“I will not let you go” (Genesis 32:22-31)

Have you ever been in a situation where there is something you didn’t want to deal with? Maybe it was a challenging issue at work. Maybe it was a tense relationship with a neighbour or a conflict with a family member. Or if you think back to your school days, perhaps it was a homework assignment. I can remember more than once burning the midnight oil (or to be truthful, the 2 a.m. oil!) to finish off a paper that was due the next morning.

Eventually the situation reaches the point where we realize we can’t postpone taking action any longer. Well, those are exactly the circumstances in which Jacob finds himself in this morning’s Old Testament reading.

Those of you who are familiar with his story will know that all his life Jacob had managed to succeed through trickery, through dishonesty and deceit. He was the master of the scam. And there had been an indication that this was the kind of person Jacob was going to be right from the time of his birth.

As you likely know as well, Jacob was a twin. His brother Esau was the first to be born. But Jacob emerged from his mother Rebekah’s womb with his tiny fist clenched tightly around his brother’s heel. In fact it was for that reason that he was given the name Jacob, which means something like “he clutches” or “he grasps”.

What happened at Jacob’s birth was the beginning of a pattern. And so it is that, as we follow the life of Jacob in the Book of Genesis we find him constantly grasping—first cheating his older brother Esau out of his birthright, later masquerading as his brother to steal their dying father’s final blessing along with his inheritance, and later still tricking his uncle Laban out of half his flocks of sheep. But now (to change the image) Jacob’s chickens had come home to roost.

Wrestling with God

As our passage opens this morning, Jacob is dreading what is about to happen. At their parting years before Esau had vowed to kill his brother. And it was only because their mother Rebekah had got wind of this and shared with him what she had found out that Jacob was able to make a hasty exit.

Now, after years of pent-up estrangement and hostility, what Jacob had been avoiding was on the verge of happening. Jacob was about to come face to face with his brother Esau once again. And Jacob quite rightly feared for his life.

As we meet him in this morning’s Old Testament reading, Jabob has been careful to ensure that his family and his flocks are safely out of harm’s way on the opposite bank of the River Jabbok. And there he sits, silent and alone, under the starlit sky.

Then the most peculiar thing happens. Suddenly Jacob finds himself wrestling with a figure who seemingly has come out of nowhere. Try to picture them, grappling with each other, throwing each other down, rolling back and forth on the grassy meadow under the starlit sky. Then, as the faint glimmer of the rising sun begins to appear over the eastern horizon, Jacob’s mysterious opponent strikes him on the hip socket and throws his hip out of joint.

However, Jacob was a tough customer. And he was not one to give up a fight. He was not going to let a mere dislocated hip stand in his way, and so he continued to wrestle with the stranger. It was at that point, seeing that Jacob was not going to call it quits, that the stranger said to him, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob was not going to let the stranger off so easily and was firm in his response: “I will not let you go before you have given me a blessing.”

So the stranger asks Jacob, “What is your name?” To which Jacob replies, “Jacob”—the grasper. “Your name won’t be Jacob any longer,” says the stranger, “From now on you will be called Israel—the God-Wrestler—for you have wrestled with God and you’ve made it through.” So Jacob called the spot where these strange goings-on happened “Peniel”, which means “the face of God”.

They wouldn’t let go

So what can we learn from this strange story from a strange land nearly four thousand years ago?

One of the things that I come away from this story of Jacob is that he was not willing to let go in his struggle with God. And Jacob was not unique. Later on in the Bible we meet with Job. As Job suffered the loss successively of his wealth, his sons and daughters, and finally his health, he continued to cling to his faith in God. In the midst of his unutterable pain and suffering, he declared to his friends, “Though [the Almighty] slay me, yet I will trust in him.” (Job 13:15)

In the New Testament we meet with the Apostle Paul, who shared with his friends in Corinth the sufferings he had endured over the course of his life:

Five times I have received … the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked… (2 Corinthians 11:24-27)

Yet in spite of all this, Paul would not relinquish his faith in Christ. And Paul was not unique. Recently I’ve been reading Letters and Papers from Prison by a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who joined the resistance against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi régime in Germany during World War 2. He was held in prison for a year and a half and then in a concentration camp for another six months before being finally executed. Yet it is clear that over the course of those years his faith in God only deepened and grew.

