Thanksgiving Sermon, Psalm 84

A few folk have asked for a transcript of the sermon from today's Memorial Service for Ruth Radcliffe. Here it is.

“Darling daughter, you will rise and shine like a star, yea, like the sun. I am happy in spirit, but the flesh is sorrowful and will not be content, the parting grieves me beyond measure. I have sent a saint to heaven.”

So spoke the great church reformer Martin Luther on the death of his beloved daughter Magdalene.

I’m sure everybody here this morning, even those of you who weren’t privileged to meet Ruth, relates to Luther’s grief. For what, in our world, could be sadder than the death of a child; a little girl with everything in life to look forward to? Our flesh is sorrowful and will not be content.

But for many of us relating to Luther’s “happiness in spirit” at “sending a saint to heaven” is quite another matter. You might be here this morning feeling that there is nothing but tragedy in this situation. You might feel that any sense of hope or joy today is inappropriate, even offensive.

But that’s not what Nick and Julia think. Shortly before Ruth diagnosed, before knew she was ill, Nick preached on these words from 1 Peter:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.

If you ask him Nick will tell you that those words, preached in the conviction that they were true then, have become very precious to him over the last two years. Not because they have become any truer, but because their relevance has become more and more obvious.

We all need to know this morning that the comfort of heaven is not something Christians have made up to deal with tragic days like today.

This morning’s service with its mixture of grief and hope is a product of the convictions this family, and all Christians, have always held, in good times and bad. Followers of Jesus have always known that being a Christian is being a pilgrim – living life as a journey. Christians have always known that journey has a destination – not the grave but the courts of the Lord God, our creator and redeemer.

We meet this morning in the conviction that though our flesh may not be content, we can yet be happy in spirit, even in the face of tragic death.

Our loss is, indeed, grievous. Nick and Julia have lost a child. Emily and Fliss a sister. Whether we are Ruth’s grandparent, cousin, Auntie, Uncle, nephew, niece or friend we are right to grieve in the flesh.

Ruth, though, as a follower of Christ has now come to a place so wonderful that it is better to be the person who opens the doors there than it is to be the proud owner of a sumptuous mansion here.

The Psalmist, writing chiefly of the beautiful stone temple Solomon had built in Jerusalem, but with one eye on the true, eternal home of God, of which that temple was just a picture…  The Psalmist longed for those courts. His flesh might fear the cost of the journey. But his soul, his inmost being, yearned to arrive there.

Ruth has gone before us to the courts of the Lord, whose time is so sweet that the passing of 24 hours there, the Psalmist says, is not even to be compared with three years of earthly life.

As we celebrate Ruth’s life our thoughts turn, inevitably, to what we have lost. To the growing up, the going to school, the exam successes, the unsuitable boyfriends and all the rest of it that we will not now experience. But today above all days we must remind ourselves that the loss is ours, not Ruth’s.

Because Ruth is somewhere lovely. She is with the Lord. No doubt we would have honoured and loved Ruth much. But she is now in the presence of the one who bestows favour and honour without limit. Ruth is with him who withholds no good thing from those, like her, who put their trust in him.

The Lord, the ruler of these courts, is not too proud, not too grand to welcome little Ruth into his home, the house of glory. In fact, the Psalmist says, even the sparrows and the swallows, those commonest of birds that we haughty human beings, filter out as of little significance in our world, can find a place in the courts of the Lord, even a central place, one near the altar.

We should be comforted this morning that the living God, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, who took children in his arms and blessed them, has many places, special places, in his courts even for those, like Ruth, who will never be considered by this world to be amongst the great.

The courts of the Lord are beautiful.

The courts of the Lord are welcoming to all who trust in him.

 And those on their way to God’s house bring great blessing on the journey.

As they pass through the desert valleys

They make them oases of water.

I hope that, for those of you who were privileged, as I was, to see Ruth’s life at close quarters, you will hold onto a quirky memory of her uniqueness. It might be her voracious appetite for meat or her uttering of a sentence completely incomprehensible to adults but perfectly translated by Emily.

