Through prayer, through Bible reading, worship and fellowship in our church, we need to ascend through the murky turbulence of current events to the sunlit, eternal lands of heaven. It’s vital to remind ourselves that God reigns above the clouds of this life and, one day, will reign here. So be encouraged. But I must say more than ‘cheer up!’ In the face of turbulent winds that can bend and break, we who trust in Christ must stand firm. We must keep the faith and to do that requires three things.
Being Greek-Cypriot I still struggle with British winters: those low clouds that lower the spirits, the rain that chills the body and the wind that batters everything. This winter, with ten named storms since September, has been particularly challenging.
Turbulence is, so to speak, in the air and those pummelling winds seem to echo much that is happening in the church in Britain and elsewhere. I could write a long blog on the troubles I know of: the defections, the divisions, the deviations, the discouragements, the derision – and that’s just under one letter of the alphabet! These are such turbulent times that even the Church of England – that weighty old tortoise long assumed to be immobile in any gale – is wobbling unsteadily. Oh yes, I could write a very long and very dark blog.
But I’m not going to. Why not? Two reasons. First, the enemy of our souls loves to spread discouraging news, whether true or false. As getting cold and damp increases your chance of catching some virus of the body, so discouraged Christians – weakened in faith, love and hope – are vulnerable to every sickness of the soul. The second reason is simply that, beyond the noisy buffeting and chilling winds of our day, there are many encouragements. Let me offer you four.
First, that the faithful church finds itself struggling against the harsh winds of the world should surprise no one. It is exactly what our Lord promised his people long ago: ‘In this world you will have trouble’ (John 16:33 NIV). Older generations of Christians, many of whom grew up shuddering at the horrors detailed in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, knew that Christians should be prepared for opposition. An appropriately meteorological comment is in that old hymn of John Bunyan’s ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, with its lines, ‘One here will constant be, come wind, come weather . . .’ No, for the faithful follower of Jesus, storms are normal. Indeed, I would be more upset if our church did not face turbulence. I’m not trivialising matters by suggesting that, with so much opposition, we must be doing something right.
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