milford reformed presbyterian church

I came across an article recently by Professor Carl Trueman in which he compared his grandfather’s generation with this present one. Here are some illuminating excerpts:

“If the poverty and hard work of my grandfather's era left men middle-aged at thirty, the ease and trivia of today's society seems to leave us trapped in a permanent Neverland where we all, like so many Peter Pans, live lives of eternal youth. The world of my grandfather was evil because it made him grow up too fast; the world of today is evil because it prevents many from ever growing up at all.

“The answer is not a naïve, nostalgic hankering for a return to an era of poverty and cruel hardship. Rather it is surely obvious: we need to put aside childish things and start acting like adults.

“Pascal put his finger on the problem of human life when he saw how entertainment had come to occupy a place, not as the necessary and momentary relief from a life of work, but as an end in itself. When entertainment becomes more than a pleasant and occasional distraction, when time and income become devoted to entertainment and to pleasure, when sports teams become more important to us than people—even the people to whom we are close—then something has gone badly wrong.

“The frothy entertainment culture in which we live is a narcotic: not only is it addictive, so that we always want more; it also eats away at us, skewing our priorities, rotting our values as surely as too much sugar rots our teeth.”

There is little doubt that we have had it easy over the last few years. We have become an entertainment-based culture with a proliferation of nite-clubs popping up all over the country, and ever more ingenious entertainment systems available for our homes. People have had more money to spend, and less inclination to save it.

Yet the shallowness of much of what is on TV, or escapism in its various forms or a live-for-the-moment mentality creates its own shallowness in our personality. Ed Welch in his book, ‘Depression: A Stubborn Darkness’, writes “While prosperity allows us to hide, hardship peels off masks we didn’t even know we were wearing.”

We have staved off hardship with a cocktail of money, drink, drugs and pleasure, and it has left us worse for the experience. A person may look 45 but still have the character of an adolescent. Where do we go?

We do not rejoice in hardship for hardship’s sake, but only because it shows us the futility of the things in which we are investing our lives in. Perhaps this current economic crisis will remind us that as long as we invest in that which is fleeting we will remain trapped in Neverland. The only way to grow up is to seek to invest our lives in one who will give us the strength to weather the storm, and who shows us what is ultimately valuable.

The ancient writer put it like this: “Why should I fear when evil days come? Man, despite his riches, does not endure. This is the fate of those who trust in themselves. Like sheep they are destined for the grave… But God will redeem my life from the grave; he will surely take me to himself.” (Psalm 49)

Apparently ‘spirit bottles’ are big business in Beijing these days. The Times reports that one store claimed to be selling more than 100 per day.

What on earth is a ‘spirit bottle’? Nothing more than an empty bottle with a label such as ‘Courage’, ‘Good Ideas’, ‘Unconditional Love’ or ‘Great Wisdom’. The sellers openly state that there is nothing but air in the bottle, yet people keep buying them.

One man browsing the shelf of bottles said, “If you are depressed and need to cry, or angry and need to vent, these spirit bottles give you the empty space you need. It is a concept that we really need right now.”

The biggest sellers in this are ‘Courage and change’ and ‘Sense of security’.

It strikes me as sad that in a nation mourning a massive loss of life this is their answer to trouble – buy an empty bottle and put all your troubles in it. Or buy an empty bottle and look to it for hope.

Then again, where do you look for hope when your country has effectively banned God? You can place your hope in human endeavour, but that doesn’t bring hope in the midst of disaster. It’s no surprise that the people of Beijing have nowhere to put their hope but in an empty bottle.

It would be easy to mock, yet we in Ireland have as many superstitions—whether they are in the old folk tales or in the new spiritualities that are doing the rounds. Bizarre empty bottles all of them.

To be fair, some would want to place biblical Christianity in the same category of wishful empty-bottle hoping.

The difference is that this bottle isn’t empty, and the proof lies ironically in something that was empty—the tomb. The resurrection of Jesus underscores the validity of Christianity.

How sad that men and women could be conned into placing their hopes in empty bottles of whatever unfounded superstitions or beliefs.

Ultimately there is no such thing as alternative spiritualities—just many empty bottles, and only one full one.

Imagine crawling into a shop from the desert—which bottle would you buy? One of the empties, or the one full of life giving water?

The only message of empty bottles is the emptiness of their hope. However, God in his rich mercy has given us a clear message from Heaven, not in a bottle, but in a person—Jesus Christ, who said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink… whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

I haven’t seen the TV programme ER for years, but a friend drew my attention to a powerful scene in a recent episode called “Atonement”. It is between the hospital chaplain and an older patient, dying with cancer. He had been a prison doctor who administered lethal injections to those sentenced to death.