It would be easy to think those were just quirky things about Ruth. Which they were. But they were more than that. They were green places. They were a gift of God to us through Ruth, even as he strengthened her for her own pilgrimage to his courts.

Those courts, where she now lives, are lovely. Ruth’s presence in them shows that they are especially open and welcoming even to the smallest and weakest of us. And our own testimony, our experience is that Ruth, like all followers of Jesus, brought us green places in the desert.

Ruth was greatly blessed in being brought up to know the Lord. That blessing has now come to its full flowering in the house of God. As we remember Ruth’s life with gladness and thanks let us remember that one day we will all follow her into death. My prayer is that each of us might be trusting in Jesus Christ when we do.

I am a Church Member

Really helpful reflection from Thom Rainer on what it means to be a member of a church.

Grieving Well - for unbelievers

All of us have friends and family members who we know will die but who we also know are not trusting Jesus as their saviour. How should we face that?

The issue of how we should deal with the deal of a non-Christian we love and care for is not addressed by 1 Thess 4:13-18, which we've looked at at Christ Church this week. But it's an important and pressing question for many of us.

Here are just four observations that might help. I come from a family where almost everyone is not a Christian, so I personally find this pretty difficult. Most of the things I’m going to say are things I’ve found helpful for myself. It's important to say that none of them solve the problem; none of them  take away the pain of knowing that those we love may face a lost eternity.

The first thing I need to know is that all my grief, for Christians and non-Christians, is put into better perspective if I love God more than anyone else. The best cure for almost all my struggles is to remember that I am made first for relationship with God and then for relationship with other people.

The second things I need to know is that I know less than I think I do. When you stand by the grave of a dead unbeliever you very rarely know whether they have made their peace with God in their final hours, or even perhaps their final minutes. We cannot presume that they have. But many do. Faced with the final undeniable reality of death and the deep, deep knowledge that this is not how things are meant to be, many people have finally stopped running from God and, blessedly, embraced Christ just before they meet him. Which is a remarkable testimony to God's grace and patience! For that reason it is so, so, important that we tell all those we know and love how to be right with God through Jesus. We never know at what point they may want to throw themselves on his grace. When a person who has not professed Christ but who knows what the gospel is dies you may not have much hope, but you usually have some hope, and that is precious.

The third thing I need to know is that however hard it is to face the death of people who do not trust Christ in a world where God does not save everybody it is much better than all the alternatives. Would it be better to live in a world where everybody faced eternal judgment, as we deserve, and there was no saviour? Would it be better to live in a world where there was no God and, therefore, no hope and no ultimate purpose for anything at all? Would it be better to live in a world where God saved everybody regardless of justice so that those who have no desire for Christ to pay for their sin are forced to glorify God for doing that forever? Even with my very, very limited human insight it seems to me that none of those worlds are any better!

The final thing I have found helpful is to remember that God loves people, even those whom he will judge, more than I do. He is the one who cries to the sinner “why will you die?” and who gave the treasure of heaven for the sins of the world. My grief at the death of unbelievers is not greater than God’s but merely a pale reflection of it, and so in my grief for unbelievers the God I worship is not distant and disapproving but near and understanding.

Grieving Well - 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

The expected, though still profoundly shocking death of Ruth Radcliffe from leukaemia this week is the first death in our church family since Christ Church Liverpool was started back in 2003. The death of a child is now such a rare thing in our country – only one child in 200 dies before their fifth birthday compared to over 40 in 200 in many parts of Africa – that, for many people in our congregation, Ruth may be the only child you have ever known who has died.

Her death this week is the first in our church. But if there is one prediction about the future of Christ Church Liverpool I can make without much fear of contradiction or need of prophetic gifting it’s that it will not be the last.

We might, as a culture, have utilised wonderful, God-given medical technologies and insights about diet, exercise and all the rest of it to delay death, for most people, until we’ve been around 8 decades or thereabouts.  But all the wonderful research those of you completing PhDs are doing, the great care our doctors, nurses and physios provide in hospitals, has, ultimately, a 100% failure rate. There is a lot of death in Christ Church’s future.

