Shorter Catechism on God: Q.6(2) – God the Father

Read: John 6:35-51

 

25 year old Paul Burns, from Glasgow, is probably the most versatile and multi-talented clinical physiologist in Scotland. He combines his busy job at Gartnavel General with a professional career in Welterweight boxing. You probably couldn’t think of two things which are more different! You would never know from looking at him in his hospital scrubs that Paul Burns has aspirations to win the British welterweight boxing title by beating the living daylights out of his opponents.

 

Just like sometimes people can surprise you by who they are and what they do, God never stops surprising you. In particular, as we enter into a brief study of God the Father, we are caused not just to be surprised, but, along with the words of Professor John Murray, “stagger with amazement.” Who He is and what He does exceeds all we give Him credit for!

 

Shorter Catechism on God (Q.6):1 – There are Three Persons in the Godhead

Read: Matthew 28:19

 

Jigsaws make popular Christmas presents. I got one last year. One jigsaw I’ve never tried is called, “the hardest jigsaw in the world”. You can find it on the internet – it’s basically a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture – just pieces. So you have no idea of where the pieces fit together. It’s really hard. The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity is a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the full picture to make up your puzzle from. You just have to fit the pieces together and then see what the jigsaw looks like. You have hints, but no final picture. And the doctrine of the Trinity – that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God – is the hardest puzzle in Christianity.

Shorter Catechism on God (Q.5):2 – The One True and Living God

Jeremiah 10:10

 

Imagine the shock the poor motorists traveling on the A96 near Nairn a few Saturdays ago must have felt. Traffic was being held up because two men were having a fight in the middle of the road. The surprising thing, however, was that one of them was dressed up as a cow, complete with a brown hat; and the other one was dressed up as a horse, complete with a straw hat. If I was a passing motorist, I’m not sure if I would have laughed or cried, but I know I would have been surprised.

 

I want to begin tonight by shocking and surprising you by saying something you will never have heard from a Free Church Pulpit before. I am an atheist – a convinced, card-carrying atheist. I’m not just an unsure agnostic, I am positively atheist. But before you pack up and walk out, let me explain myself – regarding the supposed existence of any other God other than the One True and Living God of the Bible, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I am an atheist. I am utterly convinced that no other God, other than the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, exists. I believe that our God is the True and Living God.

 

Why I Am a Christian (6) – The Meaning of Life

Christ the Meaning of Life

 

John 17:3

 

I slipped up last week. After making a mental note to put my reading of the Russian author Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories to one side, I picked them up again and read one. It was called “Typhus” and was the story of a soldier coming home to Moscow after serving in the army in Siberia. It begins on a train, with the soldier in a bad mood at a fellow passenger. Before long, the soldier starts to feel sick and run a temperature. When he gets home to Moscow, he goes straight to bed. After 2 weeks fevered hallucinations, he wakes up to a beautiful bright morning. He feels great. He’s managed to survive a dose of spotted typhus, a great killer disease of the day. Just when the story looks as if it is going to conclude on an uncharacteristically Un-Chekhov high point, the downer hits – this man’s younger sister nursed him back to health – a girl with all the promise and beauty of a life ahead of her – but during the her brother’s illness, she caught spotted typhus from him and quickly died. The last line of the story reads, “And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life and the feeling of his irrevocable loss.”

 

Shorter Catechism on God (Q.5):1- There is Only One God

Deuteronomy 6:4

 

According to a recent study by finance giant MBNA, around 2 million football fans in Britain alone have pre-match rituals. These range from taking the same route to every game, to wearing lucky clothing, to using a lucky toilet before the game starts. Most football fans have their habits. In the same way, over the years, we Christians often develop habits, some of which are not always helpful. One of these is the imprecise ways in which we speak of God. The Puritan Stephen Charnock wrote, “It is impossible to honour God as we ought, unless we know him as he is.” The more precisely we know God and are able to describe God, the more it becomes possible to honour Him in lifestyle worship and service. The better you know Him, the more you will love Him and the more you will want to give up your life to Him.

