In one of his last letters, the apostle Paul wrote to his apprentice, Timothy, “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Tim 2:2). In my final series of sermons, I have been sharing with you ten “things you have heard me say” over the last 12 years which I hope you might remember and wish to pass on. Over the weeks I have generally been applying them to our individual lives as disciples of Jesus. But today as a final encouragement I want to apply them to North Springfield Baptist Church as a church and as a fellowship of believers. Building up in order of importance here are the ten themes once again.
The church still needs ministers
North Springfield Baptist Church have always allowed me to do what a minister is called to do: to equip and support all the members of the church to play the different parts God has for each and every one of us to play in the life and work of the church. You have set me free to provide you with preaching and teaching and pastoral care and vision. Nobody has ever tried to tell me how to be your minister or tried to micromanage me. You really cared for me and Ruth and our children and patiently supported me through periods of illness. It has been a joy and a privilege to serve you as your minister and I am sure you will treat my successor the same way.
Hebrews 13 7 Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
Science and Christian faith – not either/or but both/and
This theme has always been important to me from my background studying and teaching science. But North Springfield Baptist Church clearly agree. You have affirmed my understanding of the relationship between science and faith and between creation and evolution. Recently you have bravely embraced the challenges of digital church and adjusted to Zoom services and streaming to Facebook and even hybrid services. I will always be interested in science and continue to dabble with computers. Let us all keep our eyes open to the world God has created to reveal its Designer to us.
Psalm 19 1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Church is not an optional extra for Christians
You also believe this. I have never found another church where the members and congregation are so faithful in attending Sunday services and midweek meetings and activities. But we must never lose the vision that the church is not a human organisation or a business or a club. The church is the body of Christ, the household of God and the new temple made out of living stones where God lives by His Holy Spirit. Going into a pastoral vacancy, with different preachers each week, and with keeping the church on the road taking up lots of energy, there is always a danger that folk can lose some of their enthusiasm for the fellowship. So let me remind you of these words from Hebrews chapter 10.
23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Being a disciple is very important
You also all recognize this vital truth. Jesus calls every Christian to follow him and to be his disciple. Let us all keep on praying the disciple’s prayer. Lord Jesus Christ – day by day, may I see you more clearly, love you more dearly and follow you more nearly, day by day.
You are committed in prayer and Bible reading and worship and practical Christian service. For a small church, North Springfield Baptist Church achieves an enormous amount through our services and midweek activities and special events and this is down to the dedication and hard work of so many people. Galatians 6:9 encourages us:
9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
Effective outreach to today’s world is vital
This church was planted to share the Good News of Jesus in a new community and we have never lost that vision. The church exists to preach the gospel and with all the new developments in Beaulieu and Channels our missionfield is larger than ever. We have explored new ways of reaching out, from events like the Family Fun Day, Christingle and Christmas Crafternoon and visiting speakers like Janey Lee Grace and Susie Flashman-Jarvis, to delivering Christmas and Easter Cards and paid adverts on Facebook. For me perhaps the most exciting of our projects has been Haven Café, and we are thrilled that a number of people came to faith in Jesus starting from breakfasts at the Café. I think it will be great if Haven Café can start again at some point, but in the meantime I encourage you to also pursue the exciting opportunities out there to use videos and social media for outreach. I hope to keep on doing that kind of digital mission in some form in years to come. We must all keep on stepping out in faith to share Jesus with this needy world. Remember what Jesus promised all his disciples in Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’
The Bible remains central to Christian life and faith
Perhaps the greatest sadness in all my years of ministry has been to see so many churches and preachers departing from the faith which has been handed down to us. So many have lost confidence in the Bible as the supreme authority for Christian faith and practice and given in to pressures from the world around of postmodern relativism and post-truth. But definitely not this church! North Springfield Baptist Church has never compromised and always remained faithful to the Bible. This is demonstrated in your appetite for Bible preaching and teaching in services and Bible Studies. I have particularly enjoyed the discussions we sometimes have in our Sunday evenings. For myself, with more time on my hands I may well dig deeper into academic New Testament studies trying to unravel the mystery the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete in John’s Gospel. Meanwhile, I encourage all of us to continue to stand up for the truth. “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you – guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us” (2 Tim 1:13-14).
Jude verse 3 in THE MESSAGE tells us all to “fight with everything you have in you for this faith entrusted to us as a gift to guard and cherish”.
The work of the Holy Spirit is essential
You believe this. It is God the Holy Spirit who gives us new life as individual believers and who makes us into the church. Eleven dead men don’t make a football team. North Springfield Baptist Church has always been eager to experience the Holy Spirit manifested in spiritual gifts, to hear God speaking in prophecy and dreams and visions, and for God to work among us in supernatural ways, in signs and wonders and miracles of healing and deliverance. The person and work of the Holy Spirit is not a doctrine to be understood but a reality to be experienced. Jesus promised in Luke 11:13 how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’ Keep on asking. Keep on seeking. Keep on knocking! I will.
Eternal life is our relationship with God
Being a Christian is not about coming to church services, or reading the Bible, or even telling other people about Jesus. Being a Christian is about God’s free gift of eternal life which brings us into a living relationship with God as our loving heavenly Father. It is easy to be distracted by other things but never lose this focus. It’s all about knowing Jesus. Being a Christian is not intellectual knowledge about God but instead about knowing God personally. 2 Peter 1:3 makes the point this way: “Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God” (THE MESSAGE). Paul prayed this for the Christians at Ephesus. “I ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally” (Ephesians 1:17 THE MESSAGE). Although they shouldn’t, sometimes the tasks of ministry can get in the way of a minister’s own personal relationship with God. I won’t have that excuse any more. I encourage every one of us to press on to know God better and better.
Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God
One of the most wonderful things about North Springfield Baptist Church is your appetite for prayer. The Early Church devoted themselves to prayer, and so do we. Talking with other ministers, it appears that NSBC are relatively rare in sustaining a weekly mid-week prayer meeting like Draw Near To God. Our Saturday Mornings of Prayer and Weeks of Prayer and Fasting have been very special times. And the times of open prayer in our services are very important. Spurgeon said, “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the Kingdom. I don’t feel I need to encourage you to keep on praying – I know you will. I will just remind you of Ephesians 6 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.
And so we come to the most important truth of all. I hope that through the years, my ministry has made it easier rather than harder for everyone who has seen and heard me to follow Jesus. But more than that I hope that everybody will have heard this message.

God loves you!
God loves us more than we can possibly imagine with a love which will never let us go. I have a beautifully calligraphed plaque on my desk which has been placed where I can look at it all the time in every study for the last 30 years. It reminds me of the calling before me to be a minister. It is not a Bible verse, but instead the first verse of a song I learned when I first became a Christian.
“Tell my people I love them. Tell my people I care.
When they feel far away from me, tell my people I’m there.”
This is the simple message at the heart of the Good News about Jesus Christ. God loves you. God cares about you. However tough life may be, whatever may be dragging you down or dragging you away from God, God is always there for you. This is God’s message for every one of us today, and every day. God wants us all to be certain of just how much He loves us.
At a very challenging and painful time in my life, when I was at university and leading the College Christian Union, God used one particular passage in Isaiah to assure me of His love for me. It was as if those words which were originally addressed to God’s chosen people had been written just for me. Hear these verses as God’s words to you today.
Isaiah 43 But now, this is what the LORD says—
he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel:
‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.
3 For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour;
I give Egypt for your ransom, Cush and Seba in your stead.
4 Since you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you,
I will give people in exchange for you, nations in exchange for your life.
5 Do not be afraid, for I am with you;

God loves you! God loves us with unconditional love which will never let us go. The Bible assures us in so many places just how much God loves us. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the supreme demonstration of God’s love for us. I know you know God’s love because of the love you have all shown for me as your minister over the last 12 years.
1 John 3 14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other.
I am certain you have received God’s love in your hearts because of the love you all show towards each other in so many practical ways. We love because God first loved us! That is our witness to the world as we obey Jesus’s New Commandment
John 13 34 … As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
God loved us all so much that He gave his only Son to die on the cross in our place.
1 John 4 9 This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Here is my final encouragement to us all. Keep on loving each other. Keep on caring and sharing and bearing one another’s burdens. As we each experience for ourselves the amazing love of God, we must keep on loving each other and welcoming new people into the church and reaching out into the community with God’s kind of love.
So there you are. Paul urged Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Tim 3:14 in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition 2021). In this final sermon I have laid out ten things I am passionate about which I have learned and which I confidently believe. I have discussed them all in my book, “Continue in what you have learned and believed,” and I hope you will all be happy to take a copy. In all these areas I will seek to remain tentatively definite, holding faithfully to the truth as I have grasped it so far whilst always open to continuing to learn new things. May you do the same. May we all receive God’s abundant grace to “Stick with what you learned and believed” (as the Message puts it.)

In one of his last letters, the apostle Paul wrote to his apprentice, Timothy, “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching with faith and love in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 1:13). He repeated that exhortation. “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Tim 2:2). As I reach retirement from pastoral ministry, I have been reflecting. Which of “the things you have heard me say” would I most hope the churches I have served might remember and wish to pass on?
Through the years, I hope my ministry has made it easier rather than harder for other people to follow Jesus. Within that, here are ten vital truths which have shaped and characterised all my preaching and teaching, beginning with the most important.
1 God loves you!
2 Eternal life is our relationship with God
3 Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God
4 The work of the Holy Spirit is essential
5 The Bible remains central to Christian life and faith
6 Effective outreach to today’s world is vital
7 Being a disciple is very important
8 Church is not an optional extra for Christians
9 Science and Christian faith – not either/or but both/and
10 The church still needs ministers
These principles have always been important to me, and this compilation of sermons and articles explores them in turn. Paul also urged Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Tim 3:14 in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition 2021). That is my hope and my prayer for myself, for my friends and for my churches: keep on going.
I have put these important messages together in my new book, “Continue in what you have learned and believed”, published by the College of Baptist Ministers. If you would like an free electronic copy, or to buy a print edition, do get in touch!

God loves us. I talked this morning about just how much God loves us. He lovcs us so much that Christ died on the cross in our place so that God could forgive all our sins and make us His children. God loves us so much that He gives us the free gift of eternal life and He assures us of a place in heaven with Him forever. God’s love is so wide that it reaches everybody. It is so long that it endures forever. God’s love is so high that it lifts us up to heaven. And it is so deep that it reaches down to our deepest needs and the deepest parts of our being. “See what incredible love God has for us!” (1 John 3:1 J.B. Phillips translation). And this is all God’s completely free gift to us.
The wonderful love of God is perfectly illustrated by the kind of love shown by the father in Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-25). The father doesn’t treat this wasteful son as he deserves for squandering his share of the family estate, but instead welcomes him home. God the Heavenly Father is always on the lookout, ready to welcome the wanderer home. The word used in the Bible for this welcoming, forgiving love is grace. Grace is God’s undeserved favour, what John Stott described as “love that cares and stoops and rescues.”
God’s grace welcomes back that wasteful prodigal son. Grace welcomes a slave trader like John Newton, and tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus, and thieves like the man who hung on his own cross alongside Jesus. Grace welcomes sinners of all kinds, prostitutes and murderers and drunks; as a friend once put it, scumbags, every one. God’s grace even welcomes miserable sinners like you and me. God will welcome and forgive everybody equally. God’s love and God’s grace are unconditional.
Receiving the punishment we deserve for our sins would be justice. Being spared that punishment which we deserve would be mercy. But sharing the benefits of Christ’s glorious resurrection, receiving blessing upon blessing, that is grace. It is as if a parent whose child was murdered, instead of demanding justice, welcomes the murderer into their own home and adopts them as their own child. That is a picture of what God has done for us. All we deserve from God is punishment for rejecting Him and running away from Him. But instead, we are alive with Christ, raised up with Him, seated in the heavenly realms with Him.
