Believe the Good News

A site that celebrates and shares the Good News all through the Bible

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Revival of kindness

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A willingness to learn new habits and behaviours – the stretched-out queue waiting to be admitted to the Tesco, Belmont, Hereford.
Image credit: Ian Greig

Thought of the day

Luke 9:23-24 NIV
Then He said to them all: “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Me will save it.

Ian Greig writes: My thought today is not about the difficulties, anxieties and losses from Covid 19, real though they are. The other side of the coin is the huge outflow of good that is being seen, not just in hospitals and care homes but among neighbours and in goodwill within communities.

There is a growing realisation that we need one another. And at a challenging time, to support one another without condition. It looks like what we read in the Bible is just happening…

Many people are asking, what is God doing in all of this?Let’s be clear, He doesn’t bring sickness and hardship but at many time in history He has allowed it, and used it. What is intended for harm, He can turn to good.

The turning to good is not always seen directly. Much good political reform came out of the damage of two world wars, but the change was more about people gaining a will to live (and take decisions) differently, than a landmark moment.

What can we see God bringing out of the Covid-19 pandemic? What are we seeing that is good, creative, caring – that reflects God’s goodness? You might add to my list…

  • Selfless dedication (as we clap the NHS and carers)
  • Neighbourly kindness, caring and (in certain ways) sharing
  • Exploration: people seeking and finding spiritual insights and answers
  • Self-discipline: the majority sticking to the guideline restrictions
  • Social creativity: people finding new ways to socialise
  • Innovation and development: from ‘Formula 1’ positive air pressure devices to ‘Airbus’ and ‘Dyson’ ventilator machines and apps for group conversations and streaming.
  • Cycling, running, walking: distancing outdoors
  • Learning new habits: from handwashing to the stretched-out queue and maintaining distance in the aisles.
  • Reflection and slower pace: where the practice of mindfulness was bolted on to busy routines, now restrictions make us think about what we are feeling and doing, and learn as we go.

Very few of these will have been motivated by the thought of being Jesus’s disciples, or even if the cost of followership. They are doing what they believe is right, having put personal gain to one side and personal cost to the other side.

Their beliefs might not yet have caught up with who Jesus is, but their values are reflecting HOW Jesus is. And that, to me, looks like the beginnings of a move of God.

Link to prayer

A suggested prayer on this theme

How weeping can become refreshing

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“A place of refreshing springs…” Willows growing by the side of the Newbridge Brook between Weobley and Dilwyn.
Image credit: Ian Greig

Thought for the day

Psalm 84:5-6
What joy for those whose strength comes from the Lord, who have set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs.

On a walk, what we see in the distance can be quite different when we get close. Similarly in life, our reaction to what we see can change dramatically, when we get a different perspective. This is a story of how what appears one way, can turn out differently.

At certain times of year, groups would set out to Jerusalem to celebrate a festival at the Temple. They would walk on bad roads with hills, valleys and dangerous ravines, and they probably gave them nick-names, like we do.The psalm writer’s Valley of Weeping (Hebrew baka) could also be called the Valley of Poplars, a double meaning not lost on the original hearers.

  • Poplars grow close to water — so travellers in a dry, dusty country who saw poplars on the horizon would anticipate being able to drink.

  • There’s a deeper meaning here. The ones “walking through the Valley of Weeping” , are “on a pilgrimage“. So this is a picture of believers on a journey of faith, who (like all of us at times) have hit difficulties. Sometimes difficult times can be dry times — a sense of abandonment, nothing coming from the Lord, no fresh direction. The Valley of Weeping is the right name.
  • But the Valley of Weeping can be turned into the Valley of Poplars, and there’s running water in that valley. There’s a place to drink and be refreshed.

  • The place of “refreshing springs” is where the “times of refreshing” start, Acts 3:19. The psalm points to God’s greater purpose, which is always to bring spiritual renewal.

“Those whose strength comes from the Lord” are the ones “on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem” — walking with the Lord and knowing their destiny with Him. “For you,” the psalmist says, “the valley of tears will become the place of refreshing. Why? Because when we come to the end of ourselves with the Lord, we can find Him in a new way. He’ll let us struggle on for a time, but only so we find the place of refreshing — which we always do if we turn to Him.

The psalm holds out that exact promise.

