Two big statements in a week of great ones

It’s been a week of great ones!Firstly, a privilege to host Peter Adam last Sunday.  Peter has been so influential for so long in my life.  It delights me that if he is ‘chalk’, I am ‘cheese’, yet I have devoured his example and wisdom and teaching most of my Christian life. Do you have any Peters?  If you do, I think  it’s worth telling them what they mean to you.Peter challenged me with four statements:1: ‘My times are in your hand’ - For such a time as this I have a God who knows and loves and cares about me totally.  Every hair on my greying head matters to him; in him everything past, present and future holds together.  What can people do to you when you are so intimately God’s?2: ‘For such a time as this’ - What is this time in my life? Is there something happening that God is presenting to me at this time as his opportunity?  Am I open to him in it?  Do I believe my ‘now’ is ordained by Him?3: ‘Hope lies amidst the ruin of our expectations.’ - Where does my hope lie?  What are my expectations of myself, of you?  What does success look like to me and to God? Are we likely to embrace the ruins of our lives as the place where God is working or is wanting to work?  God’s hope is an assurance that we belong to him, that we are redeemed and that we will be with him in glory forever.  Where is your ‘hope’?4: ‘The future [yours and mine] is as bright as the promises of God’ - This statement was made by a missionary about to be murdered by Burmese tribes people.  I don’t think I have dwelt on the promises of God quite as long as this missionary. Have you?  What is a promise of God you hang on to?  Do you really believe God keeps his promises?  Have you experienced him being true to his word?  Worth sharing, I think.Second great one came courtesy of Rod Eagleton.  A Fin Review article entitled Why the World Needs Religion by Jonathan Sachs.In the 19th century smart people thought religion was going to die out.  But it didn’t and it hasn’t. In fact, quality research indicates unequivocally that in the USA, “There is no good deed ….that is practised more by secular Americans than by their religious counterparts.”  It is people of faith “who turn up, get involved and lead - and the margin of difference between them and secular Americans is large.”Q: What is the best indicator of civic involvement in the US? A: That you have faith!British research indicates the same thing. Yet religion does not provide anything today that science, technology, economics, liberal democracy, doctors, psychotherapists, pharmacology or shopping malls cannot provide.“Why does something as superfluous as religion survive?”  Sachs asks. “Because only religion tackles ‘ultimate questions’: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? [and I’d add, Where am I going?].  While science takes things apart to see how they work,” Sachs says, “religion puts things together to see what they mean.”Peter’s four statements echo these questions:1. Who am I? 2. Why am I here? 3. How should I live? 4. Where am I going?  Only your faith broaches these questions effectively.“Faith remains the necessary gravitational force that stops us spinning off into independent [meaningless – my edit] orbits,” Sachs says. He concludes with, “A society without faith is like one without art, music, beauty or grace, and no society without faith can endure for long.”Blessings Malcolm