I’m missing the thought of Wimbledon this year as I love to watch this tennis tournament. One of the things I really appreciate about tennis is the unexpected triumph, those matches when a player looks completely beaten (two sets to love down and a break against them in the third set) and yet makes a comeback which astounds and astonishes spectators.

As with life, tennis is often fairly predictable. Good players beat the not-so-good players with polished regularity; it’s why there are rankings! But occasionally, the good players have to prove their greatness by defying the odds and coming back from seemingly impossible situations. These matches prove that mental stamina matters as much as physical stamina. Ivan Lendl said of his 1984 French Open Final victory against John McEnroe (which he won 3-6, 2-6, 6-4, 7-5, 7-5), ‘I felt that once I could break him, I could do it again.’ There has to be a self-belief and determination not to give in; as Stefan Edberg put it after his 1988 Wimbledon semi-final victory against Miloslav Mecir (4-6, 2-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4), ‘I wouldn’t have won today if I didn’t have guts.’

How do tennis players turn ‘inevitable’ defeats into ‘impossible’ victory? Andy Murray provides a clue when commenting on his 2013 Wimbledon quarter-final victory over Fernando Verdasco (4-6, 3-6, 6-1, 6-4, 7-5): ‘When you play more and more matches and gain more experience, you understand how to turn matches around and how to change the momentum of games.’

Experience matters. Tenacity triumphs. Having that positive mental attitude and a determination to recognise that every point is worth fighting for are what turn mediocre players into good players and good players into great ones.

It’s the same in our Christian life, except we have the added bonus that it’s not all down to us! Many times we face situations that truly are impossible, no matter how experienced, tenacious and determined we are. But defeat is not ‘inevitable.’ ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Rom 8:31) God is the God of the unexpected victory! – and how sweet the victory He brings!

So often in life, we face inevitable defeat – but then God makes a way. With the Red Sea in front of them and Pharaoh’s chariots closing in behind them, the Israelites were doomed to death – until God parted the Red Sea and made a way through. When Israel came to Jericho, they found an impregnable city – until God reduced the walls to rubble without them lifting a finger (they just had to lift their voices in a faith-filled cry of victory!) God is able to do ‘immeasurably more’ than all we ask or imagine. (Eph 3:20) He is the comeback king personified!

Our part in this is simple: to believe God. We have to develop a ‘trust God’ mentality that says, ‘even if this situation looks impossible, I will still believe God is greater than what I see.’ We become like rubber balls: able to bounce back!

We may not be able to watch Wimbledon this year, but we can still see God move in impossible situations and turn inevitable defeat into miraculous victory.

I am spending a lot of time meditating on John 10 recently. This is the well-known passage where Jesus speaks about being the good shepherd, a theme that’s recurrent throughout Scripture and throughout our services lately (Stephen preached from Psalm 23 last week.) It’s the passage where Jesus talks about His purpose: ‘I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.’ (John 10:10) Abundant life. Overflowing life. LIfe in its fullest measure. Life that is full and good. Real and eternal life, ‘more and better life than they ever dreamed of’, as the Message version says.

2020 will probably go down in history as the ‘year of the coronavirus pandemic’, where a global pandemic saw lockdowns, deaths and financial and economic collapse. None of that sounds appealing or remotely like ‘abundant life’, and it has been a struggle for many to see positive purpose in these times. Things that were once considered normal and ordinary – meeting with family and friends, attending church services, going shopping or swimming or to the gym, visiting museums, cinemas, theatres or theme parks, going on holiday – were all deemed unsafe, and it has felt like living in a straitjacket in some ways.

Jesus contrasts the life He seeks to bring to us with the purpose of the thief: ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.’ (John 10:10a) Jesus, the good shepherd, has good purposes for the sheep. The hired hands and sheep rustlers don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Sometimes – as now – it’s easy to see the negatives and the downsides of life. But on other occasions, the thief may try to lure us with temptations that are both appealing and attractive. The truth remains that he never has honourable intentions. His purpose is only to steal and kill and destroy.

Rend Collective sing, ‘There is nothing that could ever steal my song’ (‘I Choose To Worship’), but in truth, there are many things that can steal our song or our joy. Circumstances frequently do. When trouble comes our way, we so easily crumble, melting into a pool of misery faster than an ice-cream on a hot day! What we have to do when the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy is to build that altar to the Lord and raise our voices in defiant worship. Only then do we find ourselves protected from theft, death and destruction, because we discover the truth of Ps 119:68. God is good when life is not.

