You don’t get anything for nothing…

… but untold riches for 20p!

No, really, it’s true.  A while ago I picked up a brand new looking copy of John MacArthur’s book “Daily Readings from the Life of Christ” in a local charity shop for the princely sum of 20p. So, apologies to John MacArthur that I haven’t boosted his royalty stream, but I hope he would be glad to know that he has enriched us today – and not just by the difference between the retail price of the book and what I paid for it.  Today’s reading was:

Jairus’s true faith

A synagogue official came and bowed down before Him and said, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” Matthew 9:18

 

Jairus’s belief that the Lord Jesus could honour his request to revive his daughter is especially extraordinary because Jesus had not yet performed a resurrection miracle.  He had performed may healing miracles, but up to this point He had not brought someone back from the dead.  So there was no precedent for such a request, yet Jairus asked it in faith.

Jairus’s faith surpassed that of the centurion, who believed Christ could “speak” his servant well prior to death (Matthew 8:9-10).  It also topped that of Martha, who believed Jesus could have kept her brother Lazarus from dying, but relinquished hope once he died, even when Jesus said he would rise again (John 11:21,23-24).  With such unsurpassed faith that the Lord could resurrect his daughter by a mere touch, Jairus undoubtedly trusted Him for forgiveness of sins and newness of spiritual life, for salvation.

This episode also demonstrates that Jesus was not a religious guru with servants doing His every bidding, or a monk removed from everyday life, or a potentate at the top of a religious hierarchy who received people only through several layers of intermediaries.  Instead, He was the true Son of God who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) and ministered personally and directly to meet believing requests of men such as Jairus.

ASK YOURSELF:

Is your faith limited to the precedent of what you’ve seen Jesus do in the past?  Or are you willing to believe Him for more than your eye has seen or your ear has heard? Bring a big need before Him today – in believing faith – and continue to watch for His answer.

One of the amazing things about dated devotional books (sorry, I don’t mean dated as in old-fashioned… dated as in each reading has a date!) is the way God works it all out in advance somehow so that on the day when you most need to hear a particular message from Him, there it is.  Many of us have had that experience more than once but each time it happens, it is a reminder to us that our God is mind-blowingly powerful and sovereign.  He knows the end from the beginning and He knows exactly what we will need to hear and when.

That was a very timely message for us today.  We are asking Jesus to do things for us at the moment that we have never had to ask him for before.  We need him to provide a visa that the embassy in London are refusing to provide to others at the moment, or find us another way to get into the country.  We need him to provide for us financially.  And we need him to give us peace, hope and joy in our hearts as we wait… and sometimes that seems the hardest task of all.   And whatever it is that you are asking of Jesus today – be assured that he has the power to do more than you can ask or imagine, and that his ways are always perfect, right and full of overwhelming love.

What does faith look like?

If we’re good Bible-believing Christians, we know what faith is because we know the first verse of Hebrews 11 – it’s being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.   We also know that list of people who are commended for their faith and held up to us as examples of faith.  But it’s interesting to note that how their faith was worked out was different for all of them. Abel offered the right sacrifice; Noah built a boat; Enoch lived a life of obedience and closeness to God; Abraham packed his bags and moved; Sarah had a baby; Moses’ parents hid a baby… and so it goes on.

That shouldn’t surprise us.  We know that God has made each of us unique and different, yet with gifts and abilities that are to complement each other as we serve and work together in our church families. God deals with each of us differently according to our personalities, backgrounds, temperaments and situations.  The end aim is the same – to become more like Jesus.  But even when one day, in heaven, we are all finally “transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18), I can’t imagine that we will all become cookie-cutter carbon-copy Christians. In some amazing way, God will make us all like Christ, but still somehow uniquely different too.

And so, it makes sense that what faith looks like in our individual lives as we work out our obedience to God is going to look different.  Sometimes it’s easier to see other people’s faith – perhaps because God’s call to obedience in their lives is more visible.  Everyone would have been able to see Abraham’s response of faith as he packed up all his possessions, took his household and set off into the unknown.  That’s dramatic faith.  Noah’s building project was a fairly noticeable project of faith too.  But what about Enoch?  Apart from in genealogies, he only gets a couple of mentions in the Bible.  His entire life is summed up in the simple sentence: “Enoch walked faithfully with God, then he was no more because God took him away.” (Genesis 5:24) Enoch’s life wasn’t particularly dramatic – it was a quiet, humble walk of faith and obedience to God.  I wonder how much attention people around him paid to Enoch.  We don’t know, but I guess they certainly took notice at the end of this life, as we read in Hebrews that he “did not experience death” because God took him. He had no choice over that, but he did choose to walk faithfully with God. A work of faith which was perhaps less strikingly visible to those around him than Noah’s ark, but God, who looks on the heart, saw in Enoch a man of huge faith.

