Salvation

Give Your Heart a Home

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As I sat at my kitchen table, typing up Sunday evening’s sermon, I came across something in my notes which has caused me a lot of reflection. The minister had said – as ministers often will – that the
unsaved should not listen to the restraining voice which prevents them
from closing in with Christ. He pointed out that their fear is misplaced, because there is no better place to be in the whole world.

And he is, of course, absolutely right.

At the same time, however, God is not coming into your heart to pat and soothe you, or to affirm that you are essentially a good person. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just like Legion, in the same sermon, I
am commanded to tell what the Lord has done for me and, truthfully, I have to say that He has driven a coach and horses through my life.

Please don’t misunderstand me – I use that term with complete reverence and no little awe at His ability to turn everything on its head, and yet leave the person at the centre of the storm feeling more
secure than she ever has before.  That is the truth of it.

In CS Lewis’ famous Narnia series, one of the children asks about Aslan, the lion, ‘is he safe?’ The answer comes in the negative – ‘Course he isn’t safe, but he IS good’. That is a perfect description
of how I have experienced God’s providence. He has done things in my
life that I would certainly not have chosen for myself, but He does it as a loving Father, who knows my end from my beginning. What hurts me momentarily benefits me eternally; I trust this because I trust Him.

Had He been safe, I could have relied upon Him to leave me in my comfortable sin – but what kind of God would that make Him?

I am not referring here just to the loss of my husband. That was God’s providence and the death of a spouse will affect believer and unbeliever alike. But, when you have the immeasurable advantage of
knowing Christ, it’s different. There is still the pain of being parted, but there is also the sweetness of His comfort. If you let
Him, God will do more than make grief bearable; He will make it beautiful.

He has turned my life upside-down in other ways, however. When you cease to be wise in your own sight, everything comes to be thrown into sharp relief by the light of God’s wisdom. Like most dimwits on entering the Christian life, I thought that there were aspects of mine
which I could keep, untouched and unaffected by Him.

I was wrong. That is how the world sees Christianity – a philosophy, or even just a lifestyle that we choose and can adapt to our own preferences and predilections.  But it is not a lifestyle choice: it is, quite literally, a life for a life. Christ laid down His for me, and I am asked to give Him all of mine in return.

One of the sharpest difficulties has been my political beliefs. I have been a nationalist since I could pronounce the word, and I remain such. However, I cannot support many of the policies being promoted by the SNP because they go against what my conscience tells me. When your guiding principle is the Bible, there can be no compromise on what is
right, or what is moral, whatever the cost.

Being a Christian has lost me friendships – unbelieving friends who turned out not to be tolerant after all.  Part of the discipline you learn, of course, is when to stop trying. I realised that, with some,
talking of the Gospel only provides an opportunity for them to spit on it. There is most certainly a time to be silent.

However, I would not want anyone to form the impression that giving your life to Christ is all about the things He removes. Like a skilled surgeon, He cuts away the dead tissue so that what is new and healthy might flourish. And He has filled my new life with blessing, much of
which He delivers through other people.

I am privileged to be able to witness for Him through my blog and online. This has led to difficult conversations, and to public ignominy – but, more importantly and enduringly, to a world of wonderful experiences and precious friendships.  For every slur on my name for His sake, He brings me the prayers and fellowship of His people, the surrounding love of His church, and the confidence that comes from leaning on Him alone.

He has taken me down paths to serve Him that I would not have trodden of my own volition. Not a natural public speaker, and certainly not a courageous defender of anything, He fills my mouth with His words when I need them. We are not required to possess the heart of a lion,
because He does, and He lends His strength to any who ask it for His sake.

Earlier this week, I spent the evening in the company of new friends. They had known my husband before I did and I was very moved to learn of his interest in the things of God all those years ago.  We listened to a song that they had played, and which made a powerful impression
upon him – ‘Give Your Heart a Home’ – addressed by Christ to an unbeliever:
‘If you’re tired and weary
weak and heavy-laden
I can understand how
It feels to be alone
I will take your burden
If you’ll let me love you
Wrap my arms around you,
Give your heart a home’.

Christ is not safe; He won’t leave you as you are. He has turned my life into something the me of three years ago would scarcely believe. But He is good – and though He has taken me along unexpected and challenging paths, I can say with all my heart that I regret nothing
because He is with me.

And He will do as much for any heart that finds its home in Him.

Fiery Crosses and Rightful Kings

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If you wanted to foment a rebellion today, it would be a simple matter of texting all your supporters the where, when and why. ‘C u @ Gfinnan – B there or die.Charlie x’ . The Jacobites didn’t have Vodafone though, so their technology was rather more primitive, and quite possibly a lot more reliable – the crann-tàra. This was a cross of wood which had been partially burnt and then dipped in blood before being passed from person to person in a kind of relay until all had been rallied.

