Struggling with your faith and its outworking? Two people recently have shown me the contemporary truth of transforming grace in their lives (Romans 12:1-2). The second I know, the first I don’t.

Faith Under Fire.

Andrew White has been the vicar of St George’s in Baghdad since 2005. Remarkably by the age 10 he knew that he wanted to go into medicine and a priest! Whilst working at St Thomas’, London on the Crash Team for cardiac emergencies God called him into ministry via Ridley Hall, Cambridge. During his time there he was diagnosed first with ME and then MS. He asks: is it not that sometimes God moves through adverse circumstances and even sickness when we will not cooperate with Him in health and tranquility? He is the living truth of a motto given to him by Lord Coggan (“Don’t Take Care, Take Risks”).

He is inspired by the Christians in his congregation whom he says have much to teach us about experiencing the fullness of the presence of God.  St George’s is outside the Green Zone and he lives each day believing on 1 John 4:8 “Perfect love drives out fear”.

Faith Down Under.

Nearer home, a 24-year old from our congregation in The Hague has also heard the call of God and answered it late January 2013 by giving up his job and flying to Cape Town to work at the Helderberg Sports Academy in its townships’ programmes.  In the townships 80% of the children do not live with their biological father.

He has worked to fund the start of the programme, but is reliant on God’s provision for its continuation.

Please pray God will provide for both these men’s needs and use them greatly for His kingdom.

Transforming Grace.

In the Explore Bible Devotional app I read recently:

“Grace never leaves people where it finds them. David’s experience of God’s favour transforms him into a willing, self-sacrificing servant.”

As a well-known hymn concludes:

“ Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering too small. Love so amazing, so divine demands my soul, my life, my all.”

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After the miscarriage we decided to try IVF one more final time. There were more occurrences that could have been taken as ‘signs’ from God. Including almost half the money required arriving on our doorstep over the course of a weekend. We hadn’t asked anyone for any help. But unfortunately the IVF failed to work again – we didn’t get past the transfer stage this time.

What followed was one of our worst summers ever. Upon reflection we think that the realisation that IVF was now off the table affected us both, and during the summer we grieved again. Then there was a life line – someone offered us the money for a third round of IVF. We were confused and unsure, and ultimately we turned this offer down. The final straw for me was watching a video at church for that years shoebox appeal. The joy that a simple box of toys bought children’s faces moved me, and as I watched I felt I couldn’t withhold the offer of parents to a child any longer. So we started making enquires about adoption.

At the start of the adoption process we were invited to an induction evening. During this we were given newspapers which had profiles of all the children who needed parents. It was like some kind of horrendously necessary Argos catalogue of children. After three pages I put the paper down for fear of breaking down in tears at the things these young lives had had to bear. I wanted to stop the evening, to shout ‘I’ll take them all!’ Adoption is an incredibly Biblical principle, even if you ignore all of God’s talk about looking after widows and orphans you are still faced with the fact that God looked at similar catalogue of children, similarly neglected and lied to and He said ‘I’ll take them all!’ Some say when you become a parent that your life as you know it ends, God is the only person who this is literally true for – Jesus died so that we could have the privilege of being His co-heir, His brother or sister.

Romans 8:15-17 ‘For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.’

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The practice of the presence of God was popularised by Brother Lawrence  in the classic Christian book of the same name. (The Practice of the Presence of God on Amazon)  It is a great aspiration but one most of us find difficult to achieve.

I came across a guy who does a lot of driving and consequently found that his day, with all its frustrations, was very difficult and he quickly lost any sense of the God’s presence. He decided that he needed some way of being constantly reminded in his car to seek out a space to acknowledge God.

As traffic lights were one of his major frustrations he thought he would use them to his advantage.  Instead of cursing his luck as the lights turn red he would treat them as a reminder to turn his mind briefly to God.

He says it has made a big difference to his day making him more ‘God conscious’.  Is this something you could try? or do you have other ways that help you practice the presence of God in the everyday?

Roy Gregory

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 “Ladies and Gentleman, the captain has just switched on the seatbelt sign in anticipation of upcoming moderate turbulence.” A string of words never followed by a cheery, “enjoy it!” When the bumps start I instinctively look out the window, just to make sure the wings are still there. I’m suddenly rudely aware of the extent that I’m not in control. Additionally, the thought occurs to me that if airplane disasters are simply statistics then every flight is a reduction in my odds.

