It’s been a month of great surprises. We’ve eagerly anticipated the start of a new series of Sunday evening sermons on the Gospel of Mark – ‘What if God was one of Us?’ –  for quite a while now (see my introduction to the series on this website). Reading this stunning Gospel has excited me greatly and given me a huge ‘faith’ lift. We meet Jesus again for the very first time, as Mark writes to ensure that Jesus walks off the printed page and straight into the 21^st century. Mark’s theology of Christ’s miracles is that they (1) can create openness to true faith (2) don’t always result in saving faith (3) are hindered by lack of faith (4) can  strengthen a believer’s faith (5) are only a part of Jesus’ total ministry and (6) can often confirm our message to others. Among other things, these truths have led to the experience of three remarkable miracle healings among us this month.

In late April, a new baby daughter called Ruth was born to one of our young couples – Ezekiel and Sydillia. She was named after Ruth, my wife, so naturally we were thrilled with her arrival. But news soon broke while we were on holiday that serious problems had developed. Baby Ruth had severe liver damage leading to kidney problems, serious infection, a suspected brain tumor, possible liver cancer, severe dehydration, coma-threatening low blood-sugar levels, and possibly blindness. Medics on the Intensive Care ward were trying to keep her alive until a liver transplant became available. Many babies don’t last that long and the chances for Ruth’s survival were slim.

Upon our return my wife and I were keen to minister God’s help. We raced to the hospital. Baby Ruth was like a limp rag doll – weak, non-responsive, helpless and seriously ill with her liver INR levels at an alarming 4.9 (the norm is 0.8 to 1.2). Her parents were distressed, but trusting God. I gently took their child from them and held her close, feeling the stress of this sore trial along with them. But the Lord had earlier said quietly to my spirit as I approached the Intensive Care ward, ‘It is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these my little ones should perish.’ Faith comes by hearing!

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The Labour Party’s recent proposed amendments to the Equality Bill, already rejected by the Lords, are a matter of heated controversy. The Pope has just strongly denounced them as against natural law and an attack on religious freedom, so this gives us all pause for thought. Labour MP Harriet Harman has crafted these new clauses fired by what we hope were sincere motives to advance justice, human dignity, and fair-minded treatment of others. It will inevitably produce the very opposite for some. All faith communities, and particularly evangelical Christians, would be forced to violate ethical standards taught in scripture. They would be compelled to employ church leaders and staff members who openly engage in fornication and immoral sexual activities as well as others who hold religious beliefs contradictory to their own. Conscientious objectors could face expensive lawsuits and heavy fines if they do not comply.

Some beliefs are totally destructive to Christian faith and culture for they are denials of it. Christ charges us to change the world for the better, not bed-down with its shallow-rooted ideas! This legislation is akin to enforcing the freedom of British National Party members to join the Labour Party and hold office, or a radical Socialist revolutionary’s right to work as an adviser to David Cameron and the Conservative Party since we’re all ‘equal’. Thankfully, this ain’t going to happen, for reasons fairly obvious to people of common sense! Sadly, this highly valuable commodity – common sense – once thought essential in decision making and public discourse in Britain, is increasingly hard to find.

I recently re-read a very old letter from a wise and highly respected thinker, who voiced uncommon wisdom on some very important issues that relate to this legislation and should concern everyone who’s worried about the erosion of the foundations within our culture. He urges us to embrace uncomfortable truths and make a stand for them, due to their importance to us all. Here’s an extract:

“I feel very strongly about this huge obligation to tell the truth to all kinds of people across the whole spectrum of human ethnicity and beliefs, even if I’m mocked as a fool for this. The fact is I’m not remotely embarrassed about the life-changing truths I feel compelled to pass on. I’ve already seen their power to transform countless human lives for the better. God can fix anything and anybody up. He plans to rectify everyone who believes this, and then everything else around them.