A scattered population has always presented a challenge to any cause. It was difficult to provide a uniform education system, or equal access to healthcare in all the corners of the Highlands and Islands. And it was difficult to evangelise those who did not live in or near a large centre of population.

That is certainly one of the reasons why the Reformation arrived so late in our neck of the mòinteach. Keeping the effects of the Reformation alive is proving to be an equally great challenge in the present day.

People do not come to church if they don’t want to and, increasingly, they don’t want to. Attendance at the means of grace has dwindled alarmingly across the country and even here in the islands.

There is still a thing or two that we could learn from the Jacobites. They did not sit around waiting for their supporters to show up – they went and demanded loyalty from each one. The symbolism of the crann-tara was that anyone who did not respond accordingly could expect to meet with fire and blood. It was quite literally a life or death proposition.

That, I think, is how the Gospel has to be presented – urgently. All who hear His call must know the truth, that it is a straight choice between falling in with Christ, or dying eternally.

Of course, you have to know where the people are. Otherwise, how can you obey the great commission and ‘go’? We don’t have to trudge across the region, or gallop on horseback, though, to go where the people are.

They’re right here: online.

We can’t assume that methods of communication which don’t work in the real world are going to be any more successful on the internet, however. If people don’t want to walk into our churches, then, why are they going to follow us on Twitter, or click on our Facebook posts?

At Stornoway Free Church we have recently been stepping up our use of social media. This is not in some painful effort to make ourselves cool. (Mo chreach, I’m just not sure we’d know where to start).
We simply recognise two things: Jesus wanted us to go to where the people were with His message; and where the people are, the Devil is always prowling. It is incumbent upon the church, therefore, to bring light into the darkness that can sometimes exist online just as it does offline.

Christ’s church exists to glorify Him, which I think we can sometimes forget, even with the best of intentions. We think it’s up to us to devise the initiative that will be the golden key, the thing that brings people flocking to us.

What will bring people to us, actually, is grace and that is not within the gift of the Free – or any other – Church. We must surely accept the Holy Spirit’s divine authority. So, we ask for God’s guidance, and we continue worshipping and spreading the Good News.

And, we show forth who Christ is, and what He has done on our behalf. That is sufficient. Using social media is just another way of ensuring that people know the truth. We don’t have to do anything more: there isn’t anything more to be done.

If God becoming man, God suffering and hanging on a cross to die for us is not enough; if His defeat of death is not enough, then we are not people who can be satisfied. Gimmickry and hashtags will certainly not impress if His name leaves you cold. But then, if His name fails to rally our heart to His cause, we must be prepared for the consequences.

Like the Jacobites, we should use every means at our disposal to spread the news. But in passing this fiery cross to others, we have to let them see that its terrible beauty and power lie in something not unlike the original crann-tara.

The cross we hold up before them is dipped in the blood of the Saviour, and fired with the power of His salvation offer. How we pass it on hardly matters. He is not willing that any should perish, and so we may be quite sure that it will reach all those who belong beneath His royal standard.

The Minister and the Otherworld

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‘Our minister’s away with the fairies’, might very well have been the intimation from the Rev Robert Kirk’s pulpit following his disappearance in 1692. You see, his congregation did not believe that he had died, but rather, that he had been kidnapped off to fairyland. His interest in the creatures of the Otherworld had finally – they thought – been his undoing.

What was his interest? Well, strange as it sounds now, fairy belief was so prevalent at the time that Kirk felt it necessary to write a treatise on their nature. Two common ideas – that they were the spirits of infants who had died without baptism, or that they were fallen angels – could not be countenanced by him, or by the church. Instead, he sought to displace these heretical theories by investigating for himself and laying out his findings in a book, ‘The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies’.

His conclusion was that they were ‘of a middle nature, twixt man and the angels’. It’s an unusual statement for more than one reason. Firstly, well, a minister who believed in fairies. . . If that was nowadays, the very least he could expect would be some odd looks at Session meetings. Secondly, anyone with the most rudimentary grasp of scripture will know that God made man a little lower than the angels, so Kirk was essentially placing fairies above mankind. Above us, yet not perfect like the angels. The fairies required appeasement, and careful handling. Without warning, they might mete out punishment, or simply take from mankind what they coveted.

The writer, Ronald Black, described the function performed by fairyland for our ancestors as similar to modern soap opera. It was a medium for exploring and working out social dilemmas and concerns. To put it another way, it was humankind trying to sort itself out in a way that excluded God. Poor Kirk was somehow trying to accommodate fairy belief into his theology, but it was always going to end badly.

