Gospel 3: Life

Life as a Christian

Jesus said that he is the vine and we are the branches. Being a Christian means we are ‘in’ him, connected like a branch to a vine, but we also need him to be ‘in’ us, just like the branch has the life of the vine flowing through it. Some people think going to church makes you a Christian, but they’re wrong. A branch might be caught up in the vine, resting on other branches, but if it’s not connected there’s no life.

Some people wonder, what does being a Christian actually mean? What good things do you have to do in trying to live a Christian life? Christians talk about Grace a lot, God's undeserved favour, but it's so easy for us to just get on with life as normal, without really making space for Grace. Here's the secret: Christianity is about learning to cling to God, because we believe that his way is the best way.

One thing that sets Christianity apart from other religions is that humility is not only viewed as a positive attribute, but as a vital one. Our old way of life was no good, it got us into trouble, so carrying on living that way is dumb. Depend on God in everything, with confidence that he cares for you, because if he loved you enough to save you, even though you lived as though he didn’t matter, he'll keep loving you in every other circumstance of life. The bible says that nothing can separate us from God's love for us. Not trouble, not suffering or hard times, not hunger or homelessness, not danger or even death.

Come to him every day for strength. God saved us to have a relationship with him, which means two way communication: prayer and the Bible. Let God talk to you through the Bible; it's a treasure. Study it, think about it, listen to good teaching on it. And pray, which just means talking to God. What a privilege it is! Imagine trying to phone Barack Obama for a chat. It would never happen. But the God who made the whole universe wants you to talk to him, and he wants to talk to you through the bible. It's really quite incredible.

So it's not about being good?

The Bible says we are saved by faith, and we are saved for good works. So the amount of good works we do makes no difference to how acceptable we are in God's eyes; it's our faith in Jesus that saves us. Trying to be saved by doing good is like trying to ski uphill. You need to get in the ski lift of faith first, let God take you up the mountain, and then your good work of skiing can be effective and exciting.

It's Jesus’ righteousness given to us, not our own that makes us acceptable to God. But good works are important. The Bible says that without good works faith isn't real. But be careful here! This doesn’t mean that to have faith you must have done good things. It means that if you have faith you will do good things. Good will gradually begin to happen in your life. It’s like a new plant that slowly starts to bear fruit. When the plant is young, the fruit isn’t very impressive. As it matures, the fruit gets better, and there’s more of it!

What this also means is that some people who claim to be a Christian, actually aren’t. There are loads of things done by ‘Christians’, that don’t seem very Christian at all: the crusades, the Spanish inquisition, abuse of children by priests, the church even used to burn people at the stake for reading the Bible in English. Not that Christians can’t do wrong things, but clearly not everyone who claims to be a Christian is genuine. There are even people who claim allegiance to Jesus, and then claim to have his remains in their possession. That denies the very basis of Christianity, that Jesus rose from the dead!

So it IS about being good?!

If a person is saved by trusting God, the next step for that person is to live in a way that trusts God. If they went off and acted selfishly, not really caring about anyone else, doing whatever they wanted, without any concern for what the Bible says, that would not be a life of humble trust in God's plan for them, it would be an arrogant, self-centred life. So, God thinks good works are important, but what does the Bible say a 'good work' is anyway? It means actively loving people and wanting good for them. That might be spending time with people, giving money, encouragement, and most of all telling them the good news about Jesus. Christianity isn't a life for lone rangers, it's a community project, and the community of believers is the church. God loves us individually, and because he loves us he brings us into the church, where we can receive teaching, encouragement, correction, friendship, and where we can join in worshipping God for all he's done. And the church is God's method for reaching out to unsaved people throughout the whole world.

So keep this in mind: you can’t to do good deeds to earn God's favour, because you can’t get more favour than he has already given you for free. But now that God has done so much, you can do good just because you want to. It will start to come naturally, and people you know will start to notice changes in you. Having said that, it would be wrong to say that doing good will always be easy. Jesus said to love our enemies, not just our friends. So, if there are people who just don't seem to like you, who you may not get on with naturally, or who you don't see eye to eye with, you should love them anyway.

And often we'll make a mess of it, and do the same sort of wrong things we did before. But instead of being on a downward spiral we're being changed for the better by God. Sometimes very slowly! But loving others is part of the new life he gives, it's the task that God has given to those he saves, and pleasing your new dad is something you'll want to do after all the amazing things he's done for you.

Gospel 2: Sin

The bad news

Most people think they are generally quite good, moral people. Maybe not perfect, but who is? And compared with other people we know, that might be true. But comparing ourselves to other people is really not the important thing. It makes more sense to worry about how we measure up to God's standard.