So this is a particularly appropriate time to think about what we are going to do with all that death and all that grieving.

The advice of the world varies massively. In 21^st century British culture we are massively confused about it. We stand uncomfortably, somewhere between very public tears for celebrities we don’t know in any meaningful way at all and stoic silence at the graveside of family members we have spent our lives with.

But such conflicting approaches are not new. Back in the 18^th century the diarist and dictionary writer Samuel Johnson was definitely of the stiff upper lip school. “Grief,” he said “is a species of idleness.” By contrast his contemporary, the poet William Cowper (who gave us the phrase “God works in mysterious ways” through one of his many hymns), said that “grief is itself a medicine.”

In first century Greece the popular sentiment of ordinary people encouraged great and noisy grief. On the other hand, stoics and other philosophers urged rationality and reason so that one writer summarises the typical ancient letter to a grieving relative as usually containing six teachings:

 1 Death is inevitable.

2 Death is the fate of all, king and beggars, rich band poor.

3 The person's memory and honour will live on in spite of death.

4 Death releases one from the evils of life.

5 The funeral and tomb are a great honour to the deceased.

6 Either death is nonexistence and does not matter to the dead or it leads to some happier state of existence.

In this confusing maelstrom of varying advice it wasn’t surprising that the Thessalonian Christians, introduced to a new way of thinking about the whole of their lives by the apostle Paul with his good news about Jesus Christ, weren’t quite sure how to react when Christians died.

And it’s not surprising that, with so much bad advice around, many of us here have little idea what a Christian response to death is.

Should we, as W H Auden said, “pack up the moon and dismantle the sun” because everything is worthless now, or take Henry Scott-Holland’s view that just a “negligible accident,” and act as if our loved one is just in the next room?

Into this whirlpool of emotion and confusion steps the apostle Paul with some wise and timely advice about death and grieving.

1          What good grief is: grief with hope

During the three weeks or so that he spent with the Thessalonian Christians, Paul would have explained his understanding of what happens when Christians die. So what he’s doing here isn’t teaching them something new. He’s just reminding them of things that it’s hard to keep in mind when you are going through the mill and feeling pierced by grief. What does Paul want the Thessalonians, and is, to know? Well it’s simple. Here’s John Calvin’s brilliant summary of this whole passage: “we must not grieve for the dead beyond certain bounds, for all God’s children are going to be raised again.”

How should we face death? Well when you read v13 it’s actually quite oddly constructed. I wonder if you noticed the double negative? We do not want you to grieve like men who have no hope. You could rearrange that positively. How should we grieve for Christians who have died? We should grieve like those with hope.

There are, I think, lots of traditional churches and Christians in them, that give the impression that we shouldn’t grieve. Things are better for them now, people say. They might even quote some Bible verses for you – the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. There is nothing wrong with us offering each other truths from the Scriptures that are, indeed, here to give us comfort and hope in the face of death.

But can I say to you that when you are confronted with a tearful relative or friend of someone who has died you must not offer Bible verses as if they were an antidote to grief. Because they aren’t. Sometimes people have described Christian funerals to me as “not being sad at all.” Which I think is just weird. Because death should rightly produce grief.

Yes of course God is good, no truth is clearer in the Bible. Yes of course the Lord has the right to take life because he is the one who gives it. But that does not mean that I cannot grieve.

That’s what Jesus did when confronted with the death of his friend Lazarus. Death should make you angry. It should make you feel the wrongness of a world that is not how it was meant to be.

Death should shout to you about a universe that, as Paul writes elsewhere, is crying out for liberation from its slavery to decay and destruction. Death, though it is God’s just judgment on all sinners, is not how things are meant to be. Death is unnatural.

My gran, a Christian believer I think, though in a rather confused way, died peacefully at the age of 95 after just a few short weeks in a nursing home. She had kept her own home for over 60 years, led an active life until she was about 94, had a wide circle of friends and a loving family. She lived till the kind of age of some Old Testament character. Did it feel like a right time for her to die? Not at all. There is no good time to die. Death is unnatural.