Christian history right down to the present day is peppered with the stories of women, men and children who have in spite of every kind of adversity and loss, have clung to their faith in God. Indeed, in most cases that faith was only deepened. Like Jacob in our Bible reading this morning, they would not let go.

The One who will not let us go…

Had the circumstances been different, you would have been witnesses to the baptism of three young people this morning. What a privilege it is to stand around the font and witness as people mark the beginning of a lifelong journey of walking with Jesus.

For twenty centuries Christians have been baptizing in obedience to Jesus’ final words to his disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you…” (Matthew 28:18-20)

Baptisms are joyful events—and that is as it should be. Yet that joyful atmosphere can easily mask the seriousness of the vows we undertake. Listen to the words with which we address the candidates: “Will you persevere…?” “Will you seek and serve…?” “Will you strive…?” Those are strong words when you take a moment think about them! I don’t think I would be exaggerating to say they pose a superhuman challenge!

Yet we accept the challenge because when Jesus commanded the disciples to baptize, he also left them with a promise: “And remember,” he said to them, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So it is that as we grasp onto the Lord in baptism, we recognize that we are being grasped by a hand that is infinitely stronger than our own—a hand that, no matter what life may throw at us, will never let us go. And so, with the apostle Paul we are able to proclaim, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

“It’s a Battleground Out There” (Ephesians 6:10-17)

 We preachers are always looking for good illustrations for our sermons. I went online recently and it took me hardly a second before I was confronted by a whole boatload of collections of sermon illustrations. They came with titles like The Preacher’s Sourcebook of Creative Sermon Illustrations, Hot Sermon Illustrations, Encyclopedia of Sermon Illustrations, The Ultimate Book of Illustrations and Quotes, 500 Sermon Illustrations for Busy Pastors, 1000 Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching… And if those weren’t enough, there was the blockbuster: 6000 Sermon Illustrations. At a sermon a week, you’d have enough illustrations to see you through more than a century!

 Of course Jesus was the master of the illustration. Who doesn’t remember his parables of the farmer scattering his seed over the various types of soil, of the shepherd who searches high and low for his lost sheep until he finds it, or of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his gate?

In our passage from the sixth chapter of Ephesians this morning I can picture the apostle Paul pacing back and forth in his prison cell as he draws towards the conclusion of his letter to the young community of believers living in Ephesus. And I imagine him scratching his brain for an illustration to conclude all that he has been writing—something that would stick in the minds of his readers, something that they would carry away with them, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

In the previous five chapters he has covered a vast expanse of ground. The great nineteenth-century biblical teacher Handley Moule summed it up like this:

He has been telling them, from the beginning onward, of the secrets of eternal grace and love, of the wonder of their salvation from spiritual death, of their peace and life through faith, of their sealing by the Blessed Spirit, of their union with Christ their Head, of his blissful indwelling in their hearts, and then of the resultant life of humility, purity, love, truth, and every gracious duty of social holiness…[1]

When you look back on it, he has given them a whole wagonload of vital truths to consider and challenges to act upon. Now Paul needs to draw all that he has been writing to a conclusion. What can he offer them that will help his readers to retain all this in their minds—and, more importantly, to put into practical action in their daily lives?

I can imagine Paul pacing back and forth in his cell. Then, deep in his thoughts, he pauses for a moment and glances around. And suddenly it comes to him. It was one of those head-slapper moments. Of course! How could he have missed it? The perfect illustration! There it was, staring right at him! It had been within feet of him all along: the Roman soldier standing guard at the door of his cell! As Paul’s eyes rest on the guard, it all becomes clear…

Paul lists six pieces of armour in all: the belt, the breastplate, the boots, the shield, the helmet and the sword. We don’t have time in the space of one sermon to examine them all, so this morning I want us to focus on just three of them: the breastplate, the helmet, and the sword.

