Most of us, I think, are genuinely aiming to find some balance in these things. We aren’t looking to speak only about what the world will applaud us for saying. We aren’t spoiling for a fight and looking to always wade into controversial things. We aren’t necessarily seeking to keep our heads down in the hope nobody asks us anything that might get us in trouble either. We should be suspicious of those believers who are always falling into one of these camps.

All of us Christians like to think that everything we do is thoroughly biblical. We all genuinely believe we speak when and where the Bible speaks and we are more measured when and where it doesn’t. But it is telling what we are often willing to speak up about.
Some of us are very happy to speak up on matters that our culture also consider to be problems. We readily call out issues that large sections of society agree with us on – particularly those issues that garner respect for our ‘bravery’ in speaking out – and tend to major on these. I, for example, find that people are generally quite supportive when I speak on issues of mental health or racial inequality. These things can get the likes and clicks from many outside the church.
Others of us are very happy to speak up on things that our culture generally do not consider to be problems. We are quick to call out those things that we perceive our culture will largely not give us any great plaudits for mentioning. We are keen to raise issues such as abortion or sexual ethics that go against the overwhelming consensus. These are the things that tend to receive the ire of the those outside the church.
It is interesting to me when there are folks who only ever seem to be in one or other of those camps. If the former, it feels like they are keen for approval and are desperate to be applauded. If the latter, it feels like they are spoiling for a fight, all of the time and love the controversy. John speaks about the former group when he says:
Many did believe in him even among the rulers, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, so that they would not be banned from the synagogue. 43 For they loved human praise more than praise from God.
John 12:42-43
Jesus himself has this to say:
Woe to you when all people speak well of you, because this is the way their ancestors used to treat the false prophets.
Luke 6:26
To the latter group Paul says:
As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
Romans 12:18
And similarly:
Reject foolish and ignorant disputes, because you know that they breed quarrels. 24 The Lord’s servant must not quarrel, but must be gentle to everyone, able to teach, and patient, 25 instructing his opponents with gentleness. Perhaps God will grant them repentance leading them to the knowledge of the truth.
These things do not mean, of course, that we can’t speak on issues. Of course we can.
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Our opportunities for growth are limited because we have grown comfortable. And in our comfort, we forget the Lord. Obviously we don’t forget him altogether, but we forget what he actually demands of us. Because, in truth, if we hadn’t, we would be doing it. After all, Jesus said, ‘if you love me, you will keep my commandments’ and that includes all those difficult and highly uncomfortable things. We need to take seriously the call of Jesus and make ourselves much more willing to become much less comfortable.

When we read passages of scripture like the parable of the sower, we see four types of people. And three of those four are not saved. One of them doesn’t accept the Word from the off. But the two others appear to believe but later fall away. One of those falls away as a result of suffering and hardship, which seems to be what we expect. The other falls away because they get taken up with the cares of the world and exactly how that works its way out is interpreted slightly differently depending on who you are listening to.
I think many of us instinctively recognise the first two of those. We know there are those who never believed and those who face hardships and fall away. So far, no surprises really. The third group is often interpreted – often thanks to the more old fashioned ‘cares of the world’ translation – as being those who are consumed with worldly troubles and anxieties that drag them away. I’m not so convinced this is necessarily intended to convey cares as anxieties and troubles necessarily, so much as the things of the world. But because of that interpretation, those who fall away are thought to be those experiencing trouble of one kind or another.
It is this, I think, that makes Deuteronomy 8 so jarring to us when we read it. Here is what vv6-18 say:
6 So keep the commands of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and fearing him. 7 For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams, springs, and deep water sources, flowing in both valleys and hills; 8 a land of wheat, barley, vines, figs, and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey; 9 a land where you will eat food without shortage, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you will mine copper. 10 When you eat and are full, you will bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
11 “Be careful that you don’t forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commands, ordinances, and statutes that I am giving you today. 12 When you eat and are full, and build beautiful houses to live in, 13 and your herds and flocks grow large, and your silver and gold multiply, and everything else you have increases, 14 be careful that your heart doesn’t become proud and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery. 15 He led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its poisonous snakes and scorpions, a thirsty land where there was no water. He brought water out of the flint rock for you. 16 He fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your ancestors had not known, in order to humble and test you, so that in the end he might cause you to prosper. 17 You may say to yourself, ‘My power and my own ability have gained this wealth for me,’ 18 but remember that the Lord your God gives you the power to gain wealth, in order to confirm his covenant he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.
Though the Israelites were prone to grumbling when things were not going so well, the greater danger for them was when the Lord had provided all of their needs and more besides. They were far more likely to become complacent and care far less about the Lord when everything was going well. In other words, one of the greatest dangers for God’s people was their own comfort.
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I wonder whether we are better in our songs to specifically reference the Father, Son and Spirit more than we talk more generally about God. It’s not that using the word God is wrong. Nor that it would always be inappropriate. But I suspect many of us hear about God and do not naturally think of Father, Son and Spirit. 

