end of that story. There would be more, and very likely worse, to come for himself, yes, and for Timothy too. But what did it matter? The Lord had delivered his servant “in six troubles: yea and in seven there should no evil touch him.” It was for Timothy to grasp (it is for all Christians to grasp), that everlasting salvation is the birthright of every believer. For every successive evil work - its proportions do not matter - there is more than ample deliverance held in readiness by the Lord to meet the evil. Timothy had every conceivable reason for making full proof of his ministry, in hope and confidence.

Rev. Hector Cameron was Minister in London, Lybster, Drumchapel, Wick, Dornoch, Aberdeen and Killearnan.

Sermon Excerpts

Christian Discipleship - Rev. David Paterson

“I will follow thee…” - Matthew. 8:19

“I will follow Him.” Do you remember when you first made that promise - or was it a vow? You believed you were utterly sincere. Nothing was too much for Jesus. In the light of the Cross, in the light of forgiveness; in the experience of forgiveness; in the joy of gospel peace; in the fullness of your personal surrender, you made the vow and truly meant it. Yet, the truth is you did not fully know what was involved. How much you had to learn in the school of Christ! Have you been disappointed in Him, as well as in yourself? Is it possible that you have become a bit “worldly wise”, while teaching the mechanics of Salvation? Have you become a little cynical? Has the foolishness of preaching become to you foolishness? We, perhaps, long for New Testament Power, but we often forget how Power expresses itself. We want to be a powerful minister or home missionary or ordinary Christian witness, and to feel the thrill of being useful and breaking through. We often want the power of Christ more than the Cross of Christ, or the power without the Cross. Perhaps we feel we’ve heard all this before, in fact preached it. If we put into words the thoughts that brood in the heart, they may say - “It doesn’t work”. In a sense, we are right. “It doesn’t work.” Power without a Cross never works. The Bible has much to say concerning Power. Remember Paul ... “That we may know Him and the power of His Resurrection”. Yes, Him first, and the Resurrection Power second.

Never reverse the order!

Perhaps we might do well to go back to Matthew’s school to find afresh the portrait of a saint. Let us try to see the portrait in the frame of Matthew 8:9· ...“I will follow Thee.”

This confession is so often made and, yet, its implications are so seldom realized. Follow where? ... to obscurity? ... to deprivation? ... to outside the crowd? The Son of Man has still nowhere to lay His head. To develop as a disciple, we must first, of necessity, recognize who He is. Is He a Royal King, possessor of Eternal Power, or just someone who gets us out of a jam? If the first, He cannot change. He is the same now as then. Matt. 9:9, 27 gives a true picture. Remember the Centurion? “I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, ‘Go’, and he goeth; and to another,‘Come’, and he cometh; and to my servant,‘Do this’, and he doeth it…. Speak the word only and my servant shall be healed.” Yes, a Royal King. In 8:27 - “What manner of man is this that even the winds obey Him”. A supernatural, timeless King…. God’s Blessed Son. We must never lose sight of the Saviour. It was He who shed Blood! He who agonized! He who atoned! He who promised! He who commands! “I will follow Him. ...” What does this entail?

(I) God’s first demand

The portrait begins to take form - the form of a true servant for all time. Minister, missionary, elder or young Christian. Matt. 5:44 is God’s first demand. “Love your enemies.” What has this to do with power? What has this to do with sanctification? Just this ... He demands that we accept His standards, whatever they be. Love your enemies; Be ye holy as I am holy; the fruits of the Spirit as in Galatians, i.e. meekness, lowliness, love, joy, peaceableness. There are no short cuts, no lesser demands for some. If we accept less we call Him to cut off our power. His standards get progressively higher. When He says, “Love your enemies” He is not only asking us to do one particular thing, but is laying down a standard for everything. His standard ... nothing less!

(2) Wholehearted service

Wholehearted service comes next. Matt. 6:24, “No man can serve two masters for either he will love the one and hate the other or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon’.” Not a foot in each camp. We may be tempted, yes we will be tempted. Yet, Christ demands wholehearted service. Not only is serving two masters difficult, it is impossible, it just can’t be done! If we are holding back anything - sinful or legitimate - at that moment, we are serving Satan and self. The acceptance of persecution as a common lot is promised in Matt. 10:16-20 and this is often hard to stomach, especially social persecution. To be socially ostracised is not easy on flesh and blood. Jesus says, “Beware of man” - the subtle dig - the scornful sneer - the scowling scoff - yes, and worse. This is something the flesh always hates and fears, something we shun, yet something which is promised. “I will follow you” is sometimes so difficult when it leads to the school of persecution. Open witness is a full prime requirement and the call is accepted with a fearful threat. “Whosoever shall confess Me before men, will I confess before My Father. Whosoever shall deny ... him will I deny…” (Matt. 10:32). Before men - yes, men of all sorts ... open sinners, scoffers, intellectual superiors, social leaders! Courage comes before triumph! Honesty comes before success! This is what we are all called to. There is no road of escape and we ought not to want one. In Matt. 10:37, utter allegiance is called for. “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.” The knife goes deep. The soul will bleed. Note that “more than Me”. The demand to utter allegiance is great, yet it does not destroy family love, but places it in its true perspective. Yet, how hard! Do we complain at this point? Do we murmur? This is not worthy of Me. Is there a situation just now which is challenging this allegiance? Are you facing conflict? Is the battle fierce? Remember, then, “more than Me”. “I will follow Thee.” Does it not grow progressively harder?

Matt. 11 :6 demands an acceptance of all His providences. “Blessed is he who is not offended in Me.” John, in the darkness of doubt, cried out, “Art Thou He that should come or do we look for another ?” The cry from this dark dungeon is always the same, “Have I made a mistake?” Ought I to have begun this Christian work? Ought I to have started training for the Ministry? Ought I to have come to the mission field? The subtlety of the serpent is seen here. Why did this or that happen? I expected things to be different. Brethren, it is the Leader who makes the policy, we just follow. Why, thought John, does not Jesus intervene here? I have prayed, cried, longed, thought and tried. Jesus wants us to surrender to His Providence. You are fitting in to His Plan. You are acknowledging His Purpose when you don’t understand. Not, have I made a mistake about my conversion and need it renewed? Not, have I made a mistake about my call and need it renewed? Not, have I been deceived by myself - for the Gospel is preached and is successful.

Not till the loom is silent,

And the shuttles cease to fly,

Will God unroll the canvas,

And reveal the reason, why,

The dark threads are as needful

In the weaver’s skilful Hand,

As the threads of gold and silver,

In the pattern He has planned.

To say I will follow in the darkness is to advance in the school of Christ. An acknowledgment of all His brethren as ours, is a mark of true discipleship.

Matt. 12:45-50 says: “Whosoever doeth the will of my Father the same is my mother and brother and sister.” This concept demands developing grace and wisdom. John 3 is “Whosoever will….” Matt. 12 is “Whosoever does….” Our brother may make mistakes, and have all the sins of immaturity, carnality, inefficiency, smugness or even worse. The question we must ask is really this. “Is he trying to do the will of God ? Is he trying… even so weakly ?” Then they are your brethren. You must love, care, pray, help them as Christ helps you. You must give them the place and position He gives them. You need not agree with them on everything, but you must agree with everything Christ says about them and everything Christ would do for them.

(3) The conditions for continuing discipleship

Matt. 16:24 gives the conditions for continuing discipleship. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up the Cross, and follow me.” Self-denial, self destruction, self-abasement.

