Mistakes - minor, major and catastrophic
A young doctor was attending a medical conference. One day the lunch finished with a dessert of meringues, full of cream. He then went for a stroll through some adjacent woodland. At that point he looked down and noticed his tie was splashed with a dollop of white cream. He licked it off – but only then did he realise his mistake. It was not cream at all, a bird in a tree above had just done its business.
That was a simple mistake but sometimes mistakes can be very costly. I remember a patient who had found a breast lump some time previously. She had hoped it would go away on its own. By the time I saw her the cancer had grown very large and was fixed. Her mistake was to hope it wouldn’t matter, so she deferred doing anything.
In our world today we are facing massive problems including global warming, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Covid, high inflation, radical Islam, marriage breakups, drugs and alcohol and the like. What should we learn from this?
Alexandre Solzhenitsyn
When Alexandre Solzhenitsyn was young, he became a communist, a believer in the ideals of Marxism and an atheist. After serving in the Russian army during the Second World War he was arrested by SMERSH, the Russian secret police, simply because he had been captured by the Germans. He was subsequently imprisoned in the Gulag for 8 years. It was there, in spite of all its horrors, that he came to realise that there were real values that matter and that there really is a God who had created this world. He became a Christian and subsequently an outspoken critic of communism. He was later expelled from Russia for his criticisms of Stalin and he moved to live in the United States of America. He wrote some remarkable books such as ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ that have sold in the millions. He analysed much of what has gone wrong in Russia since the revolution and said,
“Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia.
‘Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this has happened.’
But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat,
‘Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this has happened.’
He subsequently analysed the problems facing countries in the west and came to precisely the same conclusion,
“Men have forgotten God.”
To forget God, to leave him out of our lives, is indeed the most catastrophic mistake a person can make. We do this because were are self-centred and stupid. It was Albert Einstein who said,
“Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
God is largely irrelevant to most people today. Even some of those, who say they believe in him, live during the week as practical atheists.
Very few people want to investigate the evidence for God’s existence even though they believe that life does have a meaning and that values such as honesty, kindness, truth and love are real. Such values cannot be real if we are just an accident by-product of primordial soup in a godless world! The failure to look at the evidence that God is real is presumably because people realise that, if there is a God who has revealed himself, this must have consequences on the way they live. How easy it is to make the mistake of allowing my selfish desires control how I think. I have tried to outline some of the evidence in the books, ‘Cure for Life’ and ‘Stepping Stones’.
Jesus
Jesus had a lot to say to those who turn their back on God and just live for this world. He keeps reminding us that we should live with the next world in view.
Some admire Jesus’ moral teaching on honesty and integrity but reject the main core of his teaching about salvation and being right with God. Even in his day, people wanted Jesus to simply be an arbiter of ethical behaviour but he refused to be drawn into this as his primary message was so much more important. One man approached Jesus because he thought the distribution of an inheritance seemed unfair.
“Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’ Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?’
Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.’ And he told them this parable:
‘The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.
He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
Then he said, ‘This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’
But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich towards God.” Luke 12:13-21
This farmer’s great problem is clear from the way Jesus tells the story, he was greedy and selfish. He was besotted with himself and his comfortable life here on earth. He had forgotten God. Jesus has a simple message for him – ‘You fool’. What a catastrophic mistake this is for any person to make, yet this is what the almighty God will say to many when they meet him face to face.
Baptism
At a recent open air Baptism Garden Party five adults publicly stated that they wanted to commit themselves to living the rest of their lives with Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. They wanted to publicly align themselves with him. What a glorious occasion it was.
The picture of baptism is vivid. Jesus had commanded his disciples,
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:18-20
A public baptism cannot have been easy for the first Christians. After Peter’s first sermon at Pentecost three thousand people responded to Peter’s appeal to repent of their previous rejection of God and his Son and to demonstrate this by allowing him to wash their sin away and to fill them with the gift of his Holy Spirit. This cannot have been easy, especially as the Jewish authorities and their minions, those who had arranged for Jesus to be crucified just seven weeks earlier, were undoubtedly looking on and making notes! Those being baptised were aligning themselves with a condemned criminal!
But what baptism represents is so important. No-one is saved by the ritual, it is the personal involvement with what the ritual means that matters. Remember that in those days baptism was by full immersion in water.
Primarily baptism teaches us what God has done for all his people, to all who are committed to following his Son Jesus, the Christ. As the candidates go into the water they are reminded that the death of Jesus of their behalf has washed all their sin away. They are given the status of being righteous in God’s eyes because they now share the righteousness of Christ. They come out of the water with the power of the Holy Spirit who enables them to live lives for God, with Christ at the centre.
Baptism is a reminder of the response we all need to make to God. As the person goes under the water they are saying, ‘I am now dead to the old life’ and as they come up again they are saying, ‘I am now risen to live a new life with and for the Lord Jesus’.
Those who witness others accepting the gift of eternal life and making a commitment to Christ in baptism should also be reminded about Jesus’ significance. They may have been baptised in the past, perhaps as a child, but have drifted somewhat in their walk with the Lord Jesus and have begun to forget God. The rite of Baptism itself saves nobody. Surely God is saying to such people, ‘Beware, don’t be a fool - remember what really matters.’
Some may never have yet turned back to allow the Lord Jesus to take his rightful place in their lives. They are like the rich farmer in Jesus’ story, who had clearly rejected God and whose life focussed on himself and the here and now.
Jesus’ message is not just ‘You fool’, he always goes on to give people hope. When Peter finished his first sermon at Pentecost, many listeners, feeling guilty, asked,
“What shall we do?”
Peter’s reply demonstrates that there is hope for all people, even today. It is never too late.
“Repent and be baptised every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call. With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation’ Acts 2:38-40
The message of the Bible is that God made this world through his Son, Jesus and has put him in control. But our problem is that we do not want God to reign over us. We naturally want to forget God. The Christian good news or gospel is the message that anyone who changes their allegiance and comes to live under the authority of God’s Son is treated by God as if they have never rebelled. The Lord Jesus took responsibility for their sin when he bore them on that cross. However God warns us all that, if we refuse to repent and turn back to God, we will separate ourselves from God for eternity. Jesus was very clear that there is a real heaven and there is a real hell and there is no intermediate destiny.
This decision is one that all people of all generations have to make. Refusing to make a decision is tantamount to rejecting God’s offer. Three thousand years ago Moses addressed a large group of people who were to some degree outwardly religious and he gave them the same ultimatum as Jesus gives us today.
“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. Deuteronomy 30:19-20
This is God’s challenge to each of us today - choose life, choose God, choose Jesus. We must make a decision and then in his power go out into life, in communion with others who love him, the ‘Lord your God’. We need to keep listening to what he teaches us in his word, the Bible, keeping close to him, so that we live for him.
The Bible’s message is that our deepest problems, whether personal or national, are, at root, because we have forgotten God, but there is hope, there is good news, eternal life is available.
If you would like to discuss further please get in touch with me on - berniepalmer1@sky.com
My website is – www.bvpalmer.com
‘Christchurch Baldock’ meets at 10.30 am every Sunday in Knights Templar School, Baldock
