But what about us? We might not be calling evil good, but we do call what is good evil, do we not? For what is it when we call wine evil when God himself says it is a gift that gladdens the heart and is for us to enjoy? What is it when we sniff at people enjoying a nice meal in a restaurant to God’s glory when the Lord himself tells us food is his gift to us. Indeed, Jesus came eating and drinking and got called a glutton and a drunkard. Sounds rather like what many like to say about these things in the church today.

We had our annual church trip to Southport the other week. Despite all our warnings, there were still folks who had never been who were surprised that it was a seaside town where you can’t see the sea. There’s a lot of beach, but the sea is a long way out and is rarely seen very far in. We were there at high tide and even at the end of the pier, you still need binoculars to see the sea – the pier ends surrounded on all sides by sand. Admittedly, it sort of defeats the point of a pier – which was supposed to take you out to sea – but then it’s better than Wigan Pier, which isn’t anywhere near a beach or the sea!
We also had a good laugh when a dear sister came back with a big bag full of shells. We thought John Piper would be proud. As her pastor, I affirm it is absolutely fine for her to do so. She likes collecting shells and she did it to the glory of God. I am convinced she has not wasted her life, for it consists of more than shell collecting (even if she glorifies God as she does it).
We can be a bit gnostic about these sorts of things. “Spiritual” activities are not wasting our lives, non-spiritual things (whatever they are) might be. Collecting shells might be a bit frivolous and something of a waste, John Piper tells us. I don’t know what he would make of someone collecting shells and sharing the gospel with someone as they did it? Does it become valuable then? What if someone in your church loves collecting shells too, and you can go with them and disciple them while you do it? Have they wasted their lives or has the time been redeemed? These sorts of things get so confusing.
I am well schooled in this sort of thinking having grown up in a sabbatarian family and dealt with even stricter sabbatarians. Nowhere is the need to discern the spiritual from the profane more necessary than determining what activities may, or may not, be acceptable on Sunday. It can hardly be surprising that sabbatarianism pushes into a form of legalism so frequently because it roots itself literally in the Mosaic law. How can it end up being anything else?
But we push this gnostic thinking to all sorts of things. It’s fine to enjoy a walk in God’s creation but not enjoy his creation on a plate in a posh restaurant. We can enjoy reading the Bible, but if we read a novel that is profane. Watching a sermon on your smart TV is just about acceptable, but watching your favourite TV show is less acceptable.
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If we have any hope of nipping gossip in the bud, it rests in the gift of the local church. Those who would gossip ought to be called to account for the reputational damage they cause and those of us further away would do well to heed the judgements of the local church who see matters up close.

If you go into pastoral ministry, it is likely you will be on the receiving end of some unwarranted and untrue gossip. I remember speaking to one person who had been publicly and clearly caught indulging in such behaviour. Their defence was, ‘well, that’s just ministry!’ I suppose, in one sense, they were right. That is ministry. But it is an unpleasant and nasty part of ministry that does not justify the one doing the gossiping. If you become a pastor, it will happen to you for such has it ever been. but that doesn’t mean we have carte blanche to gossip about our pastor. Just as sin is always inevitable until Jesus return, that doesn’t give us any right to sin.
I have spoken about Jani Ortlund’s comments on this before. I haven’t heard better advice since. She says:
After almost fifty years in a ministry marriage, here is a piece of advice I wish I had understood from the early days of marriage to my beloved pastor: be willing to risk your reputation.
Leaders are always talked about. I found that hard to live with, because many times I disagreed with the current conversation. I wish someone had mentored me in what it looks like to release my reputation to the one who lovingly made himself of no reputation for us (Philippians 2:7–9).
Her whole article is worth reading on this very thing. But as sure as night follows day, church leaders will inevitably be talked about and their reputations often unfairly maligned.
With the advent of the internet, how much more prevalent these things are. There are issues about pastors that I would never have heard about, but I have heard about, because the internet has told me so. There are things about pastors I have filed away and believed, that I would never have heard about to begin with and have subsequently been shown to be untrue, because the internet has told me. Reputational damage can be done through our networks, through relationships, and now across the internet. I suspect very few of us in any sort of ministry role, and all the more those of us with an online presence, will escape. The rumour mill presses on unabated and one cannot unhear what one has heard. It is all but impossible, try as we might, not to form opinions on what we hear.