So just how dangerous is turbulence? To answer that question, I turned to that master of knowledge, the Discovery Channel. Three words: airplane disaster documentaries. I was hooked. Human error, mechanical failure, unpredictable weather – I soaked it all in. You may think it an odd way to deal with undesirable high-altitude stress. Maybe so. My rationale was that the more I understood the more I would feel OK (as if my knowing that human error was the number one cause of airplane crashes was going to help me when I was strapped in to seat 49J with as much command over the elements as an Englishman with his BBQ hoping for that “perfect summer evening”).

My obsession with these re-enacted disasters did however bring some consolation. Through these dramas I learnt that airplane crashes are taken very seriously. They are investigated at great depth with the knowledge gained from the studies used to make future flights safer. As I learnt about the resulting developments in airplane technology my fascination with the complexity of airplanes grew and grew. I am in total awe of how advanced these modern vehicles are.

Men have sat in rooms and thought and schemed and sketched and calculated and come out with things like Concorde. Absolutely incredible. Airplane designers have my total respect. Airplane economy-section planners on the other hand … I digress.

As with my marvels at airplane technology I am profoundly in awe and wowed by scientific discoveries. As I write, NASA’s Martian rover, aptly named ‘Curiosity’, is scrambling around the Red Planet at the beginning of its two-year mission to see if conditions were ever suitable for life. Utterly fascinating.

Science describes the world we live in. It unravels mysteries that stun us with their complexity and beauty. Now, some have said, that with all of our acquired collective scientific understanding there is no need today for God to explain things. We can comprehend our world now in ways we couldn’t possibly fathom a century ago and therefore science and knowledge have replaced faith and superstition.

But science is what science is, a description of the way things are. Science relates theories and laws and provides a deeper understanding of what is physically there. Science enhances my understanding of the greatness of the makeup of the world but to conflate my knowledge of the way things work with the question of the existence of God, who explains why things exist, is to make a serious category mistake.

Being in increasing wonder of the way it all works only serves to enhance my utter awe of God. John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, writing in the Times put it this way, “The more Newton understood of the mathematical structure of the universe, the more he admired the creative genius of God, not the less.”

Science is the poetry we use to articulate the genius of God expressed in the creation of the universe. It is a language to explain what exists, not an explanation to the question of why it exists.  Just as understanding how a well-designed plane keeps me safe at 36,000 feet goes no way to understanding what I’m doing in the plane in the first place.

This article first appeared in the Nov/Dec edition of Sorted Magazine.

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‘Prove to me that God exists’, a bloke I was chatting to at a bar said to me. I was drinking a lime alcopop that I’d been given on the house. It was disgusting, and my cheeks were cowering inwards by the second.

Whilst my drink was uncommon and grotesque, his request was not. One of the major reasons people give for not believing in God is simply that ‘there’s no proof’. Now, it will often be phrased as ‘there’s no evidence,’ but what they really mean is proof – something concrete that would absolutely seal the deal, like God writing his name across the sky in stars.

There’s a lot that’s troublesome about that assertion, though.

It may make you feel enlightened and robust to say ‘I’d believe if there was irrefutable proof’, but the reality is that you wouldn’t submit any other aspect of your life to that charge. Outside of pure mathematics, people don’t talk about ‘proof’ in that strict sense. We look at the evidence and make a judgement on where that evidence leads. Nobody owns evidence. We all have the same data to work with.

You will hear people say it. ‘I only believe in what can be proven.’ Fool of a Took! Nobody does – that’s just a soundbyte. For starters, you can’t even prove that the previous sentence is true!

I can’t prove my wife loves me, or that I love her. I can put forward a good case, and I’d be happy to show you the scrapbook that I’ve collated for just such a purpose, but I can’t prove it using science or logic. But if I’d only acted on what could be proven irrevocably beyond doubt, I would never have plucked up the courage to ask her out, and we wouldn’t now be happily married.

There’s so much I can’t prove. I can’t prove to you that 50 Shades of Grey is the worst book ever written and that the author should be force-fed every copy a page at a time until she learns to never do it again and signs a binding contract to that end; but it is nevertheless true.