I was reflecting with somebody recently about the songs we sing. We can sing songs that reference God, but not much else. It is interesting, when you actually analyse what we have sung, that folks from quite a few other religious backgrounds could come in and sing those songs without any real change in their understanding of God at all. That doesn’t strike me as ideal.
I was re-reading something in Michael Reeve’s The Good God and came across this quote that seemed relevant:
John wrote his gospel, he tells us, so ‘that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). But even that most basic call to believe in the Son of God is an invitation to a Trinitarian faith. Jesus is described as the Son of God. God is his Father. And he is the Christ, the one anointed with the Spirit. When you start with the Jesus of the Bible, it is a triune God that you get.
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The Bible doesn’t tell us to preach when the Word is in season and to try something different while it isn’t. We are to preach in season and out of season. In fact, we only know what season it is by preaching! We don’t put a finger in the air and check the weather, we preach the Word and the results tell us what season it might be. But whether it appears to be an in season or an out season, we preach the Word. And, yes, we keep doing it, even expecting different results as we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

They say madness is doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting a different result. Just doing the same old same old and hoping that something different might happen. And yet, as we read the Bible, that does seem to be what we are taught to do.
We are to preach the Word in season and out of season. What doesn’t change is the preaching of the Word. We are to continue preaching in the belief that this is God’s ordained means of reaching the lost, growing his people and building his church.
But it is also true that there are times the Word is in season and times when it is out of season. Sometimes, we will preach faithfully and consistently with little to no results at all. The Word seems totally out of season. It doesn’t seem to make an impact on anyone or in anything we’re doing. Popular wisdom suggests this is the time to stop, pack it in and try something else. Only a madman keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expects anything different.
But as we keep preaching the Word, we find that there are times it is in season. The same Word we preach in the same way suddenly starts to yield apparent results. People begin to respond to it. Some come to faith, others grow. The same preaching of the Word, in pretty much the same way, suddenly starts to produce fruit.
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We ought to be asking, how should Christians live in this time at this cultural moment? And the answer is simple: faithfully, just like other believers who have lived in similar times and similar cultural moments. There is nothing more demanded of us from the Lord than that we seek to live faithful lives to him in whatever time and culture he has placed us. 

I read an article recently that asked the question, how are we to live in what feel like unprecedented times? I like the way that question was framed because of the care that was taken with it. Times may feel unprecedented, but in reality, the Bible is clear enough ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
I am just not so convinced that we do live in unprecedented times. I can concede on one level, as the article suggests, that every period in history is an utterly unique time. In a sense, that is true. This exact set of circumstances, surrounding this exact set of people, has never happened before. But, in an altogether different sense, there really is nothing unique about our times at all.
I am always surprised by the number of Christians who seem to think that this or that politicians, or political position, means that Christian people now face some unprecedented challenge. And, as someone who holds a degree in politics, I know what it can be like to so focus on that area of life and study that it can seem, in the moment, very little else matters quite so much. But perhaps it is also the fact that I hold history, religious studies and theology degrees too that I have come to see how easily we over-focus on the political present and lose perspective.
The truth is, very rarely is any moment properly unprecedented. Believers have faced challenges to their Christianity, and found times of both ease and severe discomfort, ever since they were called Christians. Those who think the COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented time in history seem to forget more recent history of the SARS and MERS in East Asia, the Spanish Flu epidemic and smallpox all coming about within the last few hundred years. The plague ran rampant in Europe before all of them. Pandemics and Epidemics are, in one sense, nothing new.
And the church having to navigate civic life and non-believing governments is an issue as old as the church itself.
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His divine nature still had all the divine attributes of God that he had before the incarnation. But in his humanity, the expression of those attributes was limited. In his humanity, Jesus took on all that means to be a human. That includes being little, weak and helpless. 