We all like slogans, because they are memorable and sum things up in a nutshell. But slogans need to be based on truth. I’m fed-up with parroting slogans that seem to me to be anodyne and meaningless (or worse: impossible and untrue.) I’ve adopted the lyric from ‘I Choose To Worship’ as my slogan: ‘You are good when life is not.’ I’ve put it up in my living-room to remind me of this truth. God is good. He is the good Shepherd. I’m going to trust His good intentions for us even in the midst of difficult circumstances. The thief may come to steal, kill and destroy, but Jesus came so that we may have life in all its fulness and no one is going to be able to take that from us.

It’s clear that Paul and Barnabas debated what to do about the matter of taking John Mark with them or not for some time and we may feel it frustrating that they could not ultimately agree and so decided to go their separate ways. (Acts 15:36-41) Paul clearly felt John Mark was not reliable (the Message version talks about him being a ‘quitter’) and we can see his point: John Mark had not seen the Jews of Antioch of Pisidia chase them through the cities of Asia Minor persecuting them; he had not seen what happened in Lystra where Paul was stoned, dragged out of the city, and left for dead. If John Mark bailed out on the first journey before the going got hard, what will happen this time when he experiences the persecutions of the Jews?! Barnabas, on the other hand, was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and a second chance, and all of us can readily identify with how it feels when someone believes in us again after failure. Conflict is so much harder to resolve when (as is more often than not the case) there is right on both sides.

It’s easy when we disagree to think we are in the right and everyone else is wrong. We often fail to know people’s back stories, the reasons why they think and act as they do. Paul constantly urges us to consider other people’s needs and to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, so to speak; conflict often arises because of our different backgrounds, different values and different perceptions. We are not robots and each one of us will see situations differently; try as we might, we will never all agree on everything.

Nonetheless, we can see that though they disagreed on something which required their action, they took time to try to work things out and eventually settled on a compromise situation. They may not ultimately have agreed, but they united under a common cause, seeing the need to preach the gospel as being more important than arguing for ever and not preaching. Sometimes, we have to agree to disagree and move on, being careful with our words, for ‘a gentle response defuses anger, but a sharp tongue kindles a temper-fire.’ (Prov 15:1, The Message)

Disagreements within the church can be painful and divisive. The Bible does not attempt to gloss over disagreements or pretend they never happen. In Acts 15:36-41 we see a painful disagreement (‘sharp disagreement’ has been translated by Tom Wright as a ‘huge row’) between Paul and Barnabas, which resulted in the pair splitting company and going in different directions on their next missionary journey. The issue which split them was Barnabas’s desire to take John Mark with them again on their journey to strengthen the churches and continue to spread the gospel, whereas Paul felt this would not be wise because he had deserted them on their previous journey.

It’s painful when we cannot agree amicably over disagreements to the extent that we feel we can no longer work alongside other Christians. It’s even more painful when we disagree over people (not just doctrine) and feel we can’t work alongside them anymore. Barnabas was more willing to give John Mark a second chance, possibly because, as his cousin, he knew him better than Paul, possibly because his encouraging nature had more tendency to believe the best. It’s not easy to work through the issues at stake and to show both respect and consideration when we disagree. Yet we are blessed to see beyond the immediate issues to the ultimate results in both the spread of the gospel and the restoration of relationships. Bengel points out that ‘out of one pair two were made.’ Barnabas and Mark went off to Cyprus to consolidate the work there and Paul took Silas (a Roman citizen) to revisit Syria and Cilicia and go much further.  Tom Wright reminds us, ‘What the gospel message itself massively demonstrates is that God can take the greatest human folly and sin and bring great good from it.’ (‘Acts For Everyone Pt 2’, P 55) Rom 8:28 reminds us that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, and ultimately, we see that this happened here. Moreover, Paul was later to write very positively about John Mark, describing him as ‘helpful to me in my ministry’ (2 Tim 4:11), so dispute did not have the last word. Disagreement, as we saw previously in Acts 15, does not inevitably have to lead to division and disunity. God is able to heal rifts and bring about changes in our attitudes. What we need most of all is a willingness to forgive and to allow God to rebuild wholeness from our fractured, broken lives.