The point is this: If someone genuinely does live believing in only what can be proven, then they will end up desperately alone, because they will never know love. Even Sheldon Cooper engages in relationship without concrete formulae. So maybe the idea of irrefutable proof is just a cop-out.

The sister statement, that tends to hang around with the idea of irrefutable proof, is the following: ‘If there was a God, He would have proven it to us by now.’ The technical response is the same as above, that nothing that really matters to you in life can be proven in that academic sense. Love, Hope, Beauty, Purpose, Forgiveness: These are the things that really count on a day-to-day basis, and we all know them to be true, even though we can’t prove it.

But when it’s said that God would have proven Himself by now, it’s perfectly correct to assert that, actually, He has – to millions and millions and millions of people across the globe and throughout time. And maybe if you haven’t met him yet, maybe that’s because you’re looking for equations instead of relationship.

Because God’s chief aim is not to get you to merely or blindly believe in Him. ‘Even the demons do that, and tremble’, says the book of James. Again, I believed my wife existed long before I started going out with her. But belief in itself doesn’t bring love or warmth or delight. It was only by getting to know her and spending time with her that those things were possible. Same with God: He wants us to know Him, not just know about Him. There’s nothing to suggest that if God drew His name across the sky in stars, more people would be drawn into a loving relationship with Him.

The guy I was chatting to at the bar was, sadly, far too hammered on the limey alcopop freebies to care what I had to say. I’ve got a few bottles in my kitchen still. I can’t prove to you how disgusting it is as a drink, but if you wanted to come round and taste it for yourself, you’d know I was telling the truth. And then you’d vomit.

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“Christianity? There are some good points to it, but I just can’t believe that one faith is superior to others. That view is intolerant.” You know the idea, it has been said in many ways. Christianity, it is understood, is basically unfair because it says that everyone else is wrong. Oh, the arrogance of this, the intolerance to other ideas and people!

In Britain today there are many people of different backgrounds, from all types of races and people groups. We can enjoy just about any food from around the world and explore just about any belief without ever leaving these fair shores. The world has come to this country and along with it has come a wonderful variety of customs, traditions, and of course, religions.

Unity in all of this diversity is greatly prized. Ideas which threaten the peace are pounced upon quickly. We can of course agree, discrimination against individuals can and should be fought against. We applaud the efforts of organisations such as FIFA to eradicate racism, a horrible and cruel practice. We celebrate equality for women in the work place as noble and worthy. But does it mean that we have to accept all religions as having equal weight? Is it discrimination to say that just one religion is correct?

Essentially this argument boils down to truth claims. When someone says that they don’t like Christianity because it is intolerant they are making a claim about truth. “I don’t like your exclusivity. I don’t like that you say that Jesus is the only way.” But as we examine those very statements being made we realise that the person making them is asserting an exclusive view too! The person who doesn’t like Christianity’s truth claims is in fact saying that their view of truth – that many viewpoints are equally valid – is the right way, the only way, to proceed. In fact, exclusivity is OK – it just must be this type of exclusivity. But hold on, within this belief this person must grant Christianity’s view too. It all starts to unravel somewhat.

The question in fact reveals that Christianity – or any religion – can’t be written off simply for making exclusive claims. All religions and ways of thinking hold some kind of exclusivity at some point. What we must do is investigate the claims that Christianity makes. Do they stack up? Does the evidence fit? Does Christianity make more sense of the world than other religions and belief systems? What we really need to do is investigate, as Alister McGrath says, what Christianity is all about. This is what we will begin to look at in future columns.

This article first appeared in the Sep/Oct edition of Sorted Magazine.

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Think about everything you do for God. Ever feel pretty good about it? Ever feel a bit annoyed when God doesn’t seem to bless you enough for what you do? I mean you probably give time, money and more to God right? And that’s a good thing yes? But what if God doesn’t want your begrudging offerings. What if God wants you?

Before Jesus was gave the ultimate sacrifice, humans made animal sacrifices. Why? To make themselves right with God. To atone. Who were these sacrifices for? I always assumed they were for God, but the wages of sin are death not sacrifice, and throughout the Old Testament (and repeated in the New by Jesus) God states that He is not happy with sacrifice, but instead desires mercy.