There is no such thing as self-denial and going our own way. Self-destruction involves the Cross. Self-abasement involves following Him. His Way ... His Paths ... not ours! These are ever the present demands of discipleship. They do not change when the going is tough. They do not change on the Home Field or on the Mission Field. They do not change because of failure - either personal or united. The human will must ever be crushed; self-trust must always feel the touch of the Cross; human wisdom must always bow where Jesus leads. In order to follow, we need daily what Matt. ‘7:9 shows clearly. The supreme vision of Jesus only. “They saw none save Jesus only.” To begin with, they saw the Law and the Prophets - then - Jesus only! Supreme in the estimation of His Father, He must become supreme in their estimation. When He is seen supreme in the estimation of His Church, whatever our problems (trial difficulty, etc.), the only true and satisfying answer is seen in the light of “Jesus only”. Love for Jesus only; the vision of Jesus only; work for Jesus only, hardship for Jesus only; labour for Jesus only. If we have the vision, we have the strength. If we lose the vision, we lose the strength!

Matt. 18 continues and the portrait takes deeper form. He demands the pattern of childlikeness. “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child the same shall be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.” The principles on earth are as in Heaven - the example of the little child coming quickly, obeying immediately and trusting implicitly ... is ever an illustration for each generation. His undoubting assurance, willing obedience and unclouded trust seem to be the daily demand here. Is it so with us? Are we childlike or childish? Is our trust in Jesus today clouded by doubt, defeat, disillusionment or denial? Is our obedience at this moment joyous, willing and confident? Is ours an undoubting assurance, in spite of the difficulties we find, even when we find them insoluble? ... in spite of the mountainous task? ... Are we childlike in our Christian service, or are we in the group who “know better”?

Matt. 18 demands integrity in personal dealings. “If your brother shall trespass against you go and tell him” ... not others ... tell God and him. How much trouble would be avoided, how much pain eased, how much trust continue, how many difficulties overcome if this command were obeyed, instead of worldly wisdom practised? Some may fear to speak. If you fear to say anything to a brother, fear to talk about him to another!

Matt. 18:22 - The portrait continues to take form in Christ’s call to be forgiving. Forgiveness is a state of mind, as well as a series of acts. Seventy times seven is the demand, and who among us has not asked God for forgiveness this same number of times? In case some do not see the spirituality of this command, let us add ... “Forgive your enemies ... those who despitefully use you”. Know the joy of being a forgiver. It is Christ’s standard.

Matt. 19:11, 29 - Discipleship becomes even more demanding. The rich young ruler comes in to the picture now. Through him, we are called to relinquish all. A glance at verse 11 is frightening…. It is not only riches and ambition, but mother, father, wife and children! We began by relinquishing all. We must continue under the same principle. How hard at the outset! How much harder during the course!

We must go farther in Matt. 10:26. We are not only to accept all believers, but be servants to all: “Whosoever shall be great let him be your minister.” A life spent in ministry, serving, helping and emptying, is a life well spent. The Master’s experience is that of washing feet! Love is needed - patience is needed - strength of character is needed - simplicity is needed. We must wash the feet of the doubter. He did! Wash the feet of the denier. He did! Wash the feet of the forsaker. He did! Even the betrayer. He did! This is the way to power. Out of love, today, we must wash the feet of the self-important and the weak, by putting ourselves out. We must pour ourselves out for all.

In Matt. 22:9, we find the servant’s call to service. This is a call to every Christian in every generation. We find it in the parable of the field - in the words “go”, ‘find”, “bid”. Go from the plans of self-interest, perhaps from the comfort, and even the smugness, of evangelical fellowship. Go from the activities which are legitimate, from the comforts you enjoy. Go from the friends who would hold you back. Go when surrounded by weariness and fatigue. Go, find:... where are they? In the pagan tribes, the materialistic homes, in their Godless occupation, in their hell-inspired pleasures…. Go and find! Remember what C. T. Studd said, “Some want to live within the sound of church and chapel bell. I want to start a workshop within a yard of hell!”

Bid them! Go! Find! Bid! Bid them. Plead with them; woo them; help them; pull them; pray them, with a Godly life and a loving Gospel ... Yes, even with a frightened heart. This is following Him.

(4) The demand for continual self-abasement

Matt. 23 leads us farther in the next demand ... the demand for continual self-abasement. “Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

No matter how far we have developed in the school of Christ, this command is never withdrawn. It comes to the minister, as to the junior missionary ... to the superintendent, as to the recruit. Just how many human problems would never have had to be faced, if this command for true discipleship had been kept! That jealous seed would never have blossomed and that resentment would have had no roots. There is no room for love of place in the school of Christ. It does not say where we should humble ourselves, but rarely are we found looking for the opportunity. We look for other opportunities, other recognitions, but to humble ourselves ... ah, that’s different. Unrest, bitterness, antagonism and suspicion are all the children of personal exaltation. They should have been slaughtered at birth and would have been, had we obeyed this command of the Lord.

So, the way is hard. Perhaps your strength has ebbed, your faith is flickering, your call is just a faint echo ... but now is the time for Matthew’s brush in 24 and 13. We need to keep on enduring. “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.” Yes, he that keeps on enduring is the sense of the word. It is true that we must endure through something ... be it temptation, personal weakness, fear, coldness, lack of vision, little results, bleak prospects ... but to endure is not just putting up with it. It is more than that. It is active, not passive. It is to face the problems, knowing what they entail, whether personal or otherwise, even when they seem insoluble. With one hand on the impossible, stretch the other out and touch the God of the impossible. It is the stretching out that is enduring.

Matt. 24.:42 gives wise counsel for all time. “Be watchful. Watch therefore for ye know not what time your Lord doth come.”

These words can be written over many things. We know not the power of Satan or his subtlety, despite our years in the battlefield. We know not the deceitfulness of our own hearts or the indwelling sin. We know not our pride and love of position. We know not our base desire always to be thought right. “Be watchful”, says Matthew, as a sentinel in a castle ... as a mother looks out for the good of her young ones ... as the guard at the front line. Don’t underestimate your enemy. Don’t over-estimate yourself!

(5) Christian humanity

The portrait of the saint is nearing completion. Matthew just added the finishing touches in 25 and 40. “In as much ye did it unto one of the least of these my little ones, ye have done it unto Me.” Matthew, here, pleads for Christian humanity. He makes the tremendous statement that an action done to any out of love to Christ is accepted as an act done, personally, for Him. Is Christian humanity anything less than Christ-likeness? See Him minister to the hungry crowd. So must we! See Him visit the homes of the outcasts ... so must we! There was no one so bad as to be outside the scope of Christ’s Blood and, so, none must be outside ours. He measures the wearisome chores out of love to Him.

When we are tired, it is like virtue going out for Him. He measures persistence in the face of all the things which annoy, as love to Him. His yardstick is not ours. It is not just listening to the Word, but He is looking for the Word in action. It is not just the attitude of prayer, but prayer in action. It is not only pressing food for the soul, but often providing food for the body. To have Christ-likeness, we must be good, kind, helpful. This is truly being evangelical.

Such is the stuff disciples are made of! When Matthew sees the woman breaking the box of alabaster ointment on Jesus’ head (ch. 26 and 7), he is still finishing off the portrait by putting the value on Christ. How do you really value Him? What is He worth? The ointment surely symbolized an outpoured life. Certainly, it is precious ... very precious, ... but is He worth it? “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down His life for His friends.” Is this the value you put on Christ? Your life with all its possessions, talents, gifts, opportunities. Is your life a daily sacrifice? Is it a daily consecration? When you said, “I will follow Thee,” did you mean an outpoured, sacrificed, consecrated life, daily? Do you value Christ above your life?

Matthew now finishes the portrait with the Lord’s command. In 28 and 19, he reiterates, “Go to the ends of the earth; teach at the ends of the earth; I AM at the ends of the earth.’’ Where He sends, He is!