If we humans are proof of anything, we are proof of our own lostness. No matter how bad we make things for ourselves, we still think it’s somehow up to us to fix it, and that we’re capable of fixing it. And, in the absence of God, we have constructed our own doctrine. Just be nice, do no wilful harm, be kind to the poor. Tolerate everything as long as it hurts no one. It will all be fine in the end.

Not like that, it won’t.

Kirk was making the kind of mistake you would hope no modern minister would make. Sometimes, what secular culture thinks is fine, is really not. There are times when what the world wants has to be opposed by Christ’s church. You can’t always accommodate it and you shouldn’t always try. It falls to His followers to hold up a hand and gently say, ‘no further’. And it’s a challenge. No one wants to be called a killjoy, or a bigot, but then, they called our Saviour worse.

I see our local Christian Party candidate being soundly mocked and derided by the usual social media suspects. He has had the temerity to subscribe to Biblical teaching and not conform to the right-on views of the secular lobby. As far as I can make out, his approach is informed by God; their view is shaped by no authority superior to their own. By that logic, if they say his beliefs, or my beliefs are stupid/bigoted/immature, well, then they are. They probably think I’ve been told by my church to vote for him as well. (Obviously I haven’t – the elders don’t know that women have the vote now, and I’m not going to be the one to break it to them.)

Christians have to live in this world for a time, but they should never belong to it. Kirk’s mistake was to think he could walk too closely with worldly ignorance and still be safe. There were two things which might have released him from the enchantment which held him: iron and salt.

We must pray for a good measure of both in our walk through this world.

Make hay on the day of small things

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It used to be a practice in some parts of Lewis, when you were constructing the haystack, to place a pat of butter inside the centre of it. Then, partway through the winter, when household stocks began, inevitably, to dwindle, it would emerge from the diminishing goc as a welcome addition to the table.

Our ancestors were inventive when it came to putting things by. Young women gradually built up a ‘bottom drawer’ with all the things they might need to set up a home of their own, should the joyful day ever arrive. Personal and household linens were stored away, in a custom that combined sentiment with practicality. It would have been impossible for them to purchase all they needed at once and so, it was achieved gradually. Happy anticipation salted their frugality and made it a good thing.

When I was a child, I heard the phrase, ‘na dèan tàir air latha nan nithean beaga’ so often that I thought it was a proverb. I think, actually, the older people used it as a sort of mantra for themselves, a wee memo about keeping things in perspective. It is, of course, from the minor prophet, Zechariah – ‘for who hath despised the day of small things?’ – and serves as a reminder that we should not expect dramatic manifestations of God’s work in our lives, but rather that we should be grateful for his constancy, and his faithfulness. These are not, in fact, small things, but great and wonderful things.

Common grace – God’s mercy enjoyed by all, regardless of whether they believe – is probably not talked about enough. Those who reject Christ would certainly argue that they are who they are, and have what they have, through their own efforts and that of other human beings. Many of us have been fooled into that kind of thinking.

Since becoming a Christian, I look back at the years before and see Him acting on my behalf in so many ways to which I must have been blind at the time. It’s like opening up an old, familiar photograph album and seeing a person that you had never previously noticed in every single picture. What did I feel on realising this? Many things. Sadness that I had carried burdens of worry, guilt and sin needlessly; grief, that I had not listened sooner to His voice; shame at my own pride and arrogance. Yet, overriding all of those feelings was joy – joy that now I am His, but also a sort of retrospective comfort. Past trials and celebrations are past, but I see them differently now, knowing that He was always there in their midst.

We are always looking for something significant. I think that I had been a Christian for quite a time before receiving assurance. Perhaps I expected some sort of fireworks display to show that Christ had saved me. No word that all the drama had already taken place 2000 years ago.
And even those who are already Christians sigh and long for the days gone by when churches were full on a Sunday. That’s natural, and we are all praying daily for an increase of God’s Kingdom. Yet, while we are fixing our eyes and our hearts upon the hope of a great and glorious revival, like the kind we read about in books, what is it we are not seeing and hearing now?

The work goes on. God is present. You pray for family and friends who are without Christ, but you remember that they are not completely alone even now. They have not noticed Him at their shoulder, they have not yet turned into His embrace, but He is there. And people are hearing the Word and being changed, sometimes like water wearing away the stone, but being changed all the same. These are the days of small things. We mustn’t give so much of our hearts to longing for a great and glorious miracle that we forget the daily miracle of God’s grace.

Sometimes, He speaks not in wind, nor earthquake, nor fire, but in the still, small voice of everyday. That is something we can put by for later, until the winter passes and the days of plenty come.