Most people have heard of the ten commandments, so trying to keep those rules would surely be a good way to keep God happy, right? Rules like 'do not commit murder' and 'do not commit adultery', they sound achievable. Murder is an obvious bad one, and the vast majority of people haven't done it. But Jesus said "anyone who says 'you fool' will be in danger of hell." Adultery is more common than murder, but again most people haven't done it. And it's a fairly easy one to avoid at least. Unfortunately no, it's not. Jesus said "anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." So it seems that God's standards are incredibly high, higher than anyone could ever hope to reach.

We are all on the wrong side of God. Falling short of God's standard is called 'sin'. This sin can either be doing something we shouldn't, like stealing, or not doing something we should, like not putting God first in our lives. And at the root of all sin is pride. We want to be in control. We'd rather live our own way than God's way. It shows that we don't trust him, or value him as much as we should. It's quite an insult to God who created us, and gave us everything we have. We all know that crime should be punished, because if it isn't, justice isn't done. So it would be unjust for God to ignore sin. He hates it, it offends him, and he has to get rid of it. If we sin, we're stained by it and we rule ourselves out of God's presence.

So what does that mean for us? Do we need to do as much good as we can, like in other religions, and hope it outweighs the bad? Unfortunately for us, because everything we have is given to us from God, we owe him perfection in every area of our lives. Actions, motives, everything. All the time! So, if you’ve ever done the teeniest thing wrong, even if it's something as small as being rude to your parents, you cant make up for it, ever! You already owe him every good thing you could ever do, so the good you do now doesn't make up for the bad you did before. We are all totally stuffed! It would be like trying to repay a man you owe money to, by taking money from his bank account and trying to give it back to him. It's just not going to work.

The good news

If God chose to come to Earth as a man and get involved with us humans, in the form of Jesus Christ, after we've all offended him so much and built up a massive debt of sin that we can't pay off, we really need to know what he was up to. The fact that he came to Earth and died is stunning. It's just seems weird, why didn't he come and start blowing people up? If I was God, I would have! Amazingly, Jesus chose to die. It wasn't forced on him, it was his plan all along. The victory Jesus came to achieve wouldn't be earned by taking control of the world by force, but by suffering and dying. He came to free us from the thing that holds us captive: Sin.

God knows we are totally lost without his help. Jesus lived a perfect life, so he had no debt of his own. He was the only perfect man to ever live, and he took the punishment for all our sin, so our debt can be cancelled. And not only does he offer to free us from sin, but he also gives us his righteousness. That means he shares with us his right, the right of a son, to come into God's presence. And on top of that, he transforms our lives. Jesus talked about us being born again, which means that there is a part of us which was dead, our spirit, which he brings to life. And with the new life come new passions and desires. As we increasingly see how amazing God is, we increasingly see sin for the disgusting thing it is. It won't disappear completely, you still have to fight it, but you can be sure that when you die, you'll be with God, and sin will be gone for ever. Then you'll be able to enjoy all the benefits of your new life, in ways that you never imagined. There wont be any more sickness, pain or death, no more sadness, no injustice, no fear. There'll be a whole universe to explore for ever. And for ever we’ll have God as our father and our friend.

How do you get it?

If someone is spiritually dead, like the bible says, how can they decide to become spiritually alive? Dead people don’t choose to come to life. The good news is that if you've decided that you want to accept Jesus’ offer of salvation, God has already chosen you! In fact the bible says he chose you before he made the world.

He brings us to life and then our natural response is to realise how desirable the gift is which he's offering us, and to want it. It's not that he forces us to take it, it's more like a man who's dying of thirst being offered a drink. There's no possibility that such a good thing would ever be refused!

So how do you actually receive this amazing, undeserved gift of salvation? Well, the first thing to do is to repent. It's not just being sorry, to repent means to change your mind, to stop going in one direction, to turn around and start going the other way. That means we turn away from the sin and pride that put us in so much trouble in the first place. We need to keep watch for it and run the other way every time we see it coming. We know that sin, as in 'doing wrong things', is the big problem that we want to escape from, so to turn away from that makes sense. But why is pride such a big deal? It never seemed like it was really that bad. Not as bad as some of the other sins, surely?