I think, then, as I look at Matthew’s portrait, that I see the power of God at work in the midst of human experience. This power seems to be expressed in character, more than in feelings. What a standard Matthew sets and, yet, this is what it means to follow Him…. We may say, “Who is sufficient for these things?” We will have our part in His strength, if we see that not only is doctrinal assent required, but development from the seed of the New Birth. Christianity is not necessarily a feeling of triumph ... of always being on top of the world. Sometimes it is a fight against the odds, a swimming against the tide and a fight against such utter personal weakness that we must find Christ afresh daily, or face personal tragedy.

Let us think again. “I will follow Him.” Will we? Even if it means Matthew’s way? Let us commit ourselves anew in dependence upon God’s grace. “I will follow Him.” “Yes I will.” “I will accept His standards. I will offer whole-hearted service. I will face persecution. I will start afresh an open witness. I will give utter allegiance. I will accept all His Providences, no matter how dark. I will acknowledge His brethren and my brethren. I will, by His grace, go the way of self-denial and self-involvement. By His grace, I will continue to be watchful. I will practise Christian humility. I will set a value on Christ, such as the woman with the alabaster box did.

This, then, is what is entailed in being a Christian ... a disciple of Christ. This is what it means to say, “I will follow Him”. Of course, we can’t do it without His strength, but how often we refuse to meet the conditions. We refuse to come to the place where His strength is found. Christ must then break us before we come to that place. Perhaps, at the moment, we are in the process of being broken, we are feeling His way hard, difficult, strait and sore. Hear again what He says to His disciples. “Those whom I love, I chasten.” “Those who bear fruit, I purge ... that they may bring forth more fruit.” Let us never make the mistake of thinking that power is merely a feeling. Power is the life of Christ expressed.

Rev. David Paterson has retired, but was formerly Minister of East Kilbride, Clyne & Perth.

Sermon Excerpts

Christ as High Priest - Rev. W. J. Cameron

” · · an high priest for ever ...” - Hebrews 6:20

A visitor to a magnificent building, such as a French Gothic cathedral, will form a better impression of the grandeur of the whole design, if he views the exterior and interior from several angles. The grand subject of the Bible is Christ. It is a many-sided and inexhaustible theme, but the inspired writers enable us to look at it in a variety of helpful ways. The special contribution of the Epistle to the Hebrews is to focus attention on Christ’s priestly service. Some other Biblical books mention or imply His priesthood, but nowhere else is it so fully or instructively explained. Let us consider four aspects of it:

(I) The purpose of His priesthood

In this age of unparalleled progress in many directions, few things are more evident than the marked absence of a general improvement in social morality. Of course, certain misguided people hail the abandonment of an absolute moral standard in favour of some type of situational ethics or permissiveness, as clear proof of notable progress. But such an attitude is at variance with God’s Word and the testimony of history. The prevalence of dishonesty, robbery, murder, sexual offences and broken marriages leaves little room for doubt that a large proportion of modern society is not much better in this respect than the society of the New Testament world. And the New Testament mentions these same evils among sins resulting from the broken harmony in man’s relation to God. It attributes the persistence of sin with all the distress it causes in this life and the appalling penalty appointed for the unforgiven hereafter to man’s revolt against divine authority. To be sure, sin is not confined to those convicted of gross moral offences in criminal courts. Their wrongdoing is symptomatic of the sin that is in every man’s heart, though manifesting its presence in different ways and degrees. The Bible teaches clearly that all have sinned and each man’s greatest need is reconciliation to God. And this is no less true today than when the Gospel first made known the way of reconciliation. Human ingenuity could not devise a way, nor could human resources provide it. But God in His love and wisdom has done both. To reconcile God and men is the great object of Christ’s priesthood, and, through it, God offers a way whereby the penitent can be forgiven and welcomed to the fellowship and service of His believing family.

(2) His qualifications for office

To begin with, He is God’s choice. Scripture declares repeatedly that God Himself appointed Christ High Priest. This fact is of no small importance. According to the proverb, “Fools make a mock at sin”. They make light of guilt. But sin is an evil of incalculable potential. Notwithstanding all the light the Bible sheds upon it, insoluble mystery still surrounds its origin, the greatness of its offence to God and the extent of the ruin to which it renders the guilty liable. God alone understands sin’s sinister nature and alienating power. But when He, who clearly grasps every aspect of man’s plight as a sinner, took the initiative in reconciliation, determined the method and chose the person to undertake the work, He laid a firm foundation for human hope.

But, again, He is God’s Son. And, beyond question, His sonship is altogether unique. Adam, as created in God’s image, was His son. But sin made him an unworthy and banished son. Hosea calls Israel God’s son. The nation became so by adoption when God rescued them from Egypt and made a covenant with them. Among their best representatives were Moses and the faithful prophets, yet Christ stands in a relation to God, which even they do not share. Believers in Christ are granted the status of sons of God, but Christ alone is called the only begotten son. Angels are sometimes called sons of God, but they are commanded to worship Christ. Nor is this all. He Himself is God, possessing fully His Father’s nature, character and power. Moreover, His divine sonship gives Him an unlimited and intimate knowledge of the Father. He shares both His knowledge of sin and His loving desire that sinners should be reconciled to Him by His Son’s priesthood.

Further, He had a sinless human career. To accomplish His Father’s purpose, He became His servant in human nature. By His birth at Bethlehem, He took man’s nature with all its essential limitations into union with His divine nature. As man, “He learned obedience by the things which he suffered.” In boyhood, at the carpenter’s bench and in years of public ministry, He felt the power of temptation. He encountered growing opposition from the envious and the prejudiced. He was unjustly condemned and crucified. He endured sharp physical pain, keen mental distress and deep spiritual suffering before He died. Thus, He discovered by personal experience the costliness of obedience that involves suffering and, in His case, unfathomable suffering. But He committed no sin. His supernatural birth prevented the sin that is present in all members of a fallen race from passing to Him. In no circumstances did He yield to temptation. When He challenged His opponents to accuse Him of sin, they were silent and the accusations made, at other times, by His enemies were baseless. Nevertheless, by His manifold encounters with temptation, He acquired rich human sympathy with the harassed and tempted, who come to Him for support and deliverance.

Once more, He has an endless life. As God, He is immortal. As man, He died, but only in the voluntary discharge of His supreme priestly duty, which was to offer Himself as a once-for-all sacrifice for the ungodly. Let Himself explain the surrender of His life. “No man,’’ He said, “taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father” (John 10:18). Accordingly, He rose from the grave on the third day, never again to die. And He evermore possesses in Heaven, in union with His divine nature, the human nature in which He triumphed over temptation, suffering and death.

(3) The once-for-all sacrifice He offered

‘Hebrews’ strongly emphasizes that Christ obtained salvation for those He represented by a single sacrifice. And we are not left in doubt as to the sacrifice meant. It was not intercession alone. The Epistle of James assures us that: “The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (Jas. 5:16). And no more righteous man than the sinless Christ ever offered intercessory prayers to God on earth. But, apart from another offering, not even His prayers could benefit Peter, future believers, or His enemies for whom He asked mercy and grace. It was not the sacrifice of a good life, devoted to loving service for others. The final chapter of ‘Hebrews’ mentions doing good as a sacrifice with which God is well-pleased. Christ went about doing good in Palestine. Never before was the compassionate, loving kindness of God so perfectly revealed as when He preached the Gospel to the poor, healed men’s bodies, liberated their spirits, wept at their sorrow and brought their dead to life. He has, indeed, left us a challenging and searching example of doing good. He desires us to share its spirit. Yet, neither His example, nor any imitation of it, can reconcile us to God. It was not the sacrifice involved in martyrdom. Christ spoke of Himself as a prophet. He claimed that He came into the world to bear witness to the truth. Once, when referring to His death, He said, “It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem” (Luke 13:33). And in that city, He was condemned by the Sanhedrin because He remained loyal to the truth He had declared. A martyr prophet, sealing with blood an incomparable body of teaching! From one point of view, He certainly was. But neither the authoritative teaching, nor the martyr-death, nor both together, sufficed to save a single individual.