Christmas continues to provide a rich source of blog material at the minute. A couple of days ago, I gave my yearly reminder that what you do at Christmas is not a measure of your spiritual temperature. Off the back of that, yesterday, I wrote about how we can go a bit gnostic at Christmas and how that often affects all sorts of aspects of our lives as believers. Today, I thought I would stick with the ancient heresy theme.
If ever there was a time that heresy slips under the radar in our churches, I think Christmas is it. We either stick it in our carols, or we pick up on lines in carols and then import heresy ourselves by ‘correcting’ what is already perfectly credible, or we just end up preaching it straight up. After all, the trinity and the incarnation are tricky business, are they not? One mere slip of the tongue and we’re in trouble. When the difference between orthodoxy and rank heresy boils down to one letter in a foreign language (ὁμοούσιος, homoousios or ὁμοιούσιος, homoiousios) I can understand how people end up in shtook.
I am reminded of the year that we sang the carol, Once in Royal David’s City. The following lines caught the attention of the person leading the meeting:
For He is our childhood’s pattern,Day by day like us He grew,He was little, weak, and helpless,Tears and smiles like us He knew,And He feeleth for our sadness,And He shareth in our gladness.
Those lines met with the incredulous comment: ‘I take real issue with this. Jesus was NEVER little, weak and helpless. He was the eternal Son of God!’
Except, of course, whilst he was the eternal Son of God incarnate, the eternal Son of God had indeed submitted to all that it meant to be a little human baby, including being little, weak and helpless. Unless we believe that Jesus – much like our Muslim friends – was chatting in full sentences from birth, what else are we supposed to think?
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I believe it is really important that we are seen to be celebrating Christmas in our community. Not because Jesus demands that we do it. Not because I think we are more godly if we do it. But because we are free to do it and the message we send if we don’t do it will be particularly terrible. What does it say to our community if, on the day they expect us to be celebrating the birth of Christ, our church is shut, the lights are off and nobody seems to be bothered? For that reason, even if nobody came, we will celebrate Christmas anyway.

If you have followed this blog for a while, you will know our church building is in the middle of an overwhelmingly South Asian Muslim area of Oldham. You will also know that we don’t find Christmas the slam dunk, open goal cultural evangelistic opportunity that a lot of others do. You may also know that, despite that fact, we will still do stuff for Christmas. The obvious question is, why?
The truth is, we don’t expect lots of people to turn up to our Christmas events. Those that do come are more likely to be indigenous Brits looking for their fix of carols, religion and tradition for the year. We sometimes pick up a few of those. The majority who come will really be those who have received an invite from someone in the congregation. They are really coming because they would rather get their bit of Christmas religious tradition with their friend who asked than somewhere else that might be that bit more traditional and Christmassy. The fact is, if you’re mainly bothered about traditional Christmas jazz, you’re probably not going to pick our 70s-built dissenting church for a carol sing-a-long over the parish church, with its lovely building, choir and whatnot. Even the traditions aren’t quite enough to pull people in to us of themselves.
More to the point, whilst we will certainly invite them, we don’t expect to see all that many of our Muslim friends and neighbours. It’s possible we might get one or two who are particularly interested in seeing what Christians do at Christmas, but for the most part, they will no more be flooding through our church doors than we tend to file into the mosque in great numbers at Ramadan. It’s just not a thing for them.
And the truth is, as a hardcore strict Baptist – whilst I love Christmas – it has almost zero religious significance for me.
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It is entirely right to use logic to work out what seems right and true. However, we should not make our logical reasoning ultimate. For one thing, it depends on our prior commitments as to what appears logical. Unless we are able to assess all our priors, whilst we will reason logically, commitment to logic alone won’t lead us to a helpful conclusion. What do we do, for example, when the Church says things that are contrary to our logical understanding? It may be that what the church is arguing is totally illogical; it may be that our logic is faulty. We might be right in not merely accepting every word that comes from the pulpit just because it is uttered in church, nevertheless, it isn’t necessarily wiser to slavishly follow what is logical to us. The Lord, by his own reckoning, does not always work as we believe he ought.