It’s natural for us to want the best for ourselves, to want to be happy. Our lives are full of choices we make in the attempt to be as happy as possible. We put ourselves firmly at the centre of our lives, the pivot around which the whole universe revolves. Unfortunately, every other person we meet has the same idea, everyone in conflict about who the most important person in the world is. It affects all our relationships, we even love other people with one eye on how it benefits us, or how it makes us look. The thing is, none of us is the most important person. God is. For us to live with ourselves at the centre is to dishonour God. This is exactly what got us into trouble in the first place! To gain salvation, we need to remove ourselves from the centre of our lives and put God there instead. This is humility, the opposite of pride. No one said that Christianity is easy, and this might be the hardest thing. The task is to trust that his way is better than our way.

We need to believe that Jesus, the son of God, died for us to take our punishment, and that his death was effective in paying our debt. And we need believe that he rose from the dead, so that we can share in his life. We're grafted into him, like shoots grafted into a plant, and it's by being 'in him' that we gain all the benefits of children of God.

So the Christian life begins by having faith in God, and we continue living by faith until we die, thanking him for all the good things he gives, trusting him for strength through all the difficulties and pains of life, and believing that however hard it might be, his plan is the best one because it's the only one that leads to eternal life.

But just one more thing, to help you practice that all important humility. Not only does God give you the gift of salvation, but even the faith by which you receive it is a gift from God. If he hadn’t brought you to life first, you would still be as dead as a doornail, totally unable to have faith in him. One more thing to thank him for!

Gospel 1: God

Is there a God?

The computer I wrote this on didn't just spring into existence, it was made. The parts it’s made of didn't just pop into existence either, they were constructed from raw materials, and the raw materials came from the earth. So where did the earth come from? Space dust? Sounds reasonable, but where did that come from? The ‘Big Bang’? Well, what made the bang? If something blows up in my house I don't just sit there thinking "not to worry, I expect that was nothing". There would obviously be a cause, I would expect that one of my possessions had blown up. I would want to know what it was.

The problem is that if a big explosion was the start of the physical universe, then there can't have been a physical cause of the bang, or else the bang wasn't the start. And anyway, you'd then have the problem of what caused the thing that caused the bang. Thinking that way doesn't help. The only thing that makes any sense is that there must have been a power outside of the universe, not restricted by the limits of space and time that we are, which was capable of creating the physical universe. It also follows that this powerful force must be intelligent. When you hear a song, or watch a film, read a book or eat a pizza, it's obvious that an intelligent designer was involved. Even if the song is a terrible one, the fact that it exists shows that a person decided to create it. So it would be common sense to assume that purely because the universe exists, an intelligent being was behind it, ie. God.

So, if God does exist, and has the power to create the whole universe, it would be wise to find out as much about him as possible. There are many reasons to want to understand more about the ultimate reality of all existence, but for starters it would be good to know how to not get on the wrong side of him. Presumably such a powerful being must also have the power to 'uncreate' us, or even to make our whole existence completely miserable, if he ever decided that would be a good idea.

Who is God?

There are many religions claiming to be the way to know God, and almost all of them teach us how to act in a way that enables us to encounter him. It's always matter of doing right, being moral, basically following the rules. Then you hope that what you did was enough. Hopefully the good will outweigh the bad, or maybe he'll overlook the bad stuff if he sees enough good in you. But if you've even tried to even keep the rules that you expect other people to keep, like don't lie, don't cheat, don't be rude, you'll know that being good just doing come naturally to anyone. This route of earning God's acceptance seems like very shaky ground.

There is one religion that teaches something else. Not that we try to find God, but that he came to find us. Jesus came into the world claiming to be God. The bible says he taught with amazing authority, and even when he was only 12 years old he astonished the Jews with his knowledge of the bible. It also says that he performed miracles, healing the sick, raising the dead, and feeding 5000 men with a little boy's packed lunch. He certainly turned the Jewish world on it's head. He was killed by a combination of the Roman empire and the Jewish authorities, both of whom he upset by claiming to be in charge. In those days there was no end of people claiming to be the 'messiah', the chosen one God had sent to bring the Jewish nation back to it's glory days. All those men met a similar end to Jesus. So why have we never heard of any of them, but we have heard of Jesus? And now the followers of Jesus far outnumber the followers of the traditional Jewish faith, and Christianity has far outlasted the mighty Roman empire.

One reason why Jesus has stuck around is because his followers claim that after he had been dead for three days, he came back to life, and then rose up to heaven. That does sound crazy, but if it was true it would be good evidence that Jesus really was God. One thing that convinces me is that his disciples, who were his closest friends and followers, almost all died for saying that he had risen from the dead. They would have known whether he had risen or not, they are the ones who made it up if it wasn't true. It certainly wasn't a hallucination, because they all saw the same thing.

