Is There a Solution to Our Biggest Problem?

“Let yourself have fun and let yourself fail. Who cares? We’re all going to die. Just have a go.”               A heavily edited excerpt from an interview my cousin, Connor Swindells, recently gave to a national newspaper. At 26 and on the edge of stardom, you might think that death would be the last thing on his mind, but it isn’t.

In fact, no human being has ever had an answer to the problem of death. It hovers over us like a dark cloud throughout our lives rearing its ugly head from time to time when we lose someone close to us.

So, we do one of several things; ignore it, refuse to think about it and bury our heads in the sand choosing instead to live for the moment, or we become obsessed with health and safety to ensure we live as long as possible, or even, in extreme cases, we arrange for some kind of preservation of the body, just in case the scientists find a way to restore life in the future. If you are hoping for the latter, by the way, it will never happen!

We can’t beat or cheat death and, at the risk of stating the obvious, it gets us all in the end.

I often meet people who are upset about a particularly serious accident or tragedy where lots of people have died. The terrible incident at Aberfan, where a rubbish tip on hills above the village merged with springs of water causing a catastrophic collapse of slurry that killed many children at the village school and some adults, have been mentioned a few times this year even though it was decades ago.

People ask how God can be loving yet not have intervened as these, and other tragedies, unfolded. One man told me that if he had been God, he would have moved the trajectory slightly as the slurry descended the hill, so it avoided the school at Aberfan. I had no answer to this particular observation, and I’m not sure the man was expecting one, it was more like he was thinking out loud.

Reflecting, I wondered whether the man would still have been upset if he had been able to change the course and a group of different people had been killed instead of all the children. What if one of the new victims had been a relative of his, or the parents of one of the children that had survived and was now an orphan?

We can easily fall into the trap of thinking like this man. Perhaps we think the saddest aspect is because most were children that had barely started life. But is there ever an age that makes it easier to lose a loved one?

Some of the angriest people I meet in the street are still holding a grudge against God for allowing one of their grandparents to die decades earlier. Often, they had lived to their 70’s or 80’s but the person still believes God was unfair in allowing it to happen.

They are asking, “Why Me?”

Leaving aside the issue of us being unable to assess the fairness of God due to our comparatively minuscule minds and the fact that we cannot see the bigger picture.

The reality is that if God intervened to prevent your relative or friend dying in an accident or from an illness, others with people who love them are dying in similar circumstances all around the world every second of every hour, of every day. These people might well ask why your loved one was saved and theirs was not. 

If fairness is what we are concerned about, would that be fair?

Taking this to its logical conclusion, the result would be that God would be forced, or expected, to intervene in every situation where someone’s life was at risk, otherwise He would be showing partiality, or favouritism, to one person over another.

Then, we would all live forever!

Maybe at this point you are thinking that this sounds like a good idea and wondering why God didn’t set things up in this way in the first place.

Actually, He did…. but we messed it up. 

Our first parents rebelled against God and rejected His rule over them. So, God gave them over to their own ideas and, because of their sin, He cursed the Earth with suffering, sickness and…. wait for it…. death.

The Bible makes it clear that we ultimately die because of our sin, “the wages of sin is death…” and that we all are guilty of sin, “for all have sinned”.

God can’t just overlook sin, or He wouldn’t be just and fair. He can’t just intervene every time someone is in danger or there would be no penalty, or consequence, for sin which also wouldn’t be just and fair.

This would be a pretty diabolical position for us all to be in, and this post would be seriously depressing, if it weren’t for one important fact.

God loved us so much that He had a rescue plan. A plan to defeat the curse of sin, suffering, sickness and death that He had placed on the Earth due to our rebellion. A plan to send His Son Jesus to live a perfect life on our behalf. A plan for Jesus to die on a cross, taking the punishment you and I deserve, and to be buried in a tomb. A plan for Jesus to defeat the curse of death by coming back to life.

I said earlier that no human being has an answer to the problem of death. This is true, but thankfully God does.

Jesus was able to stand in our place, pay for our sin and reverse the curse of death because He was sinless. If we repent (turn away from our sinful lives), ask for forgiveness, and trust that Jesus died for us on the cross, we are promised eternal life in Heaven as a free gift.

Effectively, we can receive the benefit of Jesus defeating death and live forever with Him.

The alternative, which I don't recommend, is to stand before God on Judgment Day carrying all of our unforgiven sin. God has to punish us at this point, or He is not just. The punishment is eternal in a place called Hell.

Either way, death doesn’t have the last word, God does. 

Will you face Him joyfully having been forgiven through Jesus or will you suffer His righteous anger for all eternity?

