Sermon 12th October 2014

From now until Advent, adults will ask, and discover answers to, questions on the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

One of our Lay Readers, Adrian Parkhouse, continues our study - exploring answers to the question:

How can I be sure of faith? 

A man went to buy a parrot. The pet shop owner pointed out 3 identical parrots and said, "The parrot to the left costs £10,000." "Why does that parrot cost so much?" the man wondered. The owner replied, "Well, it knows how to use a computer." The man asked about the next parrot.  because it can do everything the other parrot can do, plus it knows how to use the latest Windows operating system." Naturally, the startled customer asked about the third parrot. "That one costs £50,000."  "And what does that one do?" the man asked. The owner replied, "To be honest, I've never seen him do a thing, but the other two call him Boss."

Would you call yourself a Christian? That might seem a ridiculous question to ask in a church, but I’m sure that while some of us would say “yes”, some would say “maybe”, or “on a good day” or “ish...”Perhaps some of us would be honest enough to say “not really”.

How confident are you about God? How confident in your faith? How confident are you that God loves and accepts you, the real you with the good, the bad & ugly? How confident that God hears your prayers? And how confident that you’ll be with him for all eternity (whatever that looks like)?

Today we’re looking at how we can be sure of our faith. We all go through times when we doubt God, whether he really exists, or maybe whether he is really interested in or loves us. How can we be confident, how can we be sure?

The New Testament makes it clear that it is possible for us to be assured that we are Christians and that we have eternal life. In that Bible reading we just heard, it said  “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

So that you may KNOW...

How can we know that we are a Christian, that God loves and accepts us, and that we have eternal life?

Just as 3 legs support a camera tripod, or a 3 legged stool, the assurance of our relationship with God stands firmly on 3 things: the word or promises of God in the Bible, the work of Jesus on the cross, and the witness of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Let’s look at each in turn.

If you asked me how I know I’m married, one answer I could give would be to show you a particular document, my marriage certificate. And if you asked me how I know I am a Christian, one answer I would give would be to show you a document, the Bible.

The first leg of the tripod is the Bible. Our knowledge of God is based on the promises in the Bible. It’s based on facts, not feelings. If we were to rely only on our feelings, we could never be sure about anything. Our feelings go up and down depending on all sorts of factors, including the weather and what we had for breakfast, at least mine do! They can be changeable and even deceptive. But the promises of God in the Bible,  do not change and are totally reliable.

There are many great promises in the Bible. One verse that can be particularly helpful

when we think about being sure of our faith, is in the last book of the Bible, Revelation. In a vision, St John sees Jesus speaking to different churches. And to one of them he says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them and they with me.” Revelation 3:20.

The Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt was inspired by this verse to paint his famous picture The Light of the World. (Hold it up)The top of it is on the front of our service sheet, you may well recognise it. We have a small connection  with Holman Hunt here in the parish, as at St Paul’s Church Hunt unveiled at memorial there to John Ruskin in 1901.Long before that, in 1854 John Ruskin had written to the Times explaining the painting’s symbolism and describing it as “one of the very noblest works of sacred art ever produced in this age or any other age”.

In the painting, Jesus stands at a door, which is overgrown with ivy and weeds. The door represents the door of someone’s life. The person has never invited Jesus to come in to their life, and Jesus is standing at the door & knocking. He is waiting for a response. He wants to come in and be part of that person’s life. Apparently, someone said to Holman Hunt that he had made a mistake. They told him, “You’ve forgotten to paint a door handle.” “Oh no” replied Hunt, “that is deliberate. There is only one handle, and it’s on the inside.”

In other words, we have to open the door to let Jesus into our lives. Jesus will never force his way in. He gives us the freedom to choose. It’s up to us to decide whether or not we open the door to him. If we do, he promises, “I will come in and eat with them and they with me”. Eating together, in those days in the Middle East, and for us now, is a sign of the relationship that Jesus offers to everyone who opens the door of their lives to him.

Once we have invited Jesus to come in, he has promised that he will never leave us. We begin a relationship with Him and Father God that goes on forever. Which leads us to another wonderful promise of the Bible, that of eternal life. What the New Testament calls eternal life is a quality of life that comes from living in relationship with God through Jesus. It starts now, when we begin our relationship with God, when we invite Jesus into our life.

And this eternal life, this relationship, carries on after we die, when we live with God under his love, joy, peace and justice forever! There will be no more suffering, no more pain, no more sin and evil, just delight and joy that goes on forever. Heaven!

As CS Lewis put it at the end of his Narnia books: “The term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning... all their life in this world... had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning chapter 1 of the Great Story that goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

So, to the question how do I know I’m married, I could show you my marriage certificate. I could also point you to an event that happened on 5^th May 1984, our wedding. Similarly, if you asked me how I know I am a Christian, I could point to an event in history, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The second leg of the tripod is what Jesus did. The good, the best news ever is, that our confidence in our relationship with God and in eternal life is based not on what we do or achieve, but on what Jesus has done for us in his death on the cross. We thought about this in more depth a few weeks ago; you may remember or can see the sermon on the parish website, called Why did Jesus die?