“Be quiet!”

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A picture of hope or a chilling warning? Image credit: Newsquest

A thought for a challenging day

1 Peter 5:8-9 NIV

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

‘Red zone’ staff in the Covid areas at over 1,000 acute hospitals around the UK are well aware of people being ‘devoured’. On present statistics, most will have the experience of losing patients every day or even, every shift.

The suffering through illness, and for some, an untimely end of life, is hard for us to hear about. It sits a lot heavier for those with friends and relatives affected, or on the front line caring for them under difficult circumstances in care homes or hospitals.

But the ‘roaring lion’ is a not a picture of devouring (real though that is) but is more picture of fear and intimidation. It’s what happens in our thought life – that’s where “your enemy the devil” gets to all of us. If we let him.

The devil and his army of ‘dark angels’ is no myth or metaphor but a real threat and a real attacker. Jesus had His close encounter in the desert at the start of His ministry.

Jesus later told Pharisee antagonists that far from belonging to God, they were under the sway of the devil. The teaching of the letters to the Early Church is forthright about recognising the devil’s schemes and avoiding the trap of the devil, and the need for believers to actively resist. Following the well-known parable of the sower and soils, Jesus explains the three common strategies of the devil to attack the seed, or faith-producing word of God, as the devil “takes away the word from the hearts” of those on the unreceptive, uncultivated ‘path’, causes faith to wither through testing of those on ‘rocky ground’, and chokes the word with worries and pleasures in those inhabiting the ‘thorny ground’. The battleground is in our mind – our thoughts and perceptions. Whose thoughts are we choosing to hold on to?

How we view setbacks — the perspective we adopt — has a huge effect on how we respond to them. Ask Andy Murray how he responds to a missed shot or losing a set.

Christians have a two or three not-exactly-secret weapons.

  1. We face an enemy who makes a lot of noise but is defeated. More to thj point, this enemy knows that WE KNOW this. Our identification and relationship with the One who has been the sacrifice on the Cross, now resurrected, living and reigning, gives us a confidence in how we pray.
  2. We know how the story ends, and through that relationship with the Lord, how our own story ends — or rather, doesn’t end but continues in eternal life and fellowship.
  3. We know God. And if we know Him, we hardly need reminding that He is good, and His plans and purposes, if not always easy to understand, will work out for good. We are saved and also being saved, because He loves us.

So what do we say to the noisy ‘lion’ now? Be quiet, take off your lion outfit and go and play elsewhere! Meanwhile, having dealt with the intimidation, we have work to do, in praying down the peace and healing presence of God on those who are crying out to Him.

Luke 8:4-15; John 8:44; Ephesians 4:27; 2 Timothy 2:26; James 4:7

How HOPE prepares you to hear from God

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This is an anxious uncertain time. The scare of sickness and possible death. A very difficult time for business – some cannot operate. People cut off from friends and family. Living a locked-down, restricted life. And perhaps the worst part is the absence of positive anticipation, a sense of how this might end, which is what keep us going. We watch the daily updates, and we revere Professor Chris Whitty, a lovable boffin with his tie and collar never quite in agreement, and listen carefully to he sepulchral tones of Sir Patrick Vallance and his charts — silently asking “What hope do you have for us today?”

But that’s not where real hope is found. And the “word” we crave is going to come in a different way – if we are in the right place to discern it. This short thought from the Bible (4 1/2 mins) will help us to hear. –Ian Greig

Rev Ian Greig

Why the resurrection of Jesus changes everything

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  • The resurrection of Jesus happened
  • Jesus is alive and very much with us.
  • He broke the controlling power of our sin that put Him in the Cross
  • He showed Himself the Lord of new life because death could not hold Him
  • He invites us to believe in Him, receive Him in our hearts and know the joy of this new life in Him.

The Queen, in her Easter message, said this:

“We know that coronavirus will not overcome us. As dark as death can be – particularly for those suffering with grief – light and life are greater. May the living flame of the Easter hope be a steady guide as we face the future.”

“The discovery of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day gave his followers new hope and fresh purpose, and we can all take heart from this.”

View from a human perspective

For Jesus to have endured without retaliation the suffering of the whipping post and the Cross is instructive. A righteous man, falsely accused, who did not abuse His captors but forgave them…. So this, our sense of reason tells us, is the example for us to try to live up to. And to keep on trying harder… Perhaps this is what we should do in the present pandemic?