Which means that it is not wrong to grieve death, however old, sick or senile the person who has died. If you have some Christian brother and sister in your life who has fallen asleep and you have not shed tears for them because of some fear that would be less than godly, let me say to you that it is OK to grieve that loss.

Death, which we brought into the world with our sin, robs us of relationships which are precious to us. It is not wrong to grieve. Fortunately very few of us need bereavement counselling. Such counselling is indeed very helpful to those whose grief has exceeded normal bounds and become a real mental health issue. But the danger of a culture of counselling is that it gives the impression that heart rending grief in the face of death is not normal.. But it is normal. It is how we may well feel when confronted with the last enemy.

And mostly to come through that valley of darkness when we need is simply to know that God says grief is legitimate.

Secondly, we should grieve like those with hope.

When another Christian dies they have gone to be with the Lord Jesus and we too, will be with him soon. That does not change the fact that we have lost something. But it does change what we have lost.

When a Christian dies there is no need to grieve for them. Not because, as the cliché puts it, they have gone to a better place (though that’s true), but because they are with a better person. Dead Christians are with Christ. They are with the person they love most in all the world. They are happier with him than they would be with you.

It is vital that we remember that. Christian parents: you are, I hope, bringing up your children to trust God and to love Jesus more than they love you. Christian students: your parents, if you have been brought you up in a Christian home, love Jesus more than they love you and more than they love each other. Christian couples: your wife or husband does not love you as much as they love Jesus.

What that means is that if they die, when they die, they will be with someone they love more than you. Someone you will be with too, very soon.

So when you grieve you are grieving for a world where death reigns. You are grieving for yourself and your loss of relationship with someone you love. But you are not grieving for them.

There is nothing wrong with grieving for your loss. If someone you love dies your loss is real and your tears are legitimate. When you lose a son or daughter, a parent, a spouse or a sibling you will never be the same again. That scar of loss will remain until you too go to glory. But you need to realise that the loss is yours not theirs.

2          Why good grief is possible: because Christ is risen

For me, looking at v15-17 of this passage always makes me think: “man, this is a bit weird.” Calvin describes these verses as talking about things that are “incredible to the human mind.”

So it’s really important that Paul introduces us to these teachings on what will happen to Christians at Christ’s return, which we might feel are impossible, by pointing us to something that seems equally impossible but which has definitely already happened:

V14: We believed that Jesus died and rose again and SO we be believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.

The Christian hope for the future of those who have died, and our hope in the face of our imminent death, is based on faith. But faith isn’t, as Mark Twain suggested “believing what you know ain’t so.” It isn’t something that Christians make up when they are confronted with death to make ourselves feel better.

It’s something we believe all the time, even when death isn’t on our horizon at that moment. Christian faith is having a settled conviction about facts based on evidence. We believe that Jesus died and rose again. And there is as much reason today as ever there was to believe that Jesus Christ didn’t just die; he also rose bodily and physically from the dead.

If you are a Christian here this morning then, by definition, you already believe in the resurrection of Jesus. You already believe that he is the glorious Son of God who died for our sins and was raised to new life from the tomb before ascending to his position of reigning power in heaven.

You might, like me, find it difficult, almost impossible, to comprehend how, at the end of time, God will give all his people resurrection bodies and house us in a new earth. It’s fine not to be able to imagine the process or the scale of that! But you don’t need to feel sceptical about it. You don’t need to doubt in your mind that God can raise you, raise us, from the dead. Because God is not asking you to believe something for which there is no evidence. He is asking you to believe something that follows entirely naturally from the historical fact that Jesus has already been raised from the dead.

What God is proposing for the human race is not something new. It is not something he has never done before. What God is going to do for his people is what he has already done for his Son. He is going to repeat something that hundreds witnessed. He is going to do again the resurrection miracle, a miracle that those who saw it were so convinced was real that they were willing to put their lives on it.

It is possible for us to grieve with hope, not because Christians have some “faith” gene that enables us to believe three impossible things before breakfast, but because Jesus died and rose again.