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People can get their tins of beans and get taught the alphabet in loads of places across the town; in very few of them will anyone tell them about the life-saving message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is what the church can uniquely offer. The gospel. We can help people see Jesus. We can teach them the Bible. We can encourage them to know and love Jesus. That is what the church fundamentally has to offer. If we’re not doing that, then what is the point of any of what we’re doing?

There are no end of people offering different services in our town. Food banks are plenteous, for obvious reasons, and yet still we don’t have enough of them. English classes exist locally, but demand far outstrips provision. Youth services exist but there are far too many needy children for our paltry services to handle.
The call, as you can so often imagine, is that the church ought to be doing all these things too. What about the youth, you have probably heard before. We also have questions about the poor, the hungry, the foreigner who can’t speak English, the jobless, the addict. What are we going to do about those people? Shouldn’t we, the church, be at the forefront of helping them?
Clearly, the Bible has lots to say about helping the poor and deprived. There is something to be said for helping the needy. And it doesn’t really matter where your church is, this applies to you too. If you aren’t doing anything to serve the poor an needy in your village, town or city you probably should ask yourself some hard questions about those bits of the Bible that are pretty clear about those things. It’s no good saying “but we’re in an affluent place” because I can guarantee you will be in the vicinity of poverty. It may be more hidden in your community, but I bet there are streets and areas people talk about in hushed tones or, worse, they use as a by-word for rough people we don’t mix with.
In communities like mine, the poverty is a bit more obvious. Everybody knows Oldham is deprived. It’s not like the South Oxfordshire village I mainly grew up in, that does have poverty in it, and people know there are people struggling, but the place is overwhelmingly middle class and so it’s easy to forget, ignore and overlook. But in places like Oldham it’s everywhere, not at all hidden. Much harder to ignore. And much easier to lose yourself in the forest of felt needs.
But there are others who can meet those needs too.
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When stacked against his holiness, Isaiah 64:6 says even our very best deeds are like filthy rags. They are not good enough to do anything to overcome the weigh of our sin. If there were a divine set of scales, on one side would be an infinitely heavy block of sin and on the other the weightless power of our good deeds. The grounds for entering Heaven is not more good than bad, but sinless perfection. That means all of us, by nature, stand to face judgement. Romans 3:10 is clear: there is none righteous, not even one.

I watched the Netflix documentary on Jimmy Savile the other week. The first episode – which dragged a bit for Brits familiar with Savile – was clearly setup for a wider international audience. For most outside of Britain, it would be hard to comprehend how this absolute weirdo managed to get on television in the first place. Not only get onto, but remain on television. And then to get himself into such positions of trust that allowed him to carry out hundreds of acts of sexual abuse. I can see why it was a necessary context setting exercise for most people around the world.
One of the interesting insights into the documentary came from Mark Lawson, the journalist and broadcaster. Lawson – like Savile – had also been raised in Leeds to a Roman Catholic family. He recalls even seeing Savile at mass growing up. But the key insight from him about Savile was this: you cannot understand him without first understanding the Catholicism that drove him.
The fact is, not every one of Savile’s charitable acts were designed to increase his abuse. Clearly many were. But there were some that did not give him that sort of access. Yet his answer in response to why he did so much charitable work remained resolutely the same, and I am inclined to believe it. He insisted that it is not easy for anyone to get in Heaven. He admitted openly that he had done many things wrong (though did not go so far as to acknowledge what we all now know that included). But he claimed that when he gets to Heaven, he’d be alright, because against all the wrongdoing would be his charitable activities which would far outweigh whatever he had done. That was his hope. That his good deeds – to which he was deeply committed – would suffice to overcome the bad.
Outside of a Catholic worldview, of course, that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Most people in the post-Christian UK work more on an honour-shame basis these days. There are certain crimes for which there can be no grace and forgiveness. Though that list may be increasing in length and incorporating considerably less significant things, paedophilia has long been seen as so serious there is no coming back from it. For most post-Christian Brits, the scandal is that Savile might consider there could possibly be any hope of forgiveness for him. There are some crimes so serious, many believe, that nobody may escape righteous retribution.
On a Protestant, particularly an Evangelical, view things are a little different. The possibility of forgiveness – even for the most heinous of sin – exists. Indeed, Evangelicals would argue that though not all sins are equal in their seriousness, we have such a warped understanding of how infinitely offensive our sin is to a holy God that we fail to realise the extreme seriousness of what we would view as the vanilla end of sin. For the Evangelical, if we rightly understand our sin as God sees it, we would have no problem recognising the possibility of forgiveness for the likes of Savile because we would realise the distance between his sin and our own is much less than the distance between our lesser sin and God’s complete holiness.
That, of course, does not mean Evangelicals believe Savile was a forgiven sinner (for the record, I do not believe he was). For forgiveness only comes with repentance and there is no evidence whatsoever that Savile was ever repentant. Not only did he never make any effort to put right what he had done wrong (which, in the case of his crimes, would have minimally involved confessing to the police and bearing the just consequences), he continued to repeatedly indulge his sin over and over. His mocking tombstone – subsequently removed in the dead of night for fear of uproar and vandalism – insisted, ‘it was good while it lasted’. Such an unrepentant attitude, on a Protestant worldview, puts one beyond the bounds of forgiveness.
This is the real scandal of the Catholic worldview into which Savile bought. It is the scandal of the Catholic doctrine he was taught. If all that is required is enough good works stacked up against your bad, if you are committed enough, you may do what you want with impunity. The cleric that insisted, because of these things, that God would “fix it” for Savile to enter Heaven, not only blasphemed against Almighty God in misrepresenting his holiness and forgiveness this way, but left the door open for other heinous crimes to be committed the same way, so long as the perpetrator is committed to stacking up their good deeds to counterbalance them.
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Our sinful nature is not zapped away when we trust in Christ. But does that mean we cannot obey? No. We have God’s Word and God’s Spirit to guide and empower us to obey. Which means any time we sin as believers it is not because we are unable to do what is right but because we did not yield to the Spirit who dwells within us.