Grace is all those blessings we could never earn or deserve, lavished upon us by our loving heavenly Father. Grace is everything for nothing for those who don’t deserve anything.
We cannot do anything at all to earn or deserve God’s wonderful free gifts of forgiveness and new life.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast”.
God loves every single human being that much. And this wonderful grace is for everybody! There are absolutely no barriers of race or gender or social standing or sexual orientation – God’s love is completely unconditional. It is vital that preachers and churches make this absolutely clear. God’s love is for everyone. But some people make a mistake at this point. They wrongly assume this means that God’s amazing grace will come to every human being automatically. That is incorrect. The truth is that some people never come to experience this unconditional love of God. God’s grace is so amazing. So why is it that some people do not receive it? The answer is very simple. Because God’s love and grace are gifts, and like any gifts they need to be accepted. The free gifts of grace and forgiveness and eternal life are offered to everybody. But not everybody accepts God’s gifts – many people reject them.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God
Everybody needs to accept for themselves God’s free gifts by faith. They do not come to every person automatically.
Romans 1:16-17 says this. I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.
The gospel is the message of Good News which leads men and women to all the blessings of salvation. But each person needs to receive and believe that message for themselves. It is clear that salvation is God’s gift which is available to all and offered to all – but not accepted by all. The Bible is clear that salvation only comes to those who believe. God’s righteousness needs to be received by faith.
So many passages tell us that salvation does not come automatically to everybody but it needs to be received by faith.
Perhaps the best known Bible verse tells us so.
John 3 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
We just read at Christmas
John 1 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
In John 6 40 Jesus said, For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.
And we often read at funerals,
John 11 25 Jesus said to (Martha), ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.

Jesus Himself said many times that the blessings of salvation are for those who believe in Him – who put their trust in Him. Believing in Jesus, is much more than an intellectual agreement to the truth of certain facts. Faith is a commitment to trusting God which affects every part of our lives. Faith in Jesus is not merely believing he is able to save me. Faith is putting my life into our Saviour’s hands. Faith means trusting our Heavenly Father in the context of a personal relationship with God.
Romans 10:9-11,13 makes the same point. “If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame. … For ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” “
This is the truth which not only the apostle Paul but all the first Christians proclaimed. Not everybody is put right with God. The people who are brought into a right relationship with God are the people who believe that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. It is the people who confess “Jesus is Lord” who are saved. It is the people who call upon the name of the Lord who are saved – those people and only those people who have put their trust in Christ to be their Saviour.
In order to experience salvation, we simply need to put our trust in God. Faith is the channel by which God’s blessing comes to us. This is not saying that we earn our salvation by putting our trust in God. Faith is not some kind of good work we have to do to deserve God’s love. We never could earn or deserve God’s grace. But we receive God’s free gift of eternal life simply by believing God’s promises and accepting them for ourselves.
And the Bible says in Romans 10:9-11 that believing in our hearts will always be accompanied by confessing with our mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord. Christians are obliged to express our faith in words and declare in public our allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord. There is no such thing as a secret disciple. Either the secret will destroy our discipleship or our discipleship will destroy the secret. Believe and also confess. When a person has truly experienced the unconditional love of God they will then want to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
Christians believe that Jesus is Lord because of who He is in Himself – the Son of God. Jesus is also Lord because of what He has done in the act of creating everything that exists. Everything was created by Him and for Him and He holds everything together. Somebody has said, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not declare, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’” And then one event in history reveals to the world just how important Jesus is. That was His resurrection from the dead. We know that Jesus is Lord because God raised Him from the dead. The resurrection is God’s demonstration to the whole universe that Jesus Christ is Lord of all. This is why believing that God raised Jesus from the dead is so important.
Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is our Master. So much more important than any political or military leader. So much more important than any boss. We do what Jesus says. We go where he goes. We follow Jesus without reservation, without qualification, without hesitation. Because Jesus is Lord. This simple declaration is the core of our response to the gospel.
Let us be clear: Jesus is not Lord because people allow Him to be Lord. Jesus is not Lord because people have voted for Him to be Lord. Jesus is Lord because Almighty God has said it is so. It is a fact and the different opinions people might have about that fact do not change anything. Jesus Christ is Lord of all. Fact. It does not make any difference whether a person believes Jesus is Lord or chooses not to believe Jesus is Lord or even if they don’t know that Jesus is Lord. The Lordship of Christ is like gravity. It is a fact. Gravity isn’t affected by whether we believe in it or not. If we are sensible we will recognise that gravity exists and has a claim on our lives. From time to time some people try to live as if gravity doesn’t exist. They jump out of planes and for a few seconds pretend they are completely free of any pull gravity might have on them. But gravity has a way of bringing everybody down to earth with a bump sooner or later. The Bible tells us that sooner or later everybody will recognise that Jesus is Lord whether they have chosen to accept Him or even if they have devoted their lives to rejecting Him. Jesus is Lord. Fact. The sad reality is that people will not experience the unconditional love of God if they refuse to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord.
God’s love and God’s grace are offered to everybody. But each person needs to received those gifts by faith and by submitting to Jesus as Lord. And from the beginning of his ministry, Jesus spelled out what people need to do to in order to receive God’s free gift of forgiveness and eternal life and begin to enjoy a personal relationship with God as Father.
Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:14-15)
Alongside putting our trust in God, Jesus called for people to repent. Repentance is an important idea for everyone who wants to follow Jesus Christ. At its root the word means a complete change of direction. To do a U-turn in life. If anybody wants to meet God, they have to change direction. If we have our back to the light, all we can see is the darkness of our own shadow. If we want to see the light, we have to turn around and walk towards it. When we acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, we need to live under that Lordship.
The starting point in the process of repentance is recognising the problem of sin which separates us from God. We need to accept that there are things in our lives which need to change. All the things we do and say and think which hurt other people and actually hurt ourselves most of all: all the things we would love to change about our lives if only we could. To use a phrase from the Church of England Book of Common Prayer, we need to “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness”. We need to be truly sorry for our sins. Then we need to confess those sins before God and ask his forgiveness, for the times we sin against God and against our neighbours, through ignorance, through weakness, but most of the time through our own deliberate fault.
However, more than just admitting our sins, repentance means being sorry enough for our sins that we are ready to give them up and ask God to change us. The Good News Bible translates Jesus’s call to repent as “turn away from your sins.” The Message Translation is “change your life.” Repent: acknowledge your sins, confess them and change your ways. The New Testament was written down in Greek and that language has two ways of giving commands. One would be the one-off event, repent just once. But the word Jesus used commands an action which is repeated. It means repent lots of times, not just once but keep on repenting. The first act of repentance is only the beginning. Just as we need to keep on putting our trust in God, so also we need to keep on turning our lives round, to keep on saying no to sin and yes to God. God loves us so much that he accepts us just as we are. But He loves us too much to leave us just as we are. So calls each one of us to repentance, so that we live lives controlled by the Lordship of Christ.
The invitation to experience the unconditional love of God is always at the same time an invitation to repentance. Before he could experience the unconditional love of his father, the prodigal son needed to come to his senses and get up and head back towards home. Otherwise he would never have discovered just how much he was loved.
So, God offers each and every one human being unconditional love and His amazing gift of forgiveness and new life. He promises to change us from enemies into friends, to welcome us as precious sons and daughters. By his amazing grace, God will put us back in a right relationship with Himself on the basis of Christ’s death and resurrection. The gospel offers us that gift of righteousness and all the blessings of salvation but it is the power of God for the salvation, not of every person, but only of all who believe. We can all receive God’s free gift when put our trust in Jesus and obey His command to repent and believe. When we change direction in life and as we confess with our mouths to the watching world that Jesus Christ is indeed Lord of all. God’s love is completely unconditional. But every one of us needs to receive for ourselves God’s gift of salvation, by putting our trust in Jesus. If they don’t, people will never experience the amazing blessings of God’s unconditional love.

God loves you! This is the simple message at the heart of the Good News about Jesus. God loves you. God really cares about you. However tough life may be, whatever may be dragging you down or dragging you away from God, God is always there for you.
This morning I want us all to see how just how much God loves us!
Have you ever felt loved? Have you experienced love from a parent or a friend or a spouse? I want us all to realise that God loves each one of us much more than that, more than any love we have ever experienced in our lives, more than we can possibly imagine.
“See what incredible love God has for us!” (1 John 3:1 J.B. Phillips translation). God’s love for us is wonderful, great, amazing, fantastic. I love our amazing children and I do my very best to love them as much as any father is able to love his children. Still, I could never love them one thousandth as much as God our heavenly Father loves us. Just think about that wonderful truth and believe it. Receive for yourself God’s great incredible, amazing, fantastic, wonderful love. God loves you. You can say it for yourself, “God loves me.”
Like the astonishing generosity of the father’s love in Jesus’s parable about the wayward prodigal son, God has welcomed us home. God shows us how much He loves us by the way He treats us and in all the blessings He pours out on us.
God forgives our sins
Jesus Christ is the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 2:1-2; 1 John 1:8-9). None of us deserve to be God’s children. We all do and say things which hurt other people and cut us off from God. We could never earn or deserve forgiveness. Yet God forgives us.
We have received God’s free gift of eternal life
God has given to every believer the free gift of life in all its fullness (1 John 5:11-13; 1 John 2:25). We have passed from death to life, and we now have eternal life which not even death can take away.
We are God’s children
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1). The Almighty and Eternal God, Creator and Ruler of heaven and earth, adopts us human beings, to become His sons and daughters. Consider how great God is and how small we are. Yet God has made you His child – this is how much God loves you.
We enjoy the certainty of heaven
Other people don’t understand what Christians are talking about when we say we are looking forward to heaven. There is more to life than this mortal existence. This life is just the introduction, the prelude. We are God’s children already, but there is much, much more waiting for us. The blessings of heaven will be much more glorious than we can imagine – we will be with God forever! This is our Christian hope – not just a vague optimism but a happy certainty which rests on the promises of our God who always keeps His promises.
Jesus laid down His life for us
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross so that we could be forgiven. If we want a measure of God’s love, we just need to look at Jesus’s dying in our place (1 John 4:9-10; 1 John 3:16). We use a symbol of a cross in letters, emails, text messages and Valentine’s cards to say, “I love you”. The cross on which Jesus Christ died is God’s sign, saying “I love you” to the world.
“O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!”
God wants every one of us to know how much He loves us with an amazing love which never lets us go. In our Bible reading we heard this.
“… I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God” (Eph 3:17-19).
God wants us to do more than know about His love intellectually. He wants us to know His love in our own experience, to know His love in practice as well as in theory. God wants everybody to know His love in a living relationship with God our Father and with our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. God longs for us to be filled with His love to the measure of the fullness of God.
How wide is God’s love?
God’s love encompasses the whole world (John 3:16-17). God loves everyone equally. God does not reserve His love for a specific group of people. Things like race, gender, and social status are irrelevant. God loves all men and all women and all children equally (Gal 3:28).
God’s love is wide enough to embrace everybody – even people like you and me. We may feel we are unworthy of God’s love. That is absolutely correct. Although we are totally undeserving, God loves us just the same. Some people find it hard to believe God loves them. They think they have gone too far away from God and His love could never stretch far enough to reach them. That is mistaken. God’s love is wide enough to reach everybody.
How long is God’s Love?
What is the length of His love? God’s love stretches from eternity to eternity. Neither the present nor the future can separate us from God’s love. The Bible tells us God is love. Jesus is the same today, yesterday and forever. God does not change and His love for us will never change. We do not have to worry about God’s love running out. God’s love is forever and for always. It isn’t only available on Sundays. There are no regular business hours for God’s love. God’s love is never out to lunch – it doesn’t take holidays. God told His people, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer 31:3). God never gives up on us. God will never abandon us or let us down (Josh 1:5). God wants us to experience that love with Him forever.
