At last!

I've seen it! I've seen it! I've seen it! Yes! Yes! Yes!!

1.30 am, look north, draw a mental line from Capella to the Plough, reach out my right arm in front of me and clench my fist just below the middle of that line and there it should be right underneath the bottom of my fist - and take binoculars in case. But I didn't need that. I went out the door and looked north - there it was in plain view: Comet NEOWISE in all it's glory!

I'd never seen a comet properly before. All previous attempts had been thwarted by cloud or illness. Once at an observatory I had seen one through a telescope, but never with the naked eye, and never so spectacular. This time, after several early mornings before sunrise being greeted with wall to wall cloud or, even more frustratingly, just cloud in the north of the sky, suddenly there was a comet in front of me.

At the time of writing, that was three nights ago. The next night was cloudy, but last night it was there again. I awoke my wife and daughter, and we had a comet party at 1.30 am in the front garden. The sky was completely clear, the Milky Way was glistening above us, Saturn and Jupiter were out in the south and Mars in the East, and NEOWISE in the north. As we watched, a couple of bright shooting stars graced the sky with their presence. It was totally majestic.

What did it all mean? Possibly nothing. I don't believe in astrology. Anything or anyone that can predict my future without consulting God is highly suspect in terms of the source of that knowledge. Sometimes God provides signs in the sky, such as when Jesus was born, but often it's just to show off how inventive he is and to give us a free planetarium performance. God shares his handiwork with us to indicate who he is and to give us pleasure - and excitement in the case of a comet and two shooting stars! That was a great night - early morning - and I shall forever be grateful for the memory of it. Tonight was cloudy again.

Photograph: Lukáš Vaňátko (https://unsplash.com/@otohp_by_sakul?utm_source=wix-media-manager&utm_medium=referral)

Feeling lost?

We are all looking for that one thing that will fulfill us - our purpose here on Earth. Especially right now with lockdown and the spread of Covid-19, many of us are either stuck on that eternal, never ending cycle of work, in which more is demanded from us than ever before, or we are stuck at home with very few options or reasons to leave the house for five minutes’ peace.

Before all of this happened many of us already felt unfulfilled anyway, like we should be doing something else, but had no idea what that really was. I would like to share a little bit about a few people in the Bible who too were feeling lost until they stepped out in faith and trusted God with their lives. They went on to achieve amazing things that are still talked about to this very day, but before they got to that point they all got it very wrong.

Moses thought the answer was running away from a bad situation. He had found out that his mother was a not the princess as he had always believed and, to make things worse, he ended up taking matters into his own hands and killing an Egyptian slave master. He left Egypt with no plans to ever return. However, God had other ideas and sent Moses back to Egypt to face his adopted relative, the new Pharaoh. On his return, Moses was to ask for God’s people to be set free. The story goes on with God sending ten plagues to add pressure on Pharaoh, but nine times he said no. After the tenth, though, God’s people were set free; however, they did not actually receive their freedom until God used Moses to part the Red Sea and to lead God’s people across to safety on the other side. Moses had to be brave to go back and face his fears of his past. In order to find his purpose in life, Moses had to trust in the calling God had given him.

Joseph thought the answer was being the centre of attention, as he shared with his 11 brothers his amazing dreams of how the stars bowed down to him and how sheaves of wheat worshipped him. His brothers didn’t take too kindly to Joseph’s boasting, so they sold him to be a slave in Egypt. They saw this as an end to their dealings with him. However, they couldn’t have been more wrong! God used Joseph to interpret dreams until, one day, Egypt’s Pharaoh had a distressing dream that none of his advisors could explain. This is when he heard about Joseph and his gifts. Joseph was called before Pharaoh and asked to interpret two dreams. Joseph was a tried and tested interpreter and Pharaoh thought it wise to act upon what he advised. Joseph went on to be the no. 2 guy in Pharaoh's kingdom and his brothers had to come to him during a famine when there was food in Egypt but not at home. God took him from being a prisoner to being the second in command of one of the world’s greatest ever civilizations! But in order to achieve this, Joseph had to be bold and trust in the gifts God had given him!

Abraham thought the answer was having children, especially a son, but his wife, Sarah, was not able to have children (this was in the time before IVF treatment was invented). This caused great sorrow to them both, until Abraham heard God speak to him, promising that he would have many thousands of descendants. After a few years, though, Sarah was still childless, so she suggested that Abraham sleep with her servant, Hagar. He thought that this was a great idea and ended up having a son by her. However, God had meant his promise to be fulfilled through Sarah and came back to tell them so. Abraham thought that God was joking and Sarah laughed at this as well, because they knew that Sarah was not just barren, but also too old by now. However, Abraham then followed God and trusted in his word, until eventually Sarah fell pregnant and gave birth to a son. I’m sure you can imagine what great joy this brought both Abraham and Sarah after believing they would never have their own child. He was called Isaac, their pride and joy, and the ancestor of thousands of descendants for Abraham.