 “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

(1 Corinthians 15 vs 55-57)

10 Reasons I Am a Christian and You Should Be Too!

Maybe when you see a title like this you feel irritated, annoyed or even angry. Who am I to be telling you what you should believe? What gives me the right to suggest that every person needs to become a Christian? What about other religions? Or a combination of these and other questions.

The truth is, I have no right (apart from God's command), and my plea for you to consider Jesus has nothing to do with my believing that I’m in any way better than anyone reading this. We are all the same. We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s perfect standards. We are all in need of a remedy for that broken relationship with God.

The good news of the Bible, that Jesus died on the cross for our sin making a way for us to receive forgiveness, peace with God, and a permanent home in Heaven, is available to ANYONE who will repent of their sin and trust Him. Repentance is a complete change of mind and direction from living for ourselves and what we want to do, to following Jesus as Saviour and Lord.

This message is urgent as we are not guaranteed tomorrow. The loving thing for me to do is to tell you so that you too might be saved.

It is with this in mind that I ask you to consider these reasons:

1. I believe Christianity is exclusively true. Jesus said, “I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Me.” This statement should silence those who believe all religions lead to God, or that you can pick and choose bits of one and then another. It’s either a true statement or it’s false. My believing it doesn’t make it true, but there is plenty of evidence that it is.

Rather than being a faith I have just accepted because of my cultural roots, my parents, or a label I have had since birth. I became a Christian in my early twenties having wandered far from God for many years.

2. I don’t want to end up in Hell. I have listed this before speaking about Heaven because personally it was a greater motivation for me in coming to faith.

Many Bible characters, including Jesus, warned about Hell being eternal, conscious torment, facing the wrath and justice of an angry God towards unrepentant sinners. A place where people will want to die but won’t be able to. We are told to flee from the wrath to come.

Thankfully, Jesus has made a way for us to do this and, believing the warnings, I took it.

3. I want to go to Heaven. In the Bible, Heaven is described as a place with no sin, suffering, sickness, pain or death. We are told that no one can imagine the amazing things that God has prepared for those who love Him. Christians will be there forever with God.

Heaven is not a worldly place full of carnal lusts like the Muslim’s paradise. It does not celebrate sinful vices as we tend to do on Earth. Nor is it a boring place with people sitting on clouds playing harps as some seem to imagine. Finally, it is not too crowded as someone else surmised.

Heaven will be perfect like the world was meant to be in the beginning before humans rebelled against God.

4. The meaninglessness of life/purposelessness of life as a non-Christian. I’m not a Christian purely because I was lacking purpose and meaning in my life. However, being a Christian has given me both.

Prior to my conversion, I was seeking satisfaction and happiness, perhaps fulfilment, in worldly things; vices, relationships, career, material things, money. I ended up realising these things were empty and meaningless by themselves which led to hopelessness. It was also a very selfish way to be living and I was troubled by guilt because of my sin.

5. Receiving forgiveness of my sin- past, present and future, and peace with God. On becoming a Christian, I clearly remember that my biggest emotion was a sense of relief. Relief that I was no longer at war with God, no longer running from God, no longer at risk of Hell. I felt an immediate sense of peace knowing that all of my sin had been forgiven and that I couldn’t lose my salvation which had been secured by Jesus on the cross.

Then, I wanted to live a life that pleased God out of gratitude to Him for rescuing me.

6. Jesus changed my life. I’ve spoken briefly about vices but some of these were deeply ingrained. I had tried hard to deal with them myself and was unable to. It was only when I recognised that they were sins against God which had become idols in my life, and asked for God’s help, that I was able to be rid of lifestyle sins that had plagued me for years.

In time, I found that I no longer wanted to do these things and, whilst I have to be careful with some things, others are no longer a temptation for me. I have seen others trapped in these vices and been able to help them because Jesus helped me.

7. Creation makes sense of the evidence. I’ve never believed in the Big Bang or the theory of Evolution. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m a logical thinker. I’m often astonished when talking to people far more intelligent than I am, who seem to have swallowed the evolutionary nonsense, hook, line and sinker, despite all of the flaws in the theory, and the much more plausible alternative.

How do people explain the conscience, the soul, our wills, feelings and emotions? Also, the irreducible complexity of things created which have obviously been intelligently designed? The Bible tells us that people are without excuse for rejecting God because His Hand can be clearly seen in Creation.

8. The Bible is factually reliable. There is a lot that could be said here. I’ve never had an issue with accepting the supernatural in the Bible because if God created everything then He can do whatever He wants.