In difficult and painful times, we may think we are clinging on to God. The truth is it really is the other way around. It is God who is clinging on to us with a love which never lets us go. Some Christians worry because they think God has stopped loving them, but that is not the case. God’s love will never let us go.
John 10 27 (Jesus said) My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.
We have a personal relationship with God which will never end. Jesus has promised He will never cast us out or drive us away, but He will keep us safe into eternity (John 6:35, 37-40). We have been born again to a new life and we can never become “unborn again”. More than that, God is more than able to keep us safe in His love and He has promised to do so. . Nothing in the universe can separate us from God’s love (Rom 8:28-39). He is greater than everything. God can and God will keep us safe. So, how long is God’s love? It never ends.
How high is God’s love?
“Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, Your faithfulness to the skies” (Psa 36:5). God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (Eph 1:3) and He has raised us up and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ (Eph 2:6). We are citizens of heaven. In God, we can experience the richest, the highest, the purest, the finest love imaginable. God’s love is completely free. Anybody who wants it can have all they want. But at the same time, there is always more of God’s love to experience. C.S. Lewis gave a wonderful picture of heaven as ranges of mountains getting higher and higher nearer and nearer to God, with all the saints in glory moving on to the cry “Onward and upward, onward and upward”. However little or however much we have already experienced of God’s love – there are always more heights to press on towards.
How deep is God’s love?
Perhaps depth refers to God’s love being with us through even the most difficult of situations. That is certainly true. A Christian friend had a terrible time when her husband abandoned her with two young children. She wrote a book about her experiences and called it No pit too deep. It is true that there is no pit too deep for God’s love to reach us. Whatever the depths we are trapped in – God’s love will rescue us.
At the same time, God’s love reaches to the deepest parts of our being. God’s love is deeper than our deepest secrets. It can penetrate the darkness of our worst fears. God’s love reaches deep down inside us. Many people have deep hurts, things which have happened to us in the past which still leave echoes in the present, things which can lead to sadness or pain or depression or fears even if we think have forgotten them. God cares about how we feel just as much as about what we think. God wants to bring His healing and freedom and wholeness and peace to the deepest parts of our body, mind and spirit. However deeply we may be hurting, God’s love is deep enough to reach our need. So wide, and long and high and deep.
God invites each and every one of us to experience His amazing love, even today. All we need to do is put our trust in the heavenly Father who loves us more than we can possibly imagine. Ask and you will receive.
“… I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God” (Eph 3:17-19).

Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God. This morning I reminded us that the very best way to learn to pray is by praying. Practice makes perfect. I talked about asking prayers, because asking is the rule of the Kingdom of God, and about setting aside time for prayer. We thought about the value of set prayers and I gave us a leaflet with a week of prayers on it. And I told you about my friend who gave up praying for a while after her pet goldfish died, as an illustration of the importance of honesty and reality in our praying. This evening I want to remind us about some more important aspects of prayer, starting with:
Prayers of confession, relinquishment and formation
Certain kinds of set prayers are especially helpful. Prayers of confession help us to know ourselves better, so we can then offer the whole of ourselves to God. They confront each one of us with the truth that I, like everybody else, am a miserable sinner. We all have our own blind spots. Things about us which everybody else can see but we ourselves are oblivious to. Set prayers of confession remind us of the kinds of sins people can fall into, so the Holy Spirit can challenge our hearts just like the occasion when the prophet Nathan challenged King David over his crimes of adultery and murder: “you are the man” (2 Sam 12:7). True repentance begins when we genuinely “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness” and come to the point of “godly sorrow which leads to repentance” (2 Cor 7:10). As a result, we receive forgiveness of sins and assurance of pardon – your sins really are forgiven you, for Jesus’s sake. This in turn will bring us to an ever-increasing appreciation and fuller assurance of God’s grace and forgiveness and to a growing holiness and a deeper relationship with God.
William Carey, the founder of the Baptist Missionary Society wrote, “Secret, fervent, believing prayer is the root of all personal Godliness.” As our relationship with God deepens and as we come to know Him better, we will want to do more of the things which please God and less of the things which offend Him. We will want to become more like Jesus, so we need the kinds of praying which change us. Prayers of confession lead on to prayers of relinquishment – prayers of letting go. These prayers change us because, instead of asking God to do what we want, we invite Almighty God to do whatever He chooses in our lives. Mary had reached that point when she said to the angel, “I am the Lord’s servant … May Your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38). Even Jesus had to wrestle in prayer in Gethsemane to come to declare, “Not as I will, but as You will” (Matt 26:39). Prayers of relinquishment are laying down our own human will to do God’s will – the way of surrender. Andrew Murray was a South African pastor at the heart of the revival there in 1860. One of his most famous books is called Absolute surrender. Andrew Murray wrote this.
“The Spirit teaches me to yield my will entirely to the will of the Father. He opens my ear to wait in great gentleness and teachableness of soul for what the Father has day to day to speak and to teach. He reveals to me how union with God’s will is union with God Himself. How entire surrender to God’s will is the Father’s claim, the Son’s example, and true blessedness of soul.”
It will often be difficult to say no to self and yes to God. Prayers of relinquishment describe not only the final prayer of surrender, but also the whole process of days or weeks or months of wrestling with God in prayer until we finally come to the point of saying yes, we are willing to offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1-2). Sometimes God will ask us to hand some area of our life over to Him, only to give it straight back to us again. The point is that we all need to learn that Jesus Christ is Lord. God is the boss. When He commands, we must obey. We need to nail our will to the cross so God’s will is done, to the point where we can agree with the apostle Paul that we have been crucified with Christ and now Christ lives in us (Gal 2:20).
The simplest prayer of relinquishment is to echo the prayer of Jesus: “Not my will but Your will be done.” A longer one begins, “Lord, I am willing to be made willing. I am desirous that Thy will shall be done in me, and through me, as thoroughly as it is done in heaven. Come and take me and break me and remake me.” Very early on I discovered the wonderful book Prayers of Life by the French priest Michel Quoist. It contains a very helpful meditation entitled, “Help me to say ‘Yes’”.
After prayers of confession and of relinquishment we can use “formation prayers” or “prayers of transformation”. These prayers are intended to form the character of Christ in us and help us be transformed into His likeness. I commend the simplest of these, the prayer of Richard, Bishop of Chichester: “Day by day, dear Lord I pray: To see You more clearly; Love You more dearly; Follow You more nearly.” Another familiar example would be the prayer incorrectly attributed to Saint Francis, adapted into a popular song, which begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.” For many years I made a point of ending every day using one or other of those prayers. Prayer changes things and prayer changes us: prayers of confession, of relinquishment and of formation. God can use such prayers to make us more like Jesus. But we need to be doers of the word – not hearers only. We learn to pray by praying.
Listening to God
Prayer is conversation with God and any conversation consists not only of speaking but also of listening. We must make time to listen to God in prayer as well as to speak to him. We can expect God to speak to us through the Bible as we read and study and mediate on His word. We can also expect God to reveal Himself to us in dreams and visions and words of prophecy – I talked about this a few weeks ago when I spoke about the prophet-hood of all believers.
If we eagerly desire to meet with God and hear God speaking, most people need times of solitude and silence. My first experience of this aspect of listening to God came at Cambridge in four days of silent retreat with the College Chapel community led by the Dean at an Anglican retreat centre. Over more than 40 years I have found setting aside periods for silent retreat for hours or even days at a time to be precious and valuable. My most precious experience of refreshment and healing came in a week of individually guided silent retreat at Lee Abbey.
Silence is golden. Jesus Himself searched out solitude for prayer in the middle of the busyness of life – how much more do we need to do so. Monks and mystics have retreated into deserts in order to meet with God. Solitude is a blessing. “Be still and know that I am God” (Psa 46:10). This is not just about shutting out all the noises which so easily distract us. It is about becoming still so we can hear God’s voice. And so we will move on to:
Praying without ceasing
Jesus taught His disciples to abide in Him, to remain in union with Him and remain united to Him (John 15:4-5). Prayer is the heart of the new life and the relationship which Christians have with God through Jesus Christ. The Bible urges us to pray without ceasing (1 Thess 5:17) and to be constant in prayer (Rom 12:12). We should “pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Eph 6:18). But what does it mean in practice to pray continually?
We have already said that praying begins with asking for all the little things of life as well as the big things. We need good habits of praying, starting by making our regular times of prayer a priority. Set prayers can be helpful, not least the Lord’s Prayer. We need to work hard at meeting with God, day by day and even hour by hour. we also need to set apart special times and spaces for solitude and silence. I want to recommend some other practices which have also been very helpful to me.
Very early on as a young Christian I came across the little book, The Practice of the Presence of God by the 17th century monk Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. “Practising the presence of God” is just a simple way of seeing God and bringing prayer into all the ordinary experiences of life and discovering God is involved in every aspect of our daily lives. It gives a way of learning to trust God in every area of our lives by making an effort to acknowledge God’s presence in every situation. God is with us all the time and, rather than ignoring Him, we can enjoy continuous conversation with God as we would with a friend. Our jobs are not a hindrance to prayer but an opportunity for prayer. We can sometimes pray while we work. We should always pray about our work and for our work. But we can also pray through our work. Our work can become prayer in action. “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (Col 3:17).
Another very helpful practice in prayer is using “breath prayers.” These are specific short prayers which we can say in a single breath. Whenever we want to bring God to mind during the day and acknowledge His presence with us, we breathe this prayer. Whenever we want to dedicate a particular activity to God, we breathe this prayer. Whenever we want to ask for God’s grace and help and draw God into a particular situation, we breathe this prayer. It is a form of prayer which helps bring God into every part of our lives as we use it many times through the day.
One breath prayer has been used by Christians for centuries. “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” I used this prayer many times each day during my Sabbatical time in Uganda: first thing in the morning; last thing at night; when I moved from one activity to another; as I went to greet someone. There are many other excellent breath prayers. You might like the first line of the prayer attributed to St. Francis, “Lord, Make me a channel of your peace.” You might like to use “Abba Father, let me Yours and Yours alone.” Or God might lead you to a different “breath prayer” which is personal to you.
There is one more very simple and practical suggestion which helped me enormously when I adopted it many years ago, back in my days as a student and then as a science teacher. One of the things most of us do almost unconsciously throughout the day is look at our watch. Nowadays it is more likely to be our smartphone. For a number of years, I had fixed to the face of my watch two little strips of sticking plaster in the shape of a cross. Every time I checked the time, I saw the reminder: “I am a Christian.” “God is with me.” That simple symbol would often prompt me to prayer. In these days of smartphones, we can have a Christian image as our screensaver, or even set one or two alarms at particular times of day to call us to prayer. These things will remind us that God and our relationship with God are more important than anything else you are doing at the time. We need to learn how to pray without ceasing.
Most of what I have been saying this morning and this evening has applied primarily to individual Christians in our personal prayer lives. But I want to remind us of one more important truth.
Churches need to pray together
It is a curious coincidence that although the four churches which I have served have been of very different sizes, the attendances at the central church prayer meetings have been roughly the same. While the two larger churches only held monthly prayer meetings the smaller two have met faithfully for prayer every week. Charles Haddon Spurgeon described his church prayer meetings as the powerhouse of the church, and I remain convinced he was correct. Churches need to pray together.
Home Groups for Bible study, prayer and fellowship have rightly become a vital part of the life of many churches. Of course, prayer should be a central part of our corporate worship, although it is too often sadly neglected in favour of extra songs and over-long sermons. Although previously they were often included in the majority of our services, times of “open prayer” led spontaneously by any members of the congregation have become an indispensable element of all our services since the Zoom services during Covid lockdowns and in our “fully hybrid” services since. But central church prayer meetings are also valuable, as well as regular mornings, nights and days of prayer and fasting for the whole church.
