It is a matter of relationship… the children of God are those whom He has adopted, those being the followers of His Son, Jesus.

The other evening our son came round for dinner, something he often does when his pay packet doesn’t quite stretch to cover the entire week. He knows his mother will always feed him, and even sometimes, make his favourite dessert - a fruit-laden, cream-filled pavlova. This is not to encourage him to mess up his budget and run short of funds, but to reward the efforts he truly does make as he struggles with his course in Reality 101.

After dinner the youngster put me through an entertaining quizz session. What would stop me from loving him? He suggested all sorts of horrors, and as I answered him, I knew that none of them could possibly stop me from loving him (even though I’d be visiting him in jail if he did any of them!) It has something to do with the love of a parent, a special kind of love. He enjoyed my responses, seeming content that he was truly loved. As we sat there together I thought too of how much our Father must also love us… that nothing can separate us from His love for His own beloved children. I was aware that the kind of love I have for my son includes total forgiveness, and that it must be so of our Father whose love for His children is even so much greater. It is just wonderful to reflect on that.

To be justified by faith in Christ gives a believer the legal status of righteousness before God. Repentance is required, a turning away from sin. It is also a response to such faith as obedience reflects a love of Him, a desire to be faithful to Him. It is a relationship of love, and a love that reassures of forgiveness. To make room in our hearts to fully appreciate that requires the forgiving of others… the more I forgive, the more I experience His forgiveness. The more I love, the more I experience His love. As His child, His love and forgiveness were there for me anyway.

Thank you Father for the child you gave me, and the gift of parenthood even when the way has been tough. It is a chance to know and enjoy You just that little bit more.

Email Judah

The other day somebody asked me my name. I answered with the one that most people call me. “Interesting,” my enquirer said, “did you realize that St Jude is the patron saint of hopeless and desperate cases and lost causes?” Well, I hadn’t prefixed myself with any such title, but I did wonder where the conversation might be going to lead.

Jude is another form of the Hebrew name Judah, and just happens to be my own name as well. There is a Jude who was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, someone considered to be the brother of James, and also the brother of Jesus. There is a little disagreement among scholars over the exact kinship relationships, but this Jude is believed to have written the epistle which is included in the New Testament. He describes himself as a servant of Jesus Christ, and writes to “those who have been called, who are loved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ”. It is a short little letter, but it carries a very important message - a serious warning.

Jude warns of the false teachers who have infiltrated the early church and are trying to lure believers away from the truth, telling them that God’s forgiveness allows them to live immoral lives. These godless people were distorting the established truth, that repentance was required for forgiveness, and repentance meant turning one’s back on the sin and steering well clear of it in future. These false teachers were persuading folk that God’s grace of forgiveness meant they were free to continue sinning, that they had been granted a licence to disregard God’s moral laws and carry on just as before.

No way! says Jude. This is definitely not so, and to continue living in deliberate and unrepentant sin is a rejection and repudiation of God’s grace. He reminds folk of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities obsessed with sexual immorality and perversion, which then were seared off the face of the planet in a spectacular fireball.

Reading this epistle I was struck by the similarity of the situation in this current age. Jude could just as well be writing to the church of today. In fact, he is - in the sense that holy scripture is the written word of God meant for all human beings, back then, here now, in between, and as far as the future extends. Back in those days it was both the gnostic heresy, and profoundly libertine (morally unrestrained) teaching, that was invading the church. Today it is the secular notions of a human-centred, psycho-social orientated and revised nominal so-called Christianity, often based on a theological liberalism that allows moral relativism and New Age ideologies to distort the truth. In other words, the morally unrestrained teaching is present today, causing division and schism, and propagating a false gospel.

That Jude, and this Jude writing to my Journal, concur on the need for the warning. This is not a lost cause as God remains Sovereign. But there will be many who become hopeless and desperate cases by their own defiance of Him. Persisting in sin - that is, deliberately and unrepentantly breaking God’s moral laws that He has established - is not at all a wise thing to do. Indeed, it is very risky if you know anything at all about God. Jude warns against allowing these false teachers to continue having influence in the church, and for the church to defend the truth agressively against this infiltration. He writes that the church must contend for the one true faith once-and-for-all-delivered to the saints, and people of faith must persevere to the end by resisting the false teachers and following the truth.

Sometimes I have to conclude that some of our church leaders do not bother to read this important little epistle near the back of their Bibles, or maybe if they do, they are just not the “people of faith” themselves. What an awful thing to come to conclude!

Email Judah

As part of our family folklore, my brothers and I enjoyed the mischief involved in how it came about that our parents first met. We were told they had both been co-opted into teaching Sunday School at the local Anglican Church. It seemed that my Dad had his eye on my Mother right from the start, but she was not showing very much interest. To raise his profile a little my Dad chose to exercise a specific talent we children, some years later, came to enjoy greatly about him - his rather naughty sense of humour.

One cold winter’s evening, the little group of aspiring teachers huddled around the open fire in the front room of the vicarage, learning from the Vicar what the next Sunday’s lesson was all about. The Vicar stood facing them with his back to the fire, and my Dad was seated well to the side. When my Dad caught my Mother’s eye he silently mouthed the words “watch this!” As innocent as ever, he flicked something into the fire… a small torch battery. There was a loud bang and shower of sparks, a shocked gasp from the others, and the Vicar leapt forward with his hands protecting his bottom. After everything eventually settled down, my Dad did it again… another loud bang, shower of sparks, and a small battery consumed in the flames. My Mother was not impressed! She never really was by any of my Dad’s naughty pranks, but her attention had been got and somehow, by some miracle, they ended up becoming our parents.