3          What good grief recognises: that dead Christians will be honoured.

It seems that the Thessalonians were particularly concerned that those Christians who died before Christ returned would miss out in some way.

Many Jewish teachers in the first century taught that the blessings of the kingdom of God would only be for those who were living at the time it came. That would have been fine when the Thessalonians had first become Christians because if Christ had returned at that point all those who had believed in him would still be alive to share in the kingdom. But once some of them started to die it raised some difficult questions.

Paul wants to reassure them. Far from missing out on the blessings of the kingdom of God, the remade perfect world that Christ will bring on his return, those Christians who have died before Christ comes will be right at the front of the queue.

At the time when Paul wrote this letter it was common for visiting dignitaries to a city to be greeted some way outside the city gates by important people of the town and escorted back to the city. Ambassadors and others would send riders ahead to let people know they were coming and announce their progress with instruments and heralds so that the appropriate crowd could be gathered.

This kind of honour was even accorded to the apostle Paul on one occasion – you can read about it Acts chapter 28 later if you like. Paul was a prisoner being taken to Rome, and the Christians in that city travelled some 30 miles down the Appian way to greet him at the Forum of Appius and escort him to the world’s capital city.

When Jesus returns, Paul says, there will be a much more impressive escort than that.

When Jesus returns there will be lot of noise. There will be a loud command from heaven, archangels will shout and the call of God will sound like a trumpet. The volume of the announcement will make the coming of a Caesar seem like some school children blowing a kazoo. It will be such a noise, he implies, that it will awaken the dead.

And those deceased Christians, now clothed in their resurrection bodies, will go, with those who are alive when he comes, to meet the coming Lord Jesus. Where could you go to meet someone who is coming to be the king of the whole earth? Only into the sky to greet and escort the coming ruler of the world to his realm.

There is not going to be some sort of “rapture” of Christians to be with Jesus after which things will carry on in the world. On the last day Christians will be resurrected to meet Jesus in the air only to immediately escort him to the earth where is will remake everything and reign as king forever and ever.

At the head of that great procession of joy and triumph celebrating Jesus’ victory will be brothers and sisters who have died. If he waits a long time before he comes we will be in that group. But if Jesus comes tomorrow we will be there as well; applauding and cheering the king as he comes as we are caught up and transformed into our eternal form.

When Jesus comes we will all be there. Dead Christians will be alive. Living Christians will be more alive than we have ever been. And we, together, all of us, will be with the Lord forever.

There is a lot of death in life. But Christians face death, both our own death and that of our fellow believers, knowing that there is eternal life after death.

Not all tears are an evil. We should weep as we face the temporary parting of our fellowship with those in our church, those of our family and friends, who depart ahead of us to be with Christ.

Indeed we should weep so that, as people did who saw Jesus by the grave of is friend Lazarus, the watching world says of us “see how he loved him.” If our grief for Christians who die is shallow it may also reflect that our love for them was shallow and that should not be.

But our grief must always be infused with hope and with the conviction that the best thing in the universe is to be with Christ whom we love. It is tragic when children or young people die? Yes, for those who are left it is. Such deaths are gutting. Those funerals are massively painful. But for the child, for the student, for the graduate professional, the young parent and the middle aged amongst us, if we die today, we have not lost out; the dead in Christ will rise first. There is nothing any amongst us can look forward to in this life that will not be infinitely surpassed by the perfections of what awaits us.

So when your Christian brother or sister dies, grieve as those who loved them, but with hope. Such grief is good grief. Not just good for you, setting your world in its right perspective, but also good for the gospel; commending the love of Christ and our hope in Christ to a watching world.

When you Christian brother or sister dies, whoever they were to you, you must not believe the lie that their loss is the end of the world, or even the end of your world, even if it may well feel like that.

And if you are grieving do not despise those who encourage you with the hope of glory. That does not mean glibly telling every grieving Christian you meet that it’ll all be OK. But it does mean that as we weep together, as we seek to share in the pain of loss, we must constantly return, in the church, and in our conversations to the reality of the resurrection of Christ, even as we expect people still to grieve.