It was in anticipation of a death far more terrible than martyrdom that the courageous Christ prayed with strong crying, accompanied by tears and bloody sweat, in Gethsemane. What He saw ahead of Him was the guilt of the people He represented being reckoned as His guilt, and He Himself being dealt with by God as guilty instead of them. It was in willing submission to this dread experience that, to quote ‘Hebrews’, “through the eternal spirit”. He offered Himself without spot to God (5:14). The eternal spirit has been understood to mean the Holy Spirit who sustained His human nature. We do not question that the Spirit, in whose power His ministry was carried out, assisted Him in the culminating act of His mission. At the same time, the words underlying the translation may point, rather, to His divine nature. Though itself incapable of death, it was united to the human life He laid down and gave infinite merit to His offering.

This was the once-for-all sacrifice God required and it was offered at Calvary. There, criminals, suffering for their misdeeds, hung on either side of the Son of God. There, criminals stood before Him, guilty of His unjust death. There, abuse was heaped upon Him. There, at length, He uttered the cry of dereliction that told of distress far deeper than that of body or mind. But there too, rang out His triumphant announcement, “It is finished”, (John 19:30), anticipating the close of His priestly work on earth. For, at Calvary, contrary to the intentions of wicked men and entirely unknown to them, God had been at work in holy love providing a way of reconciliation by the substitutionary sacrifice of His beloved Son. Christ’s resurrection is proof that His sacrifice is accepted. At His ascension, He began the second part of His priestly work, which consists of heavenly intercession. He engages in this work on the throne where, as king, He now has all authority in Heaven and in earth. He will continue interceding for those who believe in Him until the end of the age. And, since His intercession is based upon His once-for-all sacrifice, it is never unavailing.

(4) The privileges He obtained for believers

These are many and great. For the present, we shall note only three aspects of salvation. First, there is refuge. The Bible describes the unforgiven sinner as exposed to the wrath of God, directed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. Whoever he may be, apart from a change in his relation to God, he is without hope of escaping irrevocable condemnation. But, in the verses preceding the text, we read of those who fled for refuge to seize the hope offered. That hope is securely grounded in Christ’s priestly intercession, which guarantees protection forever from the condemnation and penalty due to sin. It is the sole and sufficient hope of the sinner. Consideration of a further privilege will show how he may come to possess it.

Secondly, there is reconciliation. Christ by His sacrifice made reconciliation on behalf of sinners and we are invited to avail ourselves of it. The Gospel is called the word of reconciliation. It brings to men the thrilling news that God in love sent His Son to be the propitiation for their sins and is prepared to welcome sinners seeking mercy, as though they were righteous, on the ground of what Christ has done. But the Gospel does more than reveal encouraging facts. It appeals to us, with a note of urgency, to act upon these facts. “Be ye reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). “Today, if ye will hear his voice harden not your hearts” (Heb. 4:7). This involves repentance and willingness to receive a change of heart. Isaiah sheds light upon it. “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him…. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord” (Isa. 55:7/8). And, like the father in the parable, who ran to meet his returning son when he was “yet a great way off”, God is ready to meet our need (Luke 15:20). He grants repentance to those who ask it and promises an everlasting covenant assuring forgiveness, spiritual renewal and continual grace to all who return to Him, and entrust themselves to Christ as Saviour.

Thirdly, there is rest. The writer of the Epistle devotes much space to the thought of rest. As, long ago, God promised rest to Israel, the Gospel invites us, today, to find peace, and satisfaction in trusting, obeying and serving Christ. Yet, this does not exhaust the writer’s teaching on rest. Human life is transitory. The world as we know it will come to an end. But Christ’s death has secured for His servants an eternal inheritance in an enduring kingdom, where sin will no more destroy their peace, nor will death terminate their happy fellowship and service.

Refuge, reconciliation, rest now and rest eternal, all may be yours, if you receive Christ as your High Priest and, by grace, give Him whole-hearted allegiance as King. For He is “the author of eternal salvation to all them that obey him” (Heb. 5 :9).

Rev. W. J. Cameron was minister of Burghead and Buccleuch & Greyfriars. He was also Principal of the Free Church College and Professor of New Testament.

Sermon Excerpts

The Burning Bush - Rev. Alastair G. Ross

“. .. the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.” Exodus. 3:2

This familiar incident, which has become the badge of Presbyterianism throughout the world, blends in a beautiful way the natural with the supernatural. The bush was probably an ordinary bramble bush, which, as Dean Stanley says, was the most characteristic kind of vegetation in those parts. But the ordinary became extraordinary, for the bramble bush became the sanctuary of the living God. That part of the Sinai desert became “holy ground” and was pronounced so by God Himself.

Like Moses, we too are interested in this burning bush, for God was in it and from it revealed Himself to His Church as the living God. But, like Moses, we need to turn aside to see and to hear. And, as we do, we are immediately faced with:

(1) A mystery that astonishes us

It astonished Moses, who was attending to his regular duties as a shepherd in the area of the mountainous range of Horeb. “I will turn aside and see this great sight.” This was no ordinary sight, for this was no ordinary bush fire. Its significance reached down through the centuries. Jacob, when he was blessing Joseph, entreated for him the “goodwill of Him that dwelt in the bush” (Deut. 33:16). Jesus, when discussing with the Sadducees the resurrection of the dead, referred them to this incident (Luke 20:37). And Stephen, in his able defense before the Council, recounted this phenomenon as an integral part of Old Testament history and a turning point in the personal history of Moses (Acts 7:30-34).

The first astonishing thing about the whole incident was, of course, that the bush which burned did not burn out. This, needless to say, had nothing to do with the bush itself. It could have been any bush. Nor was it astonishing that the bush was on fire. This could happen in our own country through the heat of the sun. The amazing thing was that the bush was not consumed. Although the nature of fire is to devour and burn up, it was incapable of doing so in this instance. It was precisely this inability of the fire to devour the bush that constituted the mystery. The scene was, therefore, not in the realm of the natural, but the supernatural. It lay outside the normal and entered the supernormal. And this immediately plummets us into the realm of mystery. The supernatural is above us and beyond us, and we can only stand and stare.

That this is so was the unqualified admission of Paul, who said, “This is a great mystery”, when he was dealing with the supernatural relationship between Christ and His Church (Eph. 5:32). Similarly, in speaking of the supernatural nature of the resurrection of the body at the return of Christ, he acknowledged, “Behold I show you a mystery.. .” (I Cor. 15:51).

The second astonishing thing was that the Lord was in the bush (Exod. 3:4) and that God, who is a consuming fire, did not see fit to consume it. Indeed, He saw fit not to consume it for our instruction and comfort. But how could the glorious and mighty Lord be in a bush? And how could He be there in the form of fire? The mystery here is not of God manifest in flesh, but in fire and flame. This, of course, is matched by the mystery of Pentecost, when God the Holy Spirit appeared as cloven tongues like as of fire. But this present appearance of God to Moses was not the only appearance of God to man before the incarnation. There were several theophanies and each was clothed in mystery, as this one was.