Esther thought that the answer was hiding in the shadows and not being noticed. How wrong was she? She was chosen by King Xerxes of the Medes and Persians to be his beautiful queen. When her uncle heard that there was a plot to kill all the Jews in Xerxes’ empire, he asked Esther to intervene. However, life was good for her and, besides, going to talk to the king without being summoned was punishable by death, unless he granted pardon. Her uncle, though, persuaded her that she had been chosen by God to be Xerxes’ wife for a reason and now was the time that that reason was being played out. He added that she wouldn’t be safe anyway when it was found out that she was a Jewess. Esther went on to find the courage to stand up and to speak out before the King, and became the defender of a nation, saving all of God’s people at that time.

The thing is, none of these people found fulfillment, peace, joy or true happiness until they stepped out of their comfort zone and trusted God with their lives. In order to do this they had to give up the things that made them feel safe, or at least trust in something that felt uncertain. Just like these four very different people, we too are asked by God to be brave and to step out of our comfort zone, trusting in him to find that one thing for which God made us.

But in order to actually achieve that, we need to first begin by finding out who God is, and the Bible explains to us that we can do that through Jesus. He is the one person who, once found, will fill in all those cracks in our lives and hearts and finally provide fulfilling answers to many of our unanswerable questions. We can then truly live the life that we were meant to and finally be at peace.

If you don’t know Jesus, then first you need to decide if you want to give God the opportunity to do all of these things for you. If the answer to that decision is yes, then all you need to do is say a simple prayer to ask Jesus into your life. How do you do this I hear you ask? This can be done by saying the prayer below, or one that is similar.

Lord Jesus, I want to know you personally. I’m sorry for going my way instead of your way. Thank you for dying on the cross to forgive my sin. Please come into my heart and make me the person you want me to be. Amen.

You can find more information about this on the Knowing God page or the shorter summary. Alternatively you can send us a message on the Contact us page if you have any questions regarding the topics shared in this post.

Good news?

I read a very sad article the other day about someone who had found freedom from religion. In particular, she had managed to free herself from Christianity, which she found boring and restrictive. The same day, I read another article by an atheist who likes to go to church from time to time, especially midnight mass, because it's good entertainment - a great singalong and the moralizing by the vicar is generally harmless. He was encouraging other atheists to do the same, because it is a fun way of meeting nice people.

Is Christianity really so impotent that you can go along to a church service, have a good time and not be affected in any way? On the other hand, is it so restrictive that people need to be set free from it? Are churches getting something wrong? What does the Bible have to say about this?

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free," says Paul in his letter to the church in Galatia (now part of Turkey), in the first verse of chapter 5. Freedom! Freedom is found in Christ, not in escaping from him. We use the word 'gospel' to give a name to the stories about Jesus in the Bible and also for the grand story underlying the whole of the Bible. That word, though, just means 'good news'. In the original Greek, the word for good news is actually used, and gospel is just a mediaeval updating of the Old English 'godspel', which means, yes, good news.

The gospel of Christ is good news for you and me!

So what is the good news? It is that in Christ we can be set free from the way of life that ties us to addictions, the rat race, materialism, depression, anger, envy, greed, immorality etc. The problem is that while life is good we don't notice that there is anything wrong. We go to work, earn money, buy what we want to make life comfortable and exciting - and then get trapped into needing to keep that going. We might want to live with our partners without being married, but that arises from desires within us that make it difficult to abstain. In the end, these things all lead to disaster in this life, or after we die when finding ourselves living outside God's presence - that is in Hell.

If we give our lives to Jesus, he takes away all the unhelpful ties and the guilt that goes with them. Instead he gives us his Holy Spirit, so that we can start to live with our main characteristics being love, joy, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, goodness and peace, in all situations, as Paul explains later in Chapter 5 of Galatians (verses 22 & 23). There is not a rule that we have to live that way, but an invitation to allow God to make us like that. If we accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and allow the Holy Spirit to work in us, then that is what will happen: our old ways of life will drop away and we will start to live differently.

However, the Bible also makes it clear that saying we have become Christians and then deliberately continuing to live as we did doesn't work; Jesus' friend John talks about this a bit in his first letter (e.g. 1 John chapter 1, verses 5 & 6). Imposing rules on us doesn't work either, and never did, but if our lives don't start to change then we haven't really let God into us. We have to work with him and say 'yes' to what he is doing in us. It will take time and we'll get it wrong many times, but there is forgiveness if we are sorry. That can start to look like a restriction if we wriggle about it, but actually, if we do work with him, he is powerful to set us free from all the desires that would tie us down and prevent us from experiencing a full relationship with the creator of the Universe.