The breastplate: protecting the heart

So first, the breastplate. This piece of armour covered the chest and shoulders, and was constructed out of a horizontal series of circular strips of iron fastened together with leather straps. The breastplate was designed to protect all the vital organs. But the most important one, and the one I want to focus on this morning, was the heart.

Were you aware that the word “heart” occurs more than eight hundred times in the Bible? And in almost every occurrence it is referring to something much deeper, and much more vital in many ways, than the physical organ that pumps blood through our bodies. For in the Bible the heart is the seat of the will. In biblical terms, it is the core of your inner being, the source of your emotions, your morals, your sentiments, your courage, your convictions and your resolve. The heart is what makes you “you”.

For this reason the Bible places enormous emphasis on what goes on inside our hearts. Here are just a few of the hundreds of examples you can find if you take the time to look for them:

·    “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

·    “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

·    “With my whole heart I seek you…! I have stored up your word in my heart,  that I might not sin against you.” (Psalm 119:10,11)

·    “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind …” (Jeremiah 17:10)

·    “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)

·    “Yet even now,” declares the Lord,  “return to me with all your heart … and rend your hearts and not your garments.” (Joel 2:12-13)

·    “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” (Psalm 14:1)

The book of Proverbs sums it up well for us when it warns, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23) And so it is that over our hearts we put on the breastplate of righteousness.

Of course the righteousness to which Paul is referring is not our own. That is self-righteousness. That is the righteousness of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, who stood in the temple apart from everybody else and prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” (Luke 18:11).

No, like the breastplate that is put on from without, the righteousness that Paul was writing about is a righteousness that does not come from within, but is conferred upon us. It is not my righteousness; it is Jesus’ righteousness, by which he and he alone protects us from all the evil that can so easily strike to the core of our being. So it is that in the words of John Wesley we are able proclaim,

Jesus, thy blood and righteousness,
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.

The helmet: protecting the mind

We move on, then, from the breastplate, which protects our heart, to the helmet, which protects our head. Like the breastplate, the helmet is a vitally important piece of our spiritual armour. And as with our hearts, the Bible has a good deal to say about what goes on inside our heads.

Earlier in this letter to the Ephesians Paul has called upon his readers to “to be renewed in the spirit of your minds” (4:23). Elsewhere he warns, “Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:5-6) And then he cautions us “not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word” (2 Thessalonians 2:2). He challenges us to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). “Who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” he queries. And then he boldly answers, “But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:16).

So what does it mean to have the mind of Christ? Many years ago I was helped in this through a book by a lamentably little known author by the name of Harry Blamires. Blamires was both a student and a friend of C.S. Lewis and he wrote a number of books, one of which was entitled The Christian Mind. Here is one of the things he had to say on that topic:

The Christian mind sees human life and human history held in the hands of God. It sees the whole universe sustained by his power and his love. It sees the natural order as dependent upon the supernatural order, time as contained within eternity. It sees this life as an inconclusive experience, preparing us for another, this world as a temporary place of refuge, not our true and final home.[2]

Blamires was writing more than sixty years ago. Yet I dare to say that the principles he was articulating may be more crucial now in the twenty-first century than they have been at any time in the past. We live in a day when false notions and false ideas proliferate more than ever before—and as Christians we are not immune to them.

Our Lord Jesus himself warned that “false messiahs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24)

Today we are being bombarded from every direction with falsehoods dressed up in the guise of truth, immorality purporting to be virtue, reason being drowned out by emotion. Issues of human sexuality, abortion, and euthanasia are just three areas of many where our society is deeply divided, to the point where it is often difficult (if not impossible) to engage in rational dialogue—and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

What I am saying may seem very dreary and pessimistic, so let me cheer you up with another book I’ve been reading. It’s titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Its author documents how in recent years a number of leading intellectuals have begun seriously questioning the false assumptions that have taken hold of so much of our western thought, and are finding themselves attracted to the Christian faith. He asks whether we might be seeing the first ripples of a new wave of faith. Pray to God that that might be so!