I wonder whether sometimes we give up on holiness before we even get started. We know that we are sinful. We know that this side of glory we will not be sinlessly perfect. We believe in the doctrine of Total Depravity. All stacked together, we can give up before we even get going.
We thank the Father that he sent Jesus to die for us. We are grateful that Jesus lived the perfect sinless life that we couldn’t. We trust in his atoning work on our behalf. We know that we are given the righteousness of Christ and rely upon that to see us made right with God. We believe all of this and know our salvation is secure because of it.
But we just don’t think we can obey. We are sinful, we think. Our old sinful nature remains with us. We thank Jesus that he came, died for us and transferred his perfect life to our account. And then we can think that we won’t be perfect until glory so we kind of give up trying. Sinners gonna sin, innit.
But the fact is, we can obey. Yes, when we were outside of Christ our hearts could only incline towards sin. But being made alive by the Spirit means that we are capable of obedience.
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There will be those who will insist on their view, or their accusations, irrespective of what the overwhelming majority of the church think. But in the end, we have to let go of our reputations. Ultimately, it is not before every accuser that we stand or fall, it is the judgement of Jesus that really matters. We cannot be in ministry and avoid accusations and, often, we will not find that we are ultimately able to make ourselves fully understood. Sometimes people will think badly of us and we will not be able to do anything about it. 

Everybody wants a good reputation. Nobody enjoys people speaking ill of them. And let’s face it, the Lord Jesus expects elders in his church to be ‘thought well of by outsiders’ (1 Timothy 3:7) and ‘beyond reproach’ (Titus 1:7). Reputation matters.
Of course, that doesn’t mean an elder must be universally liked. As Kevin DeYoung helpfully explains here:
If [outsiders] think my blog is whack, my views are repulsive, and they believe all kinds of nasty things about me (which I hope they don’t, and I think they don’t), that would not mean I have fallen foul of 1 Timothy 3:7. If, however, most of the outsiders who know me from school or from the restaurant or from the pool know me to be rude, untrustworthy, undependable, and hypocritical, then my church should take notice. The key, I think, is that even if a pastor cannot have a good reputation with outsiders everywhere (probably impossible for anyone with more than a handful of Twitter followers), he should be respected (even begrudgingly) by the outsiders who see him up close.
He argues the same is broadly true within the church too:
If the requirement to be “above reproach” focuses on the discernment of the local believers, the qualification to “be well thought of by outsiders” concerns the wider non-believing community. Again, knowing what we do about Jesus’ public ministry, the requirement must not be pressed to mean that the elder must be universally beloved by the unregenerate world. Rather, the issue for us, as it was for Ephesus, is that “the leadership of the church should bring no unnecessary disrepute upon the church through improper and immoral actions” (Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, 183).
Whenever people make accusations against elders, the reality is that these things need to be weighed and judged by the church. Independency demands that these things are not outsourced to others, but ought to be weighed and judged by the church, within the church itself. Being above reproach and well thought of by outsiders i.e. not a hypocrite is judged by the church itself.
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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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