Billy Graham turned 93 in November 2011 and is still as passionate about telling people about Jesus Christ, his Saviour, as when he first started to preach at crusade style meetings in 1947.

He is struggling with failing eyesight and hearing, but his evangelistic drive has not diminished, he still wants to get the message across. Recently he has used modern technology to preach in Spain and Portugal, two countries he was never able to reach when he was active in ministry. He has also just published a book entitled, ‘Nearing Home’.

‘Nearing Home’ will have much to say to us as we move through our senior years and from it we might learn how Billy has been inspired and guided through his life of Christian service.

He is confident that God still has plans for him and we can take this as encouragement that God can still use us at whatever age we are.

As we move through 2012, we may wish to reflect that:

• There is no retirement when working for God’s Kingdom
• God sees us as valuable to Him in His service whatever our physical state or age is
• He wants us to finish strong through the strength He gives
• He wants us to teach our following generations, so that they can teach their children and thus pass the baton from generation to generation to generation.

That is our task and challenge for 2012, so are we ready to pick up the baton and be Christ’s messengers?

It will be interesting and encouraging to hear your experiences.

Buy the book on Amazon: Nearing Home – Thoughts on Life, Faith and Finishing Well

As we watched this incredibly gifted young lady sing to a packed Manchester audience, Miriam and I both clocked that she was a self-harmer. The scars were deep along here forearm, evenly spread, forming a disturbing repetitive pattern. “How do we reach out to someone like her?” Miriam asked, as I sipped a Dandelion and Burdock through a straw. We spoke about Jesus for a few minutes until the initial shock wore off and the music filled our thoughts.

When crowds of realists wrote off a situation as hopeless in New Testament records, Jesus was in his element. As we flick through the Gospels it is clear that Jesus made a habit of befriending the weak, vulnerable and unassuming members of the community and leading them to something great. There was never a shortage of hope in the words and actions of Jesus. And we’re not talking about the “hope” spoken of in a conversation between two people who “hope it doesn’t rain”.

There was something tangible about the hope Jesus recognised in the lives of those around him, something pragmatic. You can imagine the raised eyebrows on the hillside as Jesus said: “Blessed are the poor in Spirit” amidst a crowd of weak and poor people. Jesus must have seen something beyond the skin when he was faced with a life depleted of hope. The knee-jerk reaction of the realist never seemed to infect the man who called himself the Way, the Truth and the Life.

So what do you see in the life of your siblings, your children and your parents? After considering Jesus, I have concluded that hope runs a lot deeper than any scars. There is always hope. Always.

Peace.

I really love film. I enjoy trips to the cinema, if I want to watch something on TV it is generally a film; I am a fan of Mark Kermode’s podcast and I was even in the film society at University!  My friend Russell is also a film fan and I have recently borrowed a pile of various DVDs off him which included the film “The Gospel According to St Matthew”, directed by Pasolini in 1964.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian poet, intellectual, writer, filmmaker and political figure. He was something of a renaissance man in his breadth of activity and gifting, but he was also a controversial figure, his communist views being just one source of scandal.

The fact that Pasolini was a Marxist and an atheist makes the reverential approach of the film particularly surprising. The dialogue is taken straight from Matthew’s Gospel and he vowed to make it from the perspective of a believer; though when the work was finished he realised he had made it in a way that reflected his own Marxist worldview.  Still, it has been critically acclaimed as one of the best adaptations of the life of Jesus, and despite being quite dated in feel (and subtitled due to it being in Italian), it is very powerful.

I recommend it because it presents a different perspective on a well known story.  I am always trying to find new ways of looking at things.  The Easter story is so important, so fundamental, but when you are dealing with a story that is so familiar how do you ensure that it stays alive, how do you see new paradigms, keep the material fresh and maintain the impact?

So leading up to Easter this year I had been looking at the story from new perspectives, Pasolini’s being one of them.  I have also been reading “The Cross of Christ” by John Stott (a book I cannot recommend highly enough) and I have been meditating on the story of the Centurion who stood at the foot of the cross while Jesus died – especially the passage of Matthew 27:27-54.

We all tell the gospel from a different point of view, our own perspective.  Even the four Gospels are highly reflective of the characters that wrote them: the Jewish perspective of Matthew, the punchy account of Mark, the precise account of the doctor Luke, the mystical perspective of John.

The way we tell of our encounter’s with Jesus also reflect our own history and character.  The blind man hardly knew anything about Jesus and when questioned he just said what he knew:

John 9:11  He replied “The man they called Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes.  He told me to go to Siloam and wash.  So I went and washed and then I could see…whether he is a sinner or not I do not know.  One thing I know.  I was blind but now I see!”

It is not the whole gospel but it was the good news as he knew it, how it applied to him. There is nothing wrong with us because it is by telling our own story that it remains authentic, and when people see the change in our character they can see something of the power of the gospel.