Paul’s arrival in Jerusalem (Acts 21:17-36) provided him with an opportunity to tell the believers there about all God had done on his missionary journeys; he reported ‘in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.’ (Acts 21:19), reports which brought praise from his audience.

It’s important always to dwell on what God has done through our ministries rather than focussing on the ministries themselves. It has been a difficult year in the life of churches locally as we have been forced to close our doors to many things which normally make up the life of a church (including our Parent & Toddler group and youth club for much of this year) and have had to adapt to online services and to different ways of doing things. But as always, at the end of a year, it’s good to look back and to see what God has done in our area and beyond.

• We are grateful for the technology which has enabled us to livestream services to a wider audience than would usually attend meetings. Although the passive nature of livestreamed services (particularly on Facebook Live) is not at all representative of church as it should be, we are grateful that this is a way of reaching out to people with God’s good news and are thankful that God has put it on people’s hearts to watch and listen to His good news.

• We are grateful for every means of staying connected with people, including video calls, phone calls, text messages, social media and not forgetting Royal Mail! We have sent out countless cards and parcels of craft activities to local families and church members and believe that God uses these things as a reminder to others of His love and care.

• We are aware that God has used local churches to bless others at these difficult times, through different means of outreach, such as gift bags, food parcels, symbols of hope (Advent angels), debt advice, counselling and support.

• We are grateful that we have been able to support ministries at home and abroad, such as the Salvation Army food bank, local schools through the 4FrontTheatre pantomime ‘A Very Merry Covid-Cancelled Christmas’, Fredrick and Reeba’s ministries in India, the Christmas shoebox appeal and our ongoing support of Bedline, Innocent and Amshika in Haiti, Uganda and India respectively. Such support allows ministries to continue in what has been a very challenging year logistically!

We are looking to God to show us new ways of ministry, to show us how we can resume some of the areas which have seemed so fraught with difficulties because of the pandemic and to continue to work through us as we seek to bless our area and show others that we are ‘with God in the community, with God for the community.’

Docudramas are highly popular art forms these days, and there is much that is entertaining and informative about these series which are based on real-life events. Nonetheless, we have to understand that truth and lies are diametrically opposite and be careful to learn to sift fact from fiction.

At Christmas time, we are faced with a blurring of boundaries between fact and fantasy. Much of this may well seem harmless to people, who view it as mere entertainment. I personally have grave reservations about this attitude. My concern is that the baby may literally get thrown out with the bath water, that as children grow up and leave behind their childish beliefs about Christmas, they may also leave behind Jesus Christ, relegating Him to the same level as the other fantasies. After all, if what our parents and families have told us about everything else connected to Christmas is based on fiction, why should we believe that what they have told us about the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ is fact?

This is not a popular view, but I am deeply concerned about how we allow fact and fiction to co-exist happily in our lives with no real sifting of the two. Jesus is not fantasy or fiction. The Bible is adamant that His birth, life, death and resurrection are rooted in history and in reality, that these are the most important truths in the world. Why adorn them with elves and bunnies and anything else which detract from who He is and what He has done?

People tell me that Christmas is ‘for the children’ and it’s not right to take the magic away from this season. I love Christmas as much as anyone, but it is not just for the children. It is for all people, for we all need a Saviour to rescue us from the dominion of darkness and bring us into God’s family and God’s kingdom. I’m all for wonder and awe and eyes lighting up with joy. I just don’t believe we need anything other than God to do this. I do appreciate children have a wonderful capacity for discerning truth and for distinguishing between fact and fantasy (my granddaughter will often say to me, ‘I’m just ‘tending, Grandma!’), but I am not so sure adults retain that ability as well!

I love fiction. I have hundreds and hundreds of novels in my house and on my Kindle and can’t thank authors enough for their imaginations and the wonderful world of words which they create. I love novels which can also teach me things (much of what I know about glass-blowing, merchant banking, gemmology, geography and history comes from novels which incorporate these subjects into the works of fiction), but I have to remember that fiction is not fact.

The present series of ‘The Crown’ on Netflix has created a stir recently in re-telling the story of the Royal family in the UK in the 1980s with a disarming combination of facts and fiction. The problem is that we, the general public, don’t know which is which and also we can be remarkably influenced by fiction that is presented as fact. Fake news, another current topic, is another area where it can be hard to discern fact from fiction. How can we know what is true and what is invented?

This problem is not new. In Acts 21:17-36, we see Paul finally arriving in Jerusalem. There, he faces the dilemma of being viewed suspiciously as a man subverting people from following Jewish rules and customs. People ‘have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.’ (Acts 21:21) This was not true, as Paul’s subsequent actions indicate (he was willing to undergo Jewish purification rites and to pay the expenses of four others who wished to do this; he recognised the differences between Jews and Gentiles even if he taught that the way of salvation was the same, through faith in Christ Jesus.) Later, problems occurred in the Temple area because Jews, having seen him with the Greek believer, Trophimus, in the city assumed he had broken the law by taking him into the inner Temple area, from which Gentiles were barred. (Acts 21:28-29) All of these problems were rooted in the simple truth, ‘why let facts get in the way of a good story?’ The Jews didn’t care if what they were saying was true or not. It made a good story, a good basis for outrage and disapproval.