To do that we have to keep looking back. We find in the historical account a high call to live up to. Is it even possible? Should our worship mean solemnly revisiting a sense of failure, that our lives never measure up?

A lot of Christian religion tells it that way. It emphasises the failure, but avoids getting to the joy, which might be frivolous.

“Enthusiasm,” an 18th century bishop lectured John Wesley, “is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing indeed.” Wesley listened to God instead and continued with his enthusiastic, Spirit-led ministry. He told ordinary non-religious people of the freedom and joy that came from being born again — a kind of resurrection — into new life with Jesus as our Lord. The revival he pioneered probably saved the country from revolution in the late 1700s.

God Is good! Wesley knew God in a persona;l way through a life-changing encounter he had roughly this time of year, in 1738. And Wesley knew full well that God did not leave us, in a cycle of failure, our inability to break out of the control of sin. He didn’t leave us struggling to do all the right things and none of the wrong things and live right by Him. He doesn’t want us to live a checklist. The way people should relate to God and each other that He gave Moses had been turned into the most complicated of legalistic structures. Of course, it didn’t work, because man always tries to create an ordered, repeatable system which we can understand and control. And as Jesus taught, it doesn’t work that way. It works His way.

God never intended that we should turn Jesus into a system, a set of rules and sanctions, a religion. The destroying of the temple curtain in the earthquake that followed the crucifixion (a few decades later, the wrecking of the massive temple) ended for all time the need of a special priestly order, standing between men and God. Everyone was free to know Him through Jesus.

View from heaven

The resurrection of Jesus tells us we must not go there again.

Our God is a living, understanding, providing Father who wants us to enjoy day-by-day fellowship with Him. Why? Not just for our well-being but for His pleasure! He created us for fellowship! He wants each one of us to know this closeness, to experience His love, and He has made a way for us to overcome the crippling, blinding disability of sin that separates us from it.

How? How could we do enough good to put this historical handicap even a little bit more right?

On the day when we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, this is the headline.

We can’t. He did — and is alive and with us.

The law and the ordered, prescriptive approach of religion could only ever get us partly aligned with God. It was a rough measure, like the blaring of an aircraft cockpit warning, that told us if we were off track, but useless for helping us to line up.

The religious approach is only good at the warnings. It frightens us into pulling this way and that, striving to stop the spin and doing the exact opposite of what we should do to fly straight and level. Most aircraft stabilise in level flight with hands off the controls.

God had to help us get our attitude and alignment right. He has done this for us — but we have to let Him. We have to let go of the controls of our life and let Him have them. Only then do we make room for the enabling Saviour, who was dead but is now very much alive and with us.

The resurrection of Jesus is about Him being with us in life – the meaning of the name Immanuel.

Jesus appeared, first to an outsider among the disciples, Mary of Magdala, not the one with the best CV, but the one who felt most forgiven and accepted.

Then He came to the others, in a number of occasions, eating with them, being real with them, reminding them of all the Scriptures which pointed to Him.

This new, resurrected life defines the Way of Jesus we follow. We must resist all temptations to reduce this to a repeatable form and a constructed system of our understanding. That is what religions consist of, because they give us what we think we can understand and a familiar route we think we can follow — on our own.

Wrong! This new way is WITH Jesus, led now by His Spirit, unpredictable but always life giving.

There are a lot of world religions. They cause a lot of world conflicts, and harm those who don’t fit in with them. Knowing Jesus is a different thing all together.

Jesus came back to life, to give us life and life in abundance, in Him. Where all the news is about lock down, and terrible mortality rates, He is saying to us: “Look UP’ I AM the Way, the reality and the life.“

What is God saying, in this pandemic?

Jesus proved, by being seen as a flesh-and-blood person following His resurrection (not a ghost), that there is life after death. This pandemic is a prompting to all of us to turn to God! Is God calling you to take the step whereby you will come to know Him personally, receive His assurance that you are forgiven and have an eternal life with Him, and be empowered to live, pray and know His peace even in difficult times such as these?

Here’s a prayer you can pray

Is it true? Further reading for you to check out the evidence – a lawyer, a NT scholar and a journalist’s approaches