If you are in church leadership, it won’t be long before someone disagrees with something you do or some doctrine that you teach. And that’s okay, we aren’t expecting total agreement on every issue within the church membership. It is okay to disagree.
But when we disagree, there need to be clear grounds for doing so. All too often, we default to certain arguments that really aren’t credible. Here are some of the common ones.
I was brought up to think…
There is, of course, nothing wrong with drawing upon what you were brought up with. No doubt, if you have been to a bible believing church, there will be some good things that they established. But some of those things, that may well be legitimate, are not demanded by the bible. Other times, it may simply be a blind spot in our church that what we were doing wasn’t biblical.
When we hit upon other churches doing things differently, defaulting to ‘I was brought up to believe…’ doesn’t get us very far. Two people, brought up in two different places, might be brought up to believe two different things. Who is to say which tradition is right and which is wrong? This is not a solid ground for reaching a biblical conclusion.
Our tradition says…
This is usually a more nuanced version of the previous point. We might not be rooting things in our particular, individual church’s practice, but in the established practices of our denomination. That might be a legitimate thing to raise if you are in an Anglican Church, who claims to hold to Anglican doctrine, polity and practice, but you think might be departing from that tradition. It isn’t unreasonable to say that, assuming the purpose is to be in line with the tradition and not some biblical matter on which the tradition is being challenged. Even then, no tradition can be above the scriptures. The aim of any tradition should be to act in line with scripture, so even a reference to tradition may not end matters.
But let’s say you have moved beyond denominations. You clearly are not wedded to your denominational way of doing things. You are now dealing with two different traditions. Again, which tradition is right? We can’t settle that with reference to our particular tradition. Instead, we have to go back to the scriptures to reach a conclusion.
Everybody interprets the Bible differently
Well, that’s not entirely true. Some of us do interpret the Bible in the same way as a significant chunk of other believers. So, we might be able to establish a fairly consistent pattern of thinking. It isn’t quite true to say we all interpret differently; many of us agree on significant amounts.
But where there is a disagreement that arises from interpretation, what are we to do?
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As a general rule, we don’t want to sin in order to fix sin. Where we are in such a mess that every immediate choice looks like something we ought not to do, we want to put right as much as is wrong (such as we are able) and to press toward what will lead to least sin in the end. We ultimately want to minimise sin, whatever that means in the circumstances.

Sin gets us into a right mess, doesn’t it? The messy situations we get ourselves into because of our sin abound. And trying to unpick messy situations that result from sin, when somebody is trying to repent and do what is right is also often difficult. What exactly do you unpick? What do you counsel? What do you try to put right?
A long time ago, when faced with a particular messy situation, one of my elders landed on a fairly solid principle. You don’t want to multiply sin. It can never be good to sin in a bid to fix sin. Whatever problem we may be faced with, however messy and difficult to untangle, the solution to it is not further sin.
As a general rule of thumb, it is solid. If the proposed solution to the problem before you is something the Bible tells us not to do, then it is no solution at all. We don’t want to increase sin and we don’t want to multiply sin. More sin to address sin is not the answer.
The difficulty comes when people get themselves into messes where something needs to be done, but any solution to make things right might, on some level, be consider sinful. Consider this example of somebody who professes faith, but then repented of the following sin, has had extra-marital relations with somebody who then fell pregnant.
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Sometimes, when we ruminate on things in our own mind, we make them much bigger than they are in reality. Often, what is needed is to stop dwelling on things. Instead, we need to get out of our heads and focus on something else altogether. Go and visit someone, read something, watch TV, go out, whatever. But stop dwelling on things for a bit, focus on something altogether different, and see if there isn’t some fresh perspective to have in the morning.

Discouragement is a strange beast, isn’t it? It can strike when there is really nothing to be discouraged about at all. Things might be going really well but, one thing, and discouragement sets in. Sometimes it is that one things catches us off guard. We might cope quite well with a series of difficulties, but a discouragement coming out of the blue when things are going pretty well can really hit us. As I say, it’s a strange old beast.
So what do you do when you get discouraged? Certainly, there are things we shouldn’t do. It’s all too easy to turn to things that won’t really help.
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