Whatever the case, we need to have the helmet of salvation fitted firmly over our heads and to be actively seeking the mind of Christ. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul wrote to the believers living in Rome, “but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

The sword: our only offensive weapon

We have looked at the breastplate and the helmet. Both are defensive gear, to protect the soldier from attack. Now we turn to the only offensive weapon in Paul’s list—the sword. The sword that Paul’s guard would have carried was not a long, heavy sword like you might imagine in Robin Hood or Braveheart. Rather, it was a little less than two feet long and weighed less than two pounds. It was ground razor sharp on both edges, with a sharp point; and the soldier carried it not at his hip, but over his shoulder, so that he could whip it out at a moment’s notice.

And that is exactly what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of Jesus’ betrayal. Matthew’s gospel doesn’t tell us who the guilty party was, just that “one of those who were with Jesus” reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear (Matthew 26:50).

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

And here we have the example of our Lord Jesus, who, though he carried no physical weapon, was adept at wielding the sword of the Spirit. When the devil sought to tempt him away from his God-given mission, Jesus’ defence was not with any sophisticated philosophical argument, but with the words of Scripture. Each time his reply began, “It is written…” “It is written…” “It is written…”

Clearly Jesus knew his Bible. And if that was the case for him, how much more for us, as we are confronted with the innumerable falsehoods and temptations with which life in the modern world confronts us. For this reason I can’t recommend highly enough a practice, not only of reading the Bible daily, but of committing it to memory. In my own Anglican tradition we have a prayer in which we ask that we may “hear, read, mark (that is, pay attention to), learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures. That means taking the time and the discipline to allow the message of the Bible to soak into us, to become a part of our very being.

Early in my own Christian life I was encouraged to begin memorizing portions of Scripture. I can’t tell you how many times those verses that I committed to memory have been helpful to me, particularly in times of difficulty—and more than fifty years later many of them are still embedded in my memory.

So much of life today is a spiritual battleground, and the weapons aimed against us grow daily in sophistication and menace. So let me challenge you to put on the spiritual armour with which God supplies us—the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of truth, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God—so that in the end you may shout with all the saints, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” .

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[1] Handley Moule, Ephesian Studies, 321

[2]     The Christian Mind, 67

“Paul’s Vision for the Church” (Ephesians 3:8-21)

Many years ago (I’m embarrassed to admit how many!) a wise friend passed on to me a little book entitled The Gospel Blimp. Maybe some of you are old enough to have heard of it. Perhaps some have even read it! The story opens with a group of friends from church gathered for a barbecue in the back yard of George and Ethel Griscom. At some point someone notices the Griscoms’ next-door neighbours, who are sitting on their porch drinking beer and playing cards. This leads into a conversation on the Griscoms’ side of the fence about how to reach people with the gospel.

In the midst of the conversation an airplane flies very low overhead—so low, in fact, that everyone on both sides of the fence stops what they are doing to look up and gaze at it—and out of that there sprouts the germ of an idea. That low-flying airplane caught everybody’s attention. How about using a blimp with a message trailing behind it to glide slowly over people’s homes to proclaim the gospel to all the unchurched citizens of the whole town?

Well, the story goes on from there. And lo and behold, the idea becomes a reality. After that it doesn’t take much longer for someone to suggest a further step. How about using the blimp to sprinkle evangelistic pamphlets over entire neighbourhoods? Soon someone else comes up with the further brainwave of installing speaker horns to broadcast sermons and Christian music. Well, as you can imagine (or perhaps you’d prefer not to!) the story goes on from there. And it doesn’t take very much longer for the whole project to collapse in disaster.