He is risen. He will come again. And when he does his people, every one of us, will be caught up with him in the air and form his cheering, joyful escort as he comes to reign our new and perfect world.

Laura Robson, the rainbow hairband and evangelical Christians

The offending hairband - actually it didn't
offend anyone but the Guardian wants you
to think it did. 

British tennis player Laura Robson has been in the news this week, not so much for losing in the first round of the Australian open (that's pretty much a given for British players, sadly), but because she wore a rainbow-coloured hairband because, in her words, "I believe in equal rights for everyone."


This probably wouldn't normally have excited comment except that gay rights activists had called for people to take rainbow coloured flags into the stadium, which is named after Margaret Court, a great Australian tennis player who now pastors a pentecostal church and last month described gay people as engaging in "abominable sexual practices."


A few observations...


1 Assuming that political and/or religious symbols (and there's no doubt that the rainbow as a symbol of gay rights is both political and, in a sense, religious) are permitted by the organisers of the tournament Laura Robson had every right to wear a rainbow hairband and shouldn't be criticised for doing so. I imagine they are as I'm pretty sure I've seen players wearing crosses. If such symbols aren't permitted the tennis governing body needs to deal with the issue accordingly.


2 Margaret Court's comments about homosexuality (such as: "I've nothing against homosexual people. I help them to overcome. We have people [at the Victory Life Centre] who have been homosexual who are now married.") probably sound rather insensitive even to my more evangelical readers. It's important that we understand that the reason for this is not, I think, that she is 'homophobic' (which in our culture is largely a word used to mean 'critical of anything a gay person does in relation to their sexuality') but that like many people in churches like Victory Life Centre she has an over-realised eschatology; her expectation is that many (most) of the problems that afflict us in this life - including issues of sexuality - ought to be resolved in this life. This is, of course, a view that takes too much from one set of Bible texts and not enough from another. It fails to find a biblical balance between the wonderful power of Christ now and the struggles with sin and living in a messed up world.


3 To have this whole debate around women's tennis, several of whose most decorated and adulated stars are gay (Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King among them), seems slightly ironic as it provides at least some evidence that homosexuality is not necessarily a bar to progress; though I am sure there are prejudiced people in tennis as there are everywhere else in the world. A bit like western evangelical Christians western homosexuals are prone to seeing persecution everywhere!

4 The real problem in the story, as reported by the Guardian, is that despite the claim of a "political row" that snagged the readers' attention in the first sentence, not one single person quoted in the article or anywhere else that I can find, actually criticised Robson for wearing the hairband. In other words this "reigniting" is in reality a "row" manufactured by a newspaper to make it sound like nasty evangelical Christians are persecuting a 17 year old tennis player - when they totally aren't! 

Why Mariella Frostrup is quite right about church

In this morning's Guardian 'problem page' Mariella Frostrup is asked by her correspondent if going to church might be the solution to the "sick feminist joke that my life is"? The real surprise of the article is that her reply is that, yes, church could be the answer.


Granted that the article is heavily caveated ( I'm more naturally tilted towards Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens's atheism") and laden with irony ("desperate times call for desperate measures"), Frostrup is clearly genuine when she says that "embracing religion is one of the few guaranteed ways of joining a real-life community, carving out a blame-free 90 minutes a week for yourself against the backdrop of Mass, and experiencing a cathartic blast of exuberance during hymn singing."


Frostrup thinks that it would be truly desperate to contemplate embracing a religion you don't believe in to get some respite from your daily life, but recognises that that is precisely how desperate some, perhaps millions of, women in our culture are.


I wouldn't want to claim that churches are the only place where you can guarantee to be part of a real-life community. But my experience is that they are one of the few places where regular attenders are massively keen to welcome newcomers, not just because of a missionary zeal to see more people come to know Jesus Christ personally (though I hope we have that) but because the Christian gospel teaches us to be interested in people, precious bearers of God's image, for their own sake. 