Just recently, a lady said to me “I admire your faith.  I don’t think I could do what you are doing.” (If she had known what a stressed-out faithless heart I have had lately….!)  She has an incurable degenerative illness and a husband who has problems with alcohol. She seeks each day to quietly and humbly walk faithfully with God, in very difficult circumstances, because she believes this is the path to which God has called her.  Our step of faith is more visible.  I believe hers is much harder.  And I have to say to her “I admire your faith.  I’m not sure I could do what you do daily.”

So, what does faith look like? It looks different in everybody’s life.  Some build boats, some pack up and move, and some quietly and humbly walk faithfully with God.  And actually, whether we’re boat-building or moving house, we should all be trying to walk faithfully with God like Enoch.

 

Update:  We’re nearly at 50% of our monthly budget requirements.  We have to apply for visas in the context of a whole raft of new immigration laws which have just come into force in South Africa and which are yet always fully understood or consistently applied by officials. Be thankful with us for God’s continued provision and pray for helpful and sympathetic embassy officials when we go down to try to get our visas, and the same for our lovely friends Peter and Kelly in Northern Ireland who are going through the same process as us.

 

Big problems?

 

 

It’s frighteningly easy for us to pray the wrong way about our problems.  I don’t mean that there is a particular formula of words that we should say. It’s more to to do with our perspective.  When I pray about the problems I face, am I focusing on the problem while I talk to God, or am I focusing on God while I talk about the problem?

It’s a question of focus really.  A while ago, I embraced my middle-age and succumbed to varifocal glasses.  (Actually, “embraced” probably isn’t quite the right word…. but hey, I got the glasses!) For any young things reading this, varifocal glasses are what you get when you get older and you find that you have to hold the page you are reading further and further away in order to get it vaguely into focus.  Eventually you find that your arms aren’t long enough and you go to the opticians and they deal with the whole limb issue by charging you at least an arm, and probably a leg too, for some snazzy glasses where the prescription at the top is for distance and the prescription at the bottom is for reading.  It explains why people my age who suddenly start wearing glasses also seem to move their heads around a lot, very slowly.  We’re trying to get our peripheral vision sorted, which is a challenge with varifocals. My optician tried to convince me of the merits of varifocal contact lenses.  These work on a different basis where your distance vision runs around the outside and your reading vision is in the middle.  You choose which bit you are going to focus on. She described it to me as being a bit like looking through a window – you choose whether to focus on the glass in the window, or whatever is beyond the window.

And praying about our problems can be a bit like those varifocal contact lenses.  When we bring a problem to the Lord in prayer, He doesn’t always remove it immediately.  In fact, more often than not, the problem hangs around for a while so that God can teach us lessons about faith, persistence, patience and the like.  The thing is, that it is so easy for us to focus on the problem, and talk to God about it, rather than focus on God and talk about the problem.  I think there is a song which says “Don’t tell your God how big your mountain is, tell your mountain how big your God is.” I’m not sure that talking to our problems is going to do us much good, but it’s a good reminder to keep our focus on how great our God is, rather than how great our problem is.

I  think of this as “Cape Town theology”.  If you stand in downtown Cape Town, you will be surrounded by tall buildings. OK, nothing on the scale of Dubai or New York, but still pretty tall.  In between the buildings, you might catch a glimpse of Table Mountain, but it would be easy to stand there and think “wow, these buildings are huge”.  If you then hop in your car and head up to Bloubergstrand, you will be blown away by the traditional picture postcard view of Cape Town…

So, where exactly are those tall buildings? They are the tiny dots at the foot of the mountain. They are still there, but they seem so much less imposing when seen against the perspective of the mountain.

I needed reminding of all this because, yes, we are facing a few problems.  Nothing life-threatening, unlike our Iraqi brothers and sisters, but a few bumps have appeared on our path.  We are still a long way off having all our financial support in place, which makes it easy to start wondering if we are actually meant to be going anywhere at all.  And in the meantime, we have decisions to make which have financial implications. Do we enrol the girls in school now to ensure that they have places?  That would involve paying a non-returnable holding fee. Or do we wait and see.  These kinds of questions go round in our heads and it is easy for us to take them to God in the nature of a child coming to show a parent something, and keeping their eyes firmly fixed on the thing they have found, whilst never actually looking up at the one they are talking to.  In short, it is possible to talk to God without actually looking at Him. And not only possible, it is, as I said at the beginning, frighteningly easy.   I need to stop looking at the window and look at the view, to stop looking at the tall buildings and see the enormous mountain, to stop looking at the problem and gaze on the God of all creation, who knows the end from the beginning and who set every star in its place. The problem won’t go away but the perspective will change. Psalm 113 reminds us:

Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?

Our God doesn’t just stoop down to look on the earth.  He is so mighty and so vast that He stoops to even look down on the heavens.  The psalmist didn’t live in a modern city with massive light pollution.  He had seen the amazing beauty of the night sky and he knew that God is way way bigger than even the heavens.

That was all a bit long-winded.  Thanks for staying to the end.  Now go off and re-focus, look at the size of our God and rejoice that He is more than “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,  to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”  (Ephesians 3:20-21) And I will do the same.