OT Sermons

Terms and conditions apply. If ever you listen to an advert for something on the radio, maybe for a holiday or a free trial or something, they've only got ten seconds, because they pay by the second. So they speak twice as fast as they need to. And at the end they say “terms and conditions apply,” which basically means, “We've covered ourselves. There are a few things you ought to know about this offer before you take it up, and you ought to find out what those are, but we didn't want to waste our time and our precious advert slot to go into the small print.”

Well, as I grew up, it was the era when the sitcom Friends was the thing to watch. For those of you who haven't met it, which is probably not very many of you, the setting for this particular sitcom was six young adults in their mid-twenties, trying to navigate the joys and the distresses of life in New York — frequently those distresses caused by their own misadventures — and then seeking to find strength and equipment to navigate those challenges with the help of the friendship of one another.

Have you ever had something that you have heard of frequently but never actually seen for yourself, and then one day you get the opportunity to see it?

When I accepted the job to come to this church in Scarborough a little over five years ago, I had never at that point in my life been to Scarborough. My first visit to Scarborough was to come and look at potential houses, and I got the chance to see the seaside town of which I had heard much but never been.

When you are young, you tend to look ahead. Your life stretches out ahead of you, and you can have all kinds of dreams and ambitions. “When I grow up, I want to be a...” And that continues through your teenage years for a while. For most of us, there comes an age when you start to look back instead. Back at a golden age, a golden age that is no more. It could be a golden era in your past. The dream job that you once had but no longer do. The dream house you lived in but then you had to move. The dream family that you no longer have.

If you’re going through a hard time of one kind or another, it helps to have company – people around you who can give you companionship, support, love and care. It helps not to be alone. But it helps even more if the people who are with you have had some kind of experience similar to yours. It means they can relate to what you’re going through. They can begin to see life in your shoes and to empathise. Then you’re truly not alone.

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?

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.