Sermons

In England, it would be very easy to think that most Christians don’t suffer for their faith. After all, most English Christians don’t have to suffer for their faith. It doesn’t seem normal for your faith to cause you suffering and hardship, and therefore if the climate were to change, we could easily be thrown if we were to start to suffer for our faith in this country. In fact, it’s actually normal to suffer for your faith, and the relative comfort we have in the affluent West is actually what is weird and unusual.

Being conned is a sickening experience. I don’t know whether it’s ever happened to you. As well as the financial loss, or whatever it is, there’s the feeling — that’s entirely unwarranted — of stupidity. You think to yourself, well, how did I fall for it? And it leaves you feeling almost guilty that someone was devious enough to have cheated you. Just this last week, the Royal United Services Institute said that credit card, identity, and cyber fraud are the most prevalent crimes now in the United Kingdom, costing on average £190 billion every year.

One thankless task that Anita and I have to do every year is complete a form for the Church of England entitled 'Statistics for Mission'. It's a questionnaire that we get every January that includes some questions that are really easy to answer — how many people were in church on October the fifth last year? — we just look it up. It includes some other questions that are literally impossible to answer, and we just have to put 'don't know'. But it comes around every year, and it's one of those slightly tedious tasks that just has to be done.

I thought we'd spend the next few weeks of our services together looking at this first letter of Paul to the church in Thessalonica. In six months' time I will be leaving here, and I will no doubt after I've gone be wondering how you are all getting on. Do keep in touch — you’re friends. I look forward to hearing your news: personal news, church news, and so on.

We’ve reached today the end of the book of the prophet Malachi, written about the year 400 b.c., two and a half thousand years ago. You will remember that the Malachi prophesied in the city of Jerusalem that had been rebuilt after the people had returned from their exile to Babylon. The temple and the city walls were rebuilt, but then nothing much had happened for over a hundred years, and the people were beginning to doubt that God really loved them. So their response to God was becoming increasingly half-hearted.

Let me begin by asking you a question. What do you think being a Christian is like? On balance, when you weigh up the pros and cons, is it in your advantage to be a Christian? Is it a good thing or is it overall a bad thing to do?

I've heard it said that when someone becomes a Christian, the last part of them to be converted is frequently their wallet. That was just as true in ancient Israel as it is today.

A sermon given on Remembrance Sunday 2020, from Ephesians 2:14-22

Do you ever look at the world, and everything that is broken within it, all the bad stuff that there, is the people who do horrendously bad things – and wonder why God does not fix it. Why does he not stamp out all the bad things? Why does he not intervene, and take off the stage of this world all the people who do really awful things?

The people of Malachi’s day had got tired of God. Or rather, they suspected God had got tired of them. I won’t recap the history in full this morning. I’ve shared the historical background of the book of Malachi on a number of weeks recently. suffice to say for today that a hundred years has passed since God did anything to show that he still loves his people, and so they are growing tired and cynical. They’re treating God cheaply. This comes out in a number of ways, but one of them is that they are treating marriage cheaply.