The Wanderer

Last Thursday I had a surprise visit to South Wales.  Pastor Achille Blaize had been due to preach in Brynmawr at a monthly meeting hosted by Zion Baptist Church.  Due to ill health he had to cancel, but had been unable to contact the pastor.  Pastor Blaize had asked my father to step in, assuring him that he would pass on the details as soon as he himself was contacted.  Following the sudden death of his sister, my father accepted my offer to cover anything that he felt was a bridge too far at this point.  That meant that I travelled across to Wales on Thursday afternoon where I enjoyed some fellowship with Pastor and Mrs Teify Ebenezer before heading over to the church.  There was a reasonable congregation of mainly older saints, and I was fairly confident that they were a little disappointed to see someone who was so distinctly not Achille Blaize going up into the pulpit.  I was then obliged to confess that I was not even the substitute, but the substitute’s substitute!  Having been asked to preach something for the encouragement of the saints, and working at fairly short notice, I elected to preach again from Colossians 2.6: “As you have therefore received Jesus Christ, so walk in him.”  It sometimes feels a little cheap to repeat a sermon, but they always come out slightly differently in some respects, although I find that my brain tends to respond to the same prompts in the same way, so that what were originally off-the-cuff comments and illustrations come back when I use the same material again.

In any case, I think God was pleased to help me in preaching, and I was relieved to find that there was less evidence of disappointment after I had preached than there might have been before.  These were earnest and warm-hearted men and women of God, and they were primed to feed upon God’s Word, making my task much easier.  I left after a cup of tea, and made it home half-an-hour or so after midnight.

I started preparing for the Lord’s day on Friday, working around various other commitments.  On Saturday morning we had a regular special prayer meeting, in which we took as our springboard for prayer a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon called One antidote for many ills.  It was a very good meeting, and we prayed from about 8am until 9.30am.  Some of the men go out after the meeting to speak with people on the street, but there are not often too many around.  We acknowledged that we need to go to where people are when they are there.  Therefore, after spending a day preparing again, I went back to Maidenbower on Saturday evening with a couple of friends, and we prayed briefly and then went out looking for some of the gangs of young people who often hang around in the evening.  First stop was with a couple of lads hanging around outside the shop.  I spoke to them for about fifteen minutes while the others scouted other locations.  When I finished, I went to find them, and we headed over to a local park where there were about fifteen or twenty gathered, hanging out at a floodlit football pitch (barely five-a-side size, but nice for a kickabout).  In the kindness of God, the two lads by the shop had joined them, so the ice was already broken.  We talked to them for about thirty minutes, and a group of them came over to see the church building.  We handed out a few tract-invitations, declined a kind invitation to go for a kebab, but stopped for a twenty-minute game of football.  They were open, chatty, deliberately provocative (both in their questions and using calculatedly coarse and blasphemous language), and they had short attention spans, but we were able to speak gospel truth to them and introduce them to things that many of them had clearly never heard before, or only in twisted and convoluted fashion.  The bewilderment they expressed when finding out that I was a great sinner, and the confusion of how I could be confident of going to heaven if I was a great sinner, and the sheer amazement of the assertion that Christ had died for his people (he was a “a total mug” for taking the punishment of others, apparently), revealed again the natural responses of natural men confronted with divine truth.  It was a good evening’s work.  Although none of them did turn up at the services on Sunday (apparently the morning service is not attractive to those who generally don’t get up until mid-afternoon on a weekend), I think a door has opened, and we hope to keep pushing through it.

On the Lord’s day itself I finished dealing with the God-constituted role of parents, emphasising authority with affection, and once more returning to the gospel dynamic that must be essential if we are to function as prophets, priests and kings in relation to our children.  Next week, God willing, we move on to look at the parental tasks that are built on that foundation.

I had both morning and evening services.  In the morning I preached from 1 Thessalonians 1.9-10 on Idols, God and Jesus.  The church in Thessalonica was being described to Paul as a group of men and women characterised by a turning, a serving, and a waiting.  They had turned to God from idols, attracted to the beauty of God’s holiness from the idol cults and their practices.  We have our own idols: reputation, appetite, ease, custom, family and carnal security – the things which grip our consciences, condition our actions, demand our time and energy and money, which we are most afraid of losing, which govern and drive our thoughts, words and deeds.  Even though a Christian has been liberated from idolatry, they constantly cry for our attention, and we can give the impression of still being in thrall to them, our lives still decorated by idolatrous paraphernalia that needs to be torn down.

Further, a Christian serves God.  His one concern is to discover and do the will of God, without limit in the service rendered nor the time, duration, or effort of it.  A saint is consumed by the glory of God, and such a life is a powerful testimony to gospel realities, a potent and persuasive witness.

Finally, a Christian waits for Jesus, God’s Son, who is in heaven, having been raised from the dead, who is delivering his people from the wrath to come.  The second coming of Christ was a key element in apostolic teaching, and these believers believed it, and were in eager and expectant anticipation of it.  They lived in the light of Christ’s imminent return, rejoicing in and sustained by the fact that he would come not to condemn them, but for the consummation of redemption already enjoyed.

This is how the saints of Thessalonica were described: is that true of us?  What does the world report of you and the church of which you are a part?  Are you one characterised by turning, serving and waiting?  You ought to be.

In the evening, I felt unusual liberty in prayer.  Our evening reading from the Old Testmanet was the first chapter of Haggai, and the Lord was pleased to open my mouth in confession of sin and pleas for grace to be shown in abundant measure, taking my cue both from the criticisms and encouragements that Haggai brought to the people as appropriate.

I then preached from Philippians 4.13 on The all-sufficient Saviour.  Paul had learned a settled composure in the midst of trials, a stability of soul that was not fatalism or impassivity, but rather a freedom from anxiety through trust in God. This is the climactic summation of his testimony: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Here is Paul’s assured determination: he testifies to active faith in an active life, confident that he is competent to respond righteously to whatever circumstances he faces, a confidence road-tested from the heights of abundance to the depths of abasement.  This man can say this having made trial of God’s love in a life of extremes.

Then we looked at Paul’s believing declaration.  He can do “all things” – this is not some kind of extreme positive thinking (“With enough faith, you can do anything without fear of failure or suffering”) but the confidence that he can accomplish whatever is demanded of him in the path of Christian duty in whatever circumstances God is pleased to send.  He can “run his course with even joy.”

Finally, this would be the most ridiculous rhetoric ever blown out of the mouth of an air-headed man were it not for Paul’s humble dependence.  His sufficiency is not of himself, but of Christ.  Organic union with the Saviour secures a constant flow and steady supply of grace sufficient for every duty in every circumstance.  Such competence is not inherent, but given, found only in those who are new creatures in Christ, and found most in those who walk closely with him.  Such sufficiency in Christ is a rebuke to our unbelief, complaints, fear and inactivity.  Too many saints know little of this because they have never made trial of the promises of God, and so have never enjoyed Christ’s closeness in times when abundance might distract or abasement might divert us.  Our weakness will be the platform on which the strength of Christ is displayed: we must be willing to have it so and ready to prove it so.

Today is a little slower, and then tomorrow I am preaching at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Ashford, Kent, dropping in on a man recently appointed to the pastorate of another church on the way there.