One of the fascinating aspects of the book of Acts is how we see people introduced and growing in both grace and responsibilities. Some of these people are sketched in detail (we learn a lot about Stephen in the opening chapters before his death, for example); others are referred to very briefly and we know little about them.

In Acts 16:1-5, we are introduced to Timothy, presumably one of the converts from Paul and Barnabas’ first missionary journey, a man later described by Paul as ‘my son whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord.’ (1 Cor 4:17) He clearly became an important person in Paul’s life, described as a brother, co-worker and ‘true son in the Lord’ in various letters (1 Thess 3:2, Rom 16:21, 1 Tim 1:2), and two letters (1 & 2 Timothy, part of the ‘Pastoral Epistles’) were written by Paul to him, giving us valuable insights into the duties and responsibilities of church leaders and further showing us Paul’s relationship with this younger man.

Timothy was the son of a Jewish woman (Eunice) and a Greek man, and the grandson of Lois (2 Tim 1:5). It seems that he, his mother and grandmother were converted during Paul’s first journey to Lystra, and Timothy’s reputation was such that believers at Lystra and Iconium spoke well of him. (Acts 16:2) Paul wanted to take him with them on his missionary endeavours, but because of his anomalous position (being the son of a mixed marriage and uncircumcised), Paul decided to circumcise him.

We may feel this was an odd and inconsistent decision, given that Paul was busy contending for the fact that Gentiles did not need to be circumcised! However, it’s clear that here, Paul was treating Timothy as a Jew and wanting to remove any stigma from him which might damage his reputation in the eyes of other Jewish believers. There is no indication that circumcision was being done in order to seal Timothy’s salvation; rather, this was a pragmatic decision which reflects Paul’s desire to be ‘all things to all men.’ (1 Cor 9:20-23). John Stott comments, ‘what was unnecessary for acceptance with God was advisable for acceptance by some human beings,’ a sad reflection that sometimes people are harder to please than God! Tom Wright comments, ‘We might wish life were neater and less complicated, but the complexities are part of God’s world and God’s work and demonstrate that we cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all solution to life itself.’ It’s certainly true that we need to look at individual situations individually, which Paul definitely did.

Much of what we know about Timothy comes from Paul’s comments in his two letters to him. It seems that this man was commissioned before he left (the elders laid hands on him – see also 1 Tim 4:14, 2 Tim 1:6), and Paul reminds him of this in later years, urging him to remember the prophecies made about him and to hold on to his faith and good conscience in the face of opposition. (1 Tim 1:19) He encourages him not to let anyone despise him because of his youth, but to persevere in right living: ‘set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.’ (1 Tim 4:12) This charge to Timothy is the charge set before each one of us.

Paul’s second missionary journey started because he wanted to re-visit the towns where he had preached the word of the Lord and see how the new believers were doing. (Acts 15:36) In that sense, he was not simply a pioneer or evangelist; he also cared about the ongoing spiritual growth of the people in the churches that he planted.

Growth is a major theme of the New Testament. Peter urges to ‘like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.’ (1 Pet 2:2) Having had a son who detested milk and who stopped feeding at a very young age, causing me great anxiety and distress, I used to view this verse with some incomprehension. Both my granddaughters, however, have loved milk, and so finally I have seen what this verse means! – their delight in feeding, their contented guzzling and excitement when fed by their mother, has shown me how we should be as we seek God for the nourishment He can give us.

Paul uses the analogy of seeds growing on many occasions to remind us that growth is the natural progression for believers. (1 Cor 3:6-7) He talks of the body growing and building itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Eph 4:16) To the Colossians, he wrote that the ‘whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.’ (Col 2:19) From this, we see that growth is what happens naturally as we allow God’s Spirit to dwell in us and work in us.

At this time of separation and isolation, it’s more important than ever to ask, as Paul did, ‘How are you doing?’ Spiritual growth needs to be maintained, and this happens through our personal walk with God (developed through prayer, reading God’s Word, fellowship and witness) and through our collective gathering. We can’t gather together yet properly, but we can still maintain contact through texts, phone calls, letters and other means. Don’t forget others at this time; seek to keep in touch and to ask about spiritual growth, not just physical wellbeing, for as Paul and Timothy demonstrate, a relationship which cares about spiritual growth is a precious thing indeed.