How good it is that we do not have to solve the mystery before we can believe it. How good too that we do not have to solve the greatest mystery of all before being blessed through it - “And without controversy great is the mystery of godiiness, God manifest in the flesh” (I Tim. 3:16). Let us, therefore, bow reverently before the mystery here, as Moses did, and decline to intrude where angels fear to tread. But not only are we faced with a mystery that astonishes us, but also with:

(2) An emblem that instructs us

Unquestionably, the mysterious is meant to be instructive. And while it is no one’s province to attempt an analysis of the bush and the fire (which is to miss the whole point), it is in everyone’s wisdom to hear what God is saying to us out of the bush and to be taught by Him.

Two lessons may be noted here. It is first an emblem of the existence of the Church. This bush was not burning in the land of Canaan, a pleasant land flowing with milk and honey, but in the arid Sinai wilderness. And so is the Church. The bush represents the Church in the wilderness and not yet in glory. The Church commenced in the wilderness - in a world that knew not God - and will continue there until Christ, at His coming, will take His people home. Likewise, all who, through grace, are members of the Church live in a desert situation, and are strangers and pilgrims in it. They are in a world that has deserted God (and is, therefore, ‘‘desert”) and upon which the wrath of God rests.

But the bush burning so brightly and unremittingly was not a tall stately cedar rising majestically above the common vegetation of the wilderness. It was just a humble bramble bush that kept very close to mother earth and had no aspirations of grandeur.

Now, this is quite significant, for it reinforces the image of the Church spelt out for us by St. Paul in writing to the Corinthian Church. The Church is composed of “not many wise men ... mighty ... noble”. Indeed, God has seen fit to choose “the foolish things, the weak, the base (or the insignificant), the despised, the things that are not to bring to nought things that are.”

How alien to this description of the composition of the Church is, for example, the pomp and pomposity of some of its communions! Its copes and mitres, its professional musicians, its impressive ceremonial can find no support in Apostolic Christianity. How alien to the simplicity that is in Christ! How proper, on the other hand, that humility and simplicity should adorn the Church and its ministry in all ages.

But this bush growing in the wilderness and lowly in its kind was a bush on fire. And while the indwelling presence of God shone from the bush with glory and majesty (for the glory of His presence could not be hidden), nevertheless the fire was the symbol of something quite different. It was surely emblematic of “the affliction of my people which are in Egypt” (Exod. 3:7, Acts 7:34). The flames that unsuccessfully licked the bush in the wilderness signified the persecution to which the people of God were being subjected in Egypt by a tyrannical Pharaoh. And the cry of a persecuted people came to the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth, who raised up Moses and called him to be His people’s liberator at the bush, which was not consumed.

But the emblem is instructive not only in its looking back to Israel oppressed in Egypt, but in looking forward to the Church persecuted by the world. Down through the ages, the glorious body of Christ has been persecuted. Through the wilderness, there moves a persecuted and an afflicted people. Fire has ever followed the Church of God on its way to the beautiful city of God. Singeing and burning have ever been the Church’s experience as it presses on to God and so it will be till the Church militant becomes the Church triumphant.

But we have not yet reached the pith of the lesson. The bush not only represents the existence of the Church, but the continuing existence of the Church: “The bush was not consumed.”

The Church, which God built on the rock, is a Church against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail. It is resistant to the flames and fires of persecution. It increases in the fire and is perpetuated in the devouring flame. The testimony of church history is eloquent on this and confirms the apostolic observation in 2 Cor. 4:8, 9. “Troubled on every side yet not distressed ... perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not forsaken, cast down but not destroyed”. It is utterly impossible for this to happen, for God has promised to present it to Himself a glorious Church (conformed to the glorious humanity of the Son of God), and free from spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing - faultless and perfect, holy and blameless (Eph. 5:15 et seq.).

Glorious things of thee are spoken

Zion, city of our God!

He whose word cannot be broken

Formed thee for His own abode.

On the Rock of Ages founded,

What can shake thy sure repose?

With Salvation’s walls surrounded,

Thou mayst smile at all thy foes.

The unalterable purpose of God will yet be fulfilled in the unutterable delight of the Church. It cannot be otherwise for “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved” (Ps. 46:5).

But this Church, of which the burning bush is an emblem, is made up of individuals. The body of Christ has many members and what is true of the body is true of the individual member. David’s clear testimony was, “Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory” (Ps. 73:24). If we belong to the Lord and are under His guidance and tutelage, it cannot but be that “afterward” we shall be received into glory. Jesus is very explicit, “Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

Let us take another look at the bush? In doing so, we are faced not only with a mystery that astonishes us and with an emblem that instructs us, but with:

(3) A magnet that attracts us

It attracted Moses.

First, it turned him aside (Exod. 3:3). He could not go on. He had to go over to “see this great sight”. Even before he heard the voice of God he had to admit that it was a “great sight”. And little did he think, as he approached the bush that defied the flames, that he was to stand in the presence of the living God. God, the God of glory, the (“I am that I am”) was there and every sight of such a God is a great sight, for it was a great God who was there.

The Church where God is obviously and truly present is a great sight because there is life there. His glory can be seen and His voice can be heard, and this is what attracts the attention of men in every age. Those who esteem the reproach of Christ, greater riches than the treasures in Egypt are attracted to the place where His honour dwells. A Church that is dead and lifeless may attract dead and lifeless people, but it has no attraction for the people of God. One of the evidences of spiritual life within us is our desire to stand in God’s presence on God’s day, and be rid as far as possible of the pressures and other concomitants of a world such as ours. Men and women with the faith of Moses are turned aside with the prayer of David:

That I thy power may behold,

and brightness of thy face,

As I have seen thee heretofore

within thy holy place.

The magnet unquestionably is “God in the midst”. And when we turn aside, it is to see no man, but Jesus only.

But it not only turned him aside. It also led him to worship (Exod. 3:-6). The place was pronounced “holy ground”. The bush became a sanctuary. And approaching as near as he dared, “Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God”. That is worship. It is a basic characteristic of true worship to get down at His feet. By all means, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise unto the rock of our salvation”. But also “let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker” (Ps. 95:1-2). By all means, let us come to the throne of grace boldly; but with a boldness that is consecrated by reverence for the One who sits upon the throne. As long as unholy people like ourselves are on holy ground, our boldness will take us as far as the footstool of His throne and that is as far as we need or dare approach.

Let us be watchful, therefore, that our worship has in it something of this hiding of the face, something of the consciousness of being in the presence of the living God, who is glorious in holiness. And let us never confuse spiritual worship with mere noise, fussy activity or outward display; for true worship is marked by reverence, humility and adoration in the presence of God: “Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.”

I do not ask you, who read these words, to what Church you belong. But I do ask if you belong to the God Who dwelt in the bush, before Whom Moses bowed. This is of supreme importance. If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, then you belong to His Church and to a people whom He will never forsake, but will yet translate from the wilderness to that region where grows the “tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God”.

Rev. Alistair G. Ross has retired. but was formerly minister of Strathpeffer, St. Vincent Street, Oban and Buccleuch & Greyfriars.

Sermon Excerpts

Built on the Rock - Rev. J. Douglas MacMillan

“Upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Matt. 16:18

When Jesus uttered these words to Peter at Caesarea Philippi, He was entering the final phase of His earthly ministry; a phase that was to be very different from the earlier ones; that was to see His popularity diminish, the crowds depart and the shadows of the Cross deepen around Him. It was then He began the process of preparing His disciples for the swift series of events which was to culminate in the Cross: preparing them for the crisis which would face them, as their faith came under the crucible-test of His own death and departure from them. And He took the first step in that process when He asked them the question, ‘Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” (Matt. 16:13).

