In the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son was lost but was found and returned to the joy and love of his father. The spotlight’s on him for the first part of the story. Despite treating his father in an unforgivable way, his father forgives and welcomes him home. 

But there are two brothers in the story. The older brother does what’s expected of him, but when his lost brother comes home he refuses to come in and share his father’s joy. He's miffed that the father’s lavishing his wealth and love on his younger rebellious brother after he’s wasted his share of the estate doing whatever he wanted, while he (the older brother) didn't get to do anything he wanted with the father’s wealth. 

The two sons both wanted the same thing – they wanted what their father had with no strings attached – no responsibility to him. One brazenly took the money and ran. The other thought he could manipulate the father by his good life. Neither was interested in the father. He was just the means to get what they wanted. And that attitude isolated both of them from the father – they were both lost.

Some of our lives look like the younger brother – thumbing our nose at God and living however we like. Some of us look more like the older brother – we live a good life and do the right thing and expect God to leave us alone. Some of us flip back and forth between the two. But both ways leave us lost – away from God and outside his love.

The good news is that we all have a much better older brother who came to seek out lost people and save us from an eternity away from God. His name is Jesus. He brings the lost children of God from both near and far away back to the Father who loves us and longs to welcome us home. 

Jesus’ death and resurrection is the way home into the eternal love and joy of the father. He’s seeking you to save you. Will you let him find you?

In Christ’s love,

Paul

Jesus taught his disciples that we are to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). As Christians genuinely love one another, the observing world will know that we are truly Christ’s disciples – that we are Christians.

In 1 Peter 1:22 it says that Christians are to love one another “deeply, from the heart”. In our romanticised thinking about love, we can lose some of the impact of what it means to love ‘deeply’. The word for ‘deeply’ here means something like ‘at full stretch’. We might say ‘love each other with the pedal to the metal’, or ‘with the power turned all the way up to full’. It’s a practical word. It’s not just talking about having deep feelings towards the other members of our congregation. It’s about how we actually show that love to each other. It’s about diving to the depths of our ability to practically love one another and giving it all we've got.

I take it that this is something that we need to keep working at – otherwise Peter wouldn't feel the need to tell us to do it. Loving each other at full stretch needs attention, effort and determination. Loving each other at full stretch means sacrifice. That means that loving the other members of our congregation will cost us – it will cost us time, emotional and physical energy, money, whatever it takes. To love each other at full stretch means wanting to invest ourselves in the lives of the other people at church. At the very least that means getting to know each other. 

Every one of us can identify someone else in our own congregation who we either don’t know at all or know very little about. Out of habit we gravitate to the people we know already. Show someone else you love them by breaking that habit and investing yourself in loving them just by starting to get to know them this weekend.

The kind of love we should love each other with doesn't hold back. We don’t love each other at ‘minimum’ or even ‘medium’. We need to keep working at loving each other at full stretch. The model of that kind of love is the way that Jesus has loved us. Reflect this week on what level you’re loving the others in your congregation at.

In Christ’s love,


Paul

One of the first things that strikes you as you begin reading 1 Peter is that it doesn't try to disguise the hardships that come as part and parcel of being a Christian, as if the Christian life should be all ‘beer and skittles’ and we mustn't be doing it right if it isn't. 

Instead Peter writes to encourage us that while we live in this world, suffering, trials and rejection by the world for being a Christian is all part of God’s grace to those he has chosen and called to be his forever. When we suffer grief in all kinds of trials because we are Christians, it isn't because God isn't in control – it’s because he is in control, and is preparing us for the perfect eternal future that we will certainly inherit when this world is no more. 

It’s no wonder that we read that we are strangers to this world – we are in it but not of it. This world – the world that doesn't know the true God – should not feel like home to a Christian. People won’t understand why we won’t fall in with what the world thinks is okay. We’ll feel on the outer – like a stranger. That’s okay! That’s God’s grace to us. This world is not our home. It shouldn't feel like it is. 

Let’s encourage one another as we share our lives to be bold in standing firm in this grace of God, and not caving in to the world so that we fit in.

In Christ’s love,

Paul

The subject of wealth and money is one of those subjects that we want to leave at home when we come to church. One reason might be that we think that being a Christian doesn’t have anything to say to me about my own wealth. Another might be that we think of wealth as being something that we shouldn’t be concerned about if we’re Christians. Or we can think of wealth as something that is evil or bad.

But when we turn to the Bible we see that the subject of wealth is there. God has things to teach us about wealth – about how we go about earning money, how to use it, our attitude to it, generosity, etc. So it’s not a subject that we should never expect to hear about at church. Secondly, wealth itself, and being wealthy are not condemned. Wealth is not bad and to be avoided. Christians through the centuries have tried to portray poverty as being better than wealth – as if material poverty is what the Christian should aim for. I don’t think that is the Bible’s message on wealth either.

What the Bible does do is to teach us that loving money and wealth, and putting them in the place of God will be our downfall. When wealth becomes the thing that I trust in for security now and for the future, then it has become my god – my master. Jesus warns us that we can’t serve two masters. If we trust in our wealth, we will serve our wealth (working to gain more and keeping as much as we can as our highest priority), rather than trusting God for our security and serving Him. Proverbs 11:4 says that our wealth is worthless on the day we stand before God. What will matter on that day is how we have sought to honour and serve him – including with our wealth, as much or as little as that might be.

