An antidote to discouragement

I wonder if I've ever really taken to heart the parable of the mustard seed - what a slow lesson it is to learn!

In Christian ministry, we'd love to see heaven ripped open, the Holy Spirit descending with power, and spiritual blessing being poured out in great floods. We'd love to see "a nation born in a day", or at least homes and neighbourhoods transformed preferably before we have to buy another calendar.

Such things, though, whilst something very right to pray for, are seen and experienced only by a very few privileged servants.

God's normal way is the parable of the growing seed, and of the mustard seed (Mark 4:26-32). The beginnings are small; it seems unlikely to come to much. But it will; it is the nature of God's word, when preached in God's way, to bring forth God's harvest, even though we don't really know how it works. If planted in good soil, the fruit will and must come - and at last, the birds of the air will be able to come and shelter under the shade of the resulting tree.

So, preach the word, in season and out of season. Whatever you see, whatever you don't see - God knows what he's doing. If we live in the year 2009 this actually requires far less faith than the disciples hearing it for the first time a couple of millennia ago. The flow of history over the last 2000 years shows that Jesus' words were not empty. The tree has grown and given shade all round the world, and whole continents have enjoyed benefits from it for centuries. Sow the word, and water it - and God will give the increase, even though we it doesn't seem to grow as we watch it, and we don't know how it works. We must just get to work, and trust the results to the sovereign God!

OK...

I'm currently marking lots of exams and essays. Almost all of the students could draw accurate diagrams of the Tabernacle. But the one I'm presently looking at is very interesting. I'd never known about the "Table of the golden calf" before.

A new experience

There'll be a new life experience for us next week... rolling power blackouts. These are two days a week country-wide, and our turn is Monday and Tuesday each week. (Residents of Nairobi get an extra bonus day at least to begin with). Much of Kenya's power is hydro-electric. Unfortunately, it hasn't rained enough, so the dams are emptying and several of the stations have had to be switched off. Now we're hoping that the autumn rains will allow 7-days power again when they come.

Can't think of much else to say about it really. God is very good and we enjoy many of the blessings of modern technology. Phones and laptops have batteries, and if those run out before we can recharge them there are various things we can do if I can find the right leads for hooking up to a portable power pack I bought last year when we thought we'd be living somewhere else. Beyond that there are generators, solar panels, battery storage systems for during outages... this isn't any form of hardship yet.

The usefulness of Darwinism

Stories like this one make me chuckle. If I'd out-sourced the job of educating my children to the British state, they might make me weep. But I haven't, so they don't.

The British Humanist Association has organised a protest because guidelines on the new science curriculum don't mention evolution, led by Richard Dawkins (who you should remember doesn't actually exist). Which, they claim, is a bedrock scientific concept. In fact, the centrality of evolution is a bedrock for the humanist/atheist worldview. It's the heart of reality, and explains all existence. So its absence from teaching guidelines is a bit of an embarrassment. The reality of what the scientists involved in drawing up the guidelines thought was important failed to line up with the atheist propaganda.

So, being rational people, these atheist campaigners"representative scientists" presumably went to examine their beliefs about the significance of Darwinism? They considered changing their propaganda, to bring it into line with reality? Nope, they are insisting that the government changes the guidelines to bring the reality into line with the we-wish-it-were-true propaganda.

A more critical/rational question though would be to ask - if evolution really is what we say it is, why do we have to keep campaigning so that those actually involved in the real science realise that it's so? Why does the reality keep having to adjust to meet our propaganda, if our propaganda actually does describe reality in the fundamental way we say it does?

If that question were really critically analysed by these people, it would unravel their whole world-view. Darwin's speculative hypotheses about the past have nothing of substance to do with the examination of real, observable events in the present time. Modern observational science and technology is something quite different
from origins science. The former deals with present, repeatable, provable ideas. The latter deals with non-repeatable speculative historical reconstructions. Atheists need to blur this distinction so that they can use the blessings of modern observational science and its demonstrable, certain realities and pretend that Darwinism exists within (or within a reasonable distance of) the same category of truths. Unfortunately it doesn't, which is why they're getting a bit heated about this latest intrusion of reality into their private worlds of unbelief...

A blog you might like....

Mike Kendall is my parents' pastor. This is his blog. I appreciate Mike's focus in it on the main things, and sharing of short, thought-provoking items from a Biblical point of view.

Plod, plod, plod...

My wife and I listened to a sermon by MP3 last night that was very helpful. (Our church doesn't have an evening service). It was Stuart Olyott's final sermon in his 1982 series on Elisha, which you can find from his website here.