But meanwhile, quietly in the midst of all this energy being devoted to the blimp, the Griscoms’ neighbours do become Christians. Not because of the blimp, which only ever served to upset and annoy people. But because somewhere along the way George and Ethel actually began to get to know their neighbours and ended up helping them through a serious health crisis.

All of this reminds me of some advice another friend passed on to me early in my Christian walk: “Be careful not to get so caught up in the work of the Lord that you lose sight of the Lord of the work.”

So it is that Paul is writing to the believers in Ephesus to remind them of their true calling, and to help them focus on God’s intentions for his church. And I hope I’m going to make it easy for you to remember if I summarize what he says under three headings: They needed to be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power, and continuous in praise. 

Clear our Purpose (8-13)

First, then, the believers living in Ephesus were called to be clear in their purpose. Paul sets out that purpose in the opening verse of this morning’s passage. And it is this: to proclaim the boundless, unfathomable, infinite riches of Christ—a riches that beggars all human calculation.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” he writes elsewhere. It’s as though, in spite of all his scholarly training and oratorical eloquence, Paul is scarcely able to find the words to express himself. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33)

John, at the very end of his gospel, after setting down more than twenty chapters of his memories of Jesus, finds himself coming to a similar conclusion: “Jesus did many other things as well,” he writes. “If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) He just couldn’t ever say enough about Jesus.

So it is that Paul writes that his whole calling—and by extension yours and mine—is to make plain God’s eternal plan, which has now been realized in Jesus Christ. The verb that Paul uses here is photizo. Perhaps you can hear in it our English words photograph, photoelectric, photon, photosensitive, photosynthesis… They all have to do with light.

Of course, behind Paul’s words is the command that Jesus gave to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:16). So it is that you and I are called and empowered and commissioned to live lives shining with the light of Jesus—his all-embracing love, his unchanging truth, his pure goodness—in what today seems to be an ever-increasingly dark and threatening world.

And that light will shine only as our words are backed up by our actions, by the quality of our lives. It is our lives that give authenticity to our words. A century and a half after the apostle Paul, believers were going through a period of terrible persecution. Yet the church continued to grow. Why? It was the Christian author Tertullian who recognized the reason when he wrote, “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, … how they are ready even to die for one another!”[1] Theirs was a love that also overflowed outside the Christian community to the poor, the destitute and the hungry, to widows and orphans. And it was through that love tangibly demonstrated that people also discovered the love of a Saviour. Through their integrity people encountered him who is the truth. And through their willingness to be tortured and even to die for their faith that people found him who came to bring life in all its fullness.

Conscious of our Power (14-19)

It is a calling of truly heroic proportions. But we will never live up to it unless we are conscious of the power that alone can make it a reality. We need always to be aware the light with which Jesus calls us to shine does not originate in us. It is a reflected light. And its source is the ineffable glory, the unquenchable love, the unchanging truth of Jesus himself. Paul writes about being strengthened in our inner being through the Holy Spirit’s power. And in verses 16 through 19 he gives us three images of how that happens. So let’s take a look at each of them briefly.

Paul first writes in verse 17 about Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith. Many years ago (about as many years ago as when I was given The Gospel Blimp!) someone else introduced me to a little booklet entitled My Heart – Christ’s Home. It’s based on that verse which I am sure is familiar to most of us in Revelation 3, where Jesus says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” In it the author takes us through the various rooms of a house—the living room, where we relax; the dining room, where we eat; the study, where we read; the bedroom, and so on…

The whole point was that when you open your life to Jesus, it isn’t a matter of merely allowing him to stand in the entryway like some door-to-door salesperson. Rather, you are giving him free rein to move and to exercise his lordship throughout every room, every nook and cranny in the house: your thoughts and appetites, what you take into your mind through the books and media you read, the music you listen to, what you watch on TV and the internet and social media, your friendships, your sex life, your finances, your leisure time, and the list goes on…

Secondly, Paul calls us to be grounded in love. The image moves from a home to a forest. We are blessed with an almost endless forest behind our house. It stretches pretty well all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. But it is all on semi-swampy, rocky ground, which means that many of the trees can’t put down deep roots. So every time there’s a major windstorm (and we’ve had our share of them in recent years) there are trees that are blown over and end up falling to the ground and dying.