Ultimately, we can see that it is extremely dangerous to build our lives and actions on fiction. Generally speaking, we call people who do this insane and, in extreme cases, lock them up to protect society from them. Paul’s very life was in danger because of these mob assumptions, half-truths and misinformation, and it took the intervention of the commander of the Roman troops to stop murder by the masses. (Acts 21:30-36)

What will it take today to make us sift the truth from fiction? It’s so easy to be swept up in the rumours, the gossip, the assumptions which mingle fact and fiction with no regard for the difference between the two. We need to be rooted in the truth of God’s word and in the truth of God Himself. Jesus said He was the Way, the Truth and the Life. (John 14:6) Every fact and every fiction needs to be measured against this plumb-line.

After almost a year of virtually unmitigated bad news, it is worth stopping this Christmas-time and reflecting once again on the good news of the Christmas story – good news that will bring great joy, as the angels reminded the shepherds. (Luke 2:10)

We will be doing just that, reflecting and celebrating the good news of great joy of Christmas, at our carol service on Sunday 20th December at 6 p.m. The service will definitely be different for all kinds of reasons, but we will be showing our ‘Good News Nativity’ performance on video at the service and it will be livestreamed on Facebook to all those who can’t attend the church building. Members of the church worked hard during lockdown to record their scenes separately and we hope you will enjoy going back in time to that first Christmas and pondering again what fantastic news Christmas is!

No matter what is going on in the outside world, no matter what the weather’s doing, no matter what Government pronouncement comes our way, the truth remains that at this time we celebrate the good news of Jesus Christ, that God came down to earth as a baby, putting on human flesh, so that He could save us from our sins! Join us on 20th December to shout out this good news to all who will listen.

As a child, I learned to count and was immensely proud of being able to count to one hundred. Then I learned a quicker way of doing it: ‘one, two… miss a few… ninety-nine, one hundred!’ I found this hilarious.

Many of us want to apply this childish rhyme to life itself. We see the end goal. We know what we’re aiming for. We’re eager to get there. So we reckon it can’t hurt if we skip some of the boring bits in order to arrive at our destination more quickly. What can be so wrong about ‘missing a few’, after all?

The problem we thus encounter is that God sets things in place and it’s not always possible to circumnavigate His order. Obedience tends not to have shortcuts. We need to learn to work out our salvation (Phil 2:13), letting patience transform us, allowing perseverance to finish its work so that we can be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:4)

As a child, I used to flick to the last pages of a book to see if the story ended happily. As an adult, I’ve learned that knowing the ending is no substitute for reading the whole thing, for the ending (if well written) is even more satisfying in the context of a well-plotted storyline which draws you towards that finale.

Similarly, we want to skip to the last chapter of the Bible and reach the rewards of heaven without the slog of counting ourselves dead to sin, fleeing from evil and maintaining vigilance and obedience in our walk with God. Such shortcuts are doomed to failure. There is no substitute for the ‘long obedience in the same direction’, as Nietzsche put it.

This ‘long obedience in the same direction’ is also known as discipleship. The journey, the process of ‘being made holy’, is as crucial as the end product, for this is what actually determines the end product! Discipleship is vital in the process of being made perfect, for being conformed to the image of Christ requires a daily denial of self, a taking up of our cross and a determined following of Jesus. (Mark 8:34) Nothing else will do. There is no way we can skip steps and arrive at our destination safely. We must follow Jesus every day and do things the Jesus way. That’s one of the lessons of Advent. Waiting is never a waste of time as long as our eyes remain firmly fixed on God.

I love watching my grandchildren learn and especially seeing them begin to order things, listening to them learn to count or to sort shapes by size, for example. Getting things in the right order is indeed a useful skill in life.

I have been reading the Prophets lately, a difficult, often confusing but deeply rewarding task. The Prophets form a major section of the Old Testament, but they are not easy at times to understand. These people, who spoke the word of God they heard or described the visions they saw, were firmly established in historical contexts (most of which were desperate times of sin which often presented challenging circumstances to God-fearing people), but they were also free spirits in that they saw beyond the present times to the future of God’s eternity. Their words seem to alternate between the ‘now’ they inhabited and the future we may well now call the present. As such, they are often confusing, giving us layered meanings that are not easy to interpret, leaving us puzzling over the precise meaning of their words.

Yet the message of the prophets is startling both in its consistency and clarity. The prophets all expose the sin of people unequivocally, not pulling any punches, using shocking language and startling images, stripping away the veneer of respectability and the layers of excuses which mask our sinful motives. They hold up God’s law and expose how far we fall short of it. They describe the consequences of our rebellion and disobedience vividly and they issue the clarion call of repentance. “Return to Me!” (Zechariah 1:3) is the central message of the prophets, followed by an assurance of comfort and blessings if we do.

The prophets, without fail, operate in this order: Realisation. Repentance. Reward.

Most of us only want to focus on the ‘reward’ part. We like the prophets when they are assuring us of God’s presence, love, faithfulness and support. We are not so keen when they speak of God’s wrather, jealousy, judgment or condemnation. It’s worth remembering this has always been the case. The prophets were never popular people in their own time, even if we revere them now.

Yet just as we teach our children to count in a logical order and to sort according to logical criteria (size, colour, shape), so we must learn to follow God’s inexorably logical order so that we can reach a place of restoration.

Before we can enter into the rewards, we must realise and recognise sin and we must repent and turn back to God. There can be no other order. Just as night follows day and we cannot alter that, there are no shortcuts to God’s blessings, and we can thank the prophets for this reminder, even if we do not fully understand every detail of their prophecies.