Jesus taught His disciples, “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matt 18:19-20). Here Jesus promises that He is present in the midst when Christians gather in a way that He is not present with us as individuals. And Jesus promises that requests offered by Christians united in prayer will be answered. We will not experience these blessings if we neglect joining together in praying. The first Christians devoted themselves to prayer (Acts 2:42). They were constantly in prayer, with 33 mentions of prayer in the Book of Acts and almost as many of worship and praise. Christians and churches need to pray together just as much today.
While he was General Secretary of the Baptist Union, David Coffey said this, “Many churches need to recover this lost principle. Not prayer as a token gesture, some spiritual national anthem where we profess loyalty to the King and then proceed to the real purpose of our gathering. But urgent and dynamic prayer that seeks God in such a manner that everyone becomes aware that, unless God intervenes, we are doomed!” He was correct. Former BMS Missionary Eric Westwood said this in his address when he was President of the Baptist Union. “We must write prayer again into the lifestyle of our churches; meaningful prayer, urgent prayer, repentant prayer, constant prayer, Spirit-led prayer, even sacrificial prayer!” He was right too. Churches need to pray together.
So there you are. Prayers of confession, relinquishment and formation. Listening to God. Praying without ceasing. And praying together. Things we can all take to heart in our week of prayer and fasting this week.

Eternal life is all about our personal relationship with God our loving heavenly Father. Jesus said: “Eternal life means to know you, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, whom you sent” (John 17:3 GNB). “Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God” (2 Pet 1:3 THE MESSAGE). I promised to return to the subject of prayer this week because the first and best expression of our relationship with God is in our prayer life. Clement of Alexandra and John Chrysostom both said prayer is conversation with God. Christians are encouraged to talk with God just as they would with a trusted friend. David Watson wrote, “God is the living God, and every day He wants us to enjoy a living relationship with Him, involving a two-way conversation” (Discipleship Hodder, 1981 p149). Prayer isn’t just something which helps us in our Christian life. Prayer is our Christian life. In Richard Foster’s words, “Prayer is nothing more than an ongoing and growing love relationship with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” (Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home Hodder, 1992 p13).
Prayer is not a means to an end – prayer is a most worthwhile end in itself. Prayer expresses and deepens our relationship with God. Through prayer we do come to know God better and trust Him more and more, but more than that spending time in the company of family or friends is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Praying is enjoying time in God’s presence.
Prayer opens the doors to our experiences of all of God’s blessings, love and joy and freedom and victory and peace. God makes so many wonderful promises to believers. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, withb thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:6-7). We only come to experience God’s peace as we bring our anxieties, our needs and our fears to God in prayer.
“What a friend we have in Jesus, All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.
Oh what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry Everything to God in prayer.”
We experience God’s peace through our relationship with God which lets us commit every part of our lives to Him in prayer. God gives to Christians wonderful contentment and divine strength, but these do not come to us in abstract. They only come to us as we enjoy communion with God and draw on His strength moment by moment. “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You.” (Isa 26:3-4). Peace only comes from the act of fixing our minds steadfastly on God, relying on Him and consciously putting our trust in Him. Joy and freedom and victory come in the same way, by experiencing God’s presence.
This morning I want to talk more about the place of prayer in our relationship with God. Our weekly church prayer meetings, regular nights of prayer, mornings of prayer, days of prayer, and united prayer events have been very special times. Good habits can help us in praying. Silence and retreats are very helpful. But ultimately, each one of us need to learn for ourselves how to pray and we do that simply by praying.
That will come as no surprise to anybody. Prayer is the heart of our relationship with God and the secret of every relationship is good communication, When we become God’s children, we begin the lifelong adventure of learning to communicate with Him. In many ways, learning to pray is like learning to speak a different language, or play a musical instrument, or ride a bike, or play a sport. The key is practice. So if we want to learn how to pray, we just need to pray. Sermons and Bible Studies and reading books about prayer can be helpful. But most Christians don’t need more teaching on prayer. We need to put into practice what we already know. This means we just need to make the time and really get down to praying.
Praying begins with asking
When he was teaching His disciples to pray, Jesus said this:
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt 7:7-8). In Greek these verbs are present imperatives – keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. We will always need to express our dependence on God by keeping on asking, seeking and knocking. Of course, we should pray about our Christian activities. At the same time, we also need to be praying about all our ordinary experiences of life, starting, as Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer, by praying for our daily bread and for forgiveness and to be spared from times of trial and from the evil one. The Bible reminds us repeatedly that God values the ordinary. We need to keep asking God for the little things in life.
I have talked before about the six weeks I spent on sabbatical in 2001 visiting missionary friends in rural Uganda with another two weeks in Uganda in 2009. Then in 2019 Ruth and I spent a month teaching and visiting churches and schools in Zambia. I learned something very important about prayer from those times. African Christians pray before every meal, before every drink, before every journey, after every journey, before they say goodbye, every time when somebody is hurt or sick – not just when it is something major. For all their problems with water supply and health and transport and survival hand to mouth from day to day, Christians in Africa understand God’s provision so much better than most English Christians do. They consciously depend on God for their daily bread and for all their day-to-day needs much more than we think we need to.
We need to learn to keep on asking through all the ordinary experiences of life and by doing so we will become more aware of how God does indeed keep on meeting our needs. Many Christians find it hard to pray for the big things in life, such as praying for healing from a life-threatening disease. We need to learn by asking for God’s help in the little things like colds and headaches. Answers to prayers for the little things will build up our confidence and faith in God to ask for big things. Praying begins with asking. As C.H. Spurgeon once said, “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the Kingdom” (Charles Spurgeon Ask and have sermon #1682 1/10/1882). Let’s use this week of prayer to practise asking God for the things we need we need.
We need to set aside time to pray
John Dalrymple has wisely said, “The truth is that we only learn to pray all the time everywhere after we have resolutely set about praying some of the time somewhere.” (John Dalrymple Simple Prayer Darton, Longman and Todd 1984 p47). Every Christian can benefit enormously from setting aside regular times for personal prayer. When we make our fixed times of prayer take priority over everything else, this reminds us that God is more important than anything else.
Some Christians find a daily pattern of prayer works well for them. Others struggle to fit a prayer time in with their responsibilities as parents or carers, or with working long hours, and choose instead to set aside longer periods spread across the week. It is vital that we each find our best pattern for our personal prayers. We need to commit ourselves to making time for prayer. Just as we need to commit ourselves to another person for any relationship to grow, so we need to commit ourselves to developing and deepening our relationship with God. This will sometimes include praying when we don’t feel like it, but we need to be committed to making time to pray in whatever pattern we find works best for us. Our times of prayer are a vital expression of our relationship with God. Happy children are delighted to be able to spend time and have long conversations with loving parents. Why do some Christians approach times of prayer with so little enthusiasm? If we fail to give time to getting to know God better, we will be the losers. So let us all set aside extra time to pray this week.
Set prayers can be very useful
Baptist Christians belong to a spiritual tradition which values extemporary prayer, coming come to God whenever we want using whatever words come to mind at the time. Such prayer is like a conversation we could have with a loving parent or a dear friend, spontaneous and free. But we should remember that the vast majority of Christians through the centuries, and the Jews before them, did not generally pray the way we do. Many Christians today do not. Other traditions very happily use set prayers written by other people and often passed down through generations.
Set prayers have their dangers. They can become vain repetitions where we don’t think about what we are saying. But the same objection can apply to the songs we sing. Most Christians are very happy to use hymns and songs and choruses which other people have written. We don’t feel we need to make up a brand-new song every time we praise and worship God. The precise advantage of using words somebody else has written is that we can devote our hearts to thinking about the meaning of what we are singing, instead of having to use most of our concentration on thinking of the right things to say.
The same can be true of our prayers. Sometimes using words which another believer has written can help us to express our deepest feelings better than we are able to do ourselves. It is good sometimes to be able to focus purely on God instead of having to search for the best words. It is a good thing to add our voices sometimes to the voices of countless saints in many places over many generations by using the very same prayers they used. Praying like this also helps deliver us from temptations to individualism.
If Christians want to learn more about prayer, it should not be a question of either contemporaneous prayers or set prayers. It should be both/and. If we want to learn more about prayer, we should never look down on the rites and rituals and set prayers of other traditions. All Christians can benefit from liturgy, sacrament and written prayers as well as intimacy, informality and spontaneous prayers. We can start with the Lord’s Prayer. The disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” If we want to learn to pray, why not start by praying the very prayer Jesus gave to His disciples to use? Of course, the Lord’s Prayer also gives us a pattern for all our prayers, a way of praying. We can also explore the psalms, which formed the hymn book and the prayer book of Christians for two thousand years. There are many fine websites with excellent prayers to use, and I have given everybody a leaflet called Starting to Pray which contains a week of prayers. Next time you don’t feel like praying, or you don’t know what to pray, use prayers written by another person, quite probably somebody who knew more about prayer than any of us ever will. Take their prayer and make it your own personal prayer. Why not try praying using set prayers this week?
One more thing to keep in mind for our Week of Prayer and Fasting. When we are praying, we need to be completely open and honest with God. Nobody knows us as we really are. We are afraid of letting other people see the real me, because we are scared they will discover (borrowing the phrase from Michael Caine’s character in the film Educating Rita) “there is less to me than meets the eye.” We are afraid anybody who did know us as we really are would reject us or hurt us. There is no reason to be afraid with God! What we need is to take definite steps to open our life to God and to share our deepest feelings with Him in prayer. We need to be honest with God.
When I was a teenager, a girl in our youth group once made what is probably the most honest statement I have ever heard anybody make about prayer. She said, “I gave up praying when my goldfish died.” My friend’s pet fish was ailing, and she prayed it would recover. The goldfish died so she lost her confidence in prayer and abandoned her faith in God for a time. We desperately need that kind of reality and honesty in all our praying.
There is a world of difference between saying our prayers and true Christian prayer. Our praying is meaningless if we only say to God the kinds of things we think He wants to hear: good religious requests for suitably worthy causes. Sometimes we can find ourselves asking God for all kinds of things we don’t actually care about at all. We can pray for blessings for people we don’t know, just because these seem like good pious topics for prayer, or only because other people have asked us to pray for those things. There are no examples of that kind of prayer in the Bible at all. Prayers in the Bible are always completely honest.
Jesus promised His disciples they could ask for whatever they wished for, and God would answer their prayers (John 15:7). Whatever you wish for actually means whatever you really want. These have to be things we truly care about. Not just passing whims but things we long for with a passion.
Suppose one of our children had come to me one day saying, “We saw a programme about children in Africa, there was this little girl who looked so hungry – I don’t know what her name was – she was only on for 10 seconds – but can we make sure she gets enough to eat and is never hungry again?” On the other hand, suppose instead she had come day after day saying, “There’s this little girl in my class and I’m so sad because she always seems hungry and never has new clothes and says she doesn’t have any toys – can we help her please Daddy, please?” You know very well which request I would answer.
We can make the mistake of believing it would be selfish to ask for things for ourselves, or for our family, or for our friends, or for our neighbours, or for our church. Some Christians seem to think it is spiritual to ask God for things on behalf of people who are half a world away who they don’t know and never will. It is not. That misunderstands prayer. There are occasions when God does lay on our hearts a burden to pray for a situation which is remote from us. But in other cases, unless we really care about helping strangers in remote lands, unless we are passionate enough to send off a cheque, or unless we have friends working in those troubled areas, it is not deeply spiritual to say prayers about people and places we don’t know anything about. Unless we really care about the requests we make, we aren’t really praying at all. As Thomas Brooks once said, “Cold prayers always freeze before they reach heaven” (“Smooth Stones Taken from Ancient Brooks: Being a Collection of Sentences, Illustrations, and Quaint Sayings, from the Works of that Renowned Puritan, Thomas Brooks” (1860) p107.)