So how do we become properly rooted, so that the winds of temptation and misfortune and adversity don’t cause us to fall? I want to suggest three ways. We need to be grounded in holy Scripture—to spend time daily reading the Bible, seeking to grasp its meaning and then applying it to our lives. We need to be rooted in prayer—to bask in God’s great and unfathomable love in Christ and to lay our lives, our concerns and our deepest needs before him. And we need to be rooted in community, which means more than just spending an hour or so in church on a Sunday, but really engaging with God’s people, being nourished in an environment of mutual love and care.

So it is that, with Christ dwelling in our hearts and with our lives rooted and grounded in his love, we will find ourselves being filled to the brim with the fullness of God—and by his grace that fullness will overflow into and enrich the lives of others as well. That doesn’t mean that life will be easy or that we will always go around with a smile pasted on our face. Far from it! Christians are not immune to sorrow and tragedy. But it does mean that we are never alone in them. For we are graced with the constant presence of the one who has promised to be with us always, to the very end of time (Matthew 28:20).

Continuous in our Praise (20-21)

And so we are to be clear in our purpose and conscious of our power. Which brings us to our third point: and that is that we are to be continuous in our praise.

At this point my mind is drawn back years ago once again, when I was serving in a church in Montreal and we were graced with a visit from the Archbishop of Uganda. His name was Erica Sabiti. He had grown up in the church but it was only when he was in his thirties that he came into contact with the spiritual revival that was sweeping across East Africa at the time, and his life was forever transformed. In a word, he fell in love with Jesus.

I well remember the woman who was hosting him at one time remarking to me under her breath, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! All he ever talks about is Jesus. If I hear him even mention that name once more, I think I’m going to scream!” This was nearly forty years after his conversion, yet this man still found himself totally captivated by, utterly in love with Jesus.

It was clear that this man’s praise was no shallow, surface phenomenon. It sprang from a deep and unshakeable faith in God. Sabiti’s ministry as archbishop occurred during the tyrannous dictatorship of Idi Amin. And when Amin ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Uganda, Erica Sabiti opposed him publicly and stood up for them. He soon received a summons to appear before Amin, with every likelihood that, as with others who had taken a stand against him, the dictator would personally shoot him.

There was a tense two-hour wait before Amin appeared and sat down across from him. After what seemed an interminable period of silence, Amin burst out, “You Sabiti, do you know I can kill you? Why do you talk about the children of Israel?” Twice more Amin repeated the threat, after which the archbishop reached down into his bag and pulled out his Bible. Then, with a calmness in his voice he said, “Your Excellency, this Bible is full of the history of the Jews, so is your Koran. People have died because of the truth, which is in this Bible. The children of Israel are special because they are a chosen race and we shall talk about it.” Amin did not say a thing, but shook his head and walked out of the room.[2]

This was the man who could never stop praising Jesus. God grant that our worship in this place might powerfully engage our minds, stir our hearts and strengthen our wills. By his grace may it be a mighty upswelling of praise that arises out of a profound and unshakeable experience of God’s saving grace in Jesus—an experience week by week that accompanies and upholds us through all of life’s circumstances and irresistibly leads us ever deeper into him.

Paul’s God-given vision for the Christians in Ephesus was that they might be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power and continuous in praise. I’d like to conclude with Paul’s challenge to them, as Eugene Peterson powerfully worded it in The Message:

And I ask [God] to strengthen you by his Spirit … that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!

