The Bible with Nicky and Pippa Gumbel Youth

Confrontation is not something that I find easy. It is a delicate operation. It is crucial to find the right approach, the right words for the job. Or, to use a golfing analogy, it is like the skill of knowing which club to use.

Those who are skilled at confrontation have a great variety of approaches and words, and know when and how to use the appropriate one.

Confrontation is not always the right course. Not every critic has to be confronted. Not every wrong statement needs to be refuted.

I greatly admire the skill of those who know when to confront and are good at confronting in a loving way. They have learnt how to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).

When confrontation is necessary, how should you go about it?

At the age of eighteen I set out to read the entire New Testament in order to disprove Christianity. As I read, I was surprised to find that I became convinced that it was true. The last thing that I wanted to do was to ‘become a Christian’. I thought that would ruin my life and make it boring by stopping me having any fun. Yet, knowing in my heart that it was true, I felt I had no option but to say ‘yes’ to Jesus.

The moment I did so– to use the words that C.S. Lewis chose to describe his own experience of encountering Jesus – I was ‘surprised by joy’. Ever since, Jesus has never ceased to surprise me.

God is the God of surprises. Jesus constantly surprised his followers and he wants to continue to surprise you.

My maternal grandparents lived in the small fishing village of Pittenweem near Edinburgh in Scotland. They owned a house there. In 1939, at the start of World War II, they let their home to tenants. When the war ended, they wanted to return to their home but they were unable to. The law at the time allowed the tenants to remain in the house for as long as they lived, at approximately the same rent (with no adjustment for inflation!).

For fifty years my grandparents were unable to get possession of the house they owned. My uncle inherited the house from my grandparents. By the time he got possession, the condition of the house had deteriorated greatly. He sold it for a very small sum.

Although my family owned this house in Pittenweem, they never took possession of it. There is a big difference between ownership and possession.

The people of Israel had been given ownership of Canaan, the promised land. Now Joshua says to the Israelites, ‘How long will you wait before you begin to take possession of the land…?’ (Joshua 18:3). The New Testament presents the ‘land’ as a picture of the Christian life (Hebrews 4). Realise what is already yours in Christ Jesus and then take possession of it.

I have been involved in hosting or helping a small group on Alpha for over thirty years. During this time, I have noticed a shift in our culture. There is a change in the attitude towards Jesus, especially among young people. Many will say that they believe in God and are even open to the idea of the Holy Spirit. But increasingly, Jesus has become the stumbling-block. Some youth and young people say things like, ‘I don’t get the reason for Jesus.’

As Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa has often said, ‘The battle today is around Jesus.’

Is Jesus the universal Saviour? This is the same battle as the first century. People today are happy to accept Jesus as ‘one of many’. It is the uniqueness of Jesus that causes offence. In the passages for today we see that while we meet some exceptional people throughout the Bible, like Moses, Joshua, Elijah and John the Baptist, there was no one like Jesus. Jesus is unique. He is the universal Saviour.

You could have heard a pin drop. It was mesmerising. We were spellbound. An eighty-five-year-old man, almost totally blind, got up to speak to 1,500 people of all ages on our church holiday. He had no notes, of course, because he could no longer read. He gave two talks, each of them an hour long.

In the first talk, he gave a breathtaking summary of the entire Old Testament. In the second, which was equally brilliant, he gave a summary of the whole of the New Testament. There was no hesitation, no stumbling and not a word was out of place. It was the distilled wisdom of a man who had followed the Lord wholeheartedly all his life.

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin had one of the most remarkable ministries of the twentieth century. At the age of thirty-six he was elected as one of the first bishops of the new Church of South India*.* When he returned from India, later on in life, he wrote several books that aimed to help the church in the West fulfil its mission in a world that was rapidly changing and felt no need for God.

His writing and speaking influenced thousands of Christian leaders around the world. Yet for this astonishing man, who had achieved so much in his life, it was not over. He entitled his autobiography Unfinished Agenda. For him, there was always still so much to hope for and so much more to be done.