Prayer rightly begins with our nearest and dearest. Until we have the faith to expect God to act in our own lives and with our family and friends, praying for people who are far away who we don’t know can just become an easy get-out. We need to learn to trust God in our own situations and problems and needs. The people who have the greatest faith in praying for remote situations are the people who have experienced the greatest answers to prayer in their own lives.
So when you are asking God for something, try this simple exercise. You could even call it The Goldfish Test. Suppose God does not grant your request. Would you feel really sad, really disappointed, maybe a bit angry? Would you feel let down if God did not answer your prayers? If you would not, if life would go on just as before, if your relationship with God wasn’t affected in the slightest if God didn’t answer this particular prayer, then you aren’t really praying at all – you’re just saying prayers.
Some lines from a hymn by Samuel Wesley make the point. “Let prayer be prayer, and praise be heartfelt praise; From unreality, O set us free”. We need to be completely honest with God about what we really want. True prayer is making requests where it will be very clear to everybody what answers God has given: not beating about the bush; not covering our bets; but specific requests for things we care about.
Prayer is at the heart of our relationship with God. Prayer begins with asking. We need to make time to pray. Set prayers can be very useful. And we need to be honest in prayer. We have to get real with God!

The heart of being a Christian is our personal relationship with God. It was always God’s purpose and desire that human beings would live in communion with Him. God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:8). We read that Enoch walked faithfully with God (Gen 5:24) and so did Noah (Gen 6:9). Abraham was called God’s friend (Jas 2:23) and God spoke with Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33:11). God made His covenant with the nation of Israel so He could dwell among them (Ex 29:45-46) and walk among them (Lev 36:12). God calls His people to walk humbly with Him, to “live in humble fellowship with our God” (Mic 6:8 GNB). Christian faith is not mere intellectual assent to a set of beliefs. Rather it is the act of putting our trust in a Person, in the context of our relationship with God (Gen 15:6; Heb 11; John 3:16).
The essence of the Good News about Jesus is that human beings can experience the relationship with God for which we were created, by putting our trust in Jesus the Saviour. Jesus said: “Eternal life means to know you, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, whom you sent” (John 17:3 GNB). Some people imagine eternal life is just about living forever and never dying. In the Bible eternal life does not just mean immortality or everlasting life. Nor is eternal life primarily some spiritual aspect to life or some quality of life which never dies. Eternal life is much more exciting than that. Eternal life is the life of the age to come, which we begin to experience here and now and will continue in glory forever. In John 17:3 Jesus tells us that eternal life is knowing God, using a particular Greek word for knowing which implies personal experience. It is interesting to see Jesus using the same word meaning to know earlier in John’s Gospel. “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father” (John 10:14-15). Christians know God in just the same sense as Jesus knew His Father. This is what eternal life is all about: to experience an intimate and personal relationship with God, which even death cannot destroy and will continue forever.
Jesus declared, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10); to “have life and have it abundantly” (NRSV). This is what salvation is all about. “A rich and satisfying life” (NLT). “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (THE MESSAGE). Life in all its fullness and eternal life are different ways of describing the same experience. The world is full of people racing around, looking for something to give their lives meaning and purpose, looking for something that will satisfy them and failing to find it. People are living on the junk food of entertainment and consumerism while all the time God is longing to give everybody eternal life – life in all its fullness. Being a Christian is not just knowing about God: simply knowing about Jesus Christ doesn’t count. Being a Christian is about knowing God personally in a living relationship with Jesus Christ the Son of God.
John’s Gospel says this about people who believe in Jesus: “Yet to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:10-13). Being a Christian is about becoming God’s child and experiencing a personal relationship with the creator and sustainer of the universe, where we can call Almighty God “Our Father”. Rom 8 says the same. “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Rom 8:14-16).
God the Holy Spirit lives in every believer so we can experience a relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. This is what our life in all its fullness and it brings us so many wonderful blessings. We experience love – knowing God loves us and that His love will never let us go (1 John 3:22). We receive joy which no one and nothing can take away (John 16:22). We know peace – the calm which comes from trusting that everything is safe in the hands of Almighty God (Isa 26:3-4). Christians enjoy victory over sin and death and the devil and all the powers of evil. We experience freedom – the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom 8:21).
All these blessings are part of the life in all its fullness which is God’s gift to every Christian. They come to us as part of our relationship with God. That is the whole reason why God has made a way to forgive our sins. In and of itself, there is no real benefit in being forgiven. The whole point of forgiveness is that God has dealt with the sin which separated human beings from the Holy God. The purpose of being forgiven is so we can then experience a relationship with God, the relationship with God for which all human beings were designed and created. Sin has spoiled humankind’s relationship with God. But now the barrier of sin is removed we can come to know God as He knows us.
Some Christians misunderstand this point. They think eternal life is some mysterious spiritual something, some quality of life, which God gives to Christians when they are born again which stays with them forever. Some Christians think after we are born again, love and joy and peace and victory and freedom are then experiences which will come to us in some way apart from God, separately from God Himself. But that is not the way it works. These blessings do come to Christians, but they come to us through our relationship with God and not apart from Him. Knowing God brings us love. Knowing God brings us joy. Knowing God brings us peace. Knowing God brings us victory. Knowing God brings us freedom. But we only experience these things through our relationship with God.
To be completely clear: our relationship with God is not some means by which we can enjoy these blessings. Knowing God is not a means to anything. Our relationship with God is the most worthy and desirable end in itself. All the wonderful blessings of salvation are incidental to the true blessing which is the experience of knowing God. No blessings come to anybody outside of that relationship with God. 2 Peter 1:3 makes the point this way: “Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God” (THE MESSAGE).
We believe in the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Three Persons in One Substance. God Himself, within Himself, is Three in One; is relationship and community. In our salvation God invites us to enter into that community within God Himself. This relationship is the key to understanding what salvation and eternal life are all about. Jesus describes God the Holy Spirit as our Helper, our Comforter, our Advocate. Jesus promises His disciples that through the Holy Spirit we will have the same kind of intimate relationship with God the Father as He Himself enjoys (John 14:16-18, 20, 23). Eternal life is God living in every Christian, Father, Son and Holy Spirit making their home in us. In His High Priestly Prayer, Jesus prays for believers in every generation that we will all experience that kind of close personal relationship with God (John 17:21-23, 26).
Lots of people know lots of facts about God and about Jesus Christ, even if many don’t yet believe those things to be true. However, knowing about a person is not the same as knowing the person. Some people can know a great deal about God without really knowing God personally or actually having a relationship with God. Learning about God is not enough. We each need to get to know God and deepen our relationship with Him. Paul prayed this for the Christians at Ephesus. “I ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally” (Eph 1:17 THE MESSAGE). God gives us the Holy Spirit so we can know God better. To know the hope to which He has called us; to know the riches of His glorious inheritance; to know His incomparably great power at work in our lives. Sometimes it is possible to think we know somebody when actually we don’t. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gave a grim warning that some people may think they know God when in fact they only know about God (Matt 7:22-23).
Eternal life is the relationship we have with God, God living in us, Father, Son and Holy Spirit making their home in us. We experience our relationship with God in a variety of ways. The most important are also the most obvious – prayer, Bible Study, worship, fellowship with our brothers and sisters, and of course celebrating communion through bread and cup. These are not just channels which God might use to bless us. They are the ways in which we talk to God, and He talks to us. These are the channels by which we experience the joy and peace which come from loving God and knowing He loves us. They are the ways in which we receive the victory and the freedom which come from our relationship with God.
So, we should pray and read the Bible and worship because these are the ways we experience our relationship with God. Some Christians expect that all they have to do is just sit around, and then love and joy and peace and victory and freedom will flood into their lives. They have missed the point. We will only enjoy those blessings as we enjoy our relationship with God.
The first and best expression of our relationship with God is in our prayer life. I am going to talk about prayer next week so I will just say this today. David Watson wrote, “God is the living God, and every day He wants us to enjoy a living relationship with Him, involving a two-way conversation”. Prayer isn’t just something which helps us in our Christian life. Prayer is our Christian life. Prayer isn’t a useful tool to help us in our Christian service. In Richard Foster’s words, “Prayer is nothing more than an ongoing and growing love relationship with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
Prayer is not a means to an end. Prayer is not a means to the end of getting God to give us blessings; not a means to the end of being able to serve God better; not even a means to the end of getting to know God better. Prayer is an end and a worthwhile activity in itself. Prayer is about expressing and deepening our relationship with God. Through prayer we do come to know God better and trust Him more and more, but spending time in the company of family or friends is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Prayer is enjoying time in God’s presence. If we want to grow as Christians, prayer is the key. Prayer is the most exciting adventure any of us can imagine.
We experience God’s peace through our relationship with God which lets us commit every part of our lives to Him in prayer. “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You.” (Isa 26:3-4). Peace only comes from the act of fixing our minds steadfastly on God, relying on Him and consciously putting our trust in Him.
Joy is the same – joy only comes from our relationship with God. “You make known to me the path of life; You will fill me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand” (Psa 16:11). Our joy comes from being in God’s presence. It is a mystery why some Christians say they are eager to get to heaven to spend eternity in God’s presence, when they don’t enjoy spending time with God now. The chief end of man, the destiny of human beings, the purpose for which we were created, is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Our task on earth is to learn to enjoy God – this is what life in all its fullness is all about. “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psa 37:4). God promises we will receive everything we most desire and everything we most need, but that only happens when we are delighting ourselves in the Lord.
We also spend time with God by reading and studying our Bibles. The Bible tells us how much God loves us. We should want to spend time listening to what God has to say to us. We spend time with God in worship – giving time to praise and thanksgiving and adoration. Worship is God’s children rejoicing in God’s presence. Alone or with others, if we want to enjoy our salvation, we need to devote time to meeting with God. We won’t enjoy our eternal life, we won’t enjoy life in all its fullness, if we can’t be bothered to pray or read our Bibles or worship or meet with other Christians. When we want to know God better, the most important thing is the amount of time we are prepared to give spend in His presence.
God really wants us to know Him better, to love Him more and more, and to enjoy Him forever. Paul wrote to the Philippians, “All I want is to know Christ and to experience the power of His resurrection, to share in His sufferings and become like Him in His death” (Phil 3:10 GNB). Our personal relationship with God is more important than anything else in life.
Jesus’s parable of the wasteful prodigal son who was lost in a far country shows us how anyone can become God’s beloved child. But this leads directly on to the less familiar parable of a second lost son. He was the older brother who had dutifully remained on the family estate but all the while he was estranged from his father (Luke 15:25-32). He was just as lost but he didn’t even know it. The lost older brother gives us a picture of Christians who serve God like hired workers out of duty and cold obedience, instead of like sons and daughters out of devoted love and joyful gratitude. The words of the loving father to his lost older son are heartbreaking. “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours’” (Luke 15:31) All the time the older son was living in the father’s house as if he was a servant, instead of as a beloved child. The lost older brother gives a picture of what life can be like if we don’t embrace life in all its fullness and the personal relationship with God which He invites us to experience with him.
Imagine if you will the tragedy of a marriage which has gone wrong. The husband and the wife never speak to each other. They never spend time together. One spouse does all the cooking and prepares all the meals, but they never eat together. One spouse always does the washing up and the other never says thank you. One spouse washes and irons all the clothes but never sees the other wearing them. That is not what a marriage should be like. The chores are there but the relationship is not. Here is a very sad parable of what the Christian life can be like for some people if their relationship with God is not as it could be.