Elisha's life is often remembered for its impressive miracles - it was part of one of only three "ages of miracles" in the Bible history. But Dr. Olyott showed us that there is ample evidence in the text to demonstrate that the great majority of Elijah's ministry was one of faithful, persevering plodding. The recorded events of his 58-years ministry cover no more than 20 days. But the text shows us that at the other times, he was busily getting on with simply doing the same repetitive ministry, teaching and training others, faithfully and continually.

I think a little examination of people who've achieved a lot in their lives consistently shows that this is the way to do it. Plod, plod, plod. There are of course a few geniuses in the world who can master a range of things very quickly. But they are very few and far between (and their duty is then to combine that talent with the plodding to reach an even higher level of achievement).

I saw this lesson again this morning at Eldoret's "nature reserve". I'd never known that termites are so tiny - and yet they can build such enormous mounds, twice the height of an adult man and more! How do they do it? Plod, plod, plod. If termites can do it, surely men must be great sinners if they can find so many ways to let years pass by without achieving anything of note. And yet the self-discipline is hard because truly we are great sinners. Growing up in the modern West the culture is to seek instant gratification. We need a thrill every minute (perhaps to keep the gnawing feelings of emptiness that come from trying to live God-less lives away?). Anything that's going to be hard and involve disciplined effort over years can't be part of this scheme (that's one reason why modern secularists dislike having children, or if they have them they want to farm them out to nannies, playschools and nurseries as soon as it's possible). But this isn't God's way. Man is meant to grow to maturity in Christ through patient perseverance. That's true whether on a large scale - consider the big-picture development of Christian history over the last 2000 years - or on the individual scale of one life.

Tough lesson. But there's no other choice. You can plod forward, or stagnate before spending your last years in bitter regret because now you can't achieve what you could have done in the wasted years of strength. The memorable and dramatic days of life may come - 20 days worthy of being recorded in 58 years, in Elijah's case. But for the rest, God has set us a work, and our job is to do it. If we can trust him for the big and momentous - why not for this too?

Modern apologies

The storm-in-a-tea-cup in which the president of the USA criticised and then apologised for criticising a particular police department is a good illustration of the fall of the modern West.

This isn't a remark about President Obama personally; his "apology" is simply a good specimen of the corruption of modern manners. As society progressively does its best to abolish the idea of sin, trailing along with that the idea of taking responsibility for sin goes the same way.

Here's what was said. On Wednesday, the President said, "The Cambridge police acted stupidly". Now, he has said, "I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge police department". (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8168313.stm)

Now, to anyone in the world who's still sane, the President obviously did directly "[malign] the Cambridge police department". He called them stupid. If the word "malign" has any meaning at all, he maligned them, and that was precisely the intention when he opened his mouth to speak. But note now the very modern apology. He didn't actually malign them; rather, he gave that impression. Not a reality, note! Or rather, he thinks he gave an impression - there's still some room for doubt, if you've got time to do a thorough investigation. It's regrettable if you picked up that intention from his words.

This is original sin and human pride in action. To say "sorry, I maligned them and it was wrong" is just 8 words, that costs not one dime to say and only about 2 seconds of your time (much less than the long-winded, convoluted alternative). What it does cost, is a little loss of personal pride, a price which we all find a lot harder to pay. There's a tension between the fuss caused by having done something wrong, and this price - so instead, he tries to pass us a counterfeit instead; de-weaselising the code, he said "you misread me in thinking I said something regrettable, which ultimately is your mistake as much as mine, so we're about evens". Original sin in action: a man with the gifts, intelligence and drive to rise to the highest office in the world yet has not enough control over his own ego to admit to having been wrong about something totally and utterly trivial.

Again, this isn't about President Obama - he's hardly the first or the last politician to promise "change" and "a new politics", blah blah, but it's also useful to note how quickly such promises turn into the "same old, same old". Original sin is real, and can't be abolished simply with good intentions, charisma, education, better politics, etcetera. The world needs one thing and one thing only - to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, and to bow to him.

Let me repeat again - it's not about Barack Obama. What he did is totally common-place. It happens so often that we don't even notice it. And that again is a proof that original sin is exactly what the Bible says it is - rampant, everywhere. That's why we need such a solution as the Son of God dying for us - everything else, however good it sounds, doesn't actually deal with the problem. If a world leader can't even say "yup, I was wrong, let's not make excuses", what does that say about the condition of man?