How to change - Midweek Message 24th June
Dear Friends,
I was sharing with the Men’s Breakfast on Saturday some extracts from an
article published in the Guardian at the end of May in which a
number of people had been invited to write a letter to themselves to be opened
in May 2021. The article was entitled A letter to my post-lockdown self 1 and
each person set down lessons learnt in lockdown that they hoped might in some
manner change the way they (and maybe others too) approached life in the
post-lockdown world. In addition to that article, I also shared some
further reflections on that whole idea from Brian Draper, a Christian author
published on the LICC under the heading Note to self 2. It
is a worthy idea and it made me wonder to myself and the men at the breakfast
what we ourselves might write in such a letter to our post-lockdown selves.
There are surely some things we hope might have changed within us for the
better as a result of lockdown.
However, in that last regard, one particularly honest observation and comment
by the philosopher, Julian Baggini, in the original article gave me cause for
further thought. He wrote as follows (and remember as you read, he is writing
now to himself in May 2021:
I’m curious to know how, if at all, the world around you has changed. As
I write, many people are enthusiastically predicting that community is back,
that greed is out. I’m not so sure. Even when we’re convinced we’ve
shaken off old habits, they have a tendency to creep back until, unnoticed,
they’re as much at home as ever…..It feels like a time of momentous
transformations, but I fear that you, like the rest of the world, overestimate
your capacity for change. Please, prove me wrong: restore my faith that we
naked apes are capable of learning our lessons.
You can hear in that last sentence his longing for change in himself and
in society and yet he fears we all overestimate our capacity for change and
that in the passing of time we will quietly drift back into old habits. Change,
even where we may seem to desire it, he is saying, is not a straightforward
matter.
As you might have guessed from that reference to naked
apes Julian Baggini is an atheist, a very honest and evidently
insightful atheist, and is addressing an aspect of life, that is of infinite
relevance to all of us, whatever our worldview. It’s one the Bible addresses.
Jeremiah for example asks, Can the leopard change its spots? (Jeremiah
13.23) Can we as human being really change? Can we change for the
better? And if so, how? The Bible’s answer to that is: though
we cannot change ourselves - our own spots - we can be changed, radically and
ongoingly changed, by the grace of God that comes to us through Jesus Christ
and his gospel.
But, again, we might well ask, how does that work? How does Jesus work
through his gospel to change his people and to keep on changing them? In order
to try and answer that, let me turn to someone from an earlier age – as it
happens, a prolific writer of letters, namely John Newton, best known for
authoring his autobiographical hymn, Amazing Grace. Newton was also
a pastor who regularly wrote to encourage Christian people struggling with how
to change and to be changed by Christ and his gospel. I wanted to quote a
number of things he says, all of which can be found in one of the chapters of
Tony Reinke’s book John Newton on the Christian life 3. (Interestingly
you will notice in one of the quotes Newton makes reference to the personal and
often painful issue we were thinking about last Sunday - how to forgive others)
Newton was clear that for the Christian, crucial to growing and
continuing to change for the better was constantly looking to Jesus Christ in
faith. He wrote that in Christ there is “a balm for every grief, an
amends for every loss, a motive for every duty, a restraint from every evil, a
pattern for everything which he is called to do or suffer, and a principle
sufficient to constitute the actions of every day, even in common life, acts of
religion.”
He expressed the same basic conviction in one of his other hymns:
Since the Saviour I have known
My rules are all reduced to one -
To keep my Lord, by faith, in view,
This strength supplies, and motives, too
Elsewhere he wrote: “It is thus by looking to Jesus, that
the believer is enlightened and strengthened, and grows in grace and
sanctification.” and “To behold the glory and the love of
Jesus is the only effectual way to participate of his image.” In
other words, it is as our eyes are opened to and fixed upon the wonder, the
attractiveness of what God has done for us in Jesus – what he would call the
beauty of Christ and seen particularly in his dying for us - that we are
changed into an increasing likeness to himself.
He gives a specific example which takes us to what we were thinking
about on Sunday. He talks about the call to care for and forgive others: “None
can truly love it but those who have tasted it. When your hearts feel the
comforts of God’s pardoning love, you will delight to imitate him. When you can
truly rejoice that he has freely forgiven you that immense debt, which is
expressed by ten thousand talents, you will have no desire to take your
fellow-servant by the throat for a few pence” (Matt. 18:21–35) and
then continues “If you find this practice difficult, it is owing partly
to the remaining depravity of your nature, and partly because you have had but
a faint sense of his mercy. Pray for a more powerful manifestation of it, and
you will do better; mercy will be your delight.” In other words ask
God the Father to give you a better heartfelt understanding of the depth of his
forgiveness and mercy to you through Jesus and his death on the cross and you
will become more merciful and forgiving to others.
Finally, Newton expresses our dependence upon the Lord Jesus but
also his ability to effect ongoing change in us and complete that change at the
last
“Though [the believer is] weak in himself, he is strong in the grace
that is in Christ Jesus the Lord, upon whom he relies, as his wisdom,
righteousness, sanctification; and expects from him, in due time, a complete
redemption from every evil.”
“The life of a Christian is a life of faith in the Son of God. He,
undoubtedly, is the greatest Christian who most exemplifies in his own practice
what is recorded in the Gospel of the temper, converse, and actions of the
holy, the harmless, and undefiled Jesus, and depends the most absolutely upon
him, for wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.”
So John Newton, and the Bible before him, is saying to us: if
we want to change and keep changing post-lockdown and throughout our
lives, it is not about having our faith restored that we naked apes are
capable of learning our lessons, it’s about placing our faith in Jesus
Christ and continuing to look to him. Or as Paul expresses it in 2
Corinthians 3.18 And we all,
with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his
likeness from one degree of glory to another (RSV) Keep beholding the Lord Jesus!!
Yours in Him,
David
Notes:
2 https://www.licc.org.uk/resources/note-to-self/
3 Newton on the Christian life – to live is
Christ, Tony Reinke, Crossway - Ch 6 Christ-centred holiness p 127ff
posted by David Scott at
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
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