In a nutshell, our wrong doing, our self centredness, our failings, what the Bible calls sin, has consequences, and get in the way of a relationship with God. And on the cross, when Jesus died, he took the weight and consequences of all that sin & wrong doing, on to himself, so that we might be forgiven and freed from it. So that we can relate to God, now and for eternity. That forgiveness and that relationship is now on offer, as a gift, thanks to Jesus’ death on the cross. We can’t earn it, it’s a gift. We can only accept it with gratitude.And we receive this gift through what the Bible calls repentance and faith.

What is repentance? Repentance means not only being sorry, but deciding to live differently, turning round and going in a different direction. Being willing to turn from everything we know to be wrong and choosing to do right in future.

CS Lewis said repentance was like “laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising you have been on the wrong track and being ready to start life over again

from the ground floor up.”

That’s repentance. And what is faith? There’s a story about Charles Blondin, a famous acrobat and tightrope walker in the 19^th century. Large crowds watched him, especially when he crossed Niagara Falls. His act began with a relatively simple crossing using a balancing pole, then he’d throw the pole away and amaze the onlookers going across without it. On one occasion, the story goes, a royal party from Britain went to watch him perform. He crossed the tightrope on stilts, then blindfolded and then he got out a wheelbarrow and wheeled that across! The crowd loved it, including the royals. Apparently Blondin approached them and asked, “Do you believe that I could take a man across the tightrope in this wheelbarrow?” “Yes I do” said the Duke of Newcastle. “Then hop in!” Blondin replied. !!!But no, the duke would not accept his challenge. No one was willing to volunteer until eventually an old woman stepped forward and got into the wheelbarrow, and Blondin wheeled her all the way over and back. It turned out the woman was Blondin’s mother, the only person willing to put her life in his hands.

Faith is “hopping in” to the wheelbarrow. It’s not just an intellectual exercise of belief;

it involves an active step of putting our trust in Jesus.

When we repent and believe,  we can be sure of God’s forgiveness and know our guilt has been taken away. We can be sure that if we accept God’s offer of forgiveness and to come into our lives as in the promise in Revelation illustrated by Holman Hunt, we will have a relationship with him that goes on forever, eternal life.

To prove that I am married, as well as a document and an event, I could also point to the experience of 30 years of married life.

To show that I am a Christian, I can point to a document (the Bible), an event that took place in history in Jesus’ death, and third, to an experience, of the work of the Holy Spirit. When someone becomes a Christian, God’s Holy Spirit comes to live in them. The Spirit of Jesus, when we open the door of our life, to use that image again. There are (at least) two aspects of this experience that help us to be sure of our faith.

First, the Holy Spirit changes us from the inside out.He helps us become more like Jesus in character. We heard about this last week from Simon when he preached on what’s known as the fruit of the Holy Spirit. That is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self control. These are the ways in which we begin to grow as a Christian, over the years, becoming more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more self controlled, and so on. It’s a long term thing, and others may see the changes in us & our behaviour more easily than we can!

There can also be an inner sense of getting to know God through Jesus, as the Holy Spirit brings a personal conviction that we are forgiven, loved and accepted by God.

My children are 19 and 23, both now at university since John left 3 weeks ago. I miss him! But – as I sometimes say to each of them – just knowing you are, knowing you’re my child, knowing you’re out there being you, even when I don’t know what you’re up to, the fact that there IS a Sarah and John, simply knowing that gives me joy, makes me happy! Because I love you! I love you THAT much! Yes I know you mess up sometimes like we all do, but that doesn’t change my delight in you being you.

AND THAT’S HOW GOD FEELS ABOUT ME! And them! AND YOU! Only much much more!The love of God for each one of us is far greater than the love of human parents for their children.

I often feel that I could and should do better, that I let people down, that I fail again and again. Yet God forgives, accepts and loves us simply because he loves us. Not because we’ve earned it. As you may have heard quoted before, “There is nothing you can do to make God love you more, and nothing you can do to make God love you less.”

We can know this personally because the Holy Spirit shows it, both objectively through an ongoing change in our character, and subjectively through an inner conviction that we are beloved loved children of God.

So in these 3 ways, the promises of God, the work of Jesus and the experience of the Holy Spirit, those who believe in Jesus can be sure of their relationship with God and have eternal life. It’s not arrogant to be sure! Because it’s not based on anything we do or deserve. It’s based on what God has promised, what Jesus died to achieve, and on the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. So we can be confident about our relationship with God,

his forgiveness and love.

I wonder if some of us are unsure about whether we have ever really believed in Jesus, ever hopped in the wheelbarrow,or have ever really opened the door to him like in the picture.For some people, becoming a Christian is a clear cut step that they can identify and put a date on. We’ve probably all heard stories of dramatic conversions. For others, it’s a gradual process, saying yes to God, to Jesus, increasingly over time. The important thing is that we can now be confident that He is in our lives, at our invitation, our opening of the door, and that we’re growing and developing in our relationship with him.

If you’re unsure about whether you’ve ever really believed in Jesus, or opened the door to your life to him & started a relationship with him and God, here is a prayer that you might like to pray: So let’s pray, as we sit:

Lord Jesus Christ, I am sorry for the things I have done wrong in my life... ... please forgive me. I now turn from everything I know to be wrong.Thank you that you died on the cross for me so that I could be forgiven and set free. Thank you that you now offer me this gift of forgiveness and your Holy Spirit. I now receive that gift. Please come into my life and be with me forever. Amen.

If you’d like to speak to me or one of the other leaders, afterwards, with any response or questions, I’d be very happy to chat with you, or email or call in the week.