Joshua 3-4 page 1
|
Joshua 3-4 page 1 |
|
To view the Bible passage in a separate window hold down SHIFT and click here.
I announced that at my welcome service on Thursday night and people laughed. But I'm not taking this text because as a family we're new to Chelmsford. I'm taking this theme, because I think it is very relevant to the church today. The Israelites were about to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land: they had not passed that way before. It was a new, strange, unfamiliar place to them. And I want to suggest to you that a similar thing faces the Christian Church in the West. Our culture, our society is changing so much that the familiar things are disappearing. How many of you feel that the world today is not the one you grew up in? Here are some examples: No longer do people entirely trust doctors and traditional medicine: they also seek out 'alternative medicine' or 'complementary therapies'. Science still gives us great discoveries, but we don't treat it so much like an idol any more, because it doesn't just solve problems, it causes them: environmental ravages, weapons of mass destruction, and so on. You might have expected in the past to have been able to have a reasoned argument with someone to discover the truth, but now somebody says, 'That's true for you but something else is true for me'. There used to be broad agreement about patterns of relationships and family life, but no longer. And people used to talk about us being a Christian society, with the Church at the centre. No longer. Now the Christian faith is at best just one consumer choice in a spiritual supermarket with countless possibilities, or at worst, boring, irrelevant and untrue. The Church is only for the elderly, it's self-righteous in excluding people, and it abuses children. Another time we can think about why these changes have happened: we don't have time for that this morning. But the fact is we too 'have not passed this way before'. We are entering a new and strange land. If we are serious about sharing in God's mission today we have to resist the temptations to turn the church into a museum or a nostalgia centre. Instead, we need to find out what God requires of us so that we may be is faithful people, sharing Christ in a strange land. So what did the Lord call upon the Israelites to do and to be as they faced this challenge? I believe that what he called them to as they were about to move into a new land is similar to what he asks of us as we seek to be pilgrims in a strange place. I have highlighted four priorities from the account.
|
|
Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration. |
.gif){kind=small}