Interestingly lots of the comments on the piece seem to think that going to church when you don't believe is a sort of hypocrisy. If that view is at all representative (and I suspect it is) then Christians need to work hard to correct it and show that anybody who attends a church is most welcome to join in all sorts of aspects of our community even though they might not, in Christ, be part of the church family.

The reality is that people start to come to church for all sorts of reasons - sudden change in belief, interest in spiritual aspects of life, a way to meet new people or simply an escape from the pressures of life. No Christian minds anybody coming to church for any of those reasons - because no Christian pretends that going to church is what makes you a Christian, important though it is.

It would be a disaster, however, is people in these situations who do come to our churches, were able to get involved without coming to realise through our explanation of the gospel that the root cause of many of the stresses and strains of the post-feminist life are curable in the end not by a loving community (though it may help you cope) but by a radical shift in belief and a rejection of the values that lead so many women to be slaves to a hopeless ideal of homemaker-businesswoman-mother-goddess, 

We need to challenge the consumerism that says we all need more stuff obtained by more work. We need to challenge the right-culture, which means that when members of our family fail us we become embittered, resentful and self-righteous.

Most of all though we need to make sure that our church meetings are about worship. The fact that a church service is primarily about God (and, as a result about loving others) not me, unlike a Zumba class or a book group say, is a wonderful antidote to the self-obsession that infects our entire culture.

Only as we point stressed out, frazzled, overworked, overconsuming, rights obsessed modern people to the reality of our identity as finite creatures accountable to a great King who offers his eternal covenant love in Christ can we really offer them the hope of real rest.

Good Books on Guidance

Perhaps reflecting our rather narcissistic culture books on guidance seem to be one of the bestselling subsections in Christian literature. Having read a lot of them over the last few weeks my conclusion is, mostly, that there's no need to read more than one or at most two because all the good ones say the same things:

• God sovereignly guides us in line with his good plan for our lives.
• He only very rarely reveals that plan to us in advance.
• The Bible gives us all the guidance we need for righteousness.
• God has placed us in churches where people will give us wise advice and loving support.
• So we should trust God, do what the Bible says, take heed of the wisdom of church leaders and others and then just get on and make decisions.

All the books that follow contain these elements, but they all expand on them in helpful ways with subtly different emphases and at slightly different levels. Take your pick:

1 Decision making and the will of God, Gary Friesen, Multnomah.
The mother of all recent good book on guidance; that is to say I suspect it's the one where most of the other writers got their ideas from! Longish (450 pages) but easy to read with loads of helpful diagrams. I will be forever grateful to former boss Dr Jason Clarke for introducing mew to this book.

2 Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion? Bruce Waltke, Eerdmans.

Shorter and simpler than Friesen with a particularly good part one, which shows why lots of contemporary Christian notions of how you discover God's will are basically pagan ideas. Frightening and sobering!

3 Guidance and the Voice of God, Phil Jensen & Tony Payne, Matthias Media.
Probably the best known book on this subject in the circles I move in. Jensen & Payne's book is clear (sometimes painfully so) and practical. As a result of its brevity it loses some of the helpful nuances you get in Friesen. I also preferred the original, provocative, title The Last Word on Guidance!

4 Just Do Something: How to make a decision without dreams, visions, fleeces, open doors, random Bible verses, casting lots, liver shivers, Kevin DeYoung, Moody Press.
Another short punchy take on guidance with the sort of down the line (and occasionally across the line) humour you'd expect from the kind of preacher who hangs out with ark Driscoll a lot. DeYoung's helpful take on the subject is that he writes specifically with the aim of getting people to do something. This is the book to read if you're feckless and irresponsible - well if that's you you're probably not going to get round to buying it. But if you know some feckless and irresponsible you could give them the audiobook version?

5 Finding God's Will: Reaffirming the Sufficiency of Scripture, Colin Hamer, Wipf and Stock.
Another brief book, divided into 16 short chapters - this is the one on the list most likely to make it as your daily Quiet Time reading for a couple of weeks. Colin's writing style is punchy, no-frills and clear to the point of painfulness. If you like your doctrine unadorned with fluff this is the choice for you.