Never suppose for a moment that preachers are simply telling other people what to do. The scariest thing about preaching is that the truths you say aloud are those which definitely cause your own heart to beat that little bit more quickly. There’s never any sense of superiority in preaching, in my experience: more a terrifying humility, because you know the truth of James’s words: “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” (James 3:1) If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will!

So I have been wrestling long and hard with the simple words of the Apostles’ Creed “I believe in Jesus Christ… our Lord.” Such simple words. The Lordship of Christ is not a difficult concept to understand at all. There are loads of things in the Bible that I don’t understand, but what I find even more frightening than that are the things I do understand but find so hard to do!

Surrendering ownership of our lives is one of those things. The Bible studies on Romans have been showing us Paul’s inexorable logic in arriving at the conclusion he does in Romans 12:1. In view of God’s mercy, grace and love, the logical and reasonable conclusion is for us to offer ourselves – our whole lives, our feelings, emotions, will, mind, money, belongings, jobs, relationships, the whole job lot – to God as living sacrifices. Not hard to understand. But not always easy to do.

As always, I find others can capture the questions and yearning of my heart so much better than I can.

“If You washed away my vanity
If You took away my words
If all my world was swept away
Would You be enough for me?
Would my beating heart still sing?

If I lost it all
Would my hands stay lifted
To the God who gives and takes away?
If You take it all
This life You’ve given
Still my heart will sing to You

When my life is not what I expected
The plans I made have failed
When there’s nothing left to steal me away
Will You be enough for me?
Will my broken heart still sing?

Even if You take it all away
You’ll never let me go
Take it all away
But I still know
That I’m Yours
I’m still Yours” (Kutless, ‘I’m Still Yours’)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVyAMvx4PdQ

No matter what happens, we make the choice – at times with tears streaming or through gritted teeth – to surrender our lives and find that God is more than enough to meet every need.

Dave preached from Luke 23:32-43 last night, looking at the salvation of the penitent thief. Initially he considered the many ironies of Calvary:
1) how Jesus was mocked there by those who said He could not even save Himself and yet He actually saved the thief (and the world) precisely because He did not save Himself
2) how Jesus was ridiculed by those around Him who mocked Him in calling Him a king, clearly not believing this, and yet in actual fact He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords
3) how the blasphemers accused the one being blasphemed of blasphemy
4) how Jesus was cursed by his enemies but actually became God’s curse for us, cursed by His loving Father
5) how Jesus gives life and is the life, but actually had to die to bring us life.

There were actually two thieves crucified along with Jesus, and the accounts of the Crucifixion given in Matthew and Mark tell us that both joined in the blasphemy and mockery of the soldiers and crowds. Luke, however, shows us that one of them is affected by all He witnesses as Jesus hangs there on the cross and soon changes. He becomes penitent – feeling and expressing remose for his own misdeeds. He sees the reality and truth of what Jesus is accomplishing on the Cross, rather like Paul is changed totally and irrevocably by His encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus.

Salvation is truly a sovereign divine miracle. It has three stages. The first is an awareness of God and a fear of God, which the thief demonstrates in vs 40-41. The second stage is an acknowledgment of our own sin. Repentance means coming to one’s senses, as the Prodigal Son did. A true convert pleads nothing, but confesses his dependency and need of mercy and grace. That third stage is a recognition of the sinlessness of Christ and His ability to save us. We ‘believe in the Lord and are saved’ (Rom 10:13)

The thief acknowledged his own wrongdoings but also knew that Jesus had done nothing wrong (vs 41). His repentance and faith led him to say “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He has heard Jesus pray to His Father, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). He knows his only hope now is for forgiveness. He is aware of the wrath of God and the guilt of sin, but he is also aware of the glory of Christ and the hope of forgiveness.

Nobody survived crucifixion. In acknowledging that Jesus would have a kingdom, the thief is convinced that He will live after the crucifixion. He knows he has no right to be with Jesus, but this is grace: “today, you will be with me in paradise.” The thief is given the assurance from Jesus that he will receive that forgiveness, for he is given the promise he will be with Jesus in paradise – absent from the body, but present with the Lord.