 

The Shorter Catechism on God (Q.4, 5):14 – God is Truth

Read: 1 Kings 18:17-40

 

We come, tonight, to our final study into Q & A 4 of the Shorter Catechism, ‘What is God? God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in his being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth’ – God is Truth. I haven’t gone through this study with you to bore you, or to tire you, but to enthuse you about the God you serve so that you may know Him better, praise Him sincerely, and serve Him enthusiastically. I have also chosen to do these studies on a prayer meeting night, not because I want to cut down the length of time we pray, but because I want us to use each of God’s magnificent attributes as the focus for our prayers on behalf of ourselves and other people.

 

The Shorter Catechism on God (G.4):13 – God is Good – Grace

Read: Ephesians 2:1-10

 

I got a shock when I typed ‘grace’ into the Google Search Engine earlier on – it came back with 130,000,000 hits (approximately). And when you think of the number of things we use the word ‘grace’ for, it’s not surprising. By far, the biggest users of the word ‘grace’ are Christians – therefore, Christian web-sites dominate the search results display. Grace is so very important to us – it is the heart of the Christian Gospel. Without grace, there is no Gospel. But what is grace, and why is it so important to we Christians? I want to argue tonight that fundamentally, grace means beauty, and that therefore Christianity is all about beauty, delight and attraction. I want therefore to look at grace from two angles tonight: first, elements in the Bible’s Teaching on the Grace of God, and then secondly, applications of the Grace of God.

 

Why I am a Christian (4) – The Death of Jesus

Colonel Herbert Jones is probably a name which is known to very few of you – some of you here are too young to remember him, but I do. I remember listening to the radio before I went to school that fateful morning in May 1982 and hearing of the bravery of this man. He was a Colonel in the Parachute Regiment, commanding 2 Para during the Falklands war. The British invasion of the Falklands had hit a barrier – a heavily fortified Argentinian gun position on top of a hill at a place called Goose Green. The Argentinians had already inflicted several casualties among the assaulting British paratroops – and the invasion was at risk of getting bogged down. But Colonel Jones, according to his citation, picked up a sub-machine gun and ran at the Argentinian gun emplacements causing his own death, but cracking the enemies’ desire for battle. The Argentinians quickly surrendered and British liberation of the Falklands rolled on – but all because of the death of Colonel H. Jones. Next time you are in London, go to the National Army Museum in Chelsea and you’ll see his posthumous Victoria Cross on display there. But there’s man who, in his death, achieved much. But I want to talk to you today about another kind of cross and a man who achieved even more in his death – I want to talk about Jesus.

 

The Shorter Catechism on God (Q.4):12 – God is Good – Mercy

Read: Titus 3:1-8

 

Of all the attributes of God we have studied together so far, the least has been written on the Mercy of God. I’m not sure why that is because the mercy of God is beautifully, prominently and forcefully presented in the Bible. Indeed, the very first words Paul usually wrote to churches went something like “grace, mercy and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”. And yet, when we understand the mercy of God, our hearts are lifted up to think that the Gospel He offers us, the new life He gives to us, is all a gift of His mercy. I want to see two things about the mercy of God tonight, first, elements in the Bible’s Teaching on the Mercy of God, and then secondly, applications of the Bible’s Teaching on the Mercy of God.

 

Why I Am A Christian (5) – The Resurrection of Jesus

 

Read: John 20:1-18

This week, for my day off, I did something rather unusual. I went tramping through Sighthill Cemetery looking for the grave of Andrew Bonar, the minister of Finnieston Free Church in the 19^th Century and a man whose writings and life I greatly admire. After a good while searching, I finally found what I was looking for – the final resting place of the man whose biography I have read and re-read. There’s nothing remarkable about the place he is buried – an unremarkable stone covered with spray-can graffiti – nothing special. This greatest of Glasgow men dead and buried now for 115 years. But today, and every Lord’s Day, this congregation en masse goes gravehunting – we are looking for the body of truly the greatest of men – but we never find it. We go looking for the body of the crucified Jesus Christ, but we always find His tomb empty – the Jesus who 2,000 years ago was executed on a Roman cross, but on the third day, He rose from the dead and is alive and alive forevermore – the tomb is empty – His body is not there – He is risen!