A few of the main evidences are that there are hundreds of specific prophecies in the Old Testament that came true thousands of years later in the New Testament. There were many witnesses to Jesus' life, death and even His resurrection. The tomb was empty. The disciples went from being timid and afraid to associate with Jesus when He was arrested and killed, to boldly proclaiming that He had risen from the dead. Most of them lost their lives for their stance.

Additionally, there are plenty of facts from sources outside the Bible that confirm its reliability. Facts about the Geography of the area, the language used at the time, the names of people etc.

We know that the Bible hasn’t been changed as we have the Dead Sea Scrolls and eyewitness testimonies from the time.

9. God answers specific prayer. I know of people who have had supernatural experiences including someone who asked God to switch a TV off if He was really there. Imagine the terror when it actually happened!

Though I haven’t personally experienced anything supernatural, I have seen answers to prayer that cannot be explained away. When I was first saved, I prayed for an opportunity to speak to a group of lads that were smoking drugs on my train. I was so stunned when it happened, and was initiated by the lads, who were being chased by train security at the time, that I was almost lost for words!

10. God orders circumstances. We need to be careful about reading things into our circumstances especially when seeking guidance. But there have been several times in my life where circumstances have miraculously come together to give me the confidence to move forward in faith.

A major example was when I was seeking God about heading to the mission field, but I had a mortgage. God used my lodgers, who weren’t Christians at the time, to provide for me for the next seven years. Even my lodgers said that it felt as if things were being taken out of their hands and they later became Christians. This type of intervention gives me confidence in my faith knowing that God works things for good for those who love Him.

I could add a section dealing with the fact that Christianity works but experiences are subjective and can often be explained away. If you do want to look into this aspect, there is a good series on this YouTube page every Saturday night called Real Lives that tells individual stories of lives changed through becoming Christians. There are millions more around the world with similar stories from the mundane to the miraculous. Jesus does change lives, but this doesn’t mean that all of your problems will disappear, or that Christianity will make your life easier. My life got a lot harder when I became a Christian.  

I’m not going to mention that the Bible is the world’s best-selling book, or that Christianity is the largest world religion. Muslims often ask why, if Christianity is true, Islam is the fastest growing religion. These facts are largely irrelevant as many people who think they are Christians are just born in a “Christian” country but have no faith to speak of. Likewise, anyone born in a Muslim majority country is automatically classed as a Muslim even if they convert to another religion. A lady I know who converted to Christianity from Islam is still repeatedly told that she is Muslim by her neighbours because her father was a Muslim despite her being a member of a Christian church!

The Bible says that "narrow is the way that leads to life, and few will find it and that broad is the road that leads to destruction with many on it." This immediately makes a nonsense of any statistics regarding religious adherence. We all know also that people can be sincerely wrong, and that the majority are not always right.

These are some of the reasons I am a Christian. I’m praying that if you really think about these things, you’ll realise that you too should become a Christian for “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

The Fog

Have you ever found yourself wandering around in fog for such a long time that you end up forgetting what life was like before the fog? And then finally you emerge after days, weeks or even months and wonder why you didn’t make more of an effort to find your way out of the fog before…like perhaps when you first entered it! Suddenly everything is back in focus and things are crystal clear. You feel a sense of freedom and great relief….

The enemy often seems to work like this but the fog appears so gradually that we don’t notice it at first. Things do get harder but we attribute it to the trials of life and concentrate on navigating through the fog rather than trying to find the escape route. We pray that God will help us to endure rather than considering that God may not want us to remain in the circumstances. We think the “spiritual” thing to do is to persevere. We don’t consider what will happen if the fog begins to overwhelm us and we start to lose track of ourselves in the midst of it.  When this happens we foolishly believe that we have come so far already and persevered for so long that any attempt to exit now would make the journey so far a waste. We forget that we are learning all of the time and that God has a purpose in everything we experience, even seemingly meaningless times of floundering in fog.

When emerging from the fog we have two choices. We can either waste more time regretting the experience/wishing we had done things differently or exited before or we can PRESS ON, re-join the Christian race and continue pursuing the things we had on our hearts before we encountered the fog. Re-joining the race will often mean leaving others behind and it can be a lonely path. But it is the ONLY option for the Christian who has his heart set on the ultimate goal; eternity with Christ in heaven.

Consider the words of Spurgeon as an encouragement to leave the fog behind and to reach out to those who are not just temporarily incapacitated (by fog) but who are permanently blind and living in darkness without hope in this life

“Even if I were utterly selfish, and had no care for anything but my own happiness, I would choose, if I might, under God, to be a soul winner, for never did I know perfect, overflowing, unutterable happiness of the purest and most ennobling order, till I first heard of one who had sought and found a Saviour through my means.”