Another story is told of a husband and wife who never spoke to each other any more. They only communicated by sending one another notes. The wife always got up early and the husband much later, but one day he had a very important early meeting. So, the night before he wrote a note to his wife explaining the situation and asking her to be sure to wake him up the next morning at seven o’clock.
When the husband woke up the following morning it was already nine o’clock and he had missed his meeting. He was so upset he actually spoke aloud to his wife. “Why on earth didn’t you wake me up?” he asked. His wife just pointed to a note she had left on the husband’s pillow. In loud capital letters the note read, “WAKE UP – IT’S SEVEN O’CLOCK!”
That is another tragic parable of the way some Christians miss out on life in all its fullness. The reality should be very different. A.W. Tozer wrote, “We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God.” The blessings of eternal life, the life of the age to come, are all wrapped up in our personal relationship with the living God. Our relationship with God is our eternal life.

Over the years nearly 400 of my sermons have mentioned the Holy Spirit. I have preached 28 sermons just on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, 7 on spiritual gifts and another 13 on spiritual warfare. So no surprise at this morning’s topic: in the lives of believers and in the life of the church, the work of the Holy Spirit is essential!
Luke 11 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’
How much more! Most Christians have hardly scraped the surface of the work which God the Holy Spirit could be doing in our lives. This morning I want to talk about the ministry of the Holy Spirit in believers and in the church and encourage us all to expect God to do much, much more than we have experienced so far. As Graham Kendrick puts it,
He longs to do much more than our faith has yet allowed
To thrill us and surprise us with His sovereign power
How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’
We need to start by recognising that the Holy Spirit is not an optional extra for Christians. It is the Holy Spirit who brings us to new birth and gives us our new life in Christ. As Jesus said to Nicodemus,
John 3:5 … ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, “You must be born again.” 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.’
It is the Holy Spirit who makes us God’s children.
Romans 8: 14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. 15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
It is the Holy Spirit Who gives each of us our eternal life and makes us God’s children. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes each one of us part of the Body of Christ, the church.
1 Corinthians 12: 12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptised by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
It is the Holy Spirit living inside who takes the church beyond a human organisation and makes us into God’s new Temple.
Ephesians 2 21 In (Christ) the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
The Holy Spirit brings us new life and makes us part of the church, but that new birth is not the end of the Holy Spirit’s work but only the beginning. From then on, the Holy Spirit remains essential to our ongoing relationship with God and to every element of our Christian discipleship. So the first aspect of the work of the Holy Spirit I want us to think about this morning is the Holy Spirit as our Helper.
On the night before He died Jesus made some wonderful promises to His disciples, which are just as much for us to claim today.
“I will ask the Father and He will give you another Helper, who will stay with you forever” (John 14:16 GNB).
The underlying meaning of the word alternatively translated as Advocate, Counsellor, or Comforter is one who comes alongside to help and comfort and strengthen. The Helper who will come to the disciples is another one like Jesus Himself, continuing the work of Jesus from inside our lives. Jesus says more about this Helper. “He lives with you and will be in you … I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you … and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:17, 20, 23). The Holy Spirit the Helper is God living inside us.
These are God’s promises to every believer. We are even closer to God than Adam and Eve were when God walked beside them in the Garden of Eden. In our new life in Jesus Christ, we have gained even more than Adam ever lost by sinning. We are closer to God than the disciples were when they followed Jesus and listened to Him and ate with Him in Galilee, because God the Holy Spirit is living inside us to be our Helper. There are at least four areas in which the Holy Spirit comes to help us.
1. The Holy Spirit helps us to know Jesus
“I will ask the Father and He will give you another Helper, who will stay with you forever. He is the Spirit who reveals the truth about God.” (John 14:16-17 GNB). The Holy Spirit the Helper is the personal presence of Jesus in our lives. The Holy Spirit helps us in our relationship with God and helps us to know Jesus better by helping us to understand the Bible. We always need the help of the Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures to help us to understand the Scriptures. Then the Holy Spirit also helps us in our praying.
2. The Holy Spirit helps us to be like Jesus
God is at work inside every beliver, changing us to be like Jesus. “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18).
The Holy Spirit is working in us to make us holy too, “metamorphosing” us into the image of Christ. The Spirit helps us to avoid doing wrong, helping us to turn away from sin and evil, giving us the strength and grace to repent and live new lives. And the Holy Spirit also helps us to do what is right, producing the fruit of the Spirit, the character of Christ in us.
3. The Holy Spirit helps us to serve Jesus
We thought at the beginning of this year about the different manifestations of the Holy Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12. Every Christian is equipped with spiritual gifts to serve God as the need arises, whether by teaching or serving, by gifts of prophecy or even by working miracles. God is inside us to help us do His will and bring glory to Jesus.
4. The Holy Spirit helps us to tell others about Jesus
This is the remarkable promise Jesus made to His disciples: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The Holy Spirit gives all Christians the power to be witnesses for Jesus. The Greek word for power is dunamis from which we get the English words dynamo and dynamite. The Holy Spirit is the dynamo and the dynamite in all Christian mission and witness. We can often feel so scared of speaking about God and telling our story. We need to remember that God is in us. It is not just us speaking – it is the Holy Spirit.
We believe in the Holy Spirit – the Helper. We all need help to know Jesus better, to become more like Him and serve Him and tell others about Him. In some ways the word Helper is too weak and wishy-washy to describe the amazing work the Holy Spirit does in every Christian. We have the Strengthener – God living inside us. When it comes to living our Christian lives in the power of the Helper,
How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’
Next, we can expect God to speak into our lives through the Holy Spirit who inspires spiritual gifts of prophecy. We thought about prophecy in February. This was the Old Testament promise from the book of Joel which was fulfilled with the birth of the church on the Day of Pentecost.
Acts 2 17 ‘ “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.
18 Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.

Throughout the Bible the most widely referred to and the most significant activity of Holy Spirit is in inspiring prophetic messages. Before the birth of the Church at Pentecost the Holy Spirit only came upon particular individuals for specific purposes or occasions. But even Moses said, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!” (Num 11:29). In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit who inspires prophecy is not just for special Christians, but for every Christian.
In February I introduced you to a simple phrase which sums this idea up very well: “the prophet-hood of all believers.” “The priesthood of all believers” reminds us that every Christian can come into God’s presence and pray, and we don’t need special priests as intermediaries. The prophet-hood of all believers implies the corollary. God will speak directly to all of us because the Spirit who lives in every Christian is the same Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets in the Old and New Testaments and in the Early Church.
When Jesus talked about the Holy Spirit as the Helper, He said the Helper would teach (John 14:26), testify (John 15:26) and guide into truth (John 16:13). The Helper will “speak what He hears … tell you what is yet to come … take from what is Mine and make it known to you” (John 16:13ff). These are all activities of the Spirit who inspires prophecy bringing believers into direct communication with their heavenly Father, mediating our relationship with our heavenly Father. Time after time in the Book of Acts we can see the first Christians receiving prophecies and specific revelations from God, giving guidance, assurance, solutions to problems and predictions about personal and national events. We also saw how a number of the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 are expressions of prophecy: words of knowledge, words of wisdom and gifts of discerning of spirits. Paul explained the purpose of Christian prophecy like this. “The one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort. … the one who prophesies edifies the church” (1 Cor 14:3-4). This is the nature of the Holy Spirit promised in the Old Testament which God has now poured out on all His children – the Spirit Who inspires prophecy, visions and dreams. In principle all Christians can experience the spiritual gift of prophecy and related gifts.
The Bible gives us the standard by which all other messages from God must be tested and judged. At the same time, sometimes God also speaks to Christians through specific Bible verses and passages which come to us as if they were God speaking personally just to us. But God can also speak to us through words of prophecy.
David Watson said this about Christian prophecy. “While the written word is God’s truth for all people at all times, the prophetic word is a particular word, inspired by God, given to a particular person or group of persons, at a particular moment for a particular purpose.” The Bible shows us God speaking to His people through dreams (Deut 13:1, Joel 2:28), visions (Dan 7:15, Acts 7:55-56; 16:9-10; 18:9-10), pictures (Jer 18:1-6), and voices (1 Sam 3:4, Acts 9:4).
The apostle Paul wrote: “Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy” (1 Cor 14:1). The Good News Bible says, “Set your hearts on spiritual gifts.” Christians are not just allowed to want God to give us gifts of the Holy Spirit – we should passionately seek spiritual gifts. We are all encouraged to long for the Holy Spirit to work in our lives and to give us spiritual gifts. We should all be eagerly desiring and passionately seeking God to use us in His service and to equip us with whichever of the gifts of the Holy Spirit He chooses at any time. Of all the spiritual gifts, the apostle Paul clearly considered prophecy to be the most important, after love.
Most Christians need more education about prophecy. We all need more experience of hearing God speak directly to us, learning to listen to God. But more than anything, we all need greater expectation. 1 Thessalonians 5:19 commands: “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt.” Samuel prayed, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening” (1 Sam 3:10). We can pray the same prayer, confident that God still wants to speak to us directly today. Christians should all eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially to prophesy. When it comes to expecting God to speak to us,
How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’
The Holy Spirit is our Helper. He is the Spirit who Inspires Prophecy. Thirdly the Holy Spirit also comes into our lives to work miracles of healing and deliverance.
John 14 12 Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
I am sure we would be happy just to be continuing to do the mighty works Jesus did, but He promises we will do even greater things than these! That was the experience of the Early Church. There are so many examples of miracles of healing and deliverance in the Book of Acts. They were “naturally supernatural.” Then we also read this at the end of Mark’s Gospel.
Mark 16 15 (Jesus) said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. …. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons; … 18 … they will place their hands on people who are ill, and they will get well.’ … 20 Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.
There isn’t time to say any more this morning about the work of the Holy Spirit in miracles of healing and deliverance, except this. Through the Holy Spirit, God raised Jesus from the dead. And every Christian shares in Christ’s resurrection life.
Ephesians 1 18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know …. 19 …his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.
The Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, is now LIVING IN YOU! We can experience all the power of the resurrection in our own lives! The seemingly ordinary lives we live day to day can be lived in the resurrection power of Christ.
We just need to allow the Holy Spirit and the resurrection life of Christ to flow through us. Flow, Spirit, flow! Blaze, Spirit, blaze! Ask. Seek. Knock. When it comes to stepping out in faith, praying for signs and wonders,
How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
Paul encouraged Timothy like this. “Fan into flame the gift of God, ….. For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:6-7). We all need to fan the flame of the Spirit in our lives. There’s an old expression: to “put yourself in the way of blessing.” It means to make decisions to be in places where God can bless you! I have shared before the picture of the umbrella. When the rain of God’s blessing starts to fall we each have an umbrella – and we each have a choice. We can hold the umbrella over our heads so the rain of God’s blessing doesn’t land on us. Or we can hold the umbrella upside down to catch as much of the blessing as possible! Which way up is your umbrella?
How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

“All Scripture is God-breathed.” The New Revised Standard Version, the Good News Translation and the New Living Translation say, “All Scripture is inspired by God”. The King James Version and some others say, “given by inspiration of God”. The Bible is central to the Christian faith. Christians believe that there is something about the Bible which is different and special, something which means we can trust the Bible completely, base our lives on it, and find eternal life through it. Most Christians would say that this is because the Bible is inspired by God. So tonight I want to help us think about what we mean when we say “the Bible is inspired by God”. In the process I want to tell you why I believe in the in the “infallibility” of the Bible but not in the “inerrancy” of the Bible, and why that distinction matters.
All the Holy Books of the great religions claim to be inspired and authoritative. So which is right? Just because the Bible itself claims to be inspired by God doesn’t prove anything to anyone – that is a circular argument. Instead, Christians generally say that we trust the Bible because
The Bible is The Word of God
If we were good anglicans After every Bible reading we would all say “Thanks be to God for his Word.” But what do we mean, the Bible is “The Word of the Lord”?