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[1] Tertullian, Apology, ch 39

[2] https://ugandansatheart.blogspot.com/2015/04/uah-emarchbishop-sabitis-near-fatal.html

“Growing into Spiritual Maturity” (Galatians 3:23-29)

 One of the great things about being a follower of Jesus is that you quickly discover that you are a member of a vast international family that encircles the entire world. I am not a huge traveller, but it has been my privilege to worship with other believers in such faraway places as Australia, Britain, France, Haiti, India and Libya. While some of the customs in each of those places may have differed somewhat and while we may have stumbled at points during the service, what was far more evident was the deep bond that we shared through our common faith in Jesus Christ.

I remember too the day we welcomed the first of several dozen refugees from Burma into the congregation where I served in Minnesota. Our primary means of communication initially was through an interpreter. And so much of what they were experiencing was utterly strange to them (not least the weather!). Yet there was no question that when they were with us they were at home among their spiritual family.

I suspect too that there are some in the congregation here this morning who, when they first came to Canada, found a number of our customs—things that seem perfectly normal to us—strange and mystifying.

In many ways, entering the world of the New Testament and meeting with the believers there is much the same. Some translation is required—and I am not speaking just from Greek to English. I’m also thinking of the many customs that were observed in the Jewish and Roman worlds of the first century that require sometimes considerable explanation if we are to gain a proper understanding of the message of the Bible.

For example, when Jesus told his parable about the woman and her lost coin, we may not be aware that her loss would amount to more than a hundred dollars in our world of today. Or when Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink (which may seem like a perfectly normal thing for us to do on a hot day), he was breaking with nearly a thousand years of open hostility.

Well, welcome to the churches in Galatia in the middle of the first century—in the midst of a culture about as far removed as any in our world today. If we are to gain a proper understanding of the message the apostle Paul was seeking to get across to them, we will need to go behind his words to delve into the cultural background that underlies them. So let’s turn to Galatians 3:23-29 and see what we can learn from these verses and how we can apply it to our lives today.

The Pedagogue

When you read the opening verse of this morning’s passage, it appears that Paul has a very negative view of the Old Testament. “We were held captive under the law,” he says, “imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” It sounds as though the people of Old Testament times had been languishing in some kind of dark dungeon for fifteen hundred years.

And there are lots of people today who share that point of view about the Old Testament. On more than one occasion I have heard someone say to me, “I don’t like reading the Old Testament. It’s all about sin and punishment. I much prefer to read Jesus’ words about love and peace in the New Testament.” I don’t like to remind them that Jesus spoke about hell and judgement in some of the most vivid and frightening terms in the Bible. Just think of the parable of the rich man who ended up in anguish in hell and pleaded for Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31) or Jesus’ warnings to be careful not to be thrown into hell “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44).

But I want to say that it was never Paul’s intention to be critical of the Old Testament. In fact, in the course of his thirteen letters Paul references the Torah forty-five times. He quotes from the prophets fifty-three times. And he draws from the psalms twenty-three times. Indeed, his reverence for the Old Testament scriptures comes out in the next verse of this morning’s passage. There he speaks of them as “our guardian until Christ came”.

Now the word our Bibles translates as “guardian” is has a very specific meaning. Elsewhere it is translated “guide” (1 Corinthians 4:15) and it refers to a servant whose duty was to conduct a boy to and from school, to teach him manners, and when necessary to inflict punishment. However, the guardian was not the child’s teacher. His role was simply to bring his charge to the teacher.

These guardians (the technical term was “pedagogues”) were often known for their harshness and strict discipline. Yet the fact is that many developed life-long relationships with their charges. Whatever the case, however, their duties came to an end when the boy reached the age of maturity.[1]

Paul recognized this fact. And he recruited it as a perfect image for the role of the Old Testament. Like the guardian who did not teach his charge, so the Old Testament cannot bring us to salvation. But through its stories and instruction about righteousness and sin, it brings us to the point where we can recognize our need for salvation and, more specifically, our need for a Saviour.