Note, His method. He, first of all, draws from them the erroneous and conflicting opinions of unbelief and, then, against that background, has them confess their own conception of who He is. And the contrast drawn between the two outlooks is so immediate, so vivid in outline and sharp in focus, that the full implication of their own testimony is established and driven home to their hearts with one master-stroke. The disciples told Him what men were saying. And what marks these popular views is their utter lack of unanimity. “Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets” (v. 14). These were the conflicting opinions of speculative thought and their discord stands in complete contrast to the harmony of those taught of God. There, one voice can speak for all and one voice does. Peter does not say, “Well, this is John’s view, and this is James’s view and this Andrew’s, and my own differs from them all”. No!

“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”, said Peter, and he voiced the thought of every heart.

When the Lord comments on this testimony - and, incidentally, this was the opportune moment for Him to banish forever any wrong conception from their minds and the fact that He did not do so, testifies to His full Messianic self-consciousness - when He comments on the testimony, He reveals its true source. Peter’s confession was due, not to his own powers of insight or penetrating discernment, but to the revelation of God. Jesus wishes these men - and believing men in every age - to know that their faith stands and shall stand, not “in the wisdom of men”, but in “the power of God” (I Cor. 2 : 5).

Then, Christ proceeds to unfold the significance of their testimony to the disciples. And, first, He demonstrates that significance in relation to Peter himself. Simon gets a new name, outward symbol of the new nature that the confession implies. But He does not stop at Peter in unfolding the significance of this confession. He illustrates its meaning and relevance in relation to all believers, and that illustration, and the great truth which it highlights, we have in the words of our test.

(1) The enduring stability of the Church of Christ

The major factor in the stability of any building is the foundation and this is where Christ first directs attention. “Upon this ‘ROCK’ will I build my church.”

So much has been written on the controversy that has raged around this phrase that there is no need, here, to set out proof that the rock is not Peter, but the confession that Peter made or, more precisely, the Christ that Peter confessed. I just remark in the passing that, if the reference were to Peter, then the manner of expression used here would be extremely indirect and unnatural. The rock is Christ, the One to Whom Peter has just borne such striking testimony.

Look at that testimony again, for it stands related to what Jesus says of the stability of His Church. “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”, said Peter. These words centre on a relationship: the Sonship of Jesus to the living God. And it is within that circle of relationship that Christ 28 claims to be the “rock” on which His Church is founded. It is the relation He sustains to God that Peter has confessed and, on the basis of that confession, Jesus elucidates and establishes the relation He sustains to His Church. He is, in fact, accepting and confirming a confession of His Own Deity and Eternal Sonship. The words of Peter, “Living God” should be noted, for it is the expression that the Jew used to mark off Jehovah, in contrast to the idols of heathen nations, as the sovereign, self-existent, Creator: the One Whose being is completely underived: the One of Whom Jesus Himself says, “The Father hath life in Himself” (John 5:26). That is the importance of the relationship announced in Peter’s confession and confirmed by Christ’s reply.

Now, two things are implied in the thought of this Sonship and they help us substantiate from His own teaching the fact that Christ did make the claim to Deity. There is identity of nature and identity of life in the thought. And that is what Jesus did teach of His own relationship to God. “For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given the Son to have life in Himself” (John 5:26). We cannot doubt that the Jews recognized this as a claim to Divine nature and Divine life, for, when He asserted it, they accused Him of blasphemy, “Because He made Himself equal with God” (John 5:18). Standing in the very same tradition, Peter must have been just as sensitive to what the claim involved as were the accusers, and that fact underlines the certitude of his conviction and the grandeur of his confession.

Let us bear in mind another factor, which reveals the strength of Peter’s confession and testimony. The Divinity of Jesus is part of our theological thought-structure, but it was not so with Peter. He first knew Jesus as a man and as a man among men. He knew the place of His birth, he knew Mary His mother and he knew His brothers. Peter had seen Him tired and weary; had seen Him mourn and weep, and hunger and thirst, just like other men. Peter knew Him in the familiarity of everyday contact - and how often sheer closeness like this can blunt perception and blur vision! - but, even through this familiarity with Jesus as a man, Peter’s faith reached to take hold of this other truth, “Here is the Son of God”. “Whom do men say that I, the Son of MAN am?” and, as Heaven’s light flashed into his soul, Peter saw this grand truth. The Son of Man IS the Son of God.

But Peter’s testimony was not only to the Person of this Son, but to His work also: “THOU art the CHRIST”. He saw that Jesus of Nazareth was not only the Son, but the Servant of Jehovah. The Ordained and Anointed and Sent One. The One promised in Old Testament prophecy, and pre-figured in its sacrifice and ceremony. His confession thrills through with his recognition of the “Hope of Israel”. He saw Jesus now, not alone for who He really was, but also for what He had come to do.

This is where the Church is founded. This is the platform of her enduring stability. She is rooted, not in the visions and labours of men of faith, but in the Person and Work of the Eternal Son Himself. Her life flows from the One Who has life in Himself and Who, having life in Himself, had the authority to lay it down and the ability to take it again, actively providing both the purchase price and the saving power of her eternal redemption. “On this rock I will build my church.” And let everyone who is a part of the Church through faith in Jesus be unafraid, for it is the rock of Enduring Stability.

(2) The envisaged structure of the Church of Christ

“I will build my church.” The thought is illustrative of His Church as a building and it is a thought that leads to three remarks about the Church.

There is, first of all, the thought of personal possession. Behind every building is a person. A person who plans and prepares and builds. That is precisely the emphasis here. “My” church. “I” will build. There is a tremendous sense of assurance and possession about that: of purpose and determination. My “Church”, even although, as He spoke, that church was only a handful of country followers. But, as Jesus looked at these few, what did He see? His Church! And He saw His Church because His eye looked on from that hour at Caesarea Philippi, on through the coming 30 centuries and contemplated the building in all the glory of its completion. He saw, not merely the plan, not just the foundation, but He saw the building in its full realisation. He saw the “Lively stones” come from every nation, tribe and tongue, and they were as “the sand on the seashore for multitude”. And He saw the walls reared up straight, and stately and strong; He saw every stone hewn and shaped and fitted in place and, then, surely, He saw the great headstone itself, “brought forth with shouting”, and He heard the songs of acclamation ... “salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb ... blessing and glory” (Rev. 7:10, 12).

That was His vision when He said that great thing, “I will build my church”. And it was His vision because it was His purpose, and His Father’s purpose. The purpose that He was, even then, in the process of fulfilling; fulfilling by way of obedience; by way of suffering; by way of death. And, through all the way of His perfect obedience, through the agony of the garden and the suffering of the Cross, that purpose can be read and re-read, unchanged, “I will build my church”. The vision girdled the purpose and so, our Redeemer, “For the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2). And, as we look to Him in faith, we can also be strong, for He will build His Church, He is building His Church, and, one day, the structure will stand complete.

That leads to a second remark about the Church and it is simply this. The Church of Christ is a living structure and points to the thought of a living fellowship. The Creek original, “Ecclesia” means a group of people who are “Called” or “Called out” and so, when we think of the Church in this New Testament sense of the word, we have to dismiss any thought of buildings or organisations from our minds and think of it as a group of living persons who have been called by the Holy Spirit into fellowship with Christ, and with one another.

It is good, in these days of ecumenical ferment, that we remember this fact. For it teaches us where the true unity of the Church really centres. The question that lies at the heart of the matter is not what organization a man may belong to, but whether, by the grace of God, he has been called into the living fellowship of the Church that Christ is building. That, and not his connection among men, is what makes a Christian!