In one of the cases, after a young man was executed, a policeman was found to have framed the suspect. The doctor is wracked with remorse and wants forgiveness as he now faces his own death. The hospital chaplain is introduced and the dialogue goes like this:


Patient: How can I even hope for forgiveness?
Chaplain: I think sometimes it's easier to feel guilty than forgiven.
Patient: (Looks confused) Which means what?
Chaplain: That maybe your guilt over these deaths has become your reason for living. Maybe you need a new reason to go on.
Patient: I don't want to go on. Can't you see I'm old? I have cancer. I've had enough. The only thing that is holding me back is that I am afraid. I'm afraid of what comes next.
Chaplain: What do you think that is?
Patient: (Looking more surprised) You tell me. Is atonement even possible? What does God want from me?
Chaplain: I think it's up to each one of us to interpret what God wants.
Patient: (Flabbergasted) So people can do anything? They can rape, murder they can steal all in the name of God and it's ok?
Chaplain: No! That's not what I'm saying.
Patient: (Now agitated) What are you saying? Because all I'm hearing is some New Age, God is love, one size fits all crap. No! I don't have time for this now!
Chaplain: It's ok. I understand…
Patient: (Interrupts angrily) No you don't understand. You don't understand! How could you possibly say that? Now you listen to me. I want a real chaplain who believes in a real God and a real hell.
Chaplain: I hear that you're frustrated, but you need to ask yourself . . .
Patient: (Interrupts again) No I don't need to ask myself. I need answers, and all your questions and your uncertainty are only making things worse.
Chaplain: I… I know you're upset…
Patient: I need someone who will look me in the eye and tell me how to find forgiveness because I am running out of time.

It is a powerful moment. It highlights the reality of the power of a guilty conscience, and the inadequacy of shallow answers to such guilt. The reason that guilt has such power is because the guilt is real. That’s what I like about the Bible’s teaching about forgiveness – it deals with real guilt. And it deals with it in a real ‘blood and guts’ way.

Guilt is real. Hell is real. But sometimes in an effort to make God seem nice, people do away with the realities that provide real help. Without acknowledging a real God and a real Hell there is no help for those with a guilty conscience.

The real God (Jesus) went through the real Hell (facing punishment) so that guilty people could come to him and ask him to accept them and forgive them. And because of that he says, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Isaiah 1:18).

So a married couple from Bosnia who didn't realise they were chatting each other up on the internet are divorcing.

Sana Klaric (whose pen-name was ‘Sweetie’) and husband Adnan (pen-name ‘Prince of Joy’) spent hours in an online chat room telling each other about their marriage troubles. It wasn’t long before they were falling in love again.

The truth emerged when the two online lovers agreed to meet up in real life, and found themselves face to face with each other. What a momnent! Now they are divorcing, each accusing the other of being unfaithful.

According to reports Sana said, “I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be.”

Her husband Adnan, said: "I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years".

I don’t know what’s the saddest part – the hypocrisy of accusing the other of unfaithfulness, or the stubborn refusal to see that they could make it work after all, or the seeking of happiness in a relationship apart from the one your promised yourself to for life.

Contrary to popular myth, the love is not an emotion, but an act of the will. The word love is a verb, a ‘doing’ word as my school-teacher would have said. Love is not found when we follow our hormones, or our heartstrings, but love is developed when we continually act in a loving way day after day to another person. Certainly, love is not devoid of emotion, but emotion is not the driving force. If it was, marriage would be as unstable as our emotions – and that is what happens to those who make their feelings their guide.

What is sad about this couple is that if they had put the same effort into their marriage as they put into demonstrating their caring, wonderful characters to an apparent stranger, then they would have found their marriage transformed. But to do that you need to be able to repent and ask for forgiveness and give it – and that’s a gospel thing.

So we’ve all been issued with a free copy of “The Rules of the Road”. Ours arrived in last week, but it was only today that I got round to opening them.

I’m sorry to see them being issued—that means that I wont have marvel at people pulling onto roundabouts in front of me, or stopping on the roundabout to let me on to it. No more will people think that green means ‘Go’ and red means ‘Go faster’. No more will people think that that fancy little stick on the side of the steering column is for hanging their Magic Tree air freshener on; instead they will use it to let others know what direction they are turning. No more will people ignore the specially prepared place in the middle of some roads where you can pull into when you are turning right, so that you don’t block the traffic.

Alas I will miss the quirks and foibles of my fellow drivers. And doubtless they will miss mine. The ‘Rules of the Road’ will fix it all. A driver’s life will be idyllic and peaceful, even in the traffic jams which snarl up Letterkenny.

That’s if it’s made it out of the plastic wrapper it came in.

Go on, have you opened yours yet? Be honest—or is it still sitting on the kitchen worktop? Sure we all know what’s in it—what would we need to read that for?

It’s funny that no matter how bad a driver we are, the problem always lies with others. In our own minds we think that we aren’t that bad. We can always point to someone who is worse than us—“You think I’m bad, should see my great uncle Horatio!”

That’s the flaw in giving everyone a copy of the Rules of the Road—no-one thinks they need it. I know, because it’s the same with Bibles. Most homes have one, but when was the last time you cracked it open? Is its spine still in pristine condition, like the day you got it? Perhaps it’s sitting on the shelf in a cupboard right beside the “Rules of the Road” which you got years ago when you did your driving test—that special shelf where important-but-never-to-be-looked-at books are kept.

Doubtless if we read it we’d find that there’s part of our lives we’ve been using to hang a Magic Tree air freshener on which instead has a much more important role to play. For example, our conscience. What is that little voice that nags at us and tells us something is wrong? Is it something that we hang a few good deeds on to freshen up our lives a bit, or did the manufacturer put it there for a greater purpose?

Or we’d find that the symbol which looks like a crossroads sign has a significance far beyond anything we ever imagined.

You’ll need to crack open God’s ‘Rules for Life’ to find out.