I rather like the way Eugene Petersen put verses 23 to 25 in The Message:

Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors … who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for. But now you have arrived at your destination…

The Toga

That was Paul’s first picture: the pedagogue responsible for bringing a child to his tutor. Paul’s second picture was another that was familiar to everyone living in the Roman Empire of the first century. And it was this:

In ancient Roman culture when a boy reached an age of somewhere around sixteen, he was considered to have entered maturity. Until that time he would always have been dressed in a child’s toga. Then, in a solemn family ceremony, he would discard the toga of his childhood and it would be replaced with the pure white toga of adulthood. From that day on, wherever he went, whatever he did, everyone would recognize him as a man.

Now we can’t be altogether sure about all the details involved in baptism in New Testament times—whether it was by immersion or sprinkling, whether it was in standing water or running water as some insisted, whether or not candidates removed their outer garments, and a host of other details.

However, we do know that very early on in the tradition of the church—and very much like the tradition of the toga—the newly baptized, on coming up out of the water, would be clothed in a white robe. That white robe was a visible reminder that Jesus had taken away the stain of their sins. More powerfully still, it was a dramatic anticipation of the day when they would join with that great crowd that we meet with in the book of Revelation—“the multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10)

Whatever the case, just as the young man of Roman times put on his adult toga, so you and I through faith have put on Christ. Elsewhere Paul writes about our calling to attain to maturity, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13-15)

So it is that part of our calling in Christ is a challenge to spiritual maturity. When I was a very young Christian, a popular book that was doing the rounds had the title In Understanding Be Men. The title was based on the old King James Version of 1 Corinthians 14:20, which in our more contemporary translation of the Bible runs like this: “Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

What are the marks of a mature faith? I think the best list was given to us by Paul himself. He calls them the fruit of the Spirit, and we will come to them in a few weeks in our study of Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And if I could add a tenth, it would be humility: never to make the mistake of thinking we have arrived, that there is no more room for personal growth in our lives, but to keep on maturing in our faith—seeking to love Jesus and others more and more day by day.

The Church

So far Paul has focused on faith from an individual perspective. It is as though we have been looking at the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread out across the table. Now in the last two verses Paul fits all those pieces together. And what emerges?

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. 

It is a glorious picture. Suddenly all the things that once seemed to make a difference and had the potential of dividing us pale into insignificance: nationality, status, gender… And no doubt Paul (and you and I) could continue the list: age, political persuasion, education, tattoos, musical preferences and a whole host of other things that differentiate us and could easily cause us to drift apart or even drive wedges between us. But our unity in Christ is far more valuable, infinitely more precious than any of those things.

I wonder how many of you are familiar with the law of entropy in physics. The law of entropy states that when left alone in its natural state, everything tends to greater and greater disorder. I had a friend who used to talk about the law of spiritual entropy. That is, when left to itself, everything in the church tends to greater and greater disorder—and sometimes even to outright chaos!

The challenge for you and for me is, that if we are to avoid that spiritual entropy, if we are to be the community that Paul is describing for us in these verses in Galatians, it takes commitment and it takes hard work. We can’t be satisfied just to be pew warmers.

Unfortunately, the way our church building is structured (and most church buildings for that matter) it looks as though the great majority of us are an audience, with a few performers on the stage. Well, in my Anglican tradition, the area of the church where you are sitting right now is called the nave. It sounds a lot like navy, doesn’t it? That’s because the two words are related. “Nave” means “ship”. And in olden days, long before engines or even sails were invented, ships were powered by oars. And that’s where you come in! You are the oarsmen. You are the ones who are meant to be powering the ship.

Now I know that there are already an awful lot of people putting in an awful lot of sweat to keep this ship moving ahead. (In fact sometimes I worry that some of them are going to burn themselves out!) But let’s each ask ourselves, “How can I use the gifts that God has given me to help make this church the Christ-honouring community that God is calling us to be—where people looking in from the outside say, ‘See how they love one another!’ and yearn to come in?” This was the kind of church that Paul was yearning for in Galatia. And this is the kind of church that the world is yearning for today.

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[1]     See https://scispace.com/pdf/the-figure-of-the-paidagogos-in-art-and-literature-eubcjb89ko.pdf