Some parts of the Bible are literally God’s words. God said, “Let there be light.” Or the 10 commandments. Or the words of the prophets when they said, “Thus says the Lord”. And of course, all the words from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ were God’s words because he truly was the Son of God, God become man for our salvation. But what about the rest of the Bible? The OT histories or the letters the apostles wrote? The whole Bible is God’s self-communication to us, but generally most parts are not God’s direct speech. Only John’s apocalypse describes itself as `revelation’. The majority of scripture makes no claim to have been directly revealed to the authors by God, especially not those statements and prayers which are addressed TO God, or words ascribed to Satan or to false teachers.
When we say that the Bible is the Word of God we are using a metaphor. Calling the Bible `the Word of God’ is picture language. It is a mistake to understand it to say that “the Bible is the words of God’. It would be more accurate to describe the Bible as a combination of words God said with other words which human beings said and wrote. So it is too simplistic to suggest that “What the Bible says, God says” in every case. That is not what we mean when we call the Bible the Word of God.
There are two basic models of how the Bible came to be written. The first we can call Localised Inspiration, and the second is Generalised Inspiration.
Localised Inspiration thinks of God inspiring specific individuals to write the texts which form the Bible. Some scholars call this “verbal inspiration” or “mechanical inspiration” – as if the Bible was dictated by the Holy Spirit word for word to its writers. For scholars who believe in verbal inspiration, one consequence is the doctrine of inerrancy, meaning that the Bible contains no errors of any kind. This idea was developed by B.B. Warfield towards the end of the 19th century, and affirmed in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. This view is still very popular with evangelicals in America and Canada. P.D. Feinberg explains inerrancy like this.
“Inerrancy means that when all facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality, or with the social, physical, or life sciences.”
Inerrancy does recognise that there are different genres, different kinds of language in the Bible, from history to parable and from poetry to apocalyptic language. But at the same time his idea of inerrancy insists that there are no errors of any kind in the Bible texts. Every detail of history or geography or dates or numbers is exactly correct (with the possible exception of rounding up of approximate numbers). You will see how the doctrine of inerrancy might be very important for some issues, for example for Young Earth Creationists who want to defend the belief that God created the world in seven literal days of 24 hours.
Jim Packer put it this way.
“No Christian will question that God speaks truth and truth only (that is, what he says is infallible and inerrant). But if all Scripture comes from God in such a sense that what it says, he says, then Scripture as such must be infallible and inerrant, because it is God’s utterance.” Packer claims that `The authority of the Scriptures rests primarily and essentially on the fact that they come from the mouth of God.’
One obvious problem with the idea of inerrancy based on verbal inspiration is that it rests on there being just one inspired author, who wrote a unique inspired first manuscript known as the “original autograph.” But that doesn’t fit with what we know about how the New Testament documents were written and copied and edited. And the idea of an original inspired autograph is pretty meaningless when the origins of the Books of the Old Testament are losts in the proverbial mists of time.
But the chief problem I have with the doctrine of inerrancy is that the Bible DOESN’T actually claim to be inerrant! The Bible suggests that it is literally God’s utterance, just that Scripture is inspired. Inerrancy over-literalises the metaphor of Scripture as God’s Word. And the doctrine of inerrancy is simply not present in the scriptures usually cited to support it. For example 2 Timothy 3:16 refers only to the reliability of the Bible in matters of salvation, faith and life, and not to blanket inerrancy. In practice inerrancy is contradicted by the ways Jesus and the New Testament reinterprets the Old Testament.
James Dunn, Professor of NT at Durham, described B.B. Warfield’s teaching on inerrancy as “exegetically improbable, hermeneutically defective, theologically dangerous and educationally disastrous.” And I think Dunn is right. Most British evangelical scholars (as opposed to American evangelicals) are happier to accept the idea of the “infallibility” or “entire trustworthiness” of the Bible. Howard Marshall, who was Professor of New Testament at Aberdeen, wrote “The Bible is entirely trustworthy for the purposes for which God inspired it, to guide people to salvation.” We can rely on the Bible for ALL matters of faith and practice, without demanding its inerrancy (or absence of errors) in matters such as science or history. So for example, Old Earth Creationists like me are happy to believe that the days in the Creation story in Genesis 1 refer to long periods of time, not periods of 24 hours. It doesn’t bother me in the least that the lists of kings in the Old Testament histories might be incomplete or that the geography might appear a bit jumbled in places.
I am certainly convinced of the infallibility and the entire trustworthiness of the Bible. But you will have worked out that I am not persuaded about the mechanical or verbal inspiration of single authors. There is no place where the Bible ever claims that kind of inspiration for itself. It certainly wouldn’t fit with all that we know about how the many different pieces of literature were edited and bound up to bring us the Scriptures as we know and believe them today. Even when the New Testament quotes the Old using the formulae, `the Lord said’ or `the Lord says’, this metaphor does not imply a `dictation’ theory of revelation. The Bible can be the God’s self-communication to us without being dictated or directly revealed to the authors word by word.
2 Peter 1:20 is referring only to the Old Testament prophets when it tells us, 20 … no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
The prophets were inspired by the Holy Spirit to say and write what God wanted them to write. But apart from the Old Testament prophecies and for parts of the Book of Revelation, none of the other authors of Bible texts claim that God directly told them what to write. If we look at WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS about itself, we find that it is not the authors but it is all Scripture which is “inspired by God” or “God-breathed”.
Jesus promised his disciples that the Holy Spirit would help them to remember his teaching.
John 14:26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
John 16 13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.
The Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, will guide the disciples into all the truth but even this does not suggest that the Holy Spirit dictated to the authors. If we look at how the New Testament texts came to exist, Luke explains his process of writing his Gospel like this.
Luke 1:1 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye witnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
Paul’s companion Doctor Luke explains how he did his research and then wrote his own “orderly account” which comes to us as Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts. In the same way as far as the New Testament Letters are concerned, Paul and Peter and James and John never even hint that God was telling them word-for-word what to write. None of them knew that their letters would one day be gathered together to form the New Testament. They just wrote what they believed and what they thought their readers needed to hear.
I do not believe that God dictated the words of Scripture to its individual writers. So how do I understand the inspiration of Scripture? I subscribe to the second theory of how the Bible was written, which we can call Generalised Inspiration. The idea of God speaking every word does not fit with the various ways in which the Bible texts actually came into being. It is explicitly the Scriptures which are inspired rather than any particular authors. So we need to think instead about the ways the Holy Spirit worked in many individuals to produce the Bible texts we have received today. The Bible was written across the years and generations, the Old Testament by the people of Israel and the New Testament by the church. Paul Achtemeier wrote, `Inspiration … occurs within the community of faith, and must be located at least as much within that community as it is with an individual author.’
It is far better to understand the Inspiration of Scripture as an example of “joint causation”, explaining things both (naturally) in terms of human actions and (theologically) in terms of God’s providence or activity. This leads to an idea called “concursive inspiration”, God and human beings working side by side. We can think of the `concursive action’ of the Spirit in the production of the Bible, so that the Scriptures are both human documents created through historical and literary processes, and equally at the same time the texts which God purposed to be written. In some places the writer was consciously recording God’s words as revealed to him. In other places God’s activities of inspiration were shaping the thought processes of the writer, guiding their inquiries and their analysis and their reflections and their interpretations.
Jim Packer explained concursive inspiration like this: `God in his sovereignty so supervised and controlled the human writers of Scripture that although what they wrote was genuinely their own, and in their own idiom, it was nevertheless the very word of God’.
This concursive approach doesn’t require the specific intervention of God at any point. “If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul’s, he prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul he brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters.” The detailed mechanism of inspiration is not the prime concern. “The doctrine of inspiration is a declaration that the Scriptures have their origin in God: it is not and cannot be an explanation of how God brought them into being.” An understanding of the authority of the text is a necessary prelude to any approach to the doctrine of inspiration.”
God inspired the Bible throughout the process of the formation of Scripture and this had two functions. Firstly, inspiration was ensuring that all the testimony to God’s events and words of salvation and revelation was faithfully preserved and recorded. Secondly, God’s inspiration was guarding the community of faith in valid and normative theological interpretations of the events. We can trust that Jesus really did make all the wonderful promises and do all the amazing things we read about in the Bible, because Matthew and Mark and Luke and John were inspired in their accounts of what Jesus said and did. And we can trust that our understanding of who Jesus was and what He accomplished is correct because all the other New Testament writers were inspired to write exactly what God wants us to read. Inspiration is not the origin of Biblical authority, but inspiration is the guardian of that authority.
The Bible is God’s inspired Word. God did indeed inspire the Bible as it has come to us across the millennia. The Bible is completely reliable and entirely trustworthy for all matters of faith and Christian living. I am not persuaded by the idea of localised inspiration, or mechanical inspiration. I am equally unconvinced by the doctrine of inerrancy which regards the Bible as a book of God’s words, dictated to the authors by the Holy Spirit, completely free of any inaccuracies of any kind. On the other hand, the idea of generalised inspiration and joint causation which I hold to views the Bible just as much as God’s Word. But that Word of God needs to be interpreted correctly in the light of the original settings of the texts.
If we want to enjoy all these blessings which the Bible will bring us, Scripture itself uses a number of pictures to show us what we need to do. We must read it. We must feed on it and take it into our very being. We must bathe in it for spiritual cleansing. We must look into it like mirror to see our true self. We must meditate on it. We must commit it to memory. We must study it. We must teach it to others. We must talk about it. And we must preach the Bible and sow its seeds of truth in the field of the world. We need a regular diet, feeding ourselves on the Word of God by sermons based on the Bible, Bible Studies and personal Bible reading. In all these things we know we can trust the Bible because the Bible was given by the inspiration of God – all Scripture is God-breathed.

The comedian Victoria Wood once observed: “Church is what you did on Sundays before garden centres”. John Smith of the Evangelical Alliance commented:
“It is a brilliantly perceptive analysis of how many people regard church – as something you do, an activity. It is something restricted to one particular day of the week. It is something that has been superseded by garden centres, or car boot sales, or shopping malls or – well, take your pick, really, because that is what people have done in our pick-and-mix, consumerist society. Church is now an option – one choice among many.” (John Smith Turning the church inside out, Ministry Today UK Issue 31, June 2004)
The results of the 2021 census published last week show that fewer than half of people in England and Wales now describe themselves as Christian, at 46% down from 59% in 2011 and from 72% in 2001. And the people who said they had no religion had increased from one quarter in 2011 up to 37% in 2021. The days of Christendom, when the church and Christian values were strongly influential on the whole of British society, have long gone. For most people church has now become just a lifestyle choice, which people choose to buy into or to ignore. The world we live in is changing.
The changing world
Almost 40 years ago we were set an essay for the Sociology of Religion course at London Bible College with the title: “why is it the church has good news which nobody wants to hear?” We have watched the answers to that question become more and more true. Over the last century the world we live in has been changing ever more rapidly. People are generally much more mobile, and patterns of family life have altered. More recently, television with hundreds of channels and streaming on demand, together with the internet, has transformed leisure time just as smartphones, texting, instant messaging and social media have revolutionised communications. These advances have produced a much more fragmented society: many people’s lives have become increasingly insular and individualistic.
In the context of religion, sociologists use the term secularisation to describe the dramatic decline in the influence of the church and Christian values in Britain. We live in a disenchanted world where faith in God has been replaced by trust in science and technology. Sociologists also talk about privatisation, by which they mean that our lives are becoming more and more isolated. Local community activities and even family life are being lost in the anonymity of society where many people no longer know their neighbours. Privatisation also describes the ways faith is being squeezed into people’s private lives and out of the public sphere of politics and commerce, as the media portray Christianity as outdated and irrelevant. There is also religious pluralisation: Britain has become much more a multi-cultural multi-faith society. Christianity is no longer the only or even the dominant faith. It is now seen only as one option amongst many on offer in the supermarket of beliefs.