So what’s the issue? I think ultimately sacrifice becomes selfish. We start to think of what we give and forget why we give. This happened with the Israelites, who instead of sacrificing the right things tried to use sacrifice as a way of getting rid of their less valuable livestock. A deformed sheep they can spare but the healthy firstborn? That will cost, that will have implications.

And so we think about how much we sacrifice for God, how much we do for Him, whether it is enough to get away with, whether it costs too much. Our sense of justice skews towards ourselves – is it fair that I give this much ? We see what we do for God in terms of sacrifice but how accurate is this? Does it really compare to the sacrifice Jesus made so we could have new life? Isn’t there a better way?

Matt 9:13 ‘ But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’

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There is a man who stands in the town centre. He has done it for years. This photo is his latest sign.

What do you think? I mean, technically he’s not wrong is he? But is it the best emphasis given all the richness there is in God? Do we want to see half-hearted converts just hedging their bets in case the end of the world does appear sooner than they hoped?

Throughout the Bible we see God state that He desires mercy over sacrifice. Jesus even repeats this mantra to the Pharisees, imploring them to learn what it means. What’s more merciful – to scare people into the kingdom? Or to remind them of alternative ’100% guaranteed “Biblical facts”? Like whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Like the fact that in Jesus we are new creations. Like faith, hope and love?

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… if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing … and now these three remain, faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13)

Yes faith makes a difference, Yes hope makes a difference but without love the bible says many of our efforts may turn out to be hollow – without love we are nothing.

Sebastian Coe in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, said that the most important aspect to human life was the pursuit of the highest human achievement – whilst this is obviously a very commendable objective and to be encouraged, the bible shows us that this can be far from God’s main desire from us and humanity – he wants us to looks at our character and in-particular at our heart – his first priority is to see a foundation of love in our lives – this is even more important than human achievement, even more important than having faith to move a mountain.

When we look at all that Jesus went through, especially the cross, what do we think enabled him to endure such things and not fall – here again I believe the bible points to his relationship with his father God, a relationship built on love.

As Christian men we need to be clear about what is the foundation and motivation behind what we do in life and in particular what we do as expressions of our faith to others – it is not about charging into spiritual warfare guns blazing, not about winning at all costs, not about doing as the world does – No, it is about being men who unlike so many, do things differently and stand firm on God’s foundation of love, a love that is able to motivative us to do great things for our father, endure any weather and be there for and with our neighbours in any part of the world.

Do things differently … but the greatest of these is love.

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And there I was, standing in a tight lycra kit with mascara running adjacent to the sweat drops on my face. In my right hand was an extremely heavy, miniature cannonball thing. The stadium was full, and united in song. “Team GB, Team GB”.

The official signalled that I should step forward to throw. I replied: “Mate, I’m not a shot putter. I’m also not female. And finally, do you know why I’m wearing lycra? Seriously man, if my brothers see this I’ll be excommunicated from my family. Please help.”

The official laughed my comment off and escorted me to the throwing booth. Behind me were female athletes all scoffing at my lack of muscle and unflattering outfit. Their sarcasm didn’t dampen the crowd’s optimism though. One northerner shouted encouragement from the stands: “Go on Alex luv, throw the life out of that thing. Go girl!”

Though tempted to run out of the Olympic stadium and pray nobody was filming the event, I pondered the phrase ‘When in Rome’.

Subsequently, I threw the weakest and most dreadful shot put in the history of the sport. It was like baby vomit. I’ll be honest with you, the silence of the stadium crushed me more than the costume that was barely covering my decency. Never had I been more happy to wake from a dream.

A few hours after my torrid sleep encounter, I was chatting with a friend of mine who was talking about ‘Serious vision’ for their ‘Life Calling’. I don’t know why so many people share these sorts of visions with me. I often feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t have clear revelations about the goal of my life. But as my talented and gifted friend explained their passion for faith with phrases like ‘Heart’s desire’ and ‘Soul thirst’, he looked at me and asked me what sort of dreams I have for my life. Suffice to say, they weren’t the same as his.

It got me thinking, and here’s what I think. Guys, don’t worry if you have hardly anything in common with those you’re living your life with. Fear not if you feel like a slug amidst eagles. Despite the thousands of faith-based manifestos that ooze intensity, destiny and promise, God is also the one who created normality. He created you, whether you strive to change culture forever, or merely dream of lycra and shot puts.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

- Colossians 3:23-24

Peace

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