Whether we treat wealth as our god, or rightly as a good provision of the true God, will affect the way we accumulate, invest and give our wealth away. And so we come back to the overriding theme of the wise life that we’re discovering in Proverbs. That life begins and continues with the fear of the Lord. Our lives are in his hands – not in the hands of wealth.

In Christ’s love,

Paul

One of the most popular TV series of the last 20 years was 'Friends'. Its popularity says a lot about the way we value friendship, even in a world where we continue to become more and more individualistic. Friendships are important to us.

Friendship is an important aspect of the way God has made us. We are social beings, created for deep relationships. Our friends play an influential role in determining who we are and what we’re like. And so, according to the wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord, wisdom will mean taking care both in who we choose to be friends with and how we conduct ourselves in our friendships. In this Facebook generation we can have more friends than we could have imagined a generation ago, simply by linking up with people over the internet. In some ways, online forums like Facebook can redefine our concept of friendship. But is such a concept able to bear the weight of what a real-life friendship can?

Do we have a model for friendship to measure things like Facebook against? The book of Proverbs speaks about friendship in terms of love and faithfulness that goes even deeper than the love of blood brothers, and of genuine personal care for those we call our friends. But we all know that friends let us down, and that we let them down all to frequently.

But there is a faithful friend who loves us more than any blood relative can. He is faithful even when we fail him. He frankly confronts us to do us good by calling us out of sin and into life with him. And he showed us true friendship beyond anything we will see in this life when he laid down his life for us, who he now calls friends.

As the hymn goes, “What a friend we have in Jesus!”

In Christ’s love,

Paul

Work is one of the first topics in conversation when we meet another person. Almost as soon as we know a person’s name, we find ourselves asking them what they ‘do’. We use the answer to decide how we relate to that person. It’s as if their occupation determines their value as a person. But the wisdom of the world encourages us to see even our own value as people as a factor of what we work at.

People who, for reasons of social or economic disadvantage, are not in the workforce can tend to be stigmatized and even considered worthless. While our society highly values people who work hard and are successful in their careers. In the past couple of decades we have seen the average hours spent at work each week expand, with employers expecting more work for the wages they pay. At the same time, unpaid work is often thought to be second-rate, and something that no one should be expected to put up with in the long term.

When we look at the Bible, work is part of human life as God created it, and is therefore good. In the fallen world, work has become hard, but has not ceased to be part of what it means to be human. As Christians, we want to have a right understanding of the place and value of work in our lives. Worldly wisdom will lead us to want to find our value in what we do, whereas the gospel shows us that our value is in who we are as people made in the image of God. On the flipside, our sinfulness will lead us to laziness and self-indulgence instead of sharing in the work that is needed for the maintenance and good order of human life.

The wise person who fears the Lord is the one who recognises that work is good and is part of life for people who want to live rightly in the world that God has redeemed and is redeeming through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He or she will not pursue work as their source of satisfaction and value, nor be lazy like the sluggard of Proverbs, but will work joyfully knowing that we are working for the One whose work was to do the will of his Father to save us and give us eternal rest.

In Christ’s love,

“There’s no rest for the wicked” so the saying goes. It’s an expression that so many people use to describe their busy lives, without understanding where it comes from or what it means. 

It actually comes from the Bible, in Isaiah 48:22. In our modern NIV translation it reads as ‘”there is no peace,” says the LORD ‘for the wicked”’. In context it’s a word of judgment against the enemies of God and his people. Those who continue to oppose God will ultimately have a rest-less existence. 

It’s not about being busy. It’s about missing out on the rest-full life that God created all people to enjoy.

The theme of rest begins in Genesis 2 when God rests from creating the world and blesses this day of rest for people to enjoy with him. The writer to the Hebrews in chapters 3 and 4 says that this rest God created remains open for all who believe, but closed to those who are hard-hearted towards him. 

In the light of the cross, that means that the rest God created us for is only available through believing in Jesus. If we refuse to believe in Jesus, trusting our lives to him, we miss out on the eternal rest that God has made us to enjoy with him. 
There is no eternal rest for those who refuse to believe in Jesus. That’s what the saying means.

We all need rest. Many of us lead busy lives. And so we seek to make the most of our rest time. However we fool ourselves when we think that we’ll ever be able to achieve rest like the eternal rest only Jesus brings in this life. If we’re looking for the perfect, peaceful, restful life now – in the leisure activities we pursue, in holidays, in retirement, etc. – we will always be disappointed. 

The rest we’re rightly longing for can only be found in a right relationship with God through faith in Jesus that leads to the life of eternal rest – rest from not only the busyness of this life, but from the thing that prevents us from true rest in this life – our sin. The first people lost the enjoyment of God’s rest when they sinned. Life has been wearying for all people ever since because we, like them, are sinners. 

But Jesus brings true rest for the wicked – for weary sinners like us.

In Christ’s love,

Paul