The disciples didn't die nicely, and if they knew the whole thing was a lie they would surely have admitted it to save themselves. They didn't all die together, so it wasn't a case of working each other up into a frenzy. Some people even wonder why they didn't just pretend it was a lie so they wouldn't be killed, even if they knew it was true. The answer to that, I think, is that something about Jesus must have affected these men. They believed that they would have a much better life after death, so death was not a very big deal to them.

Another thing that convinces me is that if he hadn't really risen from the dead, the Jewish authorities would have just gone to get the body and shown it to everyone to kill off Christianity before it even started. He wasn't in the tomb. Some people say his body must have been stolen by his followers. But the tomb was under armed Roman guard, with a massive stone blocking the way. Besides which, if they did steal the body, we’re back to the same problem that the disciples wouldn't all die for something they knew was false. Some people even say that Jesus wasn't actually dead but only fainted, then after 3 days he regained consciousness. He was beaten and whipped, he had spikes pushed into his head, and was nailed through his hands and feet to a wooden cross where he hung for hours. To breathe on a cross would have been agonising, because he had to lift himself up on the nails just to get air into his lungs, his whole bodyweight for every breath. Hours later, the soldiers tested to see if he was dead by pushing a spear into his heart, and blood and water came out separately. That means he was dead.

So I think it's convincing. There are other proofs, and to be honest just reading the stories of Jesus' life in the bible is convincing. Most of the stories in the four gospels come from the disciples themselves, and they make themselves look so incredibly stupid most of the time that you think it must be true. If they had made it up, why would they make themselves look so dumb?

Tupperware is evil

Tupperware is evil, tupperware I hate. When I get to heaven, it wont share my fate.

When you put your food in and try to find a lid, every other size is there, the one you need is hid.

When you stack it neatly and try to close the door, tupper-demons mess it up and throw it on the floor.

When you're overflowing, containers all around, your wife will show you what a brilliant tupper-deal she's found.

If it's all to much now, and your heart stops workin, she'll put you in a plastic box and store you with the gherkins.

Wake Up Oh Sleeper

When Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, Jesus did the impressive bit, but Lazarus still had to play his part. He didn't just lie there, wrapped up in bandages, heart beating, eyes open, mind racing, but to all intents and purposes still dead. And why would he? People who are alive make use of their life.

Christians are spiritually alive. That's the point, we're made alive by God, our eyes are opened and we can see the beauty and truth of God, at least in a partial way. Whether I then walk to him and take advantage of his gift, or keep living in the old way with just enough truth inside to wreck my pleasures, that's up to me.

How many people around the world have been given new life by Jesus but stay flat on their backs, still wrapped up in the bandages of death, not taking advantage of the life they have, and seeming to all the world to be just another spiritual corpse? A person who has been made alive by God either takes hold of the life Jesus has given, by getting up and living, or they keep gripping onto the bandages of sin and stay in the crypt.

And when it comes to it, how many people think they're saved but aren't? Jesus said "not all that say 'Lord Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven". There are even some people who have been enlightened to some extent, who have been blessed by the Holy Spirit's work in church meetings, and have seen that the Word is good, but they wont be saved (Hebrews 6:4-6). Those people don't lose their salvation, as there is no condemnation or separation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8). They were never saved, although they might have thought they were.

For the person who says they believe, but lies wrapped up on the slab, with no signs of life (in other words a 'backslider') how can they really know that their faith was ever real? At the end, God will do what is right, whether that means Heaven or Hell for them, and they wont be able to argue.

So get up off your slab and make use of the life Jesus offers! Prayer is a privilege. The Bible is our greatest treasure! Through it God can change how you approach every part of your life and give you hope. Then you will be either living the life you could have been living all along, or it might actually be the time when you are genuinely saved, and your 'getting up' will be the evidence of God's new work in your life.

Jesus said, "I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand". He is able to keep us from falling. He is able to save to the uttermost. Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God because of Jesus.

The tipping point

I seem to be having a lot of 'Aha!' moments at the moment. I'm listening to a lot of preaches while I'm driving, which probably explains it, although my 'Ahas' are never quite what the preacher is talking about. I guess there's no accounting for the weirdness of my brain.

Occasionally I listen to 'Talksport' radio station, and you do get the feeling that a lot of the people who call in are angry. Whether it's an unsuccessful football manager, an untrustworthy politician or someone who doesn't mow their lawn enough, the callers want to see 'justice done'. Heads must roll! The feeling is that people should get what they deserve, and no better. There's not much grace on talksport.