Contemporary western culture is dominated by consumerism: people expect the right to choose, and they demand satisfaction guaranteed every time. These expectations extend to shopping between religions. Faced with the difficulty of making an informed decision about which religion to believe in, more and more people take the easy option of not believing in anything at all. People may say: “I don’t buy into any of that”. One effect of this consumerism on Christianity has been the way in which the false gods of Money and Entertainment and their false prophets the Celebrities hold sway in many churches. Another effect is the rise of niche churches.
In describing all these changes in society, I am not wanting to imply that they are necessarily undesirable or that the church should resist progress. However, Christians do need to recognise the challenges we face in this rapidly changing world and respond appropriately to them. We should be the people of the future, not living in the past. More than that, there are certain aspects of the prevailing culture and philosophy which demand critical analysis, because they pose dangers to the church from outside and from within.
Post-modern relativism
The emerging culture in society is often labelled as post-modern. Understandings of the world dating from the Enlightenment are being rejected. There is a wide distrust of authority and the establishment in education, politics, law and order, and even in religion. Certainty is replaced by questioning. The only thing post-modernists are allowed to be certain about is that nobody is allowed to be certain about anything any more. Most people and many scholars are rejecting any idea of absolute truth – everything now is relative. People are encouraged to question everything, but there is no longer the goal or the expectation of reaching definitive answers. Post-modernism insists everybody is entitled to their own understandings and beliefs and their own version of the truth. It is easy to see why relativism would appear to be correct in a world shaped by pluralism and consumerism. People are accustomed to exercising choice and so they assume they have the ability and the right to choose for themselves what is true or false and what is right or wrong. Notions of tolerance and equality and political correctness then insist that all opinions are equally valid and that it is rude (and in some cases now even a crime) to challenge the views of other people. Many people have lost sight of the concept of absolute truth and many completely reject it.
In recent years, many of these changes in society are being fuelled and sometimes driven by the rise of the internet and the proliferation of information which is not subject to any objective scrutiny. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok now make it possible for people to operate totally within their own bubbles. Algorithms feed people with persuasive content which fits with their existing bias, which they accept uncritically. This process convinces them they are experts in topics in which they, and the sources and influencers they rely on, actually have no education or expertise. It was Alexander Pope who said: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
The last decade has seen one further very unhelpful development. In 2016 Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth as their word of the year. Post-truth describes circumstances where people share their own heart-wrenching personal experiences to promote a particular cause and these emotional appeals are given more weight in popular opinion than any objective facts about the matter in question. There are many obvious examples of post-modern relativism and post-truth having a dramatic influence on society, from changes in laws surrounding marriage, divorce, abortion and euthanasia, to the rise of extremist political parties and various responses to the Covid pandemic.
One illustration of how these changes in society affect the church is in their impact on Christian approaches to evangelism and to apologetics. 30 years ago, it made sense to invite people to consider the life and the claims of Jesus Christ and answer rational questions: “Was Jesus mad? Was Jesus bad? Or was Jesus truly God?” Most people used to be prepared to think logically about matters of faith. Now many people would consider such questions irrelevant. In this post-modern, post-truth world reasoning is not important. What matters instead is plausibility; whether something appears to be true or feels like it is true. So often form triumphs over substance. For very many people, as long as something looks good and feels good, image counts for everything and facts are irrelevant.
Post-modern relativism and post-truth in the church
At least in popular understandings of a number of issues, it appears that many corners of the church are now under the spell of post-modern relativism and post-truth. Some western Christians are abandoning understandings of theology and morality which have been believed through the ages and are still widely held across the world church. This is happening over important matters, from the nature of salvation to the uniqueness of Christ as the only way of salvation to the Christian definition of marriage. Denominations are splitting over ethical issues. In these matters I believe it is right to resist change. I remain convinced that there are still some facts which are true and not just a matter of opinion. Equally, there are some opinions which are definitely not correct, however plausible they may appear and however persuasively they are presented. Wrong does not become right just because lots of people believe it. I am convinced that there are a number of specific issues where emotional appeals do not and should not be allowed to override objective truth.
Jesus said: “I am the truth” (John 14:6) and “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). God within Himself is truth, even though this absolute truth may be inaccessible to mere mortals and in this life we will “know only in part” and “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:9,12 KJV). Jesus promised His disciples that the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, would teach them all things and lead them into all the truth (John 14:26, 16:23). Of course, questioning is to be encouraged, but the quest to discern the truth should not be abandoned as hopeless.
The Bible must remain central
If we want to know the truth about God, or about the world, or about ourselves, we will need to turn to the Bible. We need God to reveal the truth to us – we cannot work it all out for ourselves. God has revealed Himself to us supremely through His Son Jesus Christ and through the Bible. So, I am convinced that the Bible, correctly interpreted, needs to remain central to Christian faith and Christian living.
The Bible carries authority for believers because it provides us with a reliable record of God’s mighty acts of salvation, supremely in and through God incarnate, Jesus Christ the Son of God. The Bible provides us with a reliable record of God’s words to human beings, supremely in the words of Jesus and of the prophets. Furthermore, the Bible brings us a reliable record of God’s words and of the theological interpretations of God’s saving acts, as received by the people of God in the Old Testament and by the apostles and eyewitnesses of Jesus in the New Testament. All this is confirmed by the agreement of the Early Church and the later generations of churches in recognising the canon of Scripture. Only the Bible provides Christians with these indispensable foundations of Christian faith. (I explored the reasons why the Bible is authoritative for Christians in my 1995 MA dissertation, Is the Longer Ending of Mark Holy Scripture? An Exploration of the Nature of Biblical Authority 1995, LBC/Brunel).
I am entirely convinced about the complete reliability of the Bible for all matters of doctrine, practice and ethics. In recent years it has been very sad to see many Christians and churches losing confidence in the Bible as the ultimate source of authority for their own lives and for theology and for the church. Many Christians have embraced the relativism of post-modernism and no longer accept the idea of absolute truth. Some no longer recognise that certain conduct is morally wrong. Post-truth emotional appeals are leading many to reject the authority of the Bible in a number of issues of theology and ethics.
The importance of correct biblical interpretation
I remain convinced that the Bible, correctly interpreted, needs to remain central to Christian faith and Christian living. I say correctly interpreted because throughout history so many misunderstandings and divisions have been caused by flawed interpretations of the Bible. Historically, the church has believed that God reveals the truth through particular channels. We begin with the word of Scripture. We then look to human reason to help us understand Scripture correctly, guided by the traditions of the church. What is known as the Methodist Quadrilateral added the fourth perspective of our personal experience of God’s grace in our own lives. We also recognise the revelatory ministry of the Holy Spirit in the church today. While some church leaders and theologians seem to have lost confidence in the Bible, I still believe that between them the five channels of scripture, tradition, reason, personal experience and the work of the Holy Spirit can lead Christians and churches into all truth today. Four comments follow.
I am convinced that the Bible, correctly interpreted, is sufficient for all the needs of individual believers and of churches. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). This does not imply that every kind of question we could ever ask about life, the universe and everything, is plainly answered in the pages of the Bible, because evidently that is not the case. What I do believe this means is that through applying the five channels, believers will be able to discern answers to every important question we actually need to be able to answer about Christian faith, practice and ethics. The Bible, correctly interpreted, will always be sufficient for all our needs.
Secondly, I am persuaded that in any issue it will not only be possible, but also in some cases very important, to discover which is the best interpretation of the Bible. There are many topics where Christians can agree to disagree, but there are some where they should not. God gave us the Bible and the Holy Spirit still wants to lead us into all the truth. That said, discerning that best interpretation will require application of all the five channels, lots of prayer and often some hard work. Sometimes reason, tradition, experience and the moving of the Holy Spirit will only lead us to parameters which still allow for several possible interpretations of Scripture. In such situations we will be obliged to seek to discern the most preferable understanding. I strongly reject the post-modern assumption that everything is all a matter of opinion, and all opinions are equally valid. When we have applied generally agreed principles of interpretation, some conclusions are clearly not possible or defensible. We are called not to judge people, but we are also called to show discernment. It remains the responsibility of church leaders and theologians to challenge and refute false teaching.
Thirdly, my belief is that when we do reach what we consider to be a correct understanding of a Bible passage or on an issue in theology or ethics it is then entirely appropriate to proclaim boldly and defend vigorously the truth as we have currently grasped it. We are allowed to be “tentatively definite”. (I first met this phrase in a postgraduate seminar with the inspiring New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey.) By that phrase, I mean we are allowed to be definite in what we declare, whilst remaining humble enough to acknowledge that God may always teach us something new which will cause us to re-examine and even change our position. We are obliged always to remain tentative because we recognise that we may be mistaken, and others may have grasped a truth which we have yet to see. But we should never be silenced by political correctness.
My fourth conviction is that it is never appropriate to say “the Bible got it wrong” on any issue. Over the centuries churches have changed their understandings of the Bible on particular topics. This has usually come about where interpreters have come to agree that specific instructions in the Bible were culture-bound, only applicable to the original settings, and should not be taken to apply to the church in the world today. (An obvious example would be the teaching on women covering their heads in worship in 1 Cor 11:1-16. Another would be the different positions taken through history with regard to women in leadership in the church.) This new position is always reached by applying agreed principles of interpretation. However, a different approach has emerged in recent years in a variety of discussions, not least in debates around sexual morality. There are certain issues where attempts have consistently failed to argue that specific verses were culture-bound, or have been mistranslated, or should on other grounds be interpreted in ways very different to their plain meaning. In such circumstances, some commentators end up taking a position which boils down to saying that the Bible got it wrong on that particular point. They argue that because the lived experiences of many individuals are at odds with those Bible texts, the Bible writers must have been mistaken. I reject the post-truth notion that a coherent and defensible understanding of an issue, which has been formed on the basis of legitimate principles of interpretation of the Bible, is automatically trumped by an individual’s personal experiences, however tragic or emotionally expressed. Yet that post-truth approach is encouraging some people to erase whole passages from their Bibles on the grounds that those texts make some individuals feel uncomfortable. We live in a changing world, but I firmly believe the authority of Scripture is unchanging. The whole Bible, correctly interpreted, still remains true today.
Guard the gospel
In 2 Timothy we find the apostle Paul passing on the baton to his apprentice Timothy to continue the mission Christ had entrusted to him. “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you – guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us” (2 Tim 1:13-14). We thought a lot about the dangers or false teaching and false teachers in our sermons on 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus.
Somebody must have said by now that one person’s reformer is another person’s heretic. There are Christians who often describe themselves as progressive or revisionist who are fighting to change the churches’ understandings and practices on a variety of ethical and theological issues. They argue that these are disputable matters and merely differences in interpretation over which Christians should seek to disagree agreeably (see Romans 13). They see themselves as reformers. However, other Christians like myself take positions on these issues which could variously be described as classic, traditional, orthodox or conservative. We do not regard the matters as legitimate differences of interpretation but rather as indisputable matters which are essential to salvation. For us, the post-modern relativism and post-truth which underpin the progressive approaches fall into the category of dangerous false teaching which the Bible condemns.
Back in the middle of the last 20th Century A.W. Tozer wrote prophetically about liberal churches which “will not quite give up the Bible, neither will they quite believe it” where “anything may be true but nothing may be trusted as certainly true”. TozerTozer wrote: “We need right now a return to a gentle dogmatism that smiles while it stands stubborn and firm on the word of God that liveth and abideth forever.” We must guard the gospel more than ever in this changing world. Jude verse 3 in THE MESSAGE tells us all to “fight with everything you have in you for this faith entrusted to us as a gift to guard and cherish”.