Trinity Church Scarborough

Life can be cruel. Cruel to you personally, cruel to your family, cruel to your business. You see much cruelty on the news, and it can make you wonder if God is, in fact, cruel. Many people who don’t believe in God don’t believe in God because they think, from looking around them, that if there is a God, he must be a cruel God. And, as awful as it is to live in a world with nobody at the controls, it would be even worse to live in a world where there is a tyrant at the controls. And so they choose to conclude it would be better if there was no one.

As we come to look at Psalm 23 together, I’m very conscious that we are on hallowed ground. This is probably one of the most loved passages in the Bible, one of the most well-known passages in the Bible, possibly second only to John 3:16, with which Tony opened our service. Many Christians have derived great comfort, support, and help from these familiar words over the years.

It's become fashionable these days to say that there is no God. It's a bit of a modern fad. For example, Richard Dawkins: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." Or the actress Emma Thompson says: "It's not enough to say that I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing. I am offended by some of the things in the Bible and in the Quran, and I refute them."

If you're ever gone for a long bike ride, or a walk, or a run, you need to know where you are and where you're going. You have to get your bearings. Perhaps you've done that thing where you get on a train or you get on a bus and you get it to drop you off some distance from where you live, or from where you're staying, and then you walk, run, or cycle back to where you started. As you get off the bus or the train, you're looking around, aren't you? Going, "Well, where am I? Which direction was the bus going in when it dropped me? What landmarks are there to tell me where I am?

A number of folk in this church love the sport of running. I gather that there's an increasing Trinity Church contingent at the Wykeham Lakes Park Run on a Saturday morning. If they change the time so it's not 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, I might be tempted to give it a go myself. But running is a popular activity for many today.

You'll be glad to know that the reading was short, but I'm going to preach on a single verse this morning—one verse for you. But I'm going to do that in its context. That verse is Galatians 6:10: "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers."

Let me ask you a question: what kind of priest do you think you need? Most religions have priests. Now, what does a priest do? A priest will represent you before God, and having represented you in the presence of God, the priest will bring to you things that you need from God. They might dispense you with forgiveness; they might give you blessings for success in various areas of life; they might give you wisdom—either general teaching or specific guidance that you might need.

We live in a very distracted age. Whether it's notifications on your phone shouting at you, "Stop what you're doing and look at me now!", whether it's you're trying to browse the internet to maybe buy your weekly shopping and pop-up ads invite you to visit pages that are nothing to do with the task at hand...

You choose to watch a single episode of something on Netflix, and as it comes to the end, you're told that maybe you'd like to watch this next – and unless you press stop, it just starts.

I have a bit of a soft spot for the Book of Proverbs. It is a very down-to-earth book. It's very useful; it's very practical with daily life. This morning we're looking at Chapters 25 to Chapter 29, and a little bit like a box of chocolates, there are a few proverbs that are little personal favourites of mine—and the coffee creams go first, the chewy toffees never go—and some of my favourites occur in these five chapters we're looking at this morning.

When I was an undergraduate at university, we had a week-long series of events for people who are not yet Christians to come and find out about the Lord Jesus. We had a series of talks, one a night for a week, on Luke's Gospel, and the speaker was the now late Australian evangelist John Chapman — Chappo to his friends.