There's not much grace in the world at all. It's hard to forgive someone who has made you suffer, however small a thing it might be. And if they aren't sorry, just forget about it. But without grace, car journeys end in road rage, relationships break down, parents disown their children, insults end in fights. A group of kids clashes with another group, driven by the need to 'get even', every act needing to be avenged, back and forth, being pulled further and further down as though by gravity. The world seems to be in moral decline, but nobody knows what to do about it.

I remember years ago hearing that when CJ Mahaney was asked "how are you?", he replied "better than I deserve." At the time I thought it was a good sentiment, but perhaps a bit over the top. It stuck with me though. Now, having mixed that with an awful lot of John Piper, I realised that 'better than I deserve' IS grace, the key to everything.

I never really understood why God made the world. I was taught that he was totally happy in his own company, and that he wasn't in need of anything that we could give. I was told that it was because of His grace, but I didn't really understand it. Surely it wasn't worth His effort, if we don't give Him anything except an awful lot of trouble?

But my new thought, that grace means 'better than I deserve', made something stand out to me. We DO give God something he didn't have before. We give him the opportunity to show grace! To say that we exist 'because of God's grace' misses something I think. We exist so that God CAN show grace. The Father can't show grace to the Son, because the Son is deserving of every good thing the Father can give. But for us, being created by God out of nothing, we obviously hadn't earned anything.

Grace is part of who God is, so to have no outlet for it limits the expression of His glory. For God to bless us with a universe to live in, all the amazing things He put in it, the friends and families we have, it's all grace. And most of all for Him to share His infinite glory with us tiny humans really is amazing grace.

Gods grace is even bigger than that though. The human race fell from that privileged position that God had made us to have. By living in a way that says we find other pleasures more glorious than God, and by trying to put ourselves at the centre of our lives, we separate ourselves from Him. We're given over to the eternal consequence of our arrogance. But He showed how amazing His grace really is, by giving up his glory and becoming human, to be punished and die for our failings and rescue us from our fate. Then He gives us eternal life, new bodies, an endless universe to explore, no sin, sickness or death, and Himself, an infinite God to treasure.

So it's no wonder that treating each other better than we deserve stops the downward spiral. Grace lifts us to places we could never reach by ourselves, it's the reason that God created everything, the reason He gave us life. We're made in God's image, so to cut grace out of our lives is to cut off a vital part of who God made us to be.

Logical ponderings on an anti-cultural pro-choice culture

I just read an article describing one way in which unborn human lives have been ended. I dont think that particular procedure happens in the UK, and it's now banned in the US. Unfortunately the accepted methods are probably more gruesome, just perhaps less immediately and absurdly shocking. My first impulse was to drive into Brighton and start throwing bricks at Wistons Clinic, but instead I thought maybe I should try to write something to clear up in my own mind why I think it's wrong.

If you watch pretty much any action film you'll see a variety of creatively disturbing ways in which baddies get what they deserve. In our culture it seems to be accepted that untimely and horrible deaths should only ever be suffered by the most evil of villains who've committed terrible atrocities.

Is it fair then to infer that a terminated fetus was an evil villain? No, obviously that's ridiculous. You couldn't even convict them if 'existence' was a crime, based on the principle of diminished responsibility.

So, if their existence isn't a crime, then the atrocity they've commited must be forcing an inconvenienced mother to give birth to an unwanted baby? Having to face the consequences of your actions is a terrible injustice right? Well, no. We'd all expect a murderer to go to prison as a consequence of their actions.

Ok, but what if the woman had no choice in the conception, or the unborn fetus would be severely handicapped if delivered? Since neither circumstance is the fault of the fetus, a death sentence is unjust, as they haven't committed any crime for which they should be punished. But I'm assuming that the law should protect a baby inside the womb the same as it does after birth. Can it really be legal to kill a baby based purely on it's location?

Some people say that a human in the womb isn't really human, or they avoid calling it a baby because of the connotations of that. But at 24 weeks a fetus can be terminated purely for convenience, and there is no physical difference between a 24 week old human inside the womb, or outside after birth. Maybe we shouldn't think of a baby's 'delivery' but of it's 'deliverance' from a lawless prison, where it has no human rights.

So, I really don't see how the 'right to choose' even meets our culture's moral ideals. Could a person be so passionate about the right to choose, that they are completely unmoved by the details of the procedures involved? Do people go through the whole process refusing to think about it at all, avoiding any details of what actually happens?

I know that there are a lot of difficult and complicated circumstances, which I would find incredibly hard to deal with. But in the light of the facts, whatever the situation might be, I just don't understand how people think that abortion is an option.