This takes us to the third remark about the Church. It is Christ who builds. And that, I think, is a thought of great tenderness. When we remember how Jesus dealt with people, then we can be trusting and unafraid. The very thought of another having absolute sovereignty over us can be overwhelming, but when we remember who it is that wields this power, then there is no place for fear. “I will build” and He reserves the work for Himself; He delegates it to no one else. Every time He touches our lives to shape us for the building - and the hewing can be a sore process sometimes - His touch carries with it His own tender word, “Be not afraid, it is I”. His is the touch of love, of perfect love, and, “Perfect love casteth out fear, for there is no fear in love” (I John 4:18). The thought carries not only tenderness, but assurance. Of this builder and His great task, the prophet said, “He shall not fail nor be discouraged” (Isa. 42:4), and the psalmist sang, “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Ps. 72:8).

(3) The eternal security of the Church of Christ

Mark how strongly Christ puts this security: “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’‘

That expression, “The gates of hell”, is, by some, regarded as being the mere equivalent of the word “Hell”. Taken so, the words just mean that the Church shall never perish, it has certainty of life. But, while that is a very wonderful truth taught elsewhere in Scripture, I do not think it is the main truth taught us here. There is the plain idea of conflict in the word “prevail”. It enshrines the idea of a consistent purpose to storm and destroy; to attack the Church with a strong, persistent onslaught. Add to this, the fact that, in Biblical times, the “gates of the city” were the places where important business was done; where the elders met to deliberate and pass judgment, and hold councils of war until the expression came to have a specific, technical usage, and to mean collective experience, wisdom and skill, and we can begin to understand how strong the thing Jesus said really was. Plainly, He was asserting that, although the total resources of Hell, the cunning and evil and malice of the marshaled forces of Satan, were to be pitted against His Church, they would not prevail nor conquer.

The Church does not just contend against flesh and blood - these are often against her - but her most formidable foe is Satan himself. Paul, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, puts it very strongly, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers… against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). Well, this word of Christ is a promise for the Church and so, for every individual member of it. Every believer can draw strength from this. Though Hell pit all its resources against us - and down through the centuries, Hell has done that - the building of Christ stands sure, having this seal, “The Lord knoweth them that are His” (2 Tim. 2 :19). No weapon forged against this building can prosper. Nothing from the armoury of Satan can destroy one of Christ’s people, for their “life is hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). What utter security belongs to those who are called into Christ and so, into His Church, for, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it”.

Let me sum up, in conclusion, the teaching of our text. Three things are vital to the lasting strength of any building. The first is the foundation. No building is any stronger than its found. Let all who have been brought into Christ’s Church by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit remember, always, the rock that is the fortress and foundation of her stability: nothing less than Christ Himself, in all the glory of His person and His Work. With Jeremiah, we can look up and say, “A glorious high throne from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary” (Jer. 17:12).

The second factor in the strength of a building is this. The workman who erects the structure. On his character, on his honesty, on his integrity, on his skill and his craftsmanship hangs the whole future of the building. And this workman is none other than the Master-builder Himself. This is the One in whom, and by whom, “Ah the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord” (Eph 2:21).

The third thing in the strength and lasting security of a building is its power of resistance to the destructive elements of nature. By what power is the Church of Jesus Christ preserved from destruction? Peter himself tells us. The believer is, he says, “Kept by the power of God, through faith, unto salvation” (I Pet. I :5).

The ultimate question with which we each, as individuals, have to deal is just this: are we, ourselves, within the safety of Christ’s true Church? Have we trusted the salvation of our souls to Him? This is the very Saviour of whom Peter was later to preach - and, let me urge the point of his sermon in his own words - “There is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). All who know Him as Saviour, all who have trusted Him, find rest and peace in Him. He is the One who carries toward fruition the redemptive accomplishment that stood clear to His gaze, as He made this great assertion, “I will build my Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”. There is our confidence: there is the measure of our Christian hope: there we may trust and not be afraid.

Rev. J. Douglas MacMillan was Minister of Bon Accord & St. Vincent Street. He was also Professor of Church History at the Free Church College.

Sermon Excerpts

Access to the Father - Rev. John M. MacSween

We have, in these few words, the fullness of the Godhead: believers have access to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. All this fullness is engaged in the work of man’s salvation. Now, in the ultimate analysis, this is salvation - access to God. We know that this is how man, ruined by sin, is presented to us in the Scriptures of Truth. Man sinned and was expelled from the presence of God, and not only was he expelled, but every precaution was taken that he would not return; that he would not, in other words, have a way of access unto life. Lest man should put forth his hand and take of the Tree of Life, the Lord set His cherubim, that is the living creature, at the Gate of Eden, guarding the way with a flaming sword.

Access, in other words, is made absolutely impossible. That is, from man’s side - and this is his guilt and misery. This is the essence of it - that he is expelled, he is a wanderer, he is cast out from God - man’s misery commenced in this, for, by the fall, man lost communion with God.

But he is not expelled in such a way that there cannot be a return. There certainly cannot be a return on the part of man, because he has neither the desire nor the energy to retrace his steps. All the propensities of his nature hasten on the way of getting further and further from God. Man’s back is towards God and his face is towards perdition, and, thus, he moves and, thus, moves gathering momentum. He doesn’t merely move at a steady pace, on a stated pace; he gathers momentum all the time in his downward course, in his flight from God. For he is without God in the world, without Christ and without hope - this is man’s condition.

But, now, Paul says “We have access”, and this access is based on peace. He has made peace through the blood of his cross. We have almost the identical thought, almost in identical words, in the first verse of Romans 5 - “being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. By whom also we have access unto this grace wherein we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God”. Being justified by faith, we have peace and we have access to peace. The peace of God means not the peace one enjoys in oneself. It is objective, not subjective. It is something that has objective reality, not something that is merely enjoyed in man’s soul. Of course, it can be enjoyed in man’s soul, but that is not its basis. It is something that God has accomplished, something that God has brought about, and that is peace.

Now, if He is our peace and if we have no peace without Him, there is the implication that what exists without Him is not a state of peace, but a state of war and a state of enmity. And that is exactly the testimony of Scripture. Man is at enmity with God. From man’s side, the angel with the flaming sword is still at the gate. He is not, and cannot, be displaced by man. But, nevertheless, God has made peace and to make peace means, or implies at least, coming to close quarters with the flaming sword. There was to be peace on no other condition; there was to be reconciliation on no other basis. We now have access - therefore, someone must have come to grips with the flaming sword.

Zechariah, the prophet, speaks in these terms: “Awake O sword against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of hosts; smite the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered”. This would seem as if, in some sense, the sword lay dormant. Now, we may think of this in the sense that the saints of God in the Old Testament dispensation came in; the sword did not bar Abraham from access to God, although the work of reconciliation was not yet effected. It lay dormant, in the sense that there was a way of access based on a coming reconciliation. Christ goes towards the sword. He is to do business with that which turns this way and that, guarding the way to the tree of life.

For Him, there is no turning back. He has set His face like a flint and His disciples were afraid - they turned and fled. But He went on; for Him, there was no turning back. As Lachlan Mackenzie used to say of that sword, “It clave His humanity till it hit His divinity”. And then, it turned back. It could go no further. He is our peace and the sword is sheathed forever. It is now not only dormant, but out of the way, for all who are in Christ Jesus and in Him ascend the hill of God, having received righteousness from Him who went before. We have access through Him and in Him, access into the very presence of God.

We have access not up to a certain point merely, but into the holiest of all and it is through Him who made peace, who met the sword, who came back, not without marks of conflict, but who came back triumphant and, as He is seen returning, it is in garments rolled in blood. Who is this that cometh, who has been to enemy country and back again? “Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in His apparel?” Who is it? It is He that speaks in righteousness and who is “mighty to save”.

Rev. John M. MacSween was Minister in Tongue, Toronto and Point.

