Sermons

I wonder who here has made a New Year resolution, because in a little over 12 hours it's time to start to keep the resolution that you have made. Interestingly, when I met with the youth before the service, only two of the people in the room had at that point picked any New Year's resolutions. The others were either leaving it to the last minute to decide which ones to go for, or decided that this is an out-of-date practice that only oldies like would have an interest in. They were too polite to tell me which of those two was what was really going on.

It is easy to be a Christian when the sun is shining. What do you do when it isn't? If your life begins to fall apart, perhaps fall apart in connection with your family, maybe it's your work, maybe it's your health, what do you do then? Now, as we've worked our way through this letter of James, we've seen that he's been helping us think this through. And today, in the final verses of his letter, he brings the various threads of his letter together to try to give us an answer of how do you keep going with Jesus when life feels like it's falling apart.

We're blessed in this church to have a great many people who work in the medical world. We have doctors, we have nurses, we have various other people who actually work in roles in the medical world, and that's a good thing, because when you become sick you need a doctor, assisted by a great many other medical staff who can help find out what is wrong and tell you what can be done to deal with your sickness.

Let me ask you a question: Do you need to be good in order to go to heaven? Do you have to do good works, good deeds, to get to heaven? That is a really important question, is it not? Because where you spend eternity really matters. This life we live in now is short; the most any of us will get is probably 100 years, relative to which eternity is a very, very long time. So where you get to spend eternity, well, there is no more important question for you than that.

Well, like almost every grown-up, I have forgotten almost everything they taught me when I studied for my GCSEs. However, when we did GCSE English, we had to read some novels of a 19th-century author called Thomas Hardy. Not to be confused with the present-day actor of the same name.

If this was not the sermon in a service but the all-age teaching slot, I would start by putting pictures up on the screen of various objects and taking a survey as to: who likes this, who doesn't like this? We could have things you might eat or activities. We could have some sports, some hobbies. Who likes stamp collecting? Yes? No? And then I would end with: who likes taxes? And everybody would say, "Boo! No, we don't like taxes."

A few months ago we finished the process of moving house. It was a process that took us as a family very many months because of the complexities that can arise. But the process begins as you start looking on the internet for houses that you might like the idea of living in, and when you find one that you like, you phone the estate agent and you arrange to meet with them.

Many people today feel very vulnerable. You don't know if you can trust the past. You don't know if you can trust the future. The past—and maybe many people—have made promises to you in the past and have broken them. Politicians promise that if we elect them, they will fix things, and yet all the problems that we labour under—whether it's housing or inflation or whatever—there's always something. Your employer promises you a promotion or job security, but then they let you down. Your landlord promises you that you can stay where you are, and then they serve notice that you have to leave.

We have all, I suspect, come across bad leadership. Bad leadership in the world, where, for example, corrupt politicians seek to serve their own interests at the expense of the citizens they are supposed to be taking care of. Two countries have had elections in recent weeks. Both sets of elections are very significant for both the country concerned and the wider region. One is Turkey and the other is Nigeria, and one of the midweek life groups that I lead has been particularly praying each week over these matters for Nigeria, and for what flowed out of the recent presidential elections.

Nobody likes conflict. One of the ugly things in local church life, and in church history, is when Christians squabble and fight amongst each other. So the idea of looking together at a letter in the New Testament that tells Christians to fight for the true version of Christianity and to oppose wrong versions doesn't sit comfortably with us.