Being a child of once-upon-a-time Sunday School teachers did result in my own attendance for a while, but with regard to our family, the seed had apparently been sown on fairly shallow ground or amongst weeds, or something like that. I’m not sure what happened to the roots but the kind of fruit tasted nice… just not especially spiritual. For instance, I remember asking my Dad once why we didn’t say Grace before a meal, and he explained that was because he worked hard for what he got and had earned it by all his very own efforts. Oh. God really was not in the picture at all. Looking back, despite the ingratitude, I see that He still blessed us abundantly anyway.

Recently our newspaper ran a story of a billionaire who honoured a pact that he had with God, a deal made many years beforehand. If God would make him wealthy, he would give half of his wealth to the church. The story told how the man had eventually fulfilled that promise, saying that God was owed that 50%. Oh.

But I have a question… who actually owned all that wealth? Was it the billionaire, or was it really God in the first place? My Christian understanding is that God created every created thing and therefore all of it belongs to Him. Having created it, He then appointed us stewards of His creation, to enjoy the gifts and blessings He pours out upon us, but only in Him do we have this access, do we have our very being. Ourselves, and including everything we lay claim to, first-and-foremost belongs to Him. It has always done so. What can we take with us when we die? Everything that exists does so only because it is His and sustained by Him.

Do you behave as though you own all you have, or as a steward of God’s wealth instead? Do you know where you rightfully stand in your relationship with God?

And he [Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
(Mark 12:41-44 - ESV)

Christians are called to be generous and attend to others according to their need. It is admirable that someone gives to the church half of all the wealth over which they have stewardship, but it is the error of worldliness to believe that they owned it all in the first place. Sometimes it is easy to forget that what we have is not really ours but His, and that wise stewardship is required of us by the true Owner of all His creation.

Email Judah

“Are you OK?” my husband asked cautiously. The concern in his voice caught my attention. I fumbled about and managed to prick my finger. “No, not really,” was my slurred response. I managed to get a glucose lolly into my mouth. “But I will be soon,” I tried to say. He looked across at my glucometer which was reading just 1·8 mmol/L. That was the second time in as many days that it had dropped that low… too low, seriously low. Normal blood sugar is in the range of 4 to 8 mmol/L and anything under 2 mmol/L is moving into medical emergency territory. After the lolly, plus 24 grams of a more sustaining carbohydrate (2 plain slices of Bürgen® Soy-Lin bread, toasted) and soon I was back to near normal again. It’s all a matter of balance.

Just as an anorexic can usually tell you exactly how many calories in a sunflower seed, so many diabetics get to know how many carbs, and of what kind (their Glycaemic Index or Glycaemic Load), plus percentage fat and protein too, in this or that item of food. What can and can’t be eaten, how much and when, must be related to existing blood glucose, insulin or hypoglycaemic meds, and levels of activity… it is all a matter of balance.

Just at present I am mildly or moderately “hypo” (hypoglycaemic) every day. It isn’t a lot of fun, but things are carefully being fine-tuned and readjusted. I’m expecting to become better balanced soon. Hey ho, happy days. It is just the way it is for me.

When it comes to matters of faith, and I’m thinking of the Christian faith in particular, there also seems to be a need for some balance… a balance between proposition (belief) and relationship. It was said to me recently that doctrine builds fences. Yes, I suppose that it does - it divides one belief from a logically opposing one. In that sense it is necessary as I am being illogical to hold both at the same time for the same situation. One will be wrong while the other is right, or both may be wrong, but both cannot be right (not wholly so). However, not all fences matter that much, and some most definitely do. There is a far greater divide between someone who says that Jesus is the begotten Son of God (as it does in the Apostle’s Creed) and someone who says that Jesus is just a prophet, highly respected, but not the begotten Son of God (as is taught in Islam) than there is between two believers in the same proposition but simply worship Him (if they do) using a different form of liturgy to do so. So doctrine does build fences, but there are fences within fences, within fences, within fences… and some are far more climbable than others. I can straddle a few fences with reasonable comfort, but some definitely keep me in one place and not in another.

When it comes to relationship, then living according to the Way, or loving as we are commanded to, my faith cannot be all propositional and never put to the test, never put into practice, be just words without those deeds that confirm my commitment to them. There is a strong and direct connection between right belief and right everything else - attitude, behaviour, lifestyle - that shows forth in relationships, and in one relationship in particular, that between Jesus and me.

The balance I now find myself seeking is that between believing according to the Word (my knowledge and understanding) and living in obedience to the Word (to Jesus, the embodiment of God’s word) whereby He is not just my Saviour, but my Lord as well. This relationship to Jesus is critical, based on my increasing knowledge of that which I know to be true… as He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. (John 14:6)

It is one thing to know about Jesus, to know what are the fundamentals of the faith, to know the doctrine of this or that church, but it is something quite else to really know Jesus through being in a real living relationship with Him. Right belief takes you only so far, but without the relationship there is no balance at all. Instead, there is the very real danger that one day those terrible words may be heard: “Depart from me…I never knew you.” (Matthew 7) Those would be the most terrible words I could ever hear said, and I certainly pray that I won’t… nor you either!

Email Judah