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A practical guide, which seeks to help Christians to maintain their principles, without alienating themselves from their workmates. What is the Christian response to some of these issues:

* I want to strive for excellence – but not fall headlong into perfectionism
* This might compromise my conscience
* How do I avoid the treadmill syndrome?
* Leisure time, family priorities, church commitments - I suffer stress!

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Work

Witness and Work

Witness and Work
Brian Allenby

Terra Nova Publications

£7.99

We live in the midst of a rapidly changing world and Christians face huge challenges as they bring faith to bear on the whole of life, including life at work. The author offers scriptural guidance for every Christian who longs to be an effective witness for God.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Work

Christian Life & Work (DVD)

Christian Life & Work
Mark Green

London Bible College

£25.00

Six-part video resource, and step-by-step leaders’ guide for small groups, helps Christians discover the everyday opportunities for ministry, witness and spiritual growth in the workplace:

* Know the joy of working for God from “9 - 5”
* Support each other effectively at work
* Raise the profile of secular work in our Church
* Make a difference for God in our workplaces

Some of our congregations have run this course to help Christians to be salt and light in their workplaces. We have a copy of the DVD, leaders’ guide and Mark Green’s book, Thank God it’s Monday.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

Stopped Work? Start Living!

Stopped Work? Start Living!
Irene Howat

CFP

£6.99

This book tells the story of retirees who, having left the workplace behind them, took up the challenge of further Christian service. With a wealth of experience and wisdom, many Christians find retirement gives the opportunity to serve God in new and different ways.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

Staying Alive

Staying Alive
Jeremy Middleton

CFP

£7.99

A twelve-part course for discipling new believers. Traces the first weeks and months of the young Christian’s walk with the Lord. Shows how following Jesus Christ involves every believer in a battle and explores the practical implications of that for everyday life. Can be used for personal study, on a one-to-one basis or in a group.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

Firm Foundations

Firm Foundations
Steve Cree & Dave Thurston

The Good Book Company

£3.00

Used by many of our own churches, post-Christianity Explored. 7-part course for teaching and reminding Christians about basic biblical belief and behaviour.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

The Freedom in Christ - Discipleship Course

The Freedom in Christ - Discipleship Course
Nigel T. Anderson & Steve Goss

Monarch Books

£18.99, for Leaders’ Guide with CD-ROM

A course for small groups with 13 teaching sessions, plus a ministry component called, ‘The Steps to Freedom in Christ’. Course is designed “to help every Christian take hold of the truth of who they are in Christ, resolve personal and spiritual conflicts through genuine repentance, and move on to maturity”. Sessions include:

Part A – Key Truths

* Where did I come from?
* Where am I now?
* Choosing to believe the truth

Part B - The World, the Flesh and the Devil

* The world’s view of truth
* Our daily choice
* Demolishing strongholds
* The battle for our minds

Part C - Breaking the Hold of the Past

* Handling emotions well
* Forgiving from the heart

Part D – Growing as Disciples

* Walking in freedom every day
* Relating to others
* Where are you heading?
* Staying on the right path

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

Being a Disciple: Counting the Real Cost

Being a Disciple: Counting the Real Cost
Kay Arthur, Tom & Jan Hart

Waterbrook Press

£4.99

40-Minute Bible Study - What did Jesus say about who His true disciples are? Jesus challenged those who would follow Him to count the cost. This bible study bring us face-to-face with what it means to be a disciple and invites us to accept the challenge to radical living, and to enjoy the blessings that come when you hold nothing back.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

Discipleship Explored

Discipleship Explored
Rico Tice

The Good Book Company

£6 for Leaders’ Guide and £3 for Study Guide

Sample materials for this eight-week course, featuring Bible studies, talks and group discussions – explore Paul’s letter to the Philippians and its call to live wholeheartedly for Christ. Discipleship Explored is intended for those beginning the Christian life and those who would like a ‘refresher’. In particular, it’s ideal for new Christians who have just completed ‘Christianity Explored’. The Leaders’ Guide gives information on how to set up the course, training in the use of the materials and provides a week-to-week guide for those running the course. The congregations that have started using these materials have given favourable feedback on the content and value of the studies.

Outreach/Evangelism

Related to Discipleship

Living for God’s Pleasure - The Fruit of the Spirit

Living for God’s Pleasure - The Fruit of the Spirit
Derek Prime

Evangelical Press

£7.99

In this extremely practical and thought-provoking book, the author deals with each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is the natural lifestyle of those in whom the Spirit lives and who follow his direction. It is not produced by commandment or law, but by life. As we depend upon him and obey him, he points us to the Lord Jesus Christ, encouraging us to model our lives on his. When we do so, we will bear the kind of spiritual fruit that brings praise and pleasure to God. Each chapter concludes with practical points for consideration and there is also a section containing questions that may be used to stimulate further discussion.

Outreach/Evangelism

General Evangelism

Is it Worth Believing?

Is it Worth Believing? The Spiritual Challenge of the Da Vinci Code
Greg Clarke

Matthias Media

£7.00

The Da Vinci Code has raised some big questions: Is Christianity really true? Is it worth believing in Jesus Christ, as he has been portrayed by the Church? Or is the real Jesus the one revealed by the Da Vinci Code? The author says that his aim is to examine why we come to believe one view of Christianity over another, how we form those beliefs and what factors contribute to our belief in one thing and our rejection of another? This book not only discusses and evaluates the Da Vinci Code as a novel, but tackles the important spiritual questions it raises.

Outreach/Evangelism

General Evangelism

What Would Jesus Say 2

What Would Jesus Say 2
Steve Ayers

IVP

£5.99

When Jesus met sinners, he told them they were forgiven. When he met social outcasts, he said they were accepted. When he met straight-laced religious people, he told them they knew nothing about God. When Jesus speaks, prepare to be surprised. In this book, Steve Ayers considers what Jesus might say to David Beckham/‘Big Brother’/Eminem/Harry Potter/ Philip Pullman/Paula Radcliffe/Anne Robinson/Homer Simpson/Robbie Williams/YOU?

Outreach/Evangelism

General Evangelism

Inside Out - The Report of Church Army’s Theology of Evangelism

Working Party 2004

“The report firstly considers the place of evangelism within mission, and particularly the relationship between word and action – and the need for both. Church Army has a long history of seeking to combine the two. Second, it makes a closely argued case for the Church to recognise, value and resource the specialist ministry of the evangelist”.

This resource is not available from the Free Church Bookshop. Please contact the Church Army Working Group:

Church Army
Marlowe House
109 Station Road
Sidcup, Kent
DA15 7AD

Tel: 020 8309 9991
Fax: 020 8309 3500

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Outreach/Evangelism

General Evangelism

Inside Out - The Report of Church Army’s Theology of Evangelism

Working Party 2004

‘The report firstly considers the place of evangelism within mission, and particularly the relationship between word and action – and the need for both. Church Army has a long history of seeking to combine the two. Second it makes a closely argued case for the Church to recognise, value and resource the specialist ministry of the evangelist’.

This resource is not available from the Free Church Bookshop. Please contact the Church Army Working Group:

Church Army
Marlowe House
109 Station Road
Sidcup, Kent
DA15 7AD

Tel: 020 8309 9991
Fax: 020 8309 3500

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Outreach/Evangelism

General Evangelism

Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult

Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult
Nigel Pollard

IVP

£6.99

“This book will help those seeking to communicate the Gospel – it will clear away the ideas which so often make it hard to hear and believe……. Evangelism is difficult. It always will be. But Nick’s thoughtful and imaginative approach, irrepressible humour and infectious enthusiasm will certainly help to make it slightly less difficult.”