In all conversion, we have to fear God and acknowledge our son sin and recognise the sinlessness of Christ and His ability to save us. None of us knows how long we will live. Earthquakes, accidents, illnesses all strike, often unexpectedly and suddenly. We need to be sure that we are in a right relationship with God.

The second part of the Apostles’ Creed says “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, our Lord.” Whilst affirming belief in one God, the Creed quickly acknowledges something of the mystery of the Godhead, namely that One God exists in Three Persons, the doctrine of the Trinity.

I believe in Jesus Christ
Jesus is God’s Final Word, the final and definitive revelation of God. As Michael Card puts it,
“When the Father’s Wisdom wanted to communicate His love,
He spoke it in one final perfect Word.

He spoke the Incarnation and then so was born the Son.
His final word was Jesus, He needed no other one.
Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed and make a way Divine.
And so was born the baby who would die to make it mine.” (Michael Card, ‘Final Word’)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_idg5Xxy6kE

Or, as the writer to the Hebrews tells us, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:1-3)

Even the names given to the Son are significant. Jesus – the name given by the angel to Joseph before the birth of Jesus (Matt 1:21) – means ‘Jehovah is Salvation.’ Christ or Messiah is the title meaning ‘Anointed One’. Both these names set out for us the purpose of Jesus, that He came into the world to save sinners. Matt 16 looks at the disciples’ confused understanding of who Jesus was, resulting in Peter’s confession ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God’ (Matt 16:16). We need spiritual or divine insight to understand who Jesus really is.

The only-begotten Son
This tells us something of that special relationship within the Godhead. The Creed echoes the language of John 1 which tells us how the one and only Son came to make his dwelling on earth and came to reveal the Father’s heart to us. Jesus was not a created being (see John 1 and Colossians 1), but one who lived in awareness of that relationship with His Father and who came to do the Father’s will. By belief in that name, we too can become children of God (John 1:12) and through believing, we can have life in that name (John 20:31)

Our Lord
Jesus is not just someone to be admired, someone to be respected. He is someone to be obeyed. Whilst we have that close, personal relationship with God, He is also someone to be feared (see Hebrews 12:22-29), for He is a consuming fire. When we stop and declare that Jesus Christ is our Lord, we are surrendering the control of our lives to God. This is scary and it’s frightening to see how often we take back that control and need, therefore, to surrender it again. That’s why it’s good to come back frequently to these core beliefs and examine who is really running our lives. Have we taken back the reins? Are we trying to manipulate circumstances and people to bend to our will? Or are we able to say, like Job, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” (Job1:21)?

1. Jesus Christ is the author of salvation – His name indicates His identity and purpose and He lived up to that name! Because of this we can be saved!
2. We strive to live in relationship with God and with others, for our God is a relational God.
3. We submit to God and surrender control of our lives, for He is our Lord. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Prov 3:5-6)

Having spent eleven chapters giving us a firm theological footing so that we will understand the situation without God and all God has done for us in Christ, Paul moves on to the practical application of this in everyday living. The chapters are linked with that vital word ‘therefore’ (I hear a former pastor’s words echoing through the ages: “every time you see a ‘therefore’ in the Bible, you know it’s there for a reason!”) We really must not divorce the ‘theoretical’ from the ‘practical’.

There are many branches of mathematics, but these are often divided into ‘pure’ maths and ‘applied’ maths – this same idea of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Pure maths can, like theology, end up very abstract and philosophical. But life involves nitty-gritty as well as theory and Paul is keen to show us how the two strands fit together.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” (Rom 12:1)

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” (Rom 12:1, The Message)

The first thing we considered was the word ‘urge’. Paul is not commanding the Romans to do this; God so often is looking for a heartfelt response, not a robot-like obedience that has no choices. In view of all that we have learned about God’s love, grace, mercy and provision, however, the logical, rational, reasonable and sensible response is to offer our whole lives to Him. As Jim Eliot, the missionary to Ecuador who lost his life there, is reputed to have said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Everything we have comes from God, even life itself. We have nothing really to cling on to, despite our illusions. All we have is the now of today to offer ourselves in service to Him.

God’s into the business of recycling! Long before this became fashionable (or expedient) to do, God has been taking ‘broken, shattered pieces’ and making them ‘more beautiful than I have ever known’ (Aaron Shust, ‘Long Live the King’). The old way of living, with its sin-tainted bias, is cleansed by God and our parts offered to Him (Rom 6:13). We are now set apart for God. The idea of ‘living sacrifices’ is memorable, for sacrifices in the Old Testament were always dead. But this is the very idea that Paul has explored earlier in Romans (notably chapter 6), that we are now dead to sin but alive to Christ. God does not waste anything!

‘True and proper worship’, ‘spiritual act of worship’, ‘reasonable worship’… all of these phrases convey the life-changing idea that worship means everything we do and are, offered to God. The rest of Romans will explore this in depth: what does this look like in the life of a believer? Is it just what we do in church? Emphatically not! It may be connected to ceremonies, songs, liturgy and celebration, but it is far more than these things. ‘Worship’ (also translated ‘service’) is our offering to God, and what we offer is our whole lives, our very beings.

As the Frances Havergal hymn goes,
“Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
Take my moments and my days,
Let them flow in endless praise.”

Or, as the Tim Hughes’ song reminds us, God is in everything:
“God in my living
There in my breathing
God in my waking
God in my sleeping
God in my resting
There in my working
God in my thinking
God in my speaking

God in my hoping
There in my dreaming
God in my watching
God in my waiting
God in my laughing
There in my weeping
God in my hurting
God in my healing”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOY-eHUsHdM

There are a few special events coming up… Have you got your diaries ready?!

Sunday 6th November
This is the next family service at 6 p.m. and we have all been requested to bring items costing no more than £1 to ‘swap’ as part of the service. No further details available, so the theme is as yet unknown, but we’re sure this will be a fun service if we all join in!

Saturday 12th November
This is the baptismal service – times and details to be announced. It’s always great to celebrate new life in Christ and we are thrilled to be able to baptise new believers.

Saturday 17th December
The Christian singer Paul Poulton will be leading a ‘Christmas Extravaganza’ at church that evening. Paul is a skilled communicator and musician, so we are hoping for a great evening’s entertainment. Bring your friends along!

“The trouble with X is they only see things in black and white! They need to understand that there are shades of grey as well!”

I work with children and young people, and part of my job inevitably involves sorting out the (to me) petty squabbles associated with youth. “She’s not talking to me!” “He’s not my mate anymore!” “They looked at me funny!” Part of growing up has to include learning how to live alongside each other and get on with people who have different personalities, different upbringings, different values and different likes and dislikes. Small wonder that the intransigence and inflexibility of youth often adds to the tensions of everyday life (not that intransigence and inflexibility are only found in young people, either…)

The phrase ‘seeing things in black and white’ usually means being rigid in seeing one’s own point of view but failing to take anyone else’s opinions into consideration, black and white being thought of as opposites. Gradually, as we mature, we learn that life is more complex than perhaps we would like to acknowledge. Certainly there are things that are definitely right and definitely wrong, but relationships and friendships are rarely as clear-cut as we’d like to pretend.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to feel irritated by this idea that maturity involves seeing life in ‘shades of grey‘. I know what’s meant by that phrase: that life is indeed more complex than we often perceive. But the notion of grey being the only colour seems to me to belie the immense variety of God’s creation, and the blandness of this colour seems to continue to paint a picture of life that is dull and drab, rather than being rich and vibrant.

When you think about it, the world is full of colours. Careful measurements of our visual system’s best performance have been made which show we can see about 1000 levels of light-dark, 100 levels of red-green, and 100 levels of yellow-blue for a single viewing condition in a laboratory. This means that the total number of colours we can see is about 10 million! (assuming we’re not colour-blind, that is…) We often use colours to describe emotions: we talk about red-hot anger or about the ‘green-eyed monster of jealousy’ or associate yellow with cowardice or purple with majesty.

Life is not all grey, any more than it is all black or white. It is full of colour, because God has made it that way. It is complex, many-layered, incorporating so many shades and tones that we have difficulty finding enough words to differentiate between them (think about all the synonyms of red: vermilion, crimson, scarlet, fuschia, maroon, burgundy etc.) If we associate the black-and-white simplicity of youth with a lack of emotional insight, I think we should also do away with mere shades of grey to represent the true depths of life. I can see a rainbow of colours, because life is vivid, spectacular, often difficult and complex, but ultimately varied and vibrant because God has made a world of wonderful colour for us to explore.