Years ago, a young member of our congregation at HTB had a job working in the library of a major national newspaper. This newspaper kept files of old cuttings about every well-known person. The files were kept in rows of long shelves and were separated into ‘living people’ and ‘dead people’.

One day, the young man was looking through the files of dead people and came across a large file marked ‘Jesus Christ’. He glanced over his shoulder to check that no one was looking and quickly moved the file from the ‘dead people’ section to the ‘living people’ section.

Jesus Christ is alive. He is risen from the dead. To anyone looking for him among files of dead people, the angels would say, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!’ (Luke 24:5–6).

Victory is not a dirty word. Jesus is the great victor. As Bishop Lesslie Newbigin often said, ‘The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the manifestation of a victory.’ The cross was not a defeat. On the cross, Jesus won a great victory for us over sin, death and the powers of evil.

At an Alpha Conference we held in East Malaysia, there were people from all over Asia. Many had been persecuted because of their faith. One man told me that his father had been imprisoned for six years for the simple fact that he was a Christian pastor. He himself was imprisoned for a year, aged nineteen, for speaking out on behalf of his father.

It is a terrible injustice when the innocent are convicted and imprisoned – even worse when they are executed.

In the New Testament passage for today we read of one of the greatest injustices in human history. Jesus was totally innocent. He was ‘a righteous man’ (Luke 23:47). Yet he was executed by crucifixion. The apostle Peter explains it like this: ‘For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God’ (1 Peter 3:18).

The word ‘righteous’ is often associated with the ‘self-righteous’, and has almost become a term of abuse. However, ‘righteous’ in the Bible is a wonderful word. It is also extremely important for our understanding of the whole Bible. ‘Righteousness’ is ultimately about right relationships – a right relationship with God and right relationships with others. In the New Testament, we come to understand that this righteousness is only possible through faith in Jesus Christ (see Romans 3:21 – 4:25).

A little girl named Liz was suffering from a rare and serious disease. Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her five-year-old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed. The doctor explained the situation and asked the little boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister. He hesitated for only a moment before taking a deep breath and saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do it if it will save her.’

As the transfusion progressed, he lay in bed next to his sister, and smiled, as they all did, seeing the colour returning to her cheeks. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded. He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, ‘Will I start to die right away?’

The little boy had misunderstood the doctor. He thought he was going to have to give his sister all of his blood in order to save her. This boy loved his sister so much that he was willing to die instead of her – as her substitute. This is an illustration of what loving substitution means.

God loves you. The amazing and wonderful message of the Bible is that God came to this earth in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, and died in your place. Words, images, metaphors, pictures and illustrations (such as the, possibly fictional, story of the five-year-old boy) can help our understanding, but they can never perfectly describe the indescribable love of God. Jesus died to remove all the bad stuff. He died instead of you and me (Mark 10:45).

Albert Einstein said, ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.’

Jesus himself said that – ultimately – there are only two ways to live: there are two paths; there are two gates; there are two destinations and there are two groups of people (see Matthew 7:13–14). In the passages for today we see starkly contrasting ways of life.

Things happen to us. So much of life is simply the set of circumstances we find ourselves in. For example, our parents, our genetic design, the weather, much of our education and our government are all things that we experience as ‘happening to us’. In Greek grammar, these things are expressed in what we call the ‘passive voice’. However, we also make things happen. When I initiate an action and do something, this is expressed in the ‘active voice’.

But Greek grammar also has a third voice – the ‘middle voice’. This is neither wholly active nor wholly passive. When I use the middle voice, I am participating in the results of an action.

Christian prayer is spoken in the middle voice. It cannot be in the active voice because it is not an action I control, as in the ritualistic pagan prayers where the gods do our bidding. Prayer is not in the passive voice either, in which I’m at the mercy of the will of gods and goddesses. In Christian prayer, as Eugene Peterson puts it, ‘I enter into an action begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of his [gracious] action.’

In one sense, the whole of the Christian life is prayer. We welcome God’s gracious hand in our lives, and we participate in what he is doing in the world. God involves you in his plans. Of course, he could do it all on his own, but he chooses to involve you. He gives you freedom, yet he remains in control.