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Last Sunday evening, 24th January 2010, Channel 4 launched its new series of seven attractively produced documentaries on the Bible, each hosted by a well-known public figure. Howard Jacobson, the best-selling Jewish novelist and humourist, tackled the awesome subject of ‘Creation’ for the pilot show – truly the foundation for all that’s to follow – and rightly so. The result must have left most viewers confirmed in their suspicions that this foundation is a pretty shaky one, for if Genesis is telling us lies how can we trust the other sixty-five books of the Bible? When does God start telling us the truth?

Back in September 2009, I was invited to participate in this programme by preaching a sermon on Genesis 1 at Westminster Chapel, then being interviewed for 90 minutes by Howard Jacobson. Both would be filmed as material to be included in this hot debate about creation. Howard wanted to find out how ‘fundamentalist’ creationists explain and defend the theology of Genesis. Most ‘fundamentalists’ usually appear not much ‘fun’, slightly ‘dumb’, and occasionally ‘mental’ to me, but I was willing to take the risk and participate.

I found Howard Jacobson to be charming, witty and incisive in his questions. A Mancunian Jew who drifted away from the faith of his fathers and lived a secular lifestyle, he now hovers indecisively somewhere between wistful longings and strong scepticism on the God-question. This was reflected in the whole tenor of the programme.

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It’s that time of year again! Advent – the wait for Christmas. Yet, every year more British people drift away from the most substantial reasons to bother with it. We now call it the ‘holiday season’, forgetting that holiday means Holy Day. So what’s ‘holy’ or ‘dazzlingly different’ about it? What makes December 25^th so special? After all, every two seconds three babies are conceived somewhere in the world but what’s different about Jesus? Jesus really was born, beginning life at conception as all human beings do. He did not suddenly appear as a full-grown male around 30 years of age. Nothing unusual about that then.

But wait. God took only some of the human components and genetic make-up from the ovaries of Mary his mother, a virgin Jewish maiden of royal lineage. From them he then cloned the embryo of Jesus, bypassing the normal intervention of male sperm and its chromosome complement, presumably through a creative miracle which subsidised the lack in Mary’s ovum. Matthew says ‘She was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit’ (1:18), and notes that Joseph’s suspicions were quelled by the explanation, ‘What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit’ (1:20). Many struggle with the apparent naivety of believing this.

Mary did too. In answer to Mary’s query of the angel as to how she could be pregnant when she was still a virgin and had never ‘played around’, she was told ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God’ (Luke 1:35).  The actual physical processes involved in this are not explained medically, but the activity of the Holy Spirit is clearly credited as the source of the resulting miracle child. The most obvious reason for this is that the child should be holy, and that Adamic sin and corruption should not be inherited by Jesus. Male paternity was bypassed to ensure this.

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Few of us could be ignorant of the widespread fall-out of the ‘nuclear accident’ that occurred in a chain reaction of alien ideas that gained momentum in the 1960s. Man-centred philosophy and rampant secular humanism exploded and the debris and shrapnel of cultural soundbites like ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’, ‘Free love’, ‘The Hippy Trail’, ‘campus riots’, ‘Make love, not war’ and ‘God is Dead!’ shaped that decade. The results included legalized abortion, family breakdown, easy divorce, playground narcotics, paedophile predators, and much more that led most of us to conclude with Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz, that ‘We are not in Kansas anymore!’ The whole spiritual landscape has changed.

The results have, for the most part, been devastating. You can’t go anywhere without meeting its tragic victims. London is filled with them. The mugged, sexually abused, depressed and suicidal, trafficked children, street sleepers, junkies, corrupt city traders, bent politicians, ‘wasted’ clubbers, abandoned single mums, fatherless kids and knifed teenagers and so on, are everywhere.

TIME-TESTED REMEDY

The only answer to this is the Gospel. The Gospel radically transforms, reorientates and remakes human lives. It affects a kind of metamorphosis – change from the inside out. No education or social conditioning can do this. Over time, the result is ‘redemptive lift’, recreating individual lives. The suicidal find hope, unshackled addicts go free, the sexually defiled feel clean again, the violent find peace. Whole communities and cultures change for the better. This is what we need so much